By Thomas Ultican 9/25/2023
This June, the school named after famed labor leader Samuel L. Gompers voted 25-17 to become non-union. The San Diego Unified School District middle school was converted to a charter school in 2005. The final class of high school aged students graduated in 2007. New school staff came in without a union but formed one in 2019. Almost immediately some teachers, led by chemistry teacher Christie Chiscano, began working to leave the union, aided by The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The Fascinating Gompers Story
In the 19th and early 20th century, Samuel Gompers rose up to be a major force in labor. He founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it as president until his death in 1924, with the exception of 1894. Among the many honors bestowed on him, several K-12 schools were named after him.
His San Diego namesake school opened in 1955 as a junior high and later became a secondary school.
In 2004, Gompers, struggling academically, was split into separate middle and high schools. The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) converted the 47th and Market streets campus into a charter middle school a year later. The high school was closed when its last students graduated in 2007.
In the fall of 2009, Gompers Charter Middle school started transitioning to Gompers Preparatory Academy (GPA) by adding one more grade each school year. By 2011, GPA enrolled the first senior class.
Unfortunately, these changes in the early 21st century were accompanied by student violence, subterfuge and bad management.
In the 1980s, SDUSD adopted a new strategy to integrate schools in poor neighborhoods with predominately brown and black students. Gompers became a science-focused magnet school. By the late 1990s, two problems arose. People living in the neighborhood were unhappy with the white kids being bused in while their children were shut out. Secondly, the business-friendly San Diego school board hired a lawyer named Alan Bersin to lead a district reform movement. Bersin wanted to use the magnet school funding for his “blueprint for success” and ended the magnet school programs at Gompers and other schools.
In her seminal book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch shared about the San Diego school reform effort:
“What happened in San Diego from 1998 to 2005 was unprecedented in the history of school reform. The school board hired a non-educator as superintendent and gave him carte blanche to overhaul the district’s schools from top to bottom. Major foundations awarded millions to the district to support its reforms. Education researchers flocked to San Diego to study the dramatic changes. The district’s new leaders set out to demonstrate that bold measures could radically transform an entire urban district and close the achievement gap between students of different racial and ethnic groups.” (Page 47)
Ravitch pointed out that San Diego was an unusual place to pick for this kind of reform experiment because it was “widely perceived as one of the nation’s most successful urban school systems” (Page 48). There was nothing timid about Bersin’s reform efforts. Many changes based on his “blueprint for success” came, driven from top down with no discussion.
Curiously, a major component of “blueprint for success” was three hours of balanced literacy instruction in elementary school reading. Yet, today’s inheritors of Bersin’s reform ideology are all in on “science of reading,” meaning phonics, and disdain balanced literacy.
Gompers Preparatory Academy
By the spring of 2004, discipline at Gompers, a middle school and a high school on the same lot, had broken down. Bersin called Vincent Riveroll, the principal at nearby Keiller Leadership Academy, to Gompers. He was to help with lunch supervision and bring as many Keiller staff as could be spared.
Following that spring, Bersin asked Riveroll to become the principal of Gompers. Riveroll took the job and proceeded to charterize Gompers. He worked toward that goal throughout his first semester and by the second half of the 2004-2005 school year, Gompers became Gompers Middle School charter. That was also Alan Bersin’s last semester as superintendent of SDUSD.
A driving force for education research and experimentation in San Diego is the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The Center for Research on Educational Equity, Access and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) is a campus-based organization, particularly invested in closing learning gaps. In 1999, CREATE was involved in establishing a model charter called Preuss School on the UCSD campus. Similar to GPA, Preuss is a grade 6-12 school. When Gompers Middle School charter was established, then CREATE Director Hugh “Bud” Mehan became a founding board member and still serves on the board. Today, Mehan is joined on the 14-member board by current CREATE Director Mica Pollock and UCSD professor Rafael S. Hernandez.
Students at Gompers and Preuss get special admissions and scholarship benefits at UCSD.
The Preuss school students are chosen by lottery. There is a low income preference with no one in the family having graduated from college. The Gompers students come from the low income neighborhood that surrounds the school.
In the eyes of many people, Vincent Riveroll is a superhero for his work at Gompers. A 2009 article in the San Diego Reader noted:
“Violence reigned supreme at Gompers. The school sits in a neighborhood that is home to more than 50 known gangs, and gang culture wasn’t suspended at school. If anything, it was exacerbated by kids from rival gangs being thrown together on one campus.”
“So, like Julius Caesar who crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. and started civil war in Rome, Vincent Riveroll, “with a group of committed teachers and staff members,” crossed 47th Street and started the war to reclaim Gompers.”
Teachers who have worked with Riveroll describe him as an inspiring leader and a visionary, possessed with charisma and passion. Parents like this man who has been named teacher of the year, educator of the year and selected as one of four principals nationwide to participate in the Public Education Leadership Program at Harvard University.
