Former Education Compact member Amy Wentz respond’s to last week’s editorial by Willie Hilliard, offering reasons why she believes Richmond Public Schools should renew Superintendent Jason Kamras’s contract for four years.

Well, well, well. Here we are again, Richmond Public Schools stakeholders: emotional, anxious, and exercising our thumbs in yet another high stakes debate. We are already stressed about the national political climate, the pandemic, injustice, and just ensuring our families are stable, but now we are adding to the long list of heated disagreements before this, like rezoning, facilities planning, toilet paper, meals tax, school closure/consolidation, and ultimately what is or isn’t best for students. What can I say? We are passionate about schools, sometimes to our own detriment.

First, I want to express that these are my thoughts. My thoughts are not more important or to be held at a higher regard than any others and it’s perfectly OK to disagree with me or counter with information of your own. Either way, the decision around Jason Kamras’ contract is now up to our new School Board, so don’t let it give you heart palpitations. Take a deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. OK. Now you can continue reading.

I’m going to make this easy, with just a rebuttal to the Op-Ed RPS Alumnus/Parent, Education Compact Member and Community Advocate Willie Hilliard submitted the other day in RVA Mag. Why? Because I share all of these titles with him and it’s important that fellow stakeholders can learn from different perspectives and viewpoints. (We have something else in common, but who really wants to bring that up again? Lol) I graduated from Huguenot High School in the late 90’s. My oldest graduated from RPS in 2016, and my youngest is a first Grader at JL Francis.  

Speaking to Willie’s assertion that “Mr. Kamras has brought a top-down approach to our community, caring more about corporate interests than including all of Richmond’s students, families, and teachers in the future of their schools.” Mr. Kamras has had a solid track record of using an extremely collaborative approach to his leadership. From my view, we have never seen the amount of grassroots partnerships, black led organizations, listening sessions, engagement opportunities and ways to give input and be heard that we have had these past three years. This is not something that should be reduced to unimportant. Consideration and compassion speak to culture, and that overwhelmingly matters to parents.

Willie says, “RPS students do benefit from stability during a pandemic, and therefore, Mr. Kamras’s contract should be renewed for two years. However, we should expect more of our public servants than using a pandemic to leverage for more, especially as Richmonders have, for the past three years, used our public dollars to pay him over five times the median Richmond salary.” Students benefit from stability in general. Not just during a pandemic. A two-year contract does not provide that. Anecdotally, the urban districts that are generally lifted up as some of the strongest examples of continuous improvement over the past 20 or 30 years had superintendents with nearly decade-long tenures, such as Carl Cohn in Long Beach, CA, or Thomas Payzant in Boston. Regarding salaries, I remember when Kim Gray was running for Mayor, she had a similar grievance, and Politico did a fact check. Also, here is some information on Mr. Kamras’s predecessor’s salary. And it’s important to note with the raises RPS has enacted since then, his predecessor would be making $254,209, more than Mr. Kamras, who has not taken any of these raises, makes now. To present additional context, in surrounding counties, Chesterfield County’s Superintendent Salary makes $217,726; Henrico County’s Superintendent makes $221,000.

“Mr. Kamras initially pushed for school reopening, but brave RPS families and teachers organized and spoke in no uncertain terms that reopening schools was not acceptable. It was the power of the people that forced Jason Kamras to acknowledge that a majority of his schools would be empty and unstaffed if he pushed to reopen schools,” says Willie. This isn’t even a reach; it’s totally false. He LED the NATION in quickly announcing that schools should and would close. Mr. Kamras closed schools before even the Governor made the decision to do so and was the first to extend the closure to go all the way through spring break. He has also been concerned about very high-need students and initially advocated for providing them with some in-person instruction in the fall, but ultimately recommended to the School Board that RPS open the 2020-21 school year virtually. Lastly, Mr. Kamras recommended that RPS remain virtual for the second semester while other districts have been opening and closing, causing incredible instability for families. Shout out to the power of the people, but when you can’t even give credit when it’s due, that’s a problem.

From Willie’s perspective: “But instead of bringing the community together, Jason Kamras has caused division and conflict, making decisions behind closed doors and bringing many highly-paid C-suite officers from Washington, DC. Even more divisive is his demand to receive a four-year contract or he will leave.” What evidence is there that Kamras has “caused division and conflict”? On the contrary, he seems to be working incredibly hard to bring the RPS community together. OK, he brought with him three colleagues. Fair, but isn’t that a sign of an effective leader? That people would want to uproot and move to work with someone? Also, these members of the Leadership team aren’t from DC: Sandra Lee, Chief Talent Officer; Shadae Harris, Chief Engagement Officer; Tracy Epp, Chief Academic Officer; and soon to be: Alana Agosto Gonzalez, Chief Operating Officer.

