A conversation with ... Jill Wynns
Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland and Birgit Nielsen were among the stars who trod the boards while Jill Wynns was working costumes backstage at the American Conservatory Theater and San Francisco Opera in the 1970s. Marriage and motherhood led to a career change; Wynns went on to direct a children’s advocacy organization, and today she still works as a consultant specializing in education issues, community organizing and development.
It’s a good résumé for someone who graduated from the prestigious Hofstra University’s New College. It’s a great résumé for someone who never graduated from high school.
“Intellectually and academically, it was not cutting it for me,” the New York native and president-elect of the California School Boards Association says now of her traditional high school experience. When her sister, already enrolled at Hofstra, told Jill of an early admission program, she leaped at the chance.
She’s hardly stopped moving since, going on to earn a degree in the humanities and then to move to San Francisco. There her continuing interest in education led to a run—full-tilt, no doubt—for the San Francisco Board of Education in 1992. Returned to office in every election since, she’s paid conscientious attention to her responsibilities there while also vaulting to influence in urban education at the local, state and national levels.
Wynns has been president of the Association of California Urban School Districts and has served on the governing board of the National School Boards Association’s Council of Urban Boards of Education. She was also a member of the California Master Plan for Education’s working group, and she’s become in expert in issues ranging from California school finance and charter schools to school nutrition programs and labor-management collaboration. She’s also served multiple terms on CSBA’s Delegate Assembly and CSBA’s Board of Directors.
She doesn’t earn voters’ trust by promising all things to all people.
“I always say: If a candidate comes to you and says ‘we’re going to fix this,’ don’t support them, because ‘this’ is a job that’s never done. The goal should be to make it better, because it has to constantly get better,” says the woman who considers herself a pragmatist, not an ideologue. “Start at the beginning. Take step one—then take the next step and do it fearlessly.”
San Francisco Unified is both a school district and a county office of education. That’s not unique, but it is unusual.
It’s unique in being a city. The only city and county in California is San Francisco. There are a number of other counties in California that are also one district and a county office of education. We’re more like a school district without a county office of education. We have folded into our operations all the county functions, and also, by the way, the county office of education revenue.
I think all of [the other combined district-county offices] have elected superintendents except ours. The appointed county superintendents tend to be in urban or suburban areas. So we’re unique in a number of ways.
Does that give you advantages?
Well, I think it does. It certainly gives us the advantage of having the county’s revenue [and] having control over things like the county schools and the continuation schools. So when kids are suspended or expelled, they stay with us. We think that’s a big advantage because we get to require them to do certain things. We have much more control over the kids that are expelled or suspended going to school. And also their families. We can make a condition, after their expulsion is over, that their family goes to family counseling. It doesn’t always work, but we have been more successful with them for that reason. Because we’re the district and county office, we have a very coherent organizational system. Every child in our schools who needs mental health services, is a foster child, has a family on public assistance—any of the services that you can name—they’re all in one system.
And we do a lot together. We run a truancy program with the city and county. The San Francisco Police Department puts [school resource officers] in our schools. We don’t pay a penny for them. And on and on. But it is also an advantage to the city. The San Francisco Department of Mental Health, if they have issues about the kids going to school who have mental health issues, they are able to do a lot of their services in our schools. They don’t need as many facilities, they don’t need as many contracts with private organizations. It’s very integrated and organized in a much easier way than other entities in the state.
There are so many bureaucratic boxes … and so many of the things that affect student achievement are not under the direct control, usually, of school districts.
There are so many school districts that are not even coterminous with their city, let alone with their county. And most of those kind of support services, health, mental health, public assistance—those are all run by counties.
You live in a place that is …
Pretty liberal?
Pretty liberal—and known for its very active political scene. And rumor has it that you’re the longest-serving school board member in San Francisco—ever.
I am the longest-serving board member in San Francisco. It’s a very political place, and it’s a very progressive place. I call myself a progressive. I think most people outside of San Francisco think I’m way too far to the left. In San Francisco, people accuse me of being not progressive enough. So they might describe me as the most conservative member of the San Francisco board.
I don’t know if you led the fight, but you were involved in keeping [the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program] in the high schools?
Yes.
Which is counterintuitive to San Francisco.
Well, that’s a good example, as I gave when I was running last year for a [CSBA] leadership position. I don’t accept the left-right axis of politics in San Francisco. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s an inaccurate description. In fact, almost everyone involved in politics in San Francisco is pretty far to the left, including me.
I think that the real divide in San Francisco is between ideologues and pragmatists. I put myself squarely on the pragmatic side. So I will not be against a program that every single participant testifies is important and valuable to them because in the ’60s I opposed the Vietnam War. But that’s the demand from the progressives on elected officials in San Francisco: If you’re for ROTC, you must be for war. Not true. That’s the needle I’ve tried to thread—so far successfully.
And you’re up for re-election again next year?
Um-hmm.
Good luck!
Thank you.
What’s kept you going to school board meetings on Tuesday nights for 20 years?