Every morning he greets the students ringing his large school bell and on Friday mornings he leads them in song and dance.
Dede Albert is a local San Diego County politician who served in both the state assembly and the state senate. She served on the Gompers Board of Directors from 2005 – 2010. Albert observed that no one other than Riveroll could have improved Gompers culture so dramatically. She claimed to have “often stood in awe” of his dedication and service.
With the strong connections Gompers has created with UCSD, nearly half the graduating seniors are accepted to the highly-selective university. Almost all students who decide to attend UCSD are given a full scholarship.
News Week credits Gompers Preparatory Academy with an incredible 94% graduation rate.
However, all is not sunshine and flowers. Inewsource, a respected non-profit publication focused on local news, ran a series of articles about Gompers in 2017.
Teacher Donny Powers said he realized within a short time that despite the public performances and constant promotion of the Gompers metamorphosis, it was all “this great kind of show, with nothing behind it and nothing deeper.”
Inewsource reported:
“Standardized tests show proficiency in math and English language arts at Gompers has gotten worse from 2011 to 2016. Forty percent of 11th-graders are below basic proficiency in English. Ninety-one percent didn’t reach the state standard for mathematics.”
The chart of SAT scores shown is from the Inewsource report. It clearly indicates that there is no way Gompers students could legitimately have more than half their students qualify for UCSD. One student got a 900 on his original SAT exam and on the second try he got 1100 out of the possible 2400 points. His application was turned down by San Diego State University but he got into UCSD with a full ride. This was not unusual.
Riveroll and his administrative staff put pressure on teachers to give good grades. Teachers were not ordered to change grades but they got the message. A former 11th grade chemistry teacher described a review, in which Riveroll said:
“You killed these kids … These kids are not going to be able to graduate high school, they’re not going to be able to go to college, they’re going to end up in jail, because of you. How do you feel about yourself right now?”
Gompers and the Union
The Inewsource articles are credited or blamed for the teachers union coming to Gompers. Teacher Azucena Garcia was a Teach For America teacher from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon who also grew up in the Gompers’ Chollas View neighborhood. She came to Gompers in 2013 and became a full-time staff member in 2015.
Garcia felt that the administration was embarrassed by the articles so in the summer of 2018 they worked the teachers hard, preparing for classes. Already working 20 days longer than SDUSD teachers, the complaining began with the sentiment that decisions were too much top-down. She said, “We wanted to have a greater voice at the school.”
In 2019, the NEA had established a bargaining unit at Gompers. Immediately, long-time chemistry teacher, Cristy Chiscano started working on what became a 197-page document challenging the union. However her group’s lawyer missed the 2019 filing deadline and did not file the document until January 2020.
Teachers, like Chiscano, remembered Gompers when it was ruled by gangs and feared that a union would take them back to those days. Other teachers felt that the special arrangements they had with management were threatened. Basically a divide developed between the older teachers who opposed the union and the newer teachers who wanted a union.
In the summer of 2020, Gompers laid off 26 of 75 staff members. Many union members were suspicious that these layoffs were retaliation. However, by July the school rescinded the layoff when state budget numbers for 2020-2021 became clearer.
This was not just a fight between teachers at Gompers. The anti-union publication, California Globe, reported:
“National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys are providing free legal aid to Gompers computer teacher Sean Bentz, who just submitted a petition to the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), requesting the agency hold a vote among his colleagues on whether to oust the union. The petition contains signatures of a majority of the teachers under the SDEA union’s control.” (That is the petition Cristy Chiscano put together evidently with the aid of the foundation.)
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a long-time player in the fight against unionism. Supported by such right-wing stalwarts as the Bradley Foundation, they never miss an opportunity to undermine unions and won in this effort to stop the union at Gompers.
Some Observations
SDUSD students who don’t attend Gompers go to Lincoln High school which is just 1.2 miles away. The demographics of the two schools are almost identical except that Gompers has middle-school aged children. 86% of Lincoln’s students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, yet they never had the discipline problems, like Gompers in 2004.
In other words, the gang problem was real but over-hyped at Gompers. It became a charter school for other reasons which did not make it better than nearby Lincoln High School.
Vincent Riveroll probably is a charismatic and effective leader, but he may have been at the school too long.
The Gompers’ connections to UCSD need to end. For more than a decade, students from this charter school have been taking seats away from more qualified students. It was a great experiment but its time has passed.
Cristy Chiscano, Sean Bentz and other staff at Gompers were able to get help from some hard-core right-wing anti-union leaders to rid the campus of the union. Bentz gets to keep his special extra work benefit and Chiscano maintains the status quo.
Today, teachers at Gompers are making significantly less than SDUSD teachers, work more hours, have less representation and substandard benefits. How is this acceptable???
tultican 
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