A conversation with ... Paul H. Chatman 

Paul H. Chatman’s story is as a compelling as his physical presence. An imposing yet good-natured man, Chatman is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War who went on to pursue a career in the National Football League before opting for the gentler world of retail management. He is the father of two grown children, Dennis and Keli, and has a granddaughter, Keliah. He and his wife, Debra, live in Oxnard.

Chatman has served on the board of Ocean View School District since 1989, including nine years as president. He has been a member of the Ventura County Association of School Boards since 1989; he was chairman in 1996 and has been a member of the executive committee since 1994.

Chatman was a member of CSBA’s Delegate Assembly from 1996 to 2001, when he was elected to the association’s Board of Directors as Director-at-Large, Black. He has served on a number of committees and was a Governmental Relations Chair for four years; he became vice president in 2005 and continues to serve CSBA in a number of capacities and is a Delegate to the National School Boards Association.

“I really, really enjoy the camaraderie” of CSBA, Chatman says.

In a wide-ranging interview with California Schools, Chatman returned again and again to the theme of camaraderie and teamwork, drawing on lessons he learned on the gridiron and in military service.

“In the Marine Corps, you all have to count on each other,” Chatman says. “You know, that’s the beautiful thing about the Marine Corps: In boot camp, they take all of us as individuals from all walks of life, and when we graduate, we’re a unit.”

That sounds an awful like what a local school board has to do, too.

Absolutely—that’s exactly what a good board will do. You can disagree, you can have your debates and you can even vote against me, but if that is the winning direction, that is the direction you go as a team. That’s how you can be part of the success, because it’s your district, your team that’s implementing it. You lose if you don’t have input. You lose if you aren’t involved in the discussion, and you lose if you aren’t part of the team that implements the program.

In 18 years with your local board and 11 years now with CSBA, you’ve seen a lot of changes in the way we run our public schools. What can you tell me about that?

I think one of the best things that has happened is the training of board members and superintendents as a team. To me, that sets the right tone for where we’re going. You get training together to learn how to work together and sit down and implement the directions that you all—all of you, including the superintendent—have decided are the goals for the district.

Because you work as a unit.

Because you work as a unit. Really, from a management standpoint and from the standpoint of being part of a team, pointing fingers when there’s failure is a sign that there really is no team—they’re individuals.

Now your local district, as I understand it, is achieving very well. You just passed a bond issue last year.

The second bond that we’ve had and both times [it passed by] over 80 percent.

So you’ve got some buy-in from the public. The public likes what you’re doing as team.

Because they’re part of the team. We make an extra, extra effort to always keep the community involved in what we’re doing in our schools. It’s an open institution, not a closed institution. We’re always that face in the mirror.

After we’ve had our [board] retreat, we’ve decided this is where we would like to go, and then we sit down with our site councils to get buy-in and input. Now we have buy-in among the staff, and everybody is all playing on the same ball field.

We actually have our principals come before us at our retreats and talk about what went wrong, why they didn’t make this score, why this group didn’t move up, and then talk about the new plan that they have, and we don’t criticize. Nobody’s looking to poke fingers. We’re not looking for the bad guy. We’re looking for a plan that will work. We try to do everything we can do to keep everybody involved in the process. And it’s hard work. It’s hard work to keep a team—and the bigger the team, the harder the work is. I learned this in retail and management.

Turning to your work with CSBA, you were the Director-at-Large, Black, on CSBA’s Board of Directors before becoming part of the Executive Committee. What problems did you see in California’s public school system in educating the state’s African American students, and what remains to be done?

I don’t really think that the differences are all that [great] from African American students to Latino students to Pacific Islanders—I think all those issues are pretty much the same … there is an achievement gap. So, who is it who will sit there on the board and say, “Now, what program are we going to implement to close the gap?”

And it’s not always students of color. You know, as one travels around this state and talks to school board members, you find some small school districts where they can’t possibly get some of the quality teachers that they need; you know, they have an achievement gap too, and those are white students. We can play the color card, or we can just start looking at why is this student—little Paul—why does little Paul score 130 points less than Johnny? What help does Paul need to get the same test scores as Johnny?

You can disaggregate the data by race and ethnic background, but you can also do it by socioeconomic conditions.