For me, the thing that makes school board service satisfying, rewarding—no matter how difficult, no matter how many hundreds of people are coming to the podium and accusing you of things and yelling at you—is that I think, much more directly than in other kinds of public service, you are able to touch, feel and communicate with the outcomes of what you do. I think of the students, and teachers, and the people who write to you and call you and tell you how much they appreciate what you do. Going into classrooms and seeing students learning and teachers teaching, is a touchstone. It’s something that touches you and gives meaning to what you do.
One of the hard things about being a very long-serving school board member is that you feel old! … I try very hard, and I think with some success, not to say, “oh, we’ve tried that already.” Even though we have tried it already. And sometimes it hasn’t worked. If I see somebody’s suggesting something that I think failed before and is likely to do the same, I’ll say. “Well, here’s what I think are the issues related to that.” Not “We did it before and you don’t know.” However, what you do get to see that’s really wonderful is that when you go into schools, when you talk to teachers, when they talk about the programs that are in place and the things that have happened, you are able to know that you had something to do with that.
You’ve talked about hoping to be around to see an improvement in the state’s school funding mechanisms.
I do. For instance, in San Francisco we have implemented a weighted student formula and site-based budgeting. I was instrumental in doing that. And now that is institutionalized. That is so much a part of our culture that it’s never going to change. The process will evolve, get better, I hope. Be different. But you could never undo that.
Do you have any optimism that if that works in San Francisco, it can be introduced statewide?
I think it can, and I hope it will be. I’ve been very pleased that in recent years our mind set in the state about school funding has started to evolve. You could describe it as one of the positive impacts of the budget crisis—that we started looking at money differently. … People are starting to think differently about how we target money. I’m hoping we can help to push that into a discussion about what a real weighted student funding system might look like. I think that targeting money at students who have lots of challenges is a good idea. We’ve ignored important things for a long, long time in California. Notably, we’ve ignored what it costs to educate kids. We’ve pretended we could do it without money, and you can’t. That’s why I’m so proud of CSBA for initiating the Robles-Wong lawsuit against the state.
So weighted funding is a success in San Francisco?
Incredibly successful. And the most successful part of it is that it has all these attendant positive impacts: the capacity of people in our schools to involve parents, to involve community people, to not just do the budget, but think about how we make decisions and how you include people, to think differently. It’s so much embedded in our community’s culture now. For instance, when we were doing the weighted student formula and site-based budgeting, we developed an outreach model that we still use [for other issues].
There’s certainly room for improvement in achievement, too.
Well, I think they’re linked together. So I think that most of what the state has done as far as trying to be a supportive entity, to try to help school districts to improve achievement, has been valuable. It’s a better system now than it was. … [but] I think there’s a lot that we need to do.
First of all, we definitely need to align the resources with the goals. I think that [CSBA] and our Education Coalition partners have a role to play in aligning those things and saying that if this is the standard you want, this is what it’s going to cost us to get there. I think we should try to stop pretending we can get there without the resources. I think we should say we’re going to keep on trying, but the resources are inadequate at best and shameful in reality.
I think a very important thing for us to do is to try to change the debate so that everybody looks at the resources for public education as a true investment in the future—that we want to spend money on education. It comes back to us, not only in money, but in a better society. Spending on education is a good thing for you.
[Former state Superintendent of Public Instruction] Delaine Eastin used to say this all the time, the answer to, “Why should I pay school taxes, or higher school taxes, when my kids are not in school, my grandkids are not in public schools?” It’s because you want the person who is going to teach your great-grandchildren, or the person who’s going to make the plane, or the pilot, or the technician in the hospital that you’re going to in a few years, to be educated. It makes the world better for you—you have a self-interest in this. And, by the way, isn’t it wonderful that our collective self-interest makes everything better? The whole is more than the sum of the parts. We get a better world that way, for all of us. Do we need to fix a lot of things? Sure we do—
Charter schools are supposed to fix some things.
My school board tenure is precisely the same as the charter law in California. The charter law took effect in January 1993. I was elected in November of ’92 and took my seat in January of ’93. … The truth is that charters are a governance change. They are privatizing control and governance. And I am against that. If you take all the studies of charter schools and aggregate them together, we can pretty much agree that, as a group, they do no worse and no better than publicly managed schools. And that’s not worth risking democracy for.
Of course, there are dependent and independent charters. I don’t know if San Francisco Unified has its own charters ...
We don’t have any dependent charters. What I think we’ve learned in the [nearly 20 years] that we’ve had charters in California … is that all the regulations to which charter schools are not subject, you probably don’t need them. How do we know? Because the data tells us that their achievement is no worse and no better than the regulated schools. What we do know is that it costs us a fortune to comply with all these regulations that have not given us any better achievement. And that’s why people have dependent charters. They want to do something that they can’t do without a charter.
