by Scott Dickensheets
CALL HIM CARLOS. Not Mr. Garcia. Not Mr. Superintendent. He's not a formal-title kind of guy. Rapport--a knack for the appearance of immediate intimacy--is a salesman's greatest asset, and this morning at Woodbury Middle School, Carlos has his schmooze working, handing out good feelings like business cards.
"Hi, Carlos," a janitor says as the superintendent of schools, her boss of bosses, surveys the first-lunch crowd. He's off to the side of the main chewing area, standing there in his nice suit and salt-and-pepper goatee, eyes sweeping the clamor. The janitor remembers that Carlos told a gathering of maintenance workers to always address him by his first name, so, what the heck, she gives it a whirl. He greets her warmly, compliments her on the school's cleanliness, just as he'd traded pleasantries with the kitchen staff a minute ago.
Carlos is here on a sales call. Oh, officially, he's here to get a ground-level feel for the organization he runs, another stop on his handshake tour of the school district. But he's also here to sell--by his buoyant presence and upbeat demeanor, by sheer personability--a vision of a school system healthier than people think, a district in touch, focused ... and of a Garcia administration now up and at 'em after a wobbly start. Outside, the morning sky is spitting rain and the autumn sun has left early for California, but it's all sunshine and springtime around the superintendent. He makes for a table of sixth-graders and turns on the old Carlos charm.
"Do you like middle school better than elementary school?" he asks them.
Most nod, some vigorously; a few shrug and keep working on their pizza.
"What do you like most about it?"
"The food is better!" one kid blurts, to widespread agreement and additional chewing.
Carlos gets a kick out of that one. He also grins later when, in a class filled with eighth-graders--veteran middle-schoolers hardened to the charms of school pizza--they grouse about the food. Whassup with the no ketchup, Carlos? Not for a second does he appear ill at ease among his mouthy charges; back when he was teaching, he says, he requested the hardcases be assigned to his room. They reminded him of his younger self. And maybe he's cranking up the good mood because a reporter is tagging along, but after a few minutes in Woodbury's halls and classrooms, Carlos seems less like a salesman rolling out a new product than what he says he is: the district's head cheerleader, getting all rah-rah because he believes in the team. In another class, the teacher introduces him as the head of the whole school district. One student can't resist piping up: "You're lucky!"
Kid, you have no idea.
"THIS IS A 15-ROUND championship fight," Carlos says a few weeks later, getting mock-pugnacious as he talks about the hits he's taken in the media. "You might have gotten me in the first round. So what? I've got 14 more rounds to come back at you."
He's wearing makeup as he says this. A little powder on the cheeks and forehead to make himself pretty for the cover of this magazine. Boy, if the vatos from the old neighborhood were here in this photo studio to see him now! What would they think, those street fighters and drug dealers who, shall we say, complicated his boyhood in the L.A. barrio, back when he was a radical longhair flunking algebra and leading student demonstrations at Banning High School?
"I've been shot at," he says when he should be saying cheese. "I've been beaten. What're [the critics] gonna do to me?"
He's playing up his bravado, of course; otherwise he wouldn't be here, nose to nose with a camera on a school day. He realizes the value of a little image-enhancement in what are still the early days of his administration. Carlos and Las Vegas are still sizing each other up. In the absence of actions, all we have to go by are his words: the notorious and unwise "N-word" incident and his strong rhetoric of change. He's talked about retooling class schedules and decentralizing the district, but they're just concepts now. (Carlos says he'll present them as concrete proposals to the School Board this year.)
Although he manages to stand still for the camera, Carlos, 49, is clearly a restless man. "If he sits down for more than 10 minutes, I'm amazed," says his wife, Gail. Even on vacation, at the beach, he builds sand castles for something to do. The bulletin board in his office at the Ed Shed, the district's Flamingo Road headquarters, is cluttered with snapshots of his artful, elaborate sand jobs. His itchiness is even more evident in his résumé: Carlos hasn't stayed in any administrative position more than three years, always moving on to the next, bigger challenge. Before coming here he ran the Fresno school district, and before that, the Sanger (California) school district, and before that he was an area superintendent in Fresno, and before that he held a string of school-principal jobs.
He insists that won't happen this time. "I'm not here to be superintendent for one year, or three years," he says. "My vision when I took the position was to stay here until I retire."
"We're unpacked for the long haul," Gail confirms.
"I think he's been well-received so far," says Allin Chandler, director of the Clark County Association of School Administrators. "He's made a conscious effort to get to know people."
"It's going to be interesting to see how he interacts with the School Board and how willing he is to really change the prevailing culture," says John Jasonek, director of the Clark County Education Association. "He speaks the right language, talking about decentralization and site-based decision-making. But we haven't seen that movement yet."
