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Martenizing the Unified District
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Cindy Marten's fortune: leading San Diego Unified forward while suffering personal setbacks
Fortune #1,082: “You will have good luck in your personal affairs.” Years ago, Cindy Marten started finding fortunes — not the cookies, just the tossed-aside slips of paper — in random locations: under her seat at a Mexican restaurant, inside a supermarket, outside a gas station.
Marten, the San Diego Unified School District’s superintendent, catalogs these messages. Some are encouraging.
Others seem to be mocking her. That “good luck” fortune? She found it soon after losing control of a scooter on a city sidewalk. This May 12 accident sent her to the emergency room with a broken right arm, cuts and bruises.
Three days later, she was released from the hospital. “She comes out on a Tuesday at 10 a.m.,” said Mel Katz, a friend. “She’s had surgery, there’s a metal plate in her arm, a gash in her head — and she goes to her 3:30 p.m. board meeting.”
She stayed to the end of the six-hour session. “People think she is going to pass out,” Katz said.
But Marten, who next week marks her fifth anniversary as superintendent, was determined to honor her personal credo: “Work Hard, Be Kind, Dream Big! No Excuses.”
“You be there for joy and for pain,” she said. “You show up for it.”
In this position, showing up for five years is a major accomplishment. To lead California’s second-largest public school district, a mammoth enterprise of 181 schools and about 106,000 students, is to defy fate. This is a meat grinder of a job, a destroyer of reputations, a graveyard of bold plans and high hopes.
In the 10 years before Marten’s hiring, the district was led by four permanent and three interim superintendents. The position seemed so unworkable, the board of trustees debated scrapping it in favor of some less-punishing arrangement.
But roughly 24 hours after another short-term superintendent resigned, the board offered the job to an elementary school principal with decades of classroom experience: Marten.
Fans say this experiment is now showing signs of success. In April, the district topped the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called “the nation’s report card.”
“San Diego Unified School District blew the socks off this cycle of the Nation’s Report Card, which measures progress on reading and math at grades four and eight,” said Mike Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, representing 69 of the country’s largest urban public school districts.
“No other city in the country saw gains in both grades in reading and math like San Diego.”
Graduation rates have risen to 91 percent. Marten seems to have won over her five-member board and many of the district’s 12,900 employees.
“The good thing is she’s been a teacher,” said Myriam Pedersen, who retired this month after 30 years of teaching in the district. “It makes a huge difference when they talk about, ‘here’s our goals, here’s what we will do,’ if they’ve been a teacher.”
Still, budget cuts and layoffs are perennial issues. An achievement gap between students of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, while narrowing, persists. There are still under-performing schools.
While juggling these professional challenges, Marten has been hit with personal crises. In January Marten’s mother, Fern Siegel, the former president of Jewish Family Service of San Diego, suffered a heart attack. Visibly scarred from her scooter mishap, Marten bears invisible scars from the deaths of her father in 2014 and her husband in 2016.
“None of it affects her job,” said Katz, who is on the board of one of the district’s charter schools, the C3 Academy. “She has such a positive attitude and really, really believes that we are doing great things for the city.
“We are just starting to see what Cindy can accomplish in San Diego.”
Fortune #592: “You will find good fortune in love.” Marten is 51, two years younger than her brother, Charley Cohen — “the love of my life,” she calls him. As a young girl, Cindy rapidly surpassed her older sibling in most academic subjects, as he is developmentally disabled.
“I’m certain I became a teacher because of my brother, Charley,” she said. “I wanted to teach him.”
The Cohens moved from Chicago to San Diego when Cindy was 11, so Charley could enroll in California’s special education program. The family prized education — the father, Donald Cohen, was a lawyer and certified public accountant who spoke several languages; the mother, a CPA and community activist, was president of a synagogue (Temple Emanu-El in San Carlos) and led a campaign to build a residence for the mentally ill (Chesed Home: Hope Village in Escondido).
Cynthia Minette Cohen, the couple’s middle child, is the only one who was adopted and the only one without a serious disability. Her younger sister, Laura, was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic as a young woman.
Cindy attended local public schools — Hardy Elementary, Horace Mann Middle — before enrolling in La Jolla Country Day. For her senior project, she interned at the Aseltine School, then a special education academy where Charley had studied.
She idolized Aseltine’s energetic principal, Marian Grant. Years later as a young teacher, Cindy Cohen took Grant to lunch.
“What’s your secret?” the fledgling educator asked her mentor. “How do you avoid burning out?”
“You’ll never burn out,” Grant predicted, “because you are curious.”
Armed with a teaching degree from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, Cohen began her career at Beth Israel Day School in 1991. That same year, she married her longtime boyfriend, a dashing hotel manager from Mexico City, Sergio Marten.
After a stint in the Poway district as a teacher and literacy specialist, Marten moved to San Diego Unified and City Heights’ Central Elementary. There, she was a teacher, vice principal and principal.
She assumed that last position in 2007, just as her husband suffered a massive stroke.
“I had 1,000 kids counting on me, our son was 12 going on 13, and my husband, my soul mate, was in the ICU and we didn’t know if he would live or die,” she said.
To maintain her emotional balance, she vowed to take one photograph a day for a year, focusing on something that made her grateful.
