Education Advocates Challenge Biden Pick For U.S. ED Deputy

San Diego Superintendent Cindy Marten said to have history of ignoring minority education needs, opposing charter schools

Amanda Gorman’s eloquent and powerful inaugural poem took the nation – and the world – by storm. Many began to seek to know more about this first Youth Poet Laureate. Gorman was educated at the famous, exclusive New Roads School in Santa Monica, where visionary founder Paul Cummins also worked to start a charter school so his exceptional education could be available for more students. One wonders how many more “Amandas” might have benefited if Cummins had succeeded in the chartering effort (he and his team did help with some other charter start-ups). She credits her mother, a single parent and teacher at a charter school in the city of Watts with having helped her overcome a significant auditory processing and speech disorder. No doubt like all great schools, her education at New Roads contributed. 

According to the California Charter Schools Association, “Her mother’s class served as the inspiration for Amanda’s poem “Neighborhood Anthem” which she recited when she was selected as the Inaugural L.A. Youth Poet Laureate at the age of 16.” 

Her Grandmother, Bertha Gorman, lends her support and time to the board of Directors of the successful Fortune charter school network based in Sacramento and San Bernardino Counties in California.

Many have raised  Amanda Gorman’s story – and the role her family members play in education – to show the contrast of the Biden Administration’s seeming embrace of a young woman whose family represents the very education opportunities that the Biden Deputy Education Secretary Candidate Marten opposes. 

Sources say she was reportedly the California Teachers Association hand-picked representative to serve on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Charter School Taskforce in 2019, which was established at the behest of the unions and charter critics to attempt to mitigate their growth. The task force’s report served mostly to bolster existing obstacles to opening new charter schools, and their recommendations sought to increase the regulatory hurdles prospective school leaders face in the state, resulting in considerable negative impact on the state’s charter community. 

According to the Sacramento Observer, “Charter school advocates are concerned that Marten has adopted the California Teachers Association (CTA) hard line against charter school growth. She testified before the Legislature for Assembly Bill 1505 which was reportedly co-authored by CTA to give local school districts more control over charter schools operating within their boundaries. Margaret Fortune, who is President and CEO of a network of charter schools serving predominantly Black students and who was a member of Gov. Newsom’s charter school task force with Marten [the network where Gorman’s grandmother serves as a director], observed the nominee for Deputy Secretary of Education taking the side of the teachers union in their war against charter schools. She advocated for a temporary freeze of charter school expansions and limits on charter school operators’ ability to appeal charter denials by local school districts.”

Jed Wallace, the former CEO of California’s charter association, has commented extensively about Marten’s opposition to charter schools. As he told The 74, the Task Force Report that Marten praised was “a complete and utter hit job” on charter schools. 

The leadership of the charter school movement nationwide, which is comprised of more than 7,500 schools, approximately 219,000 teachers, and another 100,000 board members and administrators and serves more than 3.5 million students, have come out strongly against her nomination. But one of the nation’s foremost critics of charter schools, Diane Ravitch, has praised Marten as a “knowledgeable, thoughtful educator.”  

Ravitch doesn’t endorse just anyone, though. One of her primary goals is to stop federal funding for charter schools. It’s a position advanced by an equally anti-education reform lobby, the Network for Public Education, whose leaders have also stumped for Marten. Ravitch championed her nomination pointing out how she will ensure that charter schools find no friendly treatment by Cindy Marten. Diane Ravitch says Marten was chosen as a result of a change in San Diego’s school board which aimed to stop major reforms. “The new board was very union-friendly and they picked Cindy as Superintendent.” The charter opponent says Marten is “a truly wonderful person.” 

In addition to Marten’s opposition to charter schools, her record on policing sexual abuse, protecting the rights of special needs children, some financial improprieties and concerns over equity have education advocates livid. Long time Democrat activist and Biden supporter Joe Nathan of the Center for School Change has been relentless in writing and communicating on behalf of charter leaders about their opposition to Marten. In this letter to members of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee he argued that she demonstrates a history of “deeply disturbing actions during [her] tenure as Superintendent of San Diego Unified School.” Nathan offers evidence of Marten’s failure “to protect students from sexual misconduct and cover-ups by educators and sexual acts perpetrated by other students.”

“Rather than act quickly to prevent further harm, the district obstructed students and their parents from learning the truth, suppressed information, and failed to act, resulting in lawsuits.” He also reports that rather than support low performing students, the district “acknowledged after considerable denial, that it pushed hundreds of low performing students into chartered public schools.”

Marten also “failed to provide proportionate discipline for African American and Black students, who suffered from much higher rates of suspensions and expulsions for many years.  This and Ms. Marten’s prolonged failure to address huge achievement gaps for students of color—including “no evidence of gap closure” since 2003 on the NAEP—resulted in the San Diego branch of the NAACP to oppose her nomination.” 

Finally, Nathan says there is evidence of failure to “ensure proper spending of tens of thousands in federal Title I funds at a school with a large majority of students of color,” followed by retaliation against the whistleblower, and “90 lawsuits are currently pending” in the district by families whose special needs children have been denied federally guaranteed free and appropriate public education (FAPE).

It’s not clear that such concerns are being considered in the confirmation process. U.S. Senator Richard Burr, Ranking Member of the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, who is considered a charter school supporter, seems to have discounted the multitude of voices raised in opposition to Marten, declaring at her nomination hearing that “despite any reservations…I’m inclined to support your nomination, and want to extend to you an offer to provide whatever assistance I and my staff can to help you.”  

Students and teachers have expressed their opposition across Twitter. One of dozens of first hand accounts of Marten ignoring and even bullying students comes from this student, who says Marten should be prosecuted for covering up child sexual abuse, and much more. 

Then there’s this former teacher who says she was “blacked listed from SDUSD for bringing up equity issues…from Cindy’s Leadership.” 

The fact that such controversy over a nominee has not been covered in a single non-trade media publication is concerning to some education advocates. In private discussions, some have asked what the young poet Amanda Gorman might say knowing that the very kind of education her family supports by its involvement is opposed by this nominee, along with an increasing number of Biden appointees whose most recent jobs were with the teachers unions.  

“Why wouldn’t we celebrate the kind of choice and diversity that allowed Amanda Gorman to rise up?,” asked Black Minds Matter founder Denisha Merriweather when contacted. Merriweather pointed out that Gorman understands the power of great education to impact a person’s future, alluding in particular to “In this Place”  (An American Lyric), recited in 2017 at the Library of Congress.

“…There’s a poem in Los Angeles

yawning wide as the Pacific tide

where a single mother swelters

in a windowless classroom, teaching

black and brown students in Watts

to spell out their thoughts

so her daughter might write

this poem for you.”

Why, indeed.