By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Returning to Congregation Beth Israel, at which she had her first teaching job at its now defunct Jewish day school, San Diego City School Superintendent Cindy Marten on Thursday evening, Sept.18, offered a step-by-step program for instilling student self-discipline. She coupled that with a promise that her administration will investigate all complaints of school bullying.
Marten taught second grade for seven years at Beth Israel after her mother Fern Cohen, now Fern Siegel, a president of Jewish Family Service, lobbied for her to be given a chance to undergo examination and scrutiny by a day school screening committee, which required that she submit seven lesson plans as part of the process.
As a teacher at Beth Israel Day School, Marten said, she learned the principles of creating a nurturing education with positive outcomes. From there, she moved on to the Poway School District, and later to Central Elementary School in the City Heighs section of San Diego, that has one of the highest ratios of immigrant students speaking more languages.
Teaching led her to became an administrator at the school, and following a laudatory press conference by Central Elementary’ diverse group of parents, the charmed School Board in a surprise move elevated her to city school superintendent in 2013. In the year since then, Marten’s child-and-community centered approaches to school administration have attracted national attention, prompting Harvard University to send a team of graduate studetns to the district both to learn from her and to help her devise new methodologies.
There are four levels of school discipline, she told a meeting sponsored by the Beth Israel’s Social Justice Committee, its Men’s Club, and by the San Diego regional chapter of the Anti Defamation League.
The first and least desirable level is a system of rewards and consequences. If the student does the right thing, he gets a reward; if he does the wrong thing, he suffers the consequences. “If you hit someone, you get a punishment; if you don’t, you get a sticker.” Marten described this as a Pavlovian approach to discipline.
The second level is “to get students to make choices because of the rules.” The students decide to act in a certain way because the rules say that is what you should do — similar to adults obeying traffic rules like stopping at a red light, and not going through it. However, “rules are not enough” because they are ineffective when it comes to bullying, according to Marten,.
Level three, she said, is to teach the students to beome part of a community, whether it is a classroom, the school, a church or a temple. This involves inculcating the climate of group membership, in which culture guides and defines behavior. Unlike the first two levels, said Marten, this gets students beyond a “prison mentality.” But this approach too needs to be improved upon. If following group rules is the paradigm, then what happens when a student moves to a new group, say a neighborhood gang?
Level four, Marten told her Beth Israel audience, is to instill a sense of self-worth and value in the child. “I am not going to hit because it is not who I am!”
Marten advocates such school board-approved 2020 goals as a “quality school in every neighborhood” and creating physical, academic and social environments “worthy of our children.”
In response to a report by a County Grand Jury that the school system, under her predecessors, had not done enough to combat bullying, Marten held a year long series of focus groups with “our most dissatisfied customers” — parents who had felt the schools had let them down — along with various government agencies.
The school district, which is the 8th largest in the United States serving 100,000 students, responded by creating a “quality assurance” office to which complaints can be made by phoning (619) 725-7211.
Critics who had charged that the schools had swept problems under the rug can be assured that the problems will be addressed now, Marten said. “When someone makes a complaint, we respond.” However, she added, “that alone won’t stop bullying.” The positive four-part program affecting student behavior also is required.
Marten drew a diverse audience, including Dr. Michael McQuary, who is running unopposed in November for one of five San Diego City School board seats; two school principals, numerous teachers, Rabbi Emeritus Jonathan Stein, who along with his wife Susan now divides his time between homes in San Diego and New York; and Howard Singer, the former La Jolla Town Council member who has been leading the fight to change the name of the La Jolla Christmas Parade to the La Jolla Holiday Parade. Recently Marten weighed in on Singer’s side of the debate, telling the Town Council, which sponsors the parade, she would have difficulty permitting high school bands to march in a parade that is discriminatory.
The Dorothea and David Garfield Social Hall at which the event was held was decorated with various “No Place for Hate” posters as well as hand-drawn signs by students.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
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