Nature supplied most subjects — butterflies, sunsets, ocean vistas — but homey images sometimes appeared. Her feet, for instance, kicking off her shoes after a long day.
“The world doesn’t change,” Marten said, “but the way you look at the world changes.”
When the year ended, Marten continued this practice. She still does today.
Fortune #1,083: “An unexpected visitor will bring you good blessings.” Under Marten, Central was cited as a successful inner city school by experts local and national. The principal advocated smaller class sizes, established clear, measurable results for her teachers, and provided staff with additional training and resources.
When Richard Barrera, a local labor leader, began his successful campaign for the school board in 2008, he spoke with students, teachers, staff and administrators.
“Cindy was the most articulate educator I met in this whole process,” said Barrera, secretary-treasurer of United Food and Commercial Workers’ Local 135. “She was able to take me and show me and articulate at her school how to create an environment where kids were thriving.”
When Superintendent Terry Grier resigned to lead Houston’s school district, Barrera tapped Marten to serve on the search committee for a successor.
“She became a leader in that process,” Barrera said.
That process resulted in the June 2010 hiring of Bill Kowba. Less than three years later, when he announced his retirement, Marten became the trustees’ unanimous choice without a search committee or any community testimony.
This was “virtually unheard of,” the Union-Tribune reported, and some were upset by the move. Marten disturbed some district employees and parents early in her tenure, as she replaced close to 75 percent of the district’s principals.
“She wants strong principals who support and hold accountable the teachers,” Katz said. “It’s all about proper training and doing the right things — supporting your teachers, giving them the tools they need and holding them accountable.”
Those tools include special teams dispatched to schools to share the latest best practices on math or reading instruction.
Observers say Marten benefited by inheriting a board of trustees that, unlike many earlier boards, is not split into warring camps. There’s an agreed-upon mission, to tackle racial achievement gaps and to provide every student a broad and challenging curriculum.
“We’re all pulling in the same direction,” Barrera said.
“I think we’re getting a lot accomplished,” said Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, another trustee. “We want every child reading by third grade and we're working on that. We want every child to graduate and we’re working on that.”
Part of that work involves the superintendent regularly briefing the trustees and keeping the surprises, good or bad, to a minimum.
“We meet weekly,” Whitehurst-Payne said. “That’s good access.”
Fortune #619: “You can be trusted to keep a secret.” In his retirement, Marten’s father became known as "Don the Can Man.” A longtime runner and bicyclist, Don Cohen often scoured San Diego’s streets for aluminum cans, keeping meticulous count of how many he had grabbed and recycled.
On his 80th birthday, Oct. 14, 2014, he scored his 4 millionth can. His goal was 8 million cans, but he would never reach that number. While bicycling near San Diego State University that fall, he was hit by a car. He died from his injuries on Nov. 7, 2014.
Marten had little time to mourn her father, as her husband’s health was deteriorating. In the summer of 2016, while in a rehab center, he seemed to be recovering.
Marten called him early on Aug. 21, 2016, the day of the America’s Finest City Half Marathon, which she had entered. He sounded fine, an impression reinforced by a positive report from the rehab center’s staff, and promised to see Marten after her run.
“I was running to honor my father,” she said. But the race soon took on an even darker hue.
At Mile 7, Marten’s cell phone rang. Sergio Marten’s heart had failed, and he had died at the age of 57. He and Cindy had been husband and wife for 25 years and a couple for 33 years.
Days later, the 2016-2017 school year kicked off with a rally.
“I went to school, went to the meetings,” Marten said. “I could have been the grieving widow, but you go.”
Her emotions were profoundly mixed — “there’s this great joy because the beginning of school is such an amazing time” — but she didn't want her own sorrows to cast a shadow over that special day.
“If I need to cry,” she said, “I cry.”
Even now, she tears up when discussing the Job-like series of calamities that has hit the family in the last four years. She mourns, but she also takes comfort in the loved ones who remain and the chance she has to move this district ahead.
“This district”? Scratch that.
“I don’t think of this as working for the district,” she said,. “I think of this as working for my community.”
As superintendent, she’s privy to inside information about principals, teachers, counselors, secretaries. Some of this is joyful — Marten is known for writing notes to staff, marking birthdays and anniversaries — and some is not.
On June 13, she testified for an hour in a wrongful termination lawsuit brought by an investigator who says he was fired after refusing to alter his reports on a sexual assault incident at San Carlos’ Green Elementary School.
On the witness stand, Marten was asked if she had urged anyone to “whitewash” the report by the investigator, Michael Gurrieri.
“Absolutely not,” she replied, “of course not.”
In an interview, Marten said she could not comment on this case, as a decision is still pending.
Intense scrutiny comes with this job, for better or worse. Tyler Cramer, a San Diegan who serves on the board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, was present when superintendents from the nation’s top four urban public school districts spoke in Washington, D.C.
“Cindy did her presentation on math and she was amazing,” Cramer said. “You can see her panel on Youtube and she’s a knockout on it. This is playing in the major leagues at the playoff level.”
That’s one characteristic of a champion — the ability to play and win, even when hurt. *Reposted article from the UT by Peter Rowe of June 24, 2018
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