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