Willie asserts, “The only path to lasting school improvement is real partnership — not a series of backroom deals led by corporate interests that seek to reduce the public’s voice in our schools.” I actually agree and believe there has been real partnership. What backroom deals, Willie? Your associates list none in the reference document.

Another part reads, “In districts across the country, we have seen that divisive turnaround strategies can temporarily boost test scores while sowing the seeds of division. When superintendents move on to their next job, they leave communities with less ownership of their schools and no sustainable, shared, lasting commitment — the commitment that research shows leads to the deep change that our students and teachers deserve. And at this point, due to the pandemic and the cancellations of SOLs, we lack even the barest of abilities to judge the Superintendent’s performance while he fights for a four-year contract.” I feel like this is actually an argument against your write up. He’s showing us he wants a sustainable and lasting commitment. Also, is it not contradictory to hold up SOLs as support for this argument? Let’s all fight to cancel SOLs but then use it as leverage against our Superintendent’s contract?

“Black and Latinx communities are the most likely to have change done to them instead of with them. More than 80 percent of the students in Richmond’s public schools are not white. We reject approaches that are not led with the people most impacted, especially when we see alarming evidence of declining graduation rates in certain RPS cohorts.” OK, Willie, here is our Graduation Data from VDOE. A few points to note: Class of 2018 (Mr. Kamras arrived in February of that year): 75.4 percent. Class of 2019, the year in which Kamras ended unethical practices that were artificially inflating rates, was 70.7 percent. Class of 2020 is 71.6 percent, and we are moving back UP ethically. Do we want to see greater numbers? Absolutely. Give him a chance!

Willie says, “Time and time again, Jason Kamras has managed our public schools from behind closed doors. Instead of building strong public support for education through transparency and shared responsibility, the Kamras administration has made decisions in secret in violation of open meeting laws, hidden information that should be publicly available, and even restricted people’s ability to openly criticize the district.” Speaking to the resource linked, Mr. Kamras is on record not wanting to put the names of the cut employees out in public, as he thought doing so would be disrespectful. The democratically elected School Board voted to proceed without sharing the names. This was not a unilateral action by Mr. Kamras. I mean, Richmond will openly criticize any and everything. We aren’t a shy bunch at all, so I’m not sure I follow on that part. In transparency, I did not agree with the removal of these positions, but wanted to speak on the “secret meeting” referenced.

“The Kamras administration fought against reporting teacher retention data as part of the Dreams4RPS Strategic plan,” Willie says. I’ve seen this stated before, but it’s just not true. The Administration asked UVA to calculate teacher retention using agreed-upon common definitions and statistical analysis so that there is uniformity across all years of reporting. To read the administrations 87-page summary of how each goal is calculated, click here. UVA produces this data, in a partnership with the state, with about a year lag. The Administration did not fight against reporting the data, they just did not have it yet from UVA. And when they did get it, they reported it, and teacher retention was flat year over year.  I’ll add that I agree that teacher retention needs added attention. I’ll also add that teacher and staff satisfaction was up 5 percent year over year. Also,the 2018 Promise and Equity Audit was never funded by the Board, so that’s not on him. Let’s give this a push in this year’s budget cycle.

“Kamras is working for corporations and his personal networks, not our kids.” OK, many of our RPS teachers got their start with Teach for America. Is this something that has to negatively follow them for the rest of their careers? Here’s a list of non-evil people who are associated with TFA that went on to do good things. On his two years with the Broad Academy: This is a widely respected program and it’s unfair to associate some of its graduates to Mr. Kamras. If anything, he’s worked in the opposite direction in his time in Richmond. On Great Minds: The democratically elected School Board approved the contract with Great Minds for a math curriculum that is the most widely used in the United States. As far as Navy Hill: The only time Mr. Kamras did or said anything related to Navy Hill was acknowledging, alongside School Board Chair (at the time) Dawn Page, the Mayor’s commitment to give half of all revenues to schools. Should he have stayed out of it? I can agree on that. But is that working for corporations? Nah.

“Jason Kamras’s ties to corporations mean he won’t stand up to demand that they contribute to funding our schools through a higher corporate tax rate. The residents of Richmond should not be asked to bear the cost of schools alone when the corporate tax rate hasn’t been raised for 40 years, but Jason Kamras will not fight for fair funding.” We all know the Superintendent of schools has no control over our corporate tax rate. As the kids say, bruhhh! There are endless examples of Mr. Kamras fighting for our school district. Here, here, here, here, and here. In fact, he has supported every single tax increase proposed by the state and city for increased school funding.

