Cindy Marten Calls Herself a 9/11 Soldier—Defending Public Education

As Cindy Marten tells it, the war on public education was declared Sept. 17, 2000—by George W. Bush in the library of San Diego’s Central Elementary School.

Running for president, Bush used the “Central Miracle” of vastly improved test scores among poor children as an example of what he’d do in office, said Marten, superintendent-designate of the San Diego Unified School District.

“He said: Look, if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” Marten recalled in a visit Wednesday night to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club.

“What I believe happened is he unveiled what later became No Child Left Behind—which was the beginning of the end of public education as we know it.”

Marten appreciates the irony. 

Before being named (in a midnight surprise to her) as successor to Bill Kowba in San Diego Unified, she was principal at Central Elementary in City Heights—ending in a tearful farewell only a week ago.

NCLB, she said, lulled the nation into believing that the product of public education is a test score.

“I know we’re not producing just a test score,” she told an audience of 70 at the La Mesa Community Center. “But that is what has happened over the last 12 years. … Data has been used as a weapon against public education to prove to the public that we are failing and should be shut down,” replaced by private schools and vouchers.

After Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush called for a Global War on Terror, Marten says she declared herself a soldier for public education.

Shocking her parents—a CPA mom and lawyer dad—Marten says she quit her job in the Poway Unified School District for a teaching role at Central.

“I’m taking a cut in pay, I’m giving up my tenure. … I’m quitting all that and going back to City Heights, Mom,” she recalled saying. Marten’s parents had taken her out of Crawford High and enrolled her at La Jolla Country Day School.

Smiling at the memory, Marten said: “You can take the girl out of the hood, but not the hood out of the girl.”

Marten told her mother that she saw a battle role—and a way to help children.

“I saw the war against public education begin, and I wanted to be a part of that army that was going to save it,” she said in a 45-minute talk—one of more than two dozen she’s given since being named head of the state’s second-largest school district.

Some people after Sept. 11 signed up to fight one kind of war, she said, and “I signed up for a different war.”

She got a 9/11 license plate that said at the bottom “We will never forget.” But her plate spelled out her war cry: LITERACY

“I believe a literate populace is one that makes good decisions and smart decisions,” said the former literacy specialist at Los Peñasquitos Elementary School.

Marten, 46 when named to the San Diego Unified post in late February, was born in Chicago and moved to San Diego in 1977, when she was in the fourth grade. She attended Hardy Elementary and three years at Horace Mann Middle School before going to La Jolla Country Day.

She noted with nostalgia that the La Mesa Community Pool—only a few hundred yards from her speaking venue—was where her developmentally disabled brother, Charlie, swam in Special Olympics.

After being educated at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, she taught at a Jewish private school. But she longed to put her literacy and education philosophies into practice in the public schools, since “nobody would believe me if I taught a bunch of rich, white Jewish kids.”

With a master’s degree in hand from UC San Diego, Marten went to Poway Unified—another rich white community in the minds of many.

But she landed at Los Peñasquitos Elementary in Rancho Peñasquitos—where she still lives—and taught at a campus where half the children were Title I: poverty level.

There she joined a campus with a “belief system” that affluent kids from the homes on the top of the hill had a better shot at success than the poor apartment dwellers from the bottom.

Marten focused on spelling, eventually writing a book on its value to literacy efforts.

“It completely transformed the school and transformed what we were doing”  by responding to needs, she said.

After 21 years as the lowest-performing school in the district, the school became one of the highest, “and 10 years later, it still is,” she said.

At Central, she reacted to a brain drain of teachers taking motherhood leave by founding an on-site child-care center. She launched a health center on campus with outside partners. 

She applied the philosophy of “positive deviance,” looking at why two or three students succeeded in a given class—and applying those lessons to their classmates.

She said their motto—called “The Central Way”—was: Work hard, be kind, dream big, no excuses.

Marten says teaching isn’t like treating cancer—where some things will never keep a patient alive.

“In education, children who come from poverty or come from homes where they don’t speak English—we already know how to teach those children,” she said.  “The answers are there. I’ve never met a child we can’t teach. … So any time a child or a classroom or a school or a district or a nation is failing in education is not because we don’t have the answers.

“It’s because we didn’t align the resources and create the conditions … to make it happen. … It’s an adult issue,” with educators not doing what works.

Her success at Central, “a forgotten school, a hard-to-staff school,” where she began as a first-grade teacher and was elevated to vice principal and principal as others left or took ill—caught the eye of the San Diego school board.

Marten also was known to the board for her efforts to retain 52 percent of Central teachers given layoff notices.  Marten argued that she had put $5 million into professional development of her staff.

San Diego Unified also resisted efforts—including the federal Race to the Top—that put reform in the hands of outsiders.

“We’re refusing some of these external awards … reform measures, and we’re doing it our own way,” she said. “People are starting to pay attention. It’s organic, and it’s working. But it comes from this belief system that solutions are grown locally.”

Her being hired as superintendent from the principal ranks—a first for a major district, she said—came as a shock. 

When told of her selection in a phone call, Marten at first misunderstood. She said she thought she was being asked to serve on a search committee—as she had several years ago for the Kowba hunt.

Also rare was her four-year contract—the longest a superintendent could get in San Diego Unified.

But Marten isn’t worried that the job would lead to battles with the teachers union or mayor—she says she gets along great with union leader Bill Freeman and Bob Filner, who she’s known since age 12, when she went to school with Filner’s daughter Erin (who also became a teacher).

“I chose 10 years to work in San Diego Unified—not for it,” she said. “I work for the children and the community.”

Marten says she has an answer ready for a critical school board:

 “Go ahead and fire me. I’ll just go teach second grade.”