Raymond stress focusing attention on "soft skills," like resilience and self-motivation, as underlying conditions for student achievement. Photo: Sacramento City Unified

Outgoing Sacramento City Superintendent Jonathan Raymond stressed focusing on “soft skills,” like resilience and self-motivation, as underlying conditions for student achievement. Credit: Sacramento City Unified

Jonathan Raymond saw his charge as superintendent of Sacramento City Unified as transforming the district. This week, after 4½ years leading the 42,000-student district, he departs with a credible list of accomplishments at least partly attributable to his leadership.

Some of those – progress in implementing Common Core standards, greatly expanded summer programs, new college and career programs tied to businesses and the community, home-school visits and new parent-teacher partnerships – will survive. So too probably will the new focus on social and emotional aspects of learning, which, Raymond said, “is really catching on like the beginning of a wild blaze.”

Other changes, though – protections he provided a half-dozen once low-performing Priority Schools and a waiver from the No Child Left Behind law tied in part to adoption of a new teacher evaluation system – will remain under attack from the teachers union with whom Raymond repeatedly clashed.

Harder to predict is whether Raymond’s vision of an infectious commitment “to do whatever it takes for kids” will endure. Superintendents, he said in an interview, “can create the culture that becomes the permanent change.” Raymond expressed confidence that he has.

But whether he or, for that matter, any superintendent in conflict with a strong teachers union, can create irreversible, systemic change in several years will be left for his successor and future school board members to determine.

Raymond, 53, is leaving to return to the Boston area, where he and his wife are from, and their three young children’s grandparents still live. Resigning for “family reasons” is sometimes code for feeling the heat to quit. But Raymond has had the  support of his school board throughout his time, although the once sure 6-1 votes have edged closer to 4-3. Leaving, nonetheless, is his choice.

‘Outsider’

Raymond came to Sacramento from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, a high-achieving district, where he was chief accountability officer in charge of data, innovation, school performance reviews and measures of student achievement. His career path – while not unique among urban superintendents – made him an outsider. He previously was a practicing attorney in business and labor law, deputy director at the Massachusetts Department of Labor and Workforce Development and chief executive officer at a Boston nonprofit before turning to education.

He received his training in education as a fellow at the Broad Superintendents Academy, an 18-month program funded by the Broad Foundation of Los Angeles that trains executives from inside and outside education to become activist superintendents for urban districts. Graduates include Los Angeles Unified Superintendent John Deasy; Chris Barbic, superintendent of the Achievement School District in Tennessee; and Rhode Island Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist.

“I relish the challenges and opportunities that urban districts bring,” Raymond said in a recent interview. “I am not an auto-pilot, cruise-control kind of guy.”

Admirers praised his fresh perspective.

“He thought differently from other people, because his background was different,” said Rick Miller, a former deputy state superintendent who worked closely with Raymond as executive director of the eight CORE (California Office to Reform Education) districts on the No Child Left Behind waiver.

“He took the district forward around a vision that encapsulates the whole child. He is not afraid to take risks and speak his mind, and that has caused challenges as well,” said Jay Schenirer, a Sacramento councilmember and former school board member who worked with Raymond in expanding summer programs for low-income youths.

Detractors said his lack of first-hand classroom experience showed in his frosty relationship with teachers.

“Jonathan came in with an agenda dictated by the Broad Foundation that included union busting under the guise of doing what’s best for kids,” said Nikki Milevsky, a veteran school psychologist and president of the Sacramento Teachers Association.

A new approach

Raymond arrived in Sacramento at the worst of times. The district was hit with the double whammy of big state cuts and a loss of revenue from declining enrollments. “It was like landing at Normandy,” he said.

So Raymond turned to outside resources through partnerships with the community and through foundation grants for two priorities: expanded summer learning and a focus on social and emotional learning, which stresses developing students’ non-cognitive skills, such as resiliency, self-control and self-motivation as underlying conditions for effective learning.

“Whole child, whole year” summed up the district’s approach. Seven-week programs this year included SummerQuest, giving 2,000-plus elementary school students hands-on activities in science, engineering and technology; Summer of Service, with a range of  activities for 900 middle school students; and an orientation, incorporating social media, academics and bonding activities for 700 incoming 9th graders. Summer at City Hall provided class credit and internships for 80 high school students. A youth leadership camp that Schenirer launched gave a wilderness experience to several dozen high school students.