“Kamras has not supported teachers or effective instruction, and we all know that the most important factor in a child’s education is the quality of their teachers.” In this section, Willie mentions the chosen curriculum, but it’s important to note that both were approved by the School Board, are highly respected, and were selected by a panel of RPS teachers. If the majority of teachers don’t agree with the decisions the panel made, let’s address that, but to imply that the collective decision means he’s unsupportive is unsubstantiated. As far as the “failed practices of Washington DC,” an independent study by UVA found that Kamras’s work in DCPS led to increases in teacher quality and student achievement. Assessing these practices is fair, but regardless how we feel about it, Mr. Kamras has not instituted any such program in Richmond.

I don’t want this to go to a fifth page, so I’ll get to the bottom line. We say that we want systemic and structural change, but to do so, we must understand and commit to doing this work for the long haul. Mr. Kamras came on board in February of 2018. That’s only one complete instructional year to assess before the pandemic hit and we were forced into a virtual environment. This is how we sound: “FIX OUR SCHOOLS! But you can’t adjust the curriculum, you can’t adjust teacher schedules, you can’t hire your own staff, you can’t adjust the calendar.” The way we fix schools is to be honest in our assessments. If you can’t even give credit where it’s due and have to inflate the facts to make your points, it’s a disservice to students. Let’s identify what we are getting wrong, and work with our school board to put the right measures in place to hold our Superintendent accountable. We can’t just continue to throw the whole thing away every few years.

Kamras has worked tirelessly to elevate our voices:

• held over 170 community meetings for the strategic plan
• launched five Advisory Councils: Students, Teachers, Families, Principals, and School Reopening
• launched RPS en Vivo weekly livestream for Spanish-speaking families
• launched RPS en Espanol Facebook page for Spanish-speaking families
• launched RPS Live! weekly livestream for English-speaking families
• appears weekly on the Gary Flowers show
• appears weekly on Radio Poder with Oscar Contreras
• appears weekly on Miss Clovia
• has conducted hundreds of school visits, living room meetings, and community walks
• answers every email from everyone – no matter who you are

I have to take into account the good with the bad:

• tackling the Carver scandal that existed well before he arrived
• tackling the transcript and graduation scandal that existed well before he arrived
• tackling rezoning
• creating a strategic plan with the community that was unanimously approved by the School Board – and actually implementing it
• partnering with the Mayor and Council to increase RPS funding significantly
• establishing a much better relationship with the VDOE
• hiring many new principals with a focus on instructional leadership.

Every superintendent knows that anything less than a full contract is a vote of no confidence from a School Board. When Superintendent Cashwell had two full years left on her contract (Mr. Kamras has a few months), Henrico pre-emptively extended her contract two more years, in effect giving her a six-year contract. Why did they do so? As the RTD reported: “’We wanted to show our confidence in her,’ School Board Chairman Roscoe Cooper said after Thursday’s meeting. ‘We had the authority to do it, so we did it.’” Let’s show confidence in Mr. Kamras with a four-year contract, then work with our school board to ensure we add accountability measures towards our challenges.

Note: Op-Eds are contributions from guest writers and do not reflect RVA Mag editorial policy.

Top Photo via RVASchools.net

City Council candidate and Mayor’s Education Compact member Willie Hilliard says Richmond’s School Board should offer a two-year contract for continuity amidst the pandemic, but should not commit to the four-year contract Superintendent Jason Kamras wants.

RPS students deserve an excellent education, and building a welcoming, rigorous public school system involves all of us. But superintendent Jason Kamras has brought a top-down approach to our community, caring more about corporate interests than including all of Richmond’s students, families and teachers in the future of their schools. RPS students do benefit from stability during a pandemic, and therefore, Mr. Kamras’s contract should be renewed for two years. However, we should expect more of our public servants than using a pandemic to leverage for more, especially as Richmonders have, for the past three years, used our public dollars to pay him over five times the median Richmond salary. 

Mr. Kamras initially pushed for school reopening, but brave RPS families and teachers organized and spoke in no uncertain terms that reopening schools was not acceptable. It was the power of the people that forced Jason Kamras to acknowledge that a majority of his schools would be empty and unstaffed if he pushed to reopen schools.

We can give him credit for listening. We can give him credit for working hard. However, ultimately we need to pursue the course of action best for RPS students and honor the school board that was just democratically elected by Richmond. That school board came to power as an expression of community will, and they should not tie their own hands by signing a four-year deal. 