The good vibes Carlos picked up at Woodbury--"the school was organized, kids were on task, kids were learning"--don't obscure the district's many problems. It's hurting for money; state funding hasn't kept up with inflation, let alone growth. It has a ferocious need for teachers. It's bulging with excess students. It's being assailed by critics of its bureaucracy, its waste, its performance, its size, its socioeconomic inequities. There's a move afoot to break the district--the nation's sixth largest--into smaller units. On top of that, another legislative tilt approaches. Carlos will have to be a true salesman then. The language of cheerleading (he favors such glib sound bites as "I have the greatest job in the world, all I do is fight for kids") is unlikely to move Carson City to raise our per-pupil funding, which he says is about $1,000 below the national average. He has the facts and figures to argue with--Connecticut leads the nation in funding and has high test scores, he says, a correlation you can't discount--and the vigor to make them persuasive. Will that be enough?
"I'm a realist. I think I'm in an uphill battle on that one. If I can't come out of it with all the resources I need now, at least I'd like to be able to plant the seeds of the discussion about where we're going in the future."
CARLOS IS A VISIONARY. It says so in the letter he sent to the Clark County School District last March, applying for the superintendent's chair shortly to be vacated by Brian Cram. "My leadership is honest, warm, sensitive, caring, collaborative, humorous, demanding and, above all, visionary," he wrote in a document notable partly for its lack of false modesty (a list of "professional accomplishments by order of significance" comes with the addendum, "Note that I am only listing my top 10. For additional, please review my résumé").
"When I talk about vision, I'm talking about asking questions that may be uncomfortable to ask," he says, sitting at a small table in his office. He's sitting back, legs crossed, absently dangling a slipped-off loafer from his toe. On the crowded bookshelf just behind him, Carlos prominently displays a bumper sticker that advises, "Question Authority."
"I'm saying, when do we start questioning ourselves? That's part of vision. Challenge our assumptions. One of our assumptions is that what we're doing is good enough for the future. Says who? Where's the data that supports that? Standing still isn't good enough in this day and age."
Carlos has a powerful urge to shake things up. Lack of change is another way to say "in a rut," and in a rut is precisely where he hates to be. His ideas for change aren't exactly new or particularly revolutionary, but they do question authority, at least as embodied by decades of local practice.
For instance, who says six classes a day is the best way to organize middle and high school? Carlos favors block scheduling--eight courses every two days, four a day. "Is this the right thing to do?" Carlos asks. "Let's look at the data. The data will tell you that kids who are in block scheduling, their GPAs are better. In a semester, kids have two more classes than they did before. In four years, they'll have 16 additional classes. To me, that means they're thinking better." The extra classes will allow remedial students to catch up, he says, and other students can explore electives they don't have time for now.
To ready kids for the rigors of high school and college, Carlos wants to begin algebra classes in middle school. He wants primary-grade teachers to be drilled in literacy techniques, since he believes reading fluency will stem the dropout rate.
Perhaps his most audacious notion is to divide the district into semiautonomous regions that will defer some decision-making powers from the Ed Shed to regional superintendents who will, theoretically, respond more quickly to local concerns. (A similar plan was tried here briefly in the '60s, Chandler says.) Carlos' idea is almost certainly a response to the deconsolidation drive.
"I think my plan meets that spirit," he says. "You do get the input from the community. Then we allow them to have the services out in the area."
In his previous jobs, Carlos was often able to turn such rhetoric into achievements. Topping his list of accomplishments is the "re-engineering" of the Fresno district into an organization with a service mentality; other highlights include establishing accountability programs, setting up technologically advanced facilities and turning around academically underachieving schools. "Garcia's hands-on approach and ability to articulate a vision have caught the eyes of school districts statewide," The Los Angeles Times reported from Fresno a few years ago. But in the same article, some critics dismissed him as a flake. "He's stuffing these standards down our throats without the money and resources to achieve them," one teacher huffed. Could similar complaints be heard here?
Chandler, for one, has reservations about block scheduling. "My question is, it's going to cost a fair amount to implement [in terms of staffing and textbooks] and where are we going to get that money?"
Further, Chandler says, if you math it out, kids get 9,000 minutes of instruction per course under the current system, but would receive only 7,650 minutes under a block-scheduling program. "We've lost 27 periods of instruction," he says. (Garcia argues that a lot of time is also wasted starting and ending standard 50-minute classes). This with new state standards on the way that will increase the amount of material taught in each course. "If we have more to teach in less time, will this work as well as we want it to?"