Yes! I would rather do that than any of the other [analyses], because that’s where the real problem is. They come from homes where there isn’t an awful lot of English words being spoken—and that doesn’t mean that they’re speaking another language. I mean, there are African American families that really don’t sit down and talk to little Paul on a regular basis. They don’t read books with little Paul. They don’t have the right kinds of conversations. So when little Paul starts school, little Paul’s vocabulary is way behind, and little Paul doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. We need to grab little Paul early on and start working on building his vocabulary, but we don’t do it by pulling little Paul out and putting him in a special class, because—already—you’ve told little Paul, “You’re different than the other kids.” And then you want to know why little Paul doesn’t really feel good about himself. Why? “Because he goes to school in those little bungalows out there, you know. He’s a little slow.”

But Paul is not “slow,” Paul just wasn’t exposed to the same things as everybody else. So why can’t we deal with Paul right where he is? Why do we have to devalue who he is as a kid? And once we start pulling kids out and they go to special classes, I’m telling you, I just think we lose them. I realize there are some students who belong in special ed classes, but I honestly believe they don’t belong there for a lot of the reasons we put them there today. It’s a problem that we need to get our hands around and start challenging ourselves and say, “Why is this person over there, when he really should be in this class with his peers, and why don’t we just deal with him differently in this class?” Focus a little more attention on him, and maybe some after-school programs.

It’s said that many minority students are shunted off into special education.

For African Americans, it’s been that way for a long time. But I think we do it with a lot of kids, period—because they’re problem kids and they might be a little “slow.” But you know what? All of these kids don’t learn at the same pace. And we need to focus and put a little more effort into keeping that child right where he is, but still help bring him up to speed. Give him a little extra attention; come up with a program to deal with Paul. There are a lot of things that you could do. And I realize that a lot of these things that we can do probably cost us a little more money. That’s why funding is an issue. You know, we don’t have enough money to deal with the Pauls without sending them off someplace else.

And the other little Paul over here—he’s brilliant, way ahead of the class. We need to find a way to deal with him too, but we should be able to find a way to deal with him in the classroom amongst his peers, but yet allow him to explore much further and give him other challenges that will challenge him as a person, and not slow him down. So you’ve got both sides. But we ought to be able to do all of that in the same classroom.

So if the governor’s looking for real reform, that would be something that we could get our hands around, and that’s something that would make a major difference in education, if we could sit down and have the time to work with students that aren’t really coming along very fast. The teacher—most of these teachers [would say,] “I could see the light in the child’s eyes. I know that child has it—but I just don’t have the time. I’ve got 30-some kids.” Just because that teacher doesn’t have the time, we have to send Paul to special ed class, and we’re going to lose Paul. Paul’s going to jail. Paul’s going to join a gang. He’s going to drop out. He’s going to give up.

That’s our job as educators. That’s what we ought to be doing is trying to provide that child with the opportunity to succeed.

We’ve made a lot of strides in California in terms of our teachers and to an extent too, our administrators, having teachers and administrators who “look like California.” Do you feel that African Americans are adequately represented on school boards?

Yes, I do. You cannot have that kind of representation running, basically, at large. You’re not running in an African American community. My community is only 4 percent African American, so I was elected based on my vision for public education for all students—and I’ve always stressed, for all students. I don’t think you can take a class of students and just raise that class; you have to raise everyone at the same time. When you’re running for a public position, it is the public that elects you. It is not African Americans, it is not Latinos, it is the public. You’re running on a vision, and you’re asking the voting public to accept your vision. And so, while there might be some imbalances, as far as ethnicity amongst some groups, that imbalance is because this is a political process. You have to have a political mind. Fortunately, I feel that the message that I talked about—closing the achievement gap—was an issue that most of [the voters] understood, and yet at the same time, I always talk about raising the bar and challenging all students.

When he released the 2007 Accountability Progress Report, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell stressed the achievement gap between different subgroups of our students.

That’s the importance of having the data. Ten years ago you had nothing hard and concrete to say, “These are the issues, and this is the way we’re going to attack them.” Because you did not have the data over a period of time that actually showed these are the issues that we’re having among particular groups of children. We all know there has been an achievement gap, but to say there is an achievement gap is one thing—to actually be able to point to it, and show it through data over a period of time, that’s what we have not had. No one had been able to attack it—or even willing to, in some cases—because there was no way you could actually show it. Now it’s out there for the world to see, and every school district and every school and every one will know what that achievement gap is, and are you closing it, and are you closing it fast enough, so the gap will close over a shorter period of time and not a long span.

Let’s talk about this “Year of Education” that is coming up. What do you see happening next year?