The dreams of our students, not to mention our economy and our democracy, are built on a foundation of strong public schools. Now more than ever, we need to engage our entire community to put the needs of Richmond’s students first. But instead of bringing the community together, Jason Kamras has caused division and conflict, making decisions behind closed doors and bringing many highly-paid C-suite officers from Washington, DC. Even more divisive is his demand to receive a four-year contract or he will leave. 

Richmond Public Schools need change. By so many measures we can see that our children deserve better, but we know that a top-down, closed-door change won’t work. The people of Richmond are proud of their community, their teachers, their families and their young people. We want to be fully engaged in envisioning a new future. The only path to lasting school improvement is real partnership — not a series of backroom deals led by corporate interests that seek to reduce the public’s voice in our schools. In districts across the country, we have seen that divisive turnaround strategies can temporarily boost test scores while sowing the seeds of division. When superintendents move on to their next job, they leave communities with less ownership of their schools and no sustainable, shared, lasting commitment — the commitment that research shows leads to the deep change that our students and teachers deserve. And at this point, due to the pandemic and the cancellations of SOLs, we lack even the barest of abilities to judge the Superintendent’s performance while he fights for a four-year contract. 

Black and Latinx communities are the most likely to have change done to them instead of with them. More than 80 percent of the students in Richmond’s public schools are not white. We reject approaches that are not led with the people most impacted, especially when we see alarming evidence of declining graduation rates in certain RPS cohorts. Every parent in Richmond wants a quality education for their child. And a great education is only possible if we create a long-term, shared vision for the Richmond Public Schools. We have to be sure that we are listening to all of the RPS communities and not simply the loudest or the most active on social media. 

Our children can’t afford to wait. Their future is now. We call on the School Board to renew the Superintendent’s contract for two years. We call for the Richmond Public Schools to be guided by the collective expertise of our educators, students and families. 

Jason Kamras has not been transparent or accountable to the public about the management of our schools. 

Time and time again, Jason Kamras has managed our public schools from behind closed doors. Instead of building strong public support for education through transparency and shared responsibility, the Kamras administration has made decisions in secret in violation of open meeting laws, hidden information that should be publicly available, and even restricted people’s ability to openly criticize the district. The Kamras administration fought against reporting teacher retention data as part of the Dreams4RPS Strategic plan; has consistently failed to make school board documents public; and has failed to complete the 2018 Promise of Equity Audit, a much-needed examination of the district’s racial inequalities. Advocates including the Virginia Coalition for Open Government have spoken out about the blatant disregard for the law and transparency by the Kamras administration. 

Transparency is a core element of good government and effective public school districts. Parents and teachers cannot build trust with an administration that refuses to manage public schools with the help and cooperation of the public. Leaders who are committed to transparency and accountability don’t hide information from the public; effective public leaders have nothing to hide. 

To be clear, the job of the Superintendent is to execute and administer the governance of our schools fairly and democratically: it is not to be a communications or PR manager for the district. Jason Kamras’ daily newsletter, his social media presence, his discussion of social and political issues, and 30 minute math lessons during the spring are very effective at creating a sense of unity, connectedness, and progress in the district. But a fully effective Superintendent should be judged by how they made the least connected members of the RPS family feel. 

Kamras is working for corporations and his personal networks, not our kids. 

He got his start in education with Teach for America, and worked under Michelle Rhee in Washington D.C., both part of a national movement to undermine the role of teachers in favor of increasing corporate presence in schools. He trained at the Broad Academy from 2015 to 2016.

The Broad Academy is a leadership training program of the Broad Center, whose “graduates” have been associated “with corporate management techniques to consolidate power, weaken teachers’ job protections, cut parents out of decision making, and introduce unproven reform measures.” 

In Richmond Kamras has granted lucrative contracts to the Great Minds, an organization whose founder and CEO is linked to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. He has hired associates from D.C. and charter networks for leadership positions in the Richmond Public Schools, giving them all significant raises. He’s also shown that he’s prepared to support the corporate interests over the public interest, backing the failed Navy Hill Coliseum deal proposed by Thomas F. Farrell, CEO of Dominion Energy, a lead advocate for hiring Kamras. Jason Kamras has consistently put the interests of corporations and his personal rolodex ahead of the children of Richmond. 