There are some students and some groups of students that the public school system has not been able to serve well. We have two charters in San Francisco that I am a major supporter of. One is called Life Learning Academy, and it’s run by the Delancey Street Foundation. The students are almost all in the juvenile justice system; they’re on probation. This is a population that’s very, very difficult to serve. We [the San Francisco school board] are the county office of education also, so we are responsible for all these kids, and everybody knows the difficulties that they face in school. So they really need a charter to serve these kids, and they do a spectacular job. It’s the only school I know that does what many schools say they can do, which is take kids from really low achievement up to where they should be.
They need a charter because they use a variety of funding sources, including a big juvenile justice initiative in San Francisco. And they need the regulatory relief. They pick up the kids at school at 7 o’clock in the morning and they keep them until 8 or 9 o’clock at night. If you talked to a school board about the most troubled, difficult kids and you said to them, “How could you help these kids?” they would say, “Give them to me 24 hours a day.” And that’s what they do at Life Learning Academy.
Secondly, we have a school that is run by the Sheriff’s Department in San Francisco. It’s called Five Keys. They actually provide the opportunity for adults in jail in the county of San Francisco to get a high school diploma—not a GED. And they also allow them to continue in it if they’re not finished after they get out of jail. They do some extraordinary work.
Those are populations unable to be served by the system that the state has set up, and they can’t do it without a charter.
How we measure achievement is another controversial issue.
I was on the [state’s] committee of practitioners for Title I when No Child Left Behind came in, and we had a discussion about rebenchmarking the achievement levels in California. It’s coincidental that our achievement level was called “proficient” before No Child Left Behind was in place. We set the proficiency level pretty high—it’s actually way above grade level: far below basic, below basic, basic, proficient, advanced. And yet when No Child Left Behind came in and the feds said these are the levels we want you to have: basic, proficient, and advanced … and proficient should be like grade level, right?
Like the middle of the pack.
Right—so you get the idea that everybody could achieve it, right? [But] we refused to rebenchmark the proficiency level. What we have said is, we’re not going to have low-level classes anymore. This is the analogy: We won’t have arithmetic in high school, everybody’s going to have access to AP-level work. College-level work. High-level work. Nobody should be told you only have to learn how to do arithmetic. Everybody should be told to expect to learn algebra, geometry, trigonometry. Fine. That’s the standards. But then we said, “And you know what? You all have to get a B plus.” If you said it to people like that, they’d say, “What, are you crazy?”
We want you to have the access to that curriculum. We want to tell you, this is what high-level work looks like and it’s here for you to learn. But we should say the average person should get an average grade. Not that everybody, no matter where they start, should be at the top in their achievement on these high-level standards. And we have not been able to explain the difference to people.
These are high standards indeed.
We’re not talking about lowering standards, we’re talking about lowering the passing grade on a very much higher standard than we had before. So we’re going to need to have a different debate. But we need people in the education community talking about that. I think the discussion is too simple-minded about all of these things. We have complex issues and we try to have simple answers to them. And our responsibility is to lead a more complex, in-depth debate.
One of the most disappointing things about No Child Left Behind and the whole federal context—and some of this applies to California too, but certainly in the federal law—is that we have a lot of assertions about the value of data-driven decision making and very little actual data-driven decision making. There is no data that shows that the models that the federal government is insisting that we use for intervention work. In fact, there’s plenty of data showing that they don’t work. So it’s a dilemma for all of us. And again, I think our responsibility is to try to change the debate a little bit so that we can get people to talk about the right things.
Until we do manage to do that, though—or Congress changes the law, or California applies for and receives a waiver from the Obama administration—we are going to be held to NCLB’s existing standards. And now the administration and Secretary Duncan have expanded that with the [School Improvement] Grants.
I represent a school district that has been the highest-achieving urban district in California for 10 years in a row, and we are a Program Improvement district. An urban district with 61 percent free and reduced [price] lunch—we are above the state average in every grade in all subjects tested, and we’re a Program Improvement district. It’s crazy! So what’s going to happen, is—this is my belief—that Program Improvement intervention will become irrelevant. …
I don’t think that people in California think that what the feds say is the basis on which they judge their local public schools. I think that’s what we have to do—certainly it’s what CSBA has to keep doing—is saying not only do we tell the truth, we’re going to tell the whole truth, and we’re going to try to make it something that’s really understandable to the average person.
Our challenge is to get the truth out there. And you know how I think we do it? We get those people into the public schools. You take them by the hand and say, “Let me show you these wonderful children—who, by the way, are learning things in the third grade and the fourth grade and the fifth grade that I don’t know how to do. I’m playing catch-up here; they’re the ones who are going to lead us into the future.” And they can, because they’re so capable. And because our schools are helping them and teaching them, giving them the skills they need to do those things. I think that the more time you spend in schools, the more you treasure them. … Our job is to stand up and say. “Look at these extraordinary schools and children and teachers and principals and the work they do. And the school board members who govern them—without compensation—because they are just dedicated, extraordinary citizens.”
Brian Taylor ( btaylor@csba.org ) is the managing editor of California Schools.