“(Raymond) was good at bringing in civic and community leaders and groups that had not traditionally been associated with our district,” said School Board President Jeff Cuneo.

Sacramento is one of eight districts nationwide – Oakland Unified is another – to receive a three-year, $750,000 grant to participate in CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

Milvesky, president of the teachers union, dismissed the CASEL initiative, saying good teachers have always been in touch with their students’ emotional needs and modeled behavior for learning. But schools associated with CASEL – about 30 out of 80 in the district this year – stress building a school climate and training for all staff. Parents are involved through home visits and after-school programs.

Soft skills like self-motivation and empathy are hard to measure, and evidence of effectiveness so far has been largely anecdotal but encouraging, said Koua Jacklyn Franz, Raymond’s chief of staff, who administers the program.

“As a huge advocate of social and emotional learning, Raymond is much more thoughtful and a big-picture kind of guy in ways that run counter to the tenets of the corporate reform movement,” such as merit pay, said Carl Cohn, a member of the State Board of Education, director of the Urban Leadership Program in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University and retired superintendent of Long Beach Unified.

Through foundation-backed programs like Summer Matters, the district greatly expanded its summer learning opportunities to students in all grades. Photo: Sacramento City Unified.

Through foundation-backed programs like Summer Matters, the district greatly expanded summer learning opportunities in all grades. Credit: Sacramento City Unified

Friction with teachers

Friction with the Sacramento City Teachers Association started early, during tense negotiations in response to state-forced budget cuts, over higher class sizes, furlough days, pay cuts and hundreds of preliminary layoff notices.

But it accelerated when Raymond created six Priority Schools in 2010 and added a seventh a year later. Those schools – among those that would have qualified for federal school turnaround grants – were Raymond’s beachhead into instilling a sense of urgency and taking on practices in the low-performing schools.

“It was about changing the culture in our neediest schools towards one of excellence, and demonstrating, in a time of great financial stress in our state, that we can do something really dramatic and bold in our most difficult schools,” Raymond said.

Raymond hand-picked the principals for the schools, gave them full hiring authority, created positions for additional teacher coaches and site administrators, provided extra training and time for collaboration, and gave the schools more latitude to choose their curriculum. Two years ago, Raymond chose the Priority Schools to be the first to switch to the Common Core State Standards.

Some teachers in other schools resented the extra resources to Priority Schools amid cutbacks. And when Raymond exempted Priority Schools teachers from seniority-based layoffs, citing the threat to the progress they were making and the need to protect low-performing schools from staff churn, the teachers union challenged the move. In a landmark decision, a Superior Court judge ruled that Priority Schools qualified for protection, along with teachers in areas of shortage, under the teacher layoff statute because Priority Schools teachers received specialized training.

The district and the union have continued to spar over which individuals have the training for an exemption, and there has been continued staff turnover in some schools. But improvement has been marked: Along with increased attendance and declines in suspensions, API scores in four years rose significantly – 180 points in one case – in six of the seven schools. Four of the schools with the biggest gains, including Hiram W. Johnson High, are now designated as exemplary “Reward Schools” under the CORE waiver. They will be paired with low-performing schools to share lessons they’ve learned.

Contested future of Priority Schools

Projected increases in funding under Proposition 98, which sets a minimum funding level for schools, plus more money to the district under the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, should ease some of the tensions over the district’s special treatment for Priority Schools.

But Raymond predicts the Priority Schools will be under siege.

“I think the teachers’ union leadership is going to continue, both locally and statewide, to try to do anything they can to sort of roll back on the culture and climate that we’ve created there,” he said, “and the mechanism which we have used to be able to stabilize those excellent communities of practice.”

The court ruling on Priority Schools was a watershed moment in Raymond’s relationship with the union. The animosity has continued. Raymond is openly disdainful of the union, and vice versa.

Milevsky said that Raymond hasn’t listened to teachers. Instead, “he has surrounded himself basically with a bunch of yes-men. He believes he should make all the decisions.” She predicted that now that layoff protections aren’t needed, teachers will defect from the Priority Schools. “He needed to sit down and talk about how to keep the best teachers in needy schools. His approach only worked in a time of layoffs.”

