Finalists Carol Birks, Pamela Brown and Gary Highsmith.
One candidate knows how to run a large urban school system that seeks change. One candidate knows how to build up the talent within a system. One candidate knows the Elm City. They are the three left standing in the question to become New Haven’s next superintendent.
Those defining pitches emerged from a 57-page packet of materials submitted by the three finalists applying to head New Haven Public Schools. The three candidates — Carol Birks, Pamela Brown and Gary Highsmith — emerged from a fitful and divisive nationwide search that scared away some leading candidates.
The school system has been without a permanent superintendent for more than a year, after the board pushed out Garth Harries in October 2016. Former Superintendent Reggie Mayo came out of retirement to lead the district in an interim capacity. The Board of Education is expected to finally pick a replacement this coming Monday, Nov. 20.
But before that, the candidates will answer questions from Student Council members this morning at Metro Business Academy, then speak to the general public at Betsy Ross Magnet School’s auditorium, at 150 Kimberly Ave., from 5:30 – 9 p.m.
Click on the links to download copies of the full applications for Birks, Brown and Gary Highsmith.
Following a preview of how the finalists are presenting themselves.
Carol Birks
Birks presented herself as a coach who has learned how to educate urban youth and promote leaders throughout the faculty.
“Who would have thought that a young African American girl who grew up the youngest of four in blighted conditions in the East End of Bridgeport, CT, to a mother, a domestic worker, and father, a mechanic, both with very little formal education, would be eligible to pursue such an influential position as superintendent of New Haven Public Schools?” she wrote.
Birks has worked as chief of staff for Hartford Public Schools since being promoted this July. Birks has responsibility for overseeing administrative services, like labor relations for the 4,000-member staff; assisting with the $417 million budget; and leading a $100 million project to co-locate three academies in a renovated building. The job pays a $170,000 salary.
Previously, as Hartford’s assistant superintendent for four years, Birks developed a training academy to support the growth of principals and administrators — a move that Beth Schiavino-Narvaez, Hartford’s superintendent, credited with for boosting the district’s talent pool.
The central office team is “moving from a transactional Human Resources Department to a department that builds capacity for school leaders and teachers,” the superintendent wrote. ”One of her strengths includes recognizing individuals’ strengths and developing individualized leadership plans to build their capacity.”
Schiavino-Narvaez continued: “Throughout her tenure, there has been some progress in improving academic outcomes, reducing chronic absence rates, and discipline rates. She has also worked tirelessly to improve graduation rates across the district.”
A graduate of Harding High School in Bridgeport, Birks collected degrees from Hampton University in Virginia, University of Bridgeport and the University of Connecticut.
Birks started out her education career in 1996 as a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Luis Munoz Marin School in Bridgeport, before working for the state to administer GEAR UP, a federal program to boost college-going among low-income students.
She became an assistant principal at Hamden High School in 2003 and was eventually recruited to head up her alma mater. In 2010, after three years as principal at Harding, a consultant hired to restructure the school replaced her, saying there was “not enough cohesiveness in her action plans to improve student achievement.” She took a two-year job with Global Partnership Schools and a one-year gig with CT Center for School Change.
Birks completed a doctorate from Columbia University Teachers College in 2013, where she focused on strategies for reaching young men of color. Her research led her to support single-sex education with a culturally relevant curriculum — a proposition similar to Rev. Boise Kimber’s proposed all-boys school, which New Haven’s Board of Education shot down this year.
Pamela Brown
In her application, Brown argued that tenets of New Haven’s “School Change 2.0” reform plan are strategies she has implemented at the helm of other school districts, including in the top job.
From 2012 to 2014, Brown led Buffalo Public Schools as superintendent. During her tenure, she said she oversaw the final phase of a $1.4 billion renovation project, sped the process for getting school improvement grants from the state, and added a data dashboard and parent portal to offer real-time updates on student progress. She also claimed to have notched high numbers: a nine-point increase in the four-year graduation rate, the largest among New York’s big-city districts in her first year; a 66 percent college enrollment rate, the highest level in the district’s history; a dramatic increase in the number of schools that passed standardized tests, up to 44 of 53 eligible schools; and a reversal in a trend of declining enrollment rates.
Her reforms also made her a lightning-rod for criticism, particularly for hiring administrators who lacked the proper certifications.
