Can Fresno Unified achieve double-digit proficiency gains? Interim superintendent has a plan

Over the summer, Fresno Unified’s Interim Superintendent Misty Her has been crafting a 100-day plan to move California’s third-largest school district forward.

Her was appointed interim in May, as the superintendent search stalled and former superintendent Bob Nelson’s last day approached at the end of July. Her has worked for Fresno Unified for over 30 years, starting as a bilingual instructional aide, an elementary school teacher, vice principal, principal, assistant superintendent and instructional superintendent. Her previous post was deputy superintendent.

“It’s a big ship to move in one direction,” she said. “I’ve always been in a position where I was the implementer, I was the person who said let me go help everybody start to implement it. Now becoming the person in charge, I have to trust others to implement and make sure they are pushing the work.”

“I tell everybody we are doing ‘mirror leadership’ which means anytime something doesn’t go right, we don’t blame ourselves, we put the mirror to ourselves, and we reflect on what didn’t we do right,” she said.

With the start of the new school year approaching, Her shared with The Fresno Bee details about her listening tour this summer, plans for the new semester, and how she’s going to address the critics who call Fresno Unified a failing district.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been the deputy for three years, what new things did you learn from your listening tour?

It was very raw to hear things, you think you’ve created a system that is helpful, and it was hard to hear people say “No, that actually doesn’t work for us.”

There were four big trends. One was that we had too many goals, and there was no clarity on the two or three things that we were going after. The second trend was the lack of metrics, we were very data-rich, meaning we have a lot of data that we can pull, but we’re not very data-informed. We don’t know how to utilize the data, or how to put the data in a way where our leaders, our department leads, and our teachers have access that they can quickly do something with it.

The third trend was around accountability, how do we hold people accountable for what they’re doing without putting fear into the system? One question that came to me was you can’t go in and fire everybody if you haven’t trained them or coached them to get better. So there’s accountability, but accountability with due process. And the fourth one - the way we treat people. There was a lot about what you got depending on which department you called, who you knew, and who was on the other side answering your call. So I talked to our staff about customer service. When I say people, that includes employees, kids, constituents, everybody, so that we treat everyone in the best way possible.

A lot of people criticize the culture of Fresno Unified, such as lack of accountability or responsibility, how do you plan to change that?

I think it’s about good supervision and evaluation. The majority of our people want to be coached and want to have professional learning that is going to improve our skills. I don’t think it’s about coming in and firing everybody, because that causes a worse culture with people working out of fear instead of working out of inspiration.

It’s easy to say, two goals, customer service and positive student outcomes. But when you go out to do it, I have to make sure I get them what they need. That’s why we have the supervision and evaluation process… You give them feedback that can help them move forward and if that doesn’t happen, you do it over and over, and you give people chances, like practice. And then, if it doesn’t happen, we move to the evaluation or exiting people out of our system.

How did you come up with the goal “to decrease 15% distance from standards in the next two years to get double-digit gains” and how will the district achieve it?

Our AMA team (Analysis, Measurement, and Accountability) was able to calculate that if we can increase 15 points proficiency in distance from standards in the next two years, we would start to get double-digit gains. That means every child has to do it. So what we’re going to do is know every child by need, which means we’re gonna pull every child up and look at what they excelled in and where the standards that they really struggled in, and how we help them learn things that they don’t know.

For example, my son – it’s easier for me to use my son as an example – he did really well in reading, but he had a lot of difficulties in comprehension because he didn’t know how to make inferences. So as an educator, I have to think about how to get him to get better at inference? What are the scaffolds I’m going to put in place? What are the specific questions that I’m going to put in place for him so the next time he encounters something like this, he knows strategies to solve it.

For next year in elementary, we are going to focus on the third grade. We’re going to study it deep and as we learn, we’re going to scale into the other grade levels.

The district has put forward a Literacy Plan, but there are seven regional plans. What are they and what are the differences?

In every single one of those plans, there were guardrails put in place. We will teach foundational skills, such as letters, sounds, and high-frequency words, everyone has to do that. But we let the regions decide based on their data and the things that they were doing. Because if a region is already doing a training and it’s working, I don’t want to go in and say, “You guys don’t use that anymore because now we’re going to dictate something new.” They have autonomy on how to implement the baseline requirements.

When outgoing superintendent Nelson talked to The Bee, he said dealing with politics is part of the job. How do you focus on teaching and learning while dealing with seven bosses?

Actually, I really like working for my seven bosses. They are not my enemy, and I look at it this way, they are seven people who have been elected to serve the constituents of their areas. They don’t necessarily come in with education experience – I was trained to be a teacher – but they have expertise in different areas. So I think about it as I have seven people with different areas of expertise that are going to help me run this district and understand my job.

Will you apply for the permanent superintendent position?

I say to people I’m not working to get the job. I’m going to give everything that I’ve got to do the job and to do it well so that our kids and our families and our staff get what they need. I’m not worried about whether I get the job or not - yes, I’ll put my name in when the search opens - but if I worry every day about that, I wouldn’t do my job well.

People ask me a lot why I’m pouring my heart and soul into working every day. I said because it’s the right thing to do. My heart is here. And you know, what’s the worst thing that can happen? I go back to being the deputy superintendent.

How do you “start the school year strong”?

Schools are my priority, and I told my assistant already, every week I put in school visits. I have to get into schools at least one time a week. I told her I would rather cancel everything else, but don’t cancel school site visits.

I’m excited to get going. I’m excited that students are coming back and I can’t wait to see our teachers. We want our kids back. We want them in their seats. We want them to learn. There are a lot of people that love and care about them. And I really want our educators all in this with me. I want them to try. If there’s a mistake, try something else until it works.