If you listen to the governor, he says that 2008 will be the year to reform education, and you can’t have money without reform. Well, that’s just backwards—you can’t have reform unless you’re willing to pay for it. He doesn’t understand—we’re living under so many reforms right now that aren’t paid for. You can’t implement reform without having the funds that should be designated to implement those programs. Among a lot of the things that are wrong with the No Child Left Behind Act, it just didn’t come with the funding. It isn’t reform first and pay for it later; that’s nothing new—that’s what we’re doing right now.

In your 18 years on the school board, you’ve seen more than one reform come down the pike?

Oh, boy! I’ve seen so many reforms come down the pike, and you’ve still got three or four more that you’re trying to catch up with. The Legislature has to understand: Everybody’s got these great ideas for education, but you can only implement so much at a time. Why don’t we come up with, “This is our education program,” and leave it alone for awhile. This is what it will cost to fund it; we may have to go in and tweak, but we’re not going to add anything unless we’re going to fully fund whatever it is. You don’t do it by making it an unfunded mandate.

So what’s going to happen in 2008? The governor may try to force certain reforms that don’t come with money, and they’re going to cost us an arm and a leg if they’re implemented. Some of them will probably be great ideas, but the [“Getting Down to Facts”] study said we were underfunded, and we have way too many reforms. We are overmandated and underfunded. And it said the problem exists right here in Sacramento—it doesn’t exist in the local school boards or in the districts. So whatever that reform is, it should really get down to local control—don’t impose programs that aren’t funded.

And you don’t tie funding to categorical programs. We don’t need 30 different categoricals—we should have a budget that we can go out in our community and actually explain, that’s transparent. Right now there is no way the parents in our communities can understand what our budget is. Where does the money go? It’s darn near impossible to comprehend it, it’s so complicated. You know, you have business people that look at our books, and they have no clue. And that’s wrong.

That’s an important part of what CSBA is trying to do as part of its “Learn More California” campaign for adequate school funding—to get buy-in from the business community.

Absolutely. It isn’t us against them. We all need to sit down and have a discussion. Because we see a lot of the things that they see. And they don’t realize that we understand. We should be able to look at our budgets and see where the money goes—see what’s coming in, and see where it’s going out. It should be that simple. There’s no way the budget process has to be as complicated as it is right now—that’s wrong.

What other issues do you see school board members facing today?

The devaluation of public education. You know, the polls come out and say, “Well, education has got one of the lowest [approval] ratings.” But if you go into all these communities, they rate their district high. And so you know good and well that they’re believing the [negative] message in the media about education as a broad signal, but they love their own school district. I always wonder how long can you constantly be beat up before people finally believe, “Well, I used to think my school district was doing good, but I’ve been hearing all these things long enough and now I’m beginning to believe them.” That’s the message we’ve got to counteract.

There’s more to it than showing up for a board meeting and going home. You know, I’m a Marine. I’m not someone who used to be Marine—I will always be a Marine. And so I always talk about the Marine Corps in a very favorable fashion. Whenever you go someplace and someone starts saying something negative about education, you shouldn’t be the one just sitting there. You should be the voice that stands up and tries to correct it. You’re the messenger; you’re the one to lend assistance. You should be the one to stand up and say, “I’m sorry, but that’s wrong. Excuse me, you’ve got your facts wrong.”

In the military and football, anything that is team-oriented, the worst thing you can do is fracture your own team. Because instead of me going out with a squad of 20 people, all of a sudden [some of them] don’t believe in the Marine Corps anymore, and they don’t like this, now I’m only really going out with nine who really believe what they’re doing—but I have 11 that are just going along because somebody told them to. You know, if I got into an ambush, there can be some lives lost because they won’t function as a unit.

And that’s the importance of us as a school board, as an education community; we will stand up for what we know to be the truth about education. We have to be the ones to stand up and say, “You’re wrong. I’m sorry, you may want to throw me out, that’s okay, but I’m here to tell you the information that you just said is incorrect and I’ll be glad to give you the correct information.” Speak the truth. You were elected and you swore to uphold your job and your responsibility. And if you aren’t doing that, then why are you there?

You’re now CSBA’s president-elect, and you will be president of CSBA in 2008. What are your goals going to be?

I’m going to join the governor as far as declaring ‘08 as the year to reform education. It may not look exactly like what he wants; I’m not sure what that’s going to be. But the thought behind making ‘08 the year to reform education works for me. That’s the only way we’re going to close the gap. We’re working with a 1960s model of education in the year 2008, and you can’t have reform without finances. It’s not enough to pass budget bills that demonstrate reform without tagging monies and resources on each one of those. So when they pass, they come with the dollars. If we don’t do that, then we haven’t done the right thing for children.

Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is the managing editor of California Schools.