Carl Paladino, a real estate developer and Tea Partier who lost a gubernatorial race and chaired Donald Trump’s campaign in New York, led the crusade against her. In his first motion as a newly elected school board member in 2013, he demanded her resignation. “The BOE wanted a weak African-American Superintendent from out of State who they could control to protect their influence over the bloated budget and jobs,” he wrote in an open letter, explaining his rationale. “If they were true to the children, they would have hired the best proven and capable person, regardless of color.”
John King, then New York State’s education commissioner, also criticized Brown’s handling of turnaround efforts at two low-performing high schools and a deal with a teachers union about evaluations.
In a recommendation letter, Barbara Seals Nevergold, the Buffalo Board of Education’s current president, called Brown an “extraordinary educator.” Nevergold said Brown confronted “academic, financial and political distress,” as soon as she started, “allowing little time for an orientation to this complex, dynamic position.” Still, she added, Brown had a lengthy list of accomplishments from her short tenure.
“Dr. Brown is a professional, who has maintained ultimate professional demeanor in the face of numerous professional and personal challenges. She has a calm demeanor but she is forthright and direct in her communication style,” she went on. “Dr. Brown has the ability to make the difficult, unpopular decisions that had to be made to move our District forward.”
After accepting a buyout before a new school board took power, Brown landed in Fontana, a city on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles, where she manages 30 elementary schools. In the last three years, Brown has experimented with new models, piloting a full-day kindergarten and rolling out the first phase of a dual-language immersion program that’s has swelled interest around one magnet school, leading to a wait-list that runs hundreds of names long.
Brown’s also upped the average attendance rates to 96 percent, and her plan for engaging families led to 5,000 additional sign-ups for education and engagement opportunities, plus the founding of two parent leadership groups. That job pays $174,000 — a cut from the $232,500 she pulled as Buffalo’s superintendent.
After graduating from Compton Senior High School in Southern California, Brown earned degrees from Stanford, San Francisco State and Harvard. She also earned a license to teach Spanish from the University of Southern California, which she used in her first job as a bilingual teacher in Los Angeles.
Brown has worked in Clark County Schools in Las Vegas, Nev.; San Francisco Unified School District; Creighton School District in Phoenix, Ariz.; Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in Charlotte, N.C.; Richmond City Public Schools; and the School District of Philadelphia.
Gary Highsmith
Deemed unqualified by an executive search firm, Highsmith lacks a doctoral degree and can’t speak another language besides English. But, he notes in his application, he knows New Haven better than anyone else.
“I have been preparing for this position for nearly three decades,” he wrote. “It is abundantly clear that I am uniquely qualified for the position of Superintendent of New Haven Public Schools. I was born and raised in New Haven, attended public schools from Head Start through high school in New Haven, I still live in New Haven, my children have both attended New Haven Public Schools since pre-school and kindergarten, [and] I worked in New Haven Public Schools for 16 years…. One would be hard-pressed to find a candidate more invested in and knowledgeable about New Haven Public Schools than me.”
Since 2015, Highsmith has worked as the human resources director for Hamden Public Schools, overseeing 1,100 staff. He said he’s increased the number of minority teachers, revised the district’s sexual harassment policy, saved $800,000 in salaries through an early retirement incentive and attrition, and successfully negotiated multiple collective bargaining agreements with the unions. The job netted him $175,000 last year.
A letter from Jody Ian Goeler, Hamden’s superintendent, strongly supported Highsmith’s “logical” return to the Elm City. “Over his more than two decades as a certified educator in the State of Connecticut, Gary has acquired the skills, dispositions and experience to effectively lead any Connecticut school district,” he wrote. “Gary represents a new generation of district leaders who possess the drive, skills, charisma, passion and out-of-the-box thinking necessary to bring about the types of changes needed in education today.”
Highsmith picked up two degrees and an administrative certificate from Southern Connecticut State University.
He entered the school system in 1990 as a substance abuse prevention coordinator, developing a curriculum and guest-lecturing for high school upperclassmen until 1995, when he became a social studies teacher at Troup Middle School. In 2002, he took a four-year job as principal at L.W. Beecher Elementary School, where he developed a behavior code that he said reduced out-of-school suspensions.
From 2006 to 2015, as principal at Hamden High School, Highsmith said he raised graduation rates by 10 points — a slightly inflated figure, according to state data, that mixed four-year and five-year graduation rates.