Meet the man some have credited with single-handedly improving English education in Nogales Unified School District, which has been ground-zero for the English language learner debate in the Flores v. Arizona case. In some academic circles, he is known simply as “Super Cooper.”
Kelt Cooper, who has since moved on from superintendent of NUSD to help Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne improve ELL programs across the state, is not the archetypal school administrator. A rugby player — at least in his younger days, before the effects started taking their toll — a self-taught pianist and drummer, and a fan of all things Irish, Cooper also has a “common sense” view of education and the policy that shapes it.
He spoke with Arizona Capitol Times April 3, after only about three weeks on the job at the Department of Education as the director of technical assistance for the Office of English Language Acquisition Services.
In the Flores ruling that just came out, you were mentioned in glowing terms by the judge. Did you expect that? Or for a federal judge to refer to you in a court document as “Super Cooper”?
Not at all. That was quite a surprise. The name Super Cooper originated when I was a teacher and, of course, stuck when I became a superintendent. It was kind of a play on words — Superintendent Cooper, Super Cooper. But I was surprised.
What did you think about the things Judge Collins had to say about you? He was very complimentary of you and the results you achieved in Nogales.
It’s humbling to be so recognized by so many. Quite honestly, when we were working with the Nogales school district, many of us were only remotely aware of the Flores case. It really wasn’t right there in our business every day. Of course, we were concerned about the quality of schools and education, and that’s why we focused on it. That it had meaning to larger issues than just us doing a quality job down in the district is a bit surprising in itself.
I think it’s a testimonial to all the people who worked there to get some of those results. I didn’t expect the type of accolades and recognition, but I’m glad it’s coming — not so much for me, as it is that we worked very hard and I felt very good about how the district was operating, how it operated as a much tighter, well-articulated system when I left.
What did you do differently than your predecessors to improve English education for Spanish-speaking students? Judge Collins and Superintendent Horne both have said you were the driving force for the improvements in the district.
Some of the directions actually came from the school board when I first became employed at the district as superintendent. Some of their goals for the district that had been in place for some time made sense. For example, the school board had wanted to have smaller class sizes. Once I did an assessment and realized a lot of the classes had as many as 37 or 38 kids in a classroom, I asked them a rhetorical question: If the goal is to reduce class sizes, if I can get it from 37 to 36, have I met the district goal? Of course, I wanted them to think about this. I said, let’s pick some empirical number, something we can strive for as a number, and I utilized numbers that I knew that were very common in the literature and were statutorily driven in the state that I came from as a starting point. I shared with the board that normally we adopt these preferred ratios as ideals to begin with, then we can start looking at means with which we could achieve that. Then you can start measuring how successful our administration was to getting to that point.
They made it clear that they thought there were far too many exemptions on the testing, both the Stanford 9 and the AIMS, which I concurred, because we had exemptions which were permissible under the administrative guidelines from the state, but we had some [grades] that were so few in number of the students tested that they were excluded, so we had no reporting per grade level at a few of the schools. And we had like 90-100 kids in the grade level at the school, but zero reporting. I was asked if I thought the exemptions were a proper way of conducting research for the district, and I didn’t think so. I thought it was a bit disingenuous to cherry-pick which students would represent the entirety. I said, just from a researcher’s standpoint, you want the end [number] to be as close to 100 percent as possible so you’re not making assumptions. So, we did that — before the state started cracking down on exemptions, internally, we said we wanted 20 percent fewer exemptions each year. When the state finally employed the new exemption standards, we were ahead of the game.
Reducing class sizes was paramount in the school board’s mind because they wanted performance indicators to be accurate and they wanted the internal assessments to make sense. We found that some of the testing we did predicted the students would do well on the state exams, when, in fact, it was quite the opposite. It was a great predictor: if they do well on our test, they’re going to do poorly on the state exam. We identified scopes and sequences that were lacking and textbooks that were outdated, from the 50s and the 60s that were still in use.
We just approached it saying, what does the standard, proper school look like? All kids should have current textbooks available to them. They should be aligned to the state standards. We just started setting these processes in place and creating an infrastructure to support these efforts, so it wasn’t just a one-time thing.
How did that infrastructure help when it came to educating ELL students?
That’s one of the things I think is problematic in a lot of the way we look at special populations. If the system is really a comprehensive and well-articulated school system, then it’s likely that these subgroups are going to get a very good education as well. You can target some of these once you’ve got your system in place with specific methods that are unique to those populations, as you would with special ed students.
I think when you have a healthy system, it’s much easier to target those special subgroups than applying strategies when the system is falling apart. You’ve got to have a healthy, well-operated school system for any effort to focus in on these subgroups to have any effect.
When you talk about ELL, our effort to improve reading scores throughout the schools, to start putting a heavier emphasis on science and math in the early grades, to make sure that the curriculum was properly aligned, had a definite bearing on all students and, thus, was good for the ELL students, as well.
One of the big things in the court ruling was the cost of educating ELL students. Some advocates say the state needs to spend upwards of $1,500 per student, not the $365 the state currently spends. What is your thought on that?
It depends. If you’ve got a well constructed system, $365 might be more than enough. But if you have a system that is disarticulated and the focuses aren’t right, then it doesn’t matter how much more money you pour into it — it’s just going to be same in, same out. The real tough part is to determine what is an appropriate amount, and the only way you can determine that is if you are doing a good job overall in the first place. I think that was the argument that was being used in the position the state took.
Obviously, Nogales was operating with funds that were available and sought some additional funds that were available — grants — and we saw some improvement. It wasn’t a matter of asking for additional funding for ELL. There are sources of revenue readily available if you go out and hustle, and we did that. It could be considered disingenuous to say that we didn’t seek additional funds — we did, but we did it through appropriate channels instead of going through lawsuits to get this.