The decentralization plan has its own bugs. Will an area superintendent who only has experience in, for example, secondary education be able to grasp problems unique to the elementaries under his command? "There's a certain amount of apprehension," Chandler says.
Carlos has a saying: The only people who like change are wet babies. He's ready for Round 2. Bring on the skeptics! "I always have Mission: Impossible music going on in my head, right?" he says, laughing. "Because that fuse is lit and we've got to pull this one off. I grew up watching Mission: Impossible, and at the end of the mission they accomplished it! And that's exactly the way I feel."
FATE INTERVENES. That's part of what you learn from Carlos' story. You're headed in one direction--say, down a street in East LA, on foot--and fate intervenes--say, in the form of a carload of your loco friends. Hey, Carlos, want a ride? Sure, muchachos! He climbs in and they drive away. Then something occurs to him.
"Where'd you guys get this car?"
"We ripped it off!"
This is what you might call a crossroads moment, presenting itself without warning or fanfare. Carlos is a teenager, remember: Does he risk certain uncoolness by demanding to be let out or does he hang with his guys?
Well, he got out, of course, because he's here in this office, not ... wherever he'd be now if he'd stayed. Because shortly after the guys let him out, a cop busted the whole carload. "If I'd have had a felony, I'd have never been a teacher or a school administrator," he says. "What change would my life have taken?" This sort of thing, he says, happened more than once.
Yeah, he was lucky, just like that kid at Woodbury had said; Carlos lightheartedly compares himself to Forrest Gump, fluking into good fortune. But the other thing you learn is this: "You make your own luck," Carlos says. "I knew it wasn't cool to get out, but it was the best decision I ever made."
Whenever fate has intervened, he's made the right decision. At parties, when the drugs came out, he left. When a teacher, looking past his tough-guy shtick, put him on the ballot for student body president, he had the good sense to make the most of his win, eventually parlaying his leadership abilities into a scholarship to Claremont Men's College, near LA. When a friend proposed, out of the blue one day, that the two of them parlay their degrees into teaching credentials, he followed his instincts and wound up as head of the sixth largest school district in the nation.
So maybe that's the origin of Carlos the head cheerleader--school helped turn him around, give him a direction. Maybe that's why he wants to cram algebra down the gagging throats of Valley middle-schoolers: Because it'll eventually be good for them, just like it finally was for him.
"I believe there are a bunch of kids out there just like me," he says. "That things don't come easy, they just have to work a little more."
NIG ... NO. YOU JUST DON'T. Not aloud, not on the page. Because that's not just a word, it's an act, an act bound up with 200 years of ugly history and unresolved issues of race and pain. If you're smart, you just don't say it.
Last July, Carlos, who is very smart, did say it, greatly complicating his fledgling administration. You've undoubtedly heard the story: The new supe was addressing a group of black students when he said: "I always say this, and it sounds strange. N-----s come in all colors, and a n----- is someone who doesn't respect themselves or any others."
Never mind now what he was trying to say, something about low self-esteem in the fight against racism. Never mind that he apologized, profusely. Never mind that he was reprimanded by the School Board. Never mind the firestorm it ignited: the calls for his removal, the tut-tutting editorials, the angry letters to the editor.
The judgment question remains. Why would one of our most public officials, a man entrusted to fill the heads of our children, utter that word, which the least-educated person in the Valley could have told him would cause nothing but trouble, no matter the context?
He says it didn't bother him so much that people questioned his judgment or called for his ouster. "What hurt me the most was for anybody in any way to insinuate that I would say that in a negative manner. My entire life, 24 years in public education, all I've ever done is work for everything against that." In fact, the incident reinforced his determination to raise standards and school performance. "Education is the only salvation against racism," he says.
People don't bring it up much anymore; there's a botched election to talk about and a UNLV basketball team in turmoil. But it has stamped his first year in office, and the mark will remain until Carlos paves it over with enough professional achievements listed in order of significance--until his actions supercede his words. "I don't hear people talk about it," Jasonek says, "but I think a lot of people are waiting for the other shoe to fall off."
Carlos is no longer troubled by the affair--it's ancient history. "I never live in the past, and I seldom live in the present," he says; it's another favorite maxim. He's all about the future, that big blank slate where there are, as of yet, no funding shortages, no vocal critics, no entrenched status quo--no problems, only vast, uncharted promise. His composure is admirable, and perhaps troubling, to the degree that it suggests to you a propensity to move on perhaps too quickly. Glance down. Carlos has again slipped off his left loafer and is now swinging it around on his big toe, not a tense nerve in his body. Note to the watchful: The shoe doesn't fall off.
