Supt. Tom Payzant--Style or Substance? : Education: As the schools chief approaches a decade in San Diego, some say he is a visionary risk-taker. Others consider him merely a master of rhetoric.

With a rapt audience of teachers behind him, union president Hugh Boyle ranted at Supt. Tom Payzant and San Diego school board trustees during a nasty 1984 confrontation over a new teachers’ contract.

“Payzant was brought in here just to make a few swift changes and slam (down) the union, and then he’ll be out of here within another year onto the next rung on the ladder in his professional advancement,” Boyle thundered.

The timeline hasn’t quite worked out the way that Boyle, or even Payzant, imagined at the time.

Last month, Payzant began his 10th year as chief of San Diego Unified--the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system--a record unmatched by any current superintendents of the nation’s largest and often-troubled school districts.

Through the years, Payzant has pricked trustees of the sprawling district of 124,000 students into trying a host of management, curriculum and social welfare experiments--even a novel labor compact with Boyle’s union--and along the way has earned a national reputation for reform.

Now, as Payzant marks a decade here, both he and those involved with education in San Diego are beginning to think about his legacy, and whether he can help save public education from revolutionary competition embodied in various proposals for public funding of private schools.

Is Payzant a visionary risk-taker battling conservative, stand-pat educators to bring academic success to all students, especially the large number of Latinos and blacks in the district? Or is he a master of rhetoric with little steak behind his sizzle of experimentation?

His harshest critics, mainly within the teaching and principal ranks, call Payzant’s reputation undeserved, and they lash him for leading the district away from what they say is its basic mission of education.

“He’s a master politician, a superb talker, and wonderful with rhetoric, but I don’t think it’s backed up by accomplishments,” said veteran Mira Mesa High School Principal Jim Vlassis in comments echoed by an increasing number of his colleagues. “In 10 years, the test scores aren’t higher, the class sizes aren’t smaller; nothing’s changed except the rhetoric. And if that’s not so, why is morale so friggin’ low with everyone?”

Others more charitable find fault not with his philosophy per se but with his inattention to implementing the nitty-gritty of dropout prevention, remedial education, minority achievement and other key policies.

“I think yes, the district is better than 10 years ago, there’s been some genuine improvement in the education of kids, if that is the bottom line,” said Kermeen Fristrom, former district director of basic education. Fristrom now walks a fine line as executive director of the independent Administrators Assn., whose members--principals and central-office managers--are openly griping about Payzant’s leadership.

“But things could have been much, much better if he had tempered his management style with more positive communication toward administrators and teachers so that they would see themselves as more valued,” Fristrom said.

Yet a longtime Latino community adviser doesn’t see Payzant as having been diligent enough with harnessing the rank-and-file. “I’d rank him at about a 7 or 7 1/2 on a scale of 10,” said Augustine Chavez, director of equal opportunity programs at San Diego State University. “He has a message, he has a vision, but I think there’s a real problem in getting principals and teachers in the classroom to carry it out.”

That’s similar to the complaint of veteran black activist Walter Kudumu, who trains parents to become stronger advocates for their children. “In many ways, Tom has a tendency to put a policy on the book and then move on, without making sure that it takes effect and makes a difference, by holding teachers and principals more responsible,” Kudumu said.

But many, both within the district and in the San Diego community lavish praise on Payzant’s intellectual style and innovations, lauding his efforts to open top jobs to minorities and women and to change teacher attitudes to be more positive toward nonwhite students. They concede he hasn’t often met the lofty goals he sets, but quickly ask: What urban district superintendent has?

Without Tom Payzant, they contend, San Diego Unified would be much worse off and similar to its counterparts in, say, Los Angeles, Oakland or New York, given the increasing numbers of poor students, nonwhite students and non-English speaking students who populate the district. (The district is 65% nonwhite, contrasted with about 42% nonwhite when he started in 1982.)

“I know that Tom would love to see San Diego do better, and he works very hard on that,” former trustee Dorothy Smith said, “but when you look at the whole United States picture, San Diego seems like an oasis.”

Smith served on the board that plucked the reserved, erudite Payzant in early 1982 from the superintendent’s post in Oklahoma City to be San Diego’s leader for reform and to articulate an educational vision that the board felt was lacking with then-superintendent Thomas Goodman.

“He’s got the toughest job in town,” said Pacific Bell executive Terry Churchill, a member of key district citizens committees. “We as parents and as community don’t understand that we’ve asked the schools to solve every social problem we have. San Diego is the last successful urban school district and, given all the challenges, Payzant has done a phenomenal job.”

Payzant, 51, and described by many as boyish-looking, lists numerous achievements under his tenure. At the top, Payzant named his almost daily efforts to persuade the non-school community of its stake in supporting better schools, especially with their pocketbooks.

Other highlights that the native Bostonian emphasized:

* Keeping $30 million in this year’s budget cuts away from classroom activities as much as possible by slashing administrative positions and functions instead.

* Agreeing to a multi-year labor agreement that emphasizes cooperation on teaching issues.

* Supporting experiments to put community medical and social service agencies into schools, fleshing out his strong belief that education cannot adequately proceed without such help.

* Opening up his assistant superintendent posts and other key management positions to minorities and women, and persuading teachers to give nonwhite students more chances at advanced courses under the core curriculum policy.

* Beginning a still-controversial restructuring effort to give individual schools more freedom to plan the way their courses are taught, but also to take more responsibility for the results, good or bad, and to suffer as-yet unspecified consequences.

“I know I haven’t achieved the objective of closing the achievement gap,” Payzant said, referring to that between Latinos and black students, on the one hand, and white and Asian students, on the other. “And it’s my greatest disappointment,” Payzant said of his policy most often spotlighted for improvement. “All I can say positively is that the district now has a much better attitude overall on making an effort to do it than say, four or five years ago.”

Payzant concedes he would have never expected 10 years ago to still be in San Diego in 1992.

“But I have really become intrigued by whether a superintendent can bring some continuity to his policies and have a longer-term impact on a district” by staying around, he said. Payzant noted that the short time