Raymond said teachers at the Priority Schools don’t want the union to interfere. “And I think they also believe, frankly, that their union doesn’t represent them, or doesn’t speak for them. And I think more and more of them are becoming outspoken about what they want to see, and what they believe, and what they get in the profession for.”

If the Priority Schools are the model for team-building and training for other low-achieving schools, then it will be left to Raymond’s successor to replicate it. And that, says Carl Cohn, who served as Long Beach superintendent for a decade, is the risk in leaving too soon.

“When you can get some of the best teachers to embrace kids who are the neediest, that is no small accomplishment,” Cohn said. “But you don’t know where Sac City is going next and whether it will build on what Jonathan Raymond has done. That’s the big gamble.”

Cuneo, the board president, praised Raymond for “directing the focus on some of our vulnerable and disadvantaged kids” and said the Priority Schools initiative was one way to address it. But he also acknowledged that relations with the Sacramento City Teachers Association “became frayed, and there could have been more effort to repair the relationship.”

Could relations have been fixed if Raymond had stayed? “You wonder,” he said, adding that he is hoping “the next superintendent is adept and diplomatic to bring everyone to the table to see kids achieve.”

Cuneo said he wants the next superintendent to continue the initiatives that Raymond started: “Someone who can understand the landscape of Sacramento and build on what has been done. We’re on a good path.”

Looking back, Raymond said that he would have spent more time early on developing a deep leadership team. “Who you recruit and develop and retain is absolutely critical,” he said. “People make or break you in this business.”

Other than that, he said, “No regrets. Things unfold the way they unfold. It is what you do with the cards you are dealt.”

John Fensterwald covers state education policy. Contact him and follow him on Twitter @jfenster. Sign up here for a no-cost online subscription to EdSource Today for reports from the largest education reporting team in California.

To get more reports like this one, click here to sign up for EdSource’s no-cost daily email on latest developments in education.

Share Article

Comments (7)

Leave a Reply to Mikaila Rodinsky

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * *

Comments Policy

We welcome your comments. All comments are moderated for civility, relevance and other considerations. Click here for EdSource's Comments Policy.

  1. Ian 6 years ago6 years ago

    In hindsight, one hopes the author realizes his misplaced love affair with Mr. Raymond didn't help anyone, nor did it inform the public. With Mr. Raymond's short-lived "return to Boston," morale among staff and students at Sac City improved. Laid-off employees were returned to work to provide services to students and Raymond's predicted doom never came to pass. We had an interim Superintendent who was pretty damned good, but she had to make way … Read More

    In hindsight, one hopes the author realizes his misplaced love affair with Mr. Raymond didn’t help anyone, nor did it inform the public. With Mr. Raymond’s short-lived “return to Boston,” morale among staff and students at Sac City improved. Laid-off employees were returned to work to provide services to students and Raymond’s predicted doom never came to pass.

    We had an interim Superintendent who was pretty damned good, but she had to make way for the guy who came in and fixed as many of the things Raymond broke as he possibly could.

    Now we have the Superintendent who everyone should support as his only promise and his only goal is student achievement.

    Raymond never cared about student achievement. Look at his resume. His job was to shut down as many public school sites as possible and turn them all into charter schools and let the charter school folks stop talking about “pupils” and continue talking about “revenue units.” Not all charter schools are bad, but how many have been busted for faking test scores?

    No charter school has ever shut down based on failure, but how many have closed mid-semester because they were no longer profitable.

    You loved Raymond because you thought he was a businessman taking over our schools. Essentially, your support of Jonathan Raymond shows EdSource is basically the folks Trump is hoping to reach.

    Oh, but wait, you’re the folks hoping to destroy public education in the United States so your kids–dumb as they may be–go on to rule without any interference from the great unwashed!