We want everyone to support our public schools, including our local business community — but corporations and personal associates shouldn’t have a seat at the table when teachers and parents are left out. When corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes then we have full public coffers, and all of us can democratically decide how to allocate funding – that’s the way to ensure students and families aren’t left behind. We can’t turn our schools over to interests driven by profit and efficiency, not equity. The values of all of the people of Richmond should drive the leadership of our schools, not corporate interests.

Jason Kamras’s ties to corporations mean he won’t stand up to demand that they contribute to funding our schools through a higher corporate tax rate. The residents of Richmond should not be asked to bear the cost of schools alone when the corporate tax rate hasn’t been raised for 40 years, but Jason Kamras will not fight for fair funding. 

Kamras has not supported teachers or effective instruction, and we all know that the most important factor in a child’s education is the quality of their teachers. 

Jason Kamras has brought the failed practices of Washington DC to Richmond, emphasizing standardization and testing over the development of a high quality, professional teaching community. Across the nation, in places where administrators blame teachers for the heavy burdens placed on schools by poverty, districts have turned to more rules and regulations over what and how teachers teach — all driven toward increasing scores on standardized tests, not building a healthy and vibrant school community. The Kamras administration has favored a “scripted” approach to curriculum, relying on rote scripts delivered by teachers with little room for creativity. These programs are often referred to as “teacher proof” and do not attract high quality, committed teachers to classrooms. Many talented teachers, faced with scripted curricula, choose to leave for another district that will treat them as professionals.

Research has clearly shown the power of excellent teachers in every classroom. Is Jason Kamras helping Richmond recruit and retain excellent teachers? Is Jason Kamras making Richmond a place where the most committed and talented teachers want to work? If one looks at his leadership, from his failed effort to implement a teacher comprehensive performance-measurement system in Washington, DC to his failing to provide contemporaneous teacher retention data, we should be worried that RPS is losing its long-serving, high-quality teachers, especially in light of the demands of them by the pandemic. 

Kamras has not built a shared agenda for our public schools. Our children deserve a uniter, not a divider. 

The families of Richmond are the people most invested in our children, their education and their future. Our families hold the highest expectations for their children, they pay the taxes that support the district, and they are the people, rooted here for generations, who make our community strong. 

We know, across the nation, that most superintendents stay in urban districts for less than 5 years. It is essential that all of Richmond’s families have a voice in choosing the leadership of their children’s schools because they will be the people advocating for their child from the time they set foot in a classroom for the first time to the day they cross a graduation stage. Superintendents and politicians will come and go, but we know that deep change takes time. Without a strong partnership, long-term change just isn’t possible. 

Black and Latinx communities in Richmond are disproportionately enrolled in our public schools and disproportionately underrepresented in the governance or leadership of the district. We don’t need paternalistic ideas of reform from Washington, DC. We need true collaboration to surface the best possible ideas from around the world and bring them to our classrooms. 

Jason Kamras has opposed the right of teachers to organize and advocate for better schools. Jason Kamras has fought public access to information. In the two years he has led the Richomnd public schools, Jason Kamras has not brought the community together to push for excellence. His hollow proclamations about equity and justice are not backed up by support for public access, teacher excellence, or elevating the voices of the black and brown families who the Richmond Public Schools seek to serve. 

Jason Kamras has been ineffective in bringing our community together to make the urgent, substantive change that our children deserve. 

We cannot wait four more years. Our children deserve an excellent education now, in spite of the burdens of this pandemic.

We can’t allow Jason Kamras to limit our community’s future with closed-door deals, corporate influence, and nepotism. There is a logic to maintaining continuity of leadership during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, but allowing a four-year renewal will allow the Superintendent’s lack of transparency and failure to build coalitions to continue harmfully for far too long. Our children deserve a leader who will bring the community together over the long term, and lead with transparency to build a shared vision of public education that honors the voices of our community, demands excellence, and puts racial justice at the center of transformation. 

For too long Black and Latinx communities in Richmond have been left behind. The racist defunding of the school system leaves it unable to deliver on the promise of opportunity. For equity and justice to move beyond lip service, the parents, teachers, and students of Richmond must be included in guiding the system that seeks to serve them. The demand of a four-year contract or nothing is very disturbing. It doesn’t say that he’s truly committed to this school system by using a take it or leave it approach. We’re not saying NO to Kamras, we’re saying two years is more than sufficient enough to prove that you’re worthy of further lucrative commitments from a cash-strapped school division.

Note: Op-Eds are contributions from guest writers and do not reflect RVA Mag editorial policy.

Top Photo: G.W. Carver Elementary School in Richmond. Photo by Noah Daboul. Research by Kath Connolly, Nat Hardy, Gary Broderick, Quinton Robbins.