We sought out grants, we managed our money much better. We were being much more scientific about our approach. As far as the money goes, I would say that we could all use more money, we can all be more creative when we have more money, but how many times do we continue to put more money into programs that yield no significant change in student results?
Today, in 2007, we’ve got literally hundreds of schools, and thousands in the nation, that are underperforming and are clamoring for more money when I think it really comes down to good governance, good administrative leadership and excellent teaching in the classroom. If you have those three components, and people know what they’re supposed to do, I think there’s plenty of funds out there.
So, better management is more important than additional money?
Yes, I do think so.
How do you duplicate the system and success you had at Nogales statewide?
I think when we counsel the school districts, I wager that most properly trained administrators and teachers are familiar with best practices in teaching. There’s lots of research on it, we’ve all gone through the schooling together.
It’s sometimes difficult when you’ve got political priorities in a community — then they focus on things that are other than academic. Superintendents, unfortunately, have to balance those types of priorities in developing their budgets, and superintendents only have as much control as what the school board allows them to. School boards are an important feature of our American history, in that they communicate the local values and priorities. Unfortunately, in some communities, a winning football program is far more important than an effective reading program.
Superintendents have to contend with those realities in place. If the stars align and people have a prioritization for school improvement, it makes the superintendent’s job that much easier. Likewise, a superintendent must provide the leadership for principals to enact the changes and reforms they need and not worry so much about sacred cows. You’ve got teachers that are insulated because they’re family and friends with people in power. In an ideal world, you’d have everybody with the same philosophy, everybody with the same agenda. That, unfortunately, is never going to happen.
In our case in Nogales, we had the support of the board. We had some excellent administrators that were amenable to some additional training we could bring in from the outside, and we had some great teachers, and that kind of worked together.
So, how do we replicate that in the state? I’m hoping that, with the direction of my supervisor, Irene Moreno, that we can define what we would expect an ideal ELL program — what ingredients we expect to find in a proper program, determine if those ingredients exist and then, if they are in place, determine if or if not it’s working and why.
If we just were to say, let’s do the standard best practices of governance. If boards were to take the best practices and an altruistic perspective of governance, if superintendents were to operate with the best practices and be altruistic about it, then I think you’ll have some effective programs.
But it takes a lot of spine and taking on some tough challenges and being willing to take some political hits for it.
There has to be the will within the district to make those changes.
I shared with my principals in Nogales, when I first got there, we had a meeting, and I asked them, “Who thinks they are hot stuff?” At first, no one raised their hand. It was kind of a trick question. I said I don’t want anybody who doesn’t believe that he is hot stuff. Of course, they all raised their hand. Then I said, “That’s good, because you have to have a sense that you’re good at what you do. Now you have to prove you’re hot stuff. Do it by having a top-notch school.”
It’s one thing to have a title and positional power, but you can get that if you know somebody. You can get it by luck, you can get it by accident. But to really prove that you’re a hot principal, you need to prove that by having an effective team and improving school scores. I think that’s the kind of attitude people have to have.
What’s your role going to be in changing ELL education in the state?
The agency has committed itself to provide direct service — it’s not just a compliance agency, but it’s taken on a role of service. We are to identify and showcase those districts and schools who have been successful as an example, and to share ideas.
What I’m anxious to do is make sure my unit works with other units in the agency that are also out in the field identifying the good and not so good in the different schools so we can have a comprehensive approach to school reform.
But that’s not our function, which is on the ELL programs. Again, I look at it systemically, and if they’re making systemic reform that is positive in the school system, it’s going to translate into school programs, getting us the resources to focus on the ELL program.
We’re another set of eyes and ears and we’re going to provide an external perspective on what we see. Sometimes we’re so close we can’t see the trees through the woods. Here we are, we’re not in a compliance mode, we’re not in an accountability mode, we’re coming here to help and consult with you to show you what we see is positive and, ultimately, to share with them what we’re seeing that they might be blind to.
If school districts make these systemic changes, would ELL even be an issue for the courts and policy makers?
The challenges are going to exist. We expect between 20 to 40 percent of our population the next 20 years will be other than English speakers. We’re going to be challenged with educating the youth in this area, but I don’t think it’s going to be strung out over eight or 10 years and have students that still can’t speak English when they finish our program. We anticipate a good program can, in two or three years, produce proficient students that have a legitimate, fighting chance to be in the mainstream so they get the content down when they go to college or to the workplace.
There’s no excuse for students to be graduating from high school without those requisite skills to succeed. There are reasons for these programs not to be working well, but there are no excuses for it.
Before you came back to Arizona, you were up for a superintendent’s job in Washington, near Seattle. Why choose this job over that one?
From a career standpoint, you can’t help but look at a district with that location — Seattle is Seattle. It’s got a lot of green trees, it’s a very progressive community, they’ve got a lot of technology — there’s some things that are very attractive to working there. The district itself is very affluent, the school board members were fantastic, it’s a larger district and the salary was fantastic.
But, as I got to know it, the issues that they have are more legislative. As a superintendent, I would be doing less in shaping the school district because it was in good shape already, by all accounts. I just saw my role as superintendent would be a big departure from what I’m comfortable doing. I like working with programs and taking tough cases and turning them around, taking tough schools and turning them around.
I just thought, where is my skill set and where does my heart really lie? Although I’m not a native-born Arizonan, I remarried here and my wife is from Arizona. It’s not about money, it’s about who you’re going to work for and the goal and mission. You get to a certain point in your career that these things are more important than the career profile or the giant salary that’s available in a lot of districts.
I’m pretty sure my wife was glad I wasn’t going to leave Arizona, too. I’ve adopted Arizona, I like the system, I see it moving in the right direction and I wanted to be a part of that.