  2. Wanda F Williams 8 years ago8 years ago

    I would like to sign my daughter up for the summer program

  3. John G 10 years ago10 years ago

    What this article does not mention is that Raymond raised the salary of principals and vice-principals at those "priority schools", thereby creating even more friction among principals as well. Once you change so many variables ($, hand-picked staff, # of staff ...etc.), it is not a fair comparison between a "non-priority" and a "priority school." Read More

    What this article does not mention is that Raymond raised the salary of principals and vice-principals at those “priority schools”, thereby creating even more friction among principals as well.
    Once you change so many variables ($, hand-picked staff, # of staff …etc.), it is not a fair comparison between a “non-priority” and a “priority school.”

  4. Mikaila Rodinsky 10 years ago10 years ago

    It is easier to pack up and leave then to deal with the mess that Raymond created. There is no accountability and this flowed throughout SCUSD. Year after year, teachers are given the pink slip, put through a hearing process with lawyers on both sides,only to rehired them back wasting money that could better serve the children. To make matters worst, they reshuffle teachers from school to school instead of placing them back at their … Read More

    It is easier to pack up and leave then to deal with the mess that Raymond created. There is no accountability and this flowed throughout SCUSD. Year after year, teachers are given the pink slip, put through a hearing process with lawyers on both sides,only to rehired them back wasting money that could better serve the children. To make matters worst, they reshuffle teachers from school to school instead of placing them back at their original school sites and some are rehired a couple of days before school start or worst after school starts. How is this best for the kids? Also, as for the priority schools, how can you single out a few schools for funding by taking those funds from other schools? There are schools literally a few blocks away from these priority schools, with children who are under performing and schools in disrepair. The list goes on and on. Raymond has left, leaving an atmosphere of distrust among teachers, principals, and the district. In the end this does no good for the children he supposedly cares for.

  5. Neuville Elphage 10 years ago10 years ago

    You did not mention that he RIFed all librarians in the district, even though it was in clear violation of the contract. This resulted in the disruption and destruction of the library collection and a costly settlement when an arbitrator ruled in favor of the union regarding this clause in the contract. The total cost of this bonehead move will eventually be in excess of one million dollars. You also did not mentioned … Read More

    You did not mention that he RIFed all librarians in the district, even though it was in clear violation of the contract. This resulted in the disruption and destruction of the library collection and a costly settlement when an arbitrator ruled in favor of the union regarding this clause in the contract. The total cost of this bonehead move will eventually be in excess of one million dollars. You also did not mentioned that he tried to get TFA into the district and was only thwarted when one of the better principals pointed out that there were and excess of excellent teachers already applying for work in the district. I am surprised that you did not mention that test scored did not go up in the district. In addition, several of Raymond’s favorite principals left or retired leaving behind a wake of unethical and, possibly illegal activity. He quietly swept this under the rug.

  6. Jennifer 10 years ago10 years ago

    They don't tell the whole truth at how he used political savvy to achieve some of those statistics. He claims "to do whatever it takes for kids", apparently even if it means kicking them out of school because their struggling scores/grades don't allow him to meet the statistics that make him look like he made an improvement during his tenure. He didn't improve things. He just passed the problems on to others … Read More

    They don’t tell the whole truth at how he used political savvy to achieve some of those statistics. He claims “to do whatever it takes for kids”, apparently even if it means kicking them out of school because their struggling scores/grades don’t allow him to meet the statistics that make him look like he made an improvement during his tenure. He didn’t improve things. He just passed the problems on to others to truly deal with instead of practicing what he preached. Just because you don’t acknowledge or try to hide the issues doesn’t mean their not still there.

  7. Eric Premack 10 years ago10 years ago

    The political, financial, and labor situation in Sacramento makes the superintendency a nearly impossible job. Sacramento is damn lucky that the likes of Raymond are willing to not only work here, but work their butts off in a largely thankless job. While I disagree with a number of decisions Raymond has made, I have enormous respect for is judgment, hard work, and political savvy. He's made significant progress in a time of … Read More

    The political, financial, and labor situation in Sacramento makes the superintendency a nearly impossible job. Sacramento is damn lucky that the likes of Raymond are willing to not only work here, but work their butts off in a largely thankless job. While I disagree with a number of decisions Raymond has made, I have enormous respect for is judgment, hard work, and political savvy. He’s made significant progress in a time of profound challenges. Some of our neighboring districts are paying a huge price for less capable leadership. We were lucky to have Raymond as long as we did and it will be a huge challenge for our board to fill his shoes.