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Wilcox: School choice 'flawed'

The school superintendent says in an interview that it's his role to "tell the truth relentlessly." And he lets loose on the choice plan, and more.

By THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published January 25, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - In an interview extraordinary for its candor, Pinellas school superintendent Clayton Wilcox on Monday painted a less-than-flattering picture of the district he came to work for in August.

He said the school choice plan was "fundamentally flawed from its inception" and in need of short- and long-term changes.

Members of the School Board are "very well-intentioned," Wilcox said, but are "struggling with the line between management and policymaking," meaning they too often interfere with his job.

He said the board is starting to load the district down with more work at a time when he and his staff need to focus and think about ways to work smarter.

"I run from fire to fire to fire," said Wilcox, who said one board member "would like to see me fail."

Pinellas teachers, he said, need more diversity training.

"I think I have an awful lot of middle-class, white teachers who sometimes struggle with understanding the environments that a lot of kids come out of," he said.

Wilcox also offered an inside glimpse of his sometimes strained relations with top administrators, including School Board attorney John Bowen.

"I screamed at him," Wilcox said, recounting a recent internal dispute over a personnel matter.

He said area superintendents, his top subordinates, have criticized him for going over their heads by e-mailing principals directly.

But Wilcox, who sends scores of e-mails every day and plans to make them public on a regular basis, said he does not plan to discontinue the practice of handling issues directly.

He also portrayed the district's bureaucracy as slow, outdated and due for a major reorganization.

His broad assessment of Pinellas schools: "While this school district is thought of as a lighthouse, there are tremendous challenges." He mentioned the district's sagging graduation rate, test scores that no longer are the envy of other districts and the fact that half the district's 16 high schools received D grades from the state last year.

"The fact is, this district has a real hard time saying we have problems," he said.

His comments came during an appearance before the Times editorial board. He concluded the meeting by saying he loved his new job, saw it as the best opportunity of his career and relished the challenges it presented.

Wilcox has often said that his style is to make "evolutionary rather than revolutionary change." Asked whether he now risked alienating his colleagues by pointing out their failings, Wilcox said, "I admit (failings) too. I'm in the soup."

He added: "The constituency I care about is the one that will do things on behalf of kids. ... People have known for a long time things weren't getting done."

His role, he said, is to "tell the truth relentlessly."

He recounted a recent meeting with principals in which he recited "10 brutal facts" about Pinellas high schools. "Then I stood back and said, "You're the only ones who can solve it."'

He said it was the first time many of them had been asked to solve a problem.

In a later interview Monday, Wilcox acknowledged that the board member he said wanted to "see me fail" was veteran board member Linda Lerner.

Lerner was one of two board members who expressed reservations about Wilcox when the board hired him away last spring from the East Baton Rouge Parish School System in Louisiana.

"There is nothing I do that she doesn't second-guess," Wilcox told the Times editorial board. "The rest of the (school) board feels the need to rally around me."

He said Lerner's actions are "becoming a bit of a distraction."

Lerner has criticized Wilcox recently on several matters. One was that he told news reporters of his plans to reorganize the district's transportation department after the death of a student. The plans included disciplinary action against employees. Lerner said Wilcox had acted against district policy by talking publicly about the disciplinary measures.

"I completely disagree with him," Lerner said Monday. "I believe I'm trying to help him succeed. I believe he does not think before he speaks sometimes."

She said she disagreed with Wilcox's practice of airing his thoughts on the flaws of long-time district administrators.

"You bring people along with you," she said. "He needs to look at himself."

Wilcox told the editorial board that he planned to conduct a "strategic listening tour" of Pinellas County soon, with stops at libraries, meeting halls and churches. His goal is to gauge the community's pulse on the vexing issue of the choice plan.

As a successor to court-ordered busing, the plan's aim is to encourage black and white families to integrate voluntarily by choosing schools outside their neighborhoods. Choice is working in some schools, but is failing in many others.

"It's a tough question for us," Wilcox said Monday. He said he did not yet know the best way to proceed, adding that bolstering some magnet and "attractor" schools was one solution. He wondered aloud about the assumptions that drove the creation of court-mandated desegregation orders many years ago, followed later in Pinellas by choice.

Are all-black schools inherently unequal, as many contend?

"That's just not the case if you look at some of the other districts in this country," Wilcox said.

Some people equate all-black schools with low quality, he said. "But (all-black) absolutely doesn't mean to me that there won't be high levels of achievement and scholarship." He said it becomes a problem "only if you let it."

The superintendent also weighed in on what he views as a problem with Pinellas administrators doling out too many student suspensions. He said Pinellas high school students miss an average of 40 days between ninth and 12th grades, much of it because of suspensions. About one of every five high school students are suspended, he said. "That's not a sign of a healthy environment."

He called for a new "behavior management plan."

Asked his opinion of zero tolerance discipline policies, Wilcox called for a more common sense approach. He spoke of a recent case in which a Pinellas third-grader, new to the U.S., was sent to an alternative school after he pointed a squirt gun at other kids. He was sent to a school that did not have an English as a Second Language program.

"That kind of thing we're going to change," Wilcox said. "That just defies common sense. ... Organizations tend to do this one-size-fits all thing. We're going to get away from that."

-- Times staff writer Donna Winchester contributed to this report.

[Last modified January 30, 2005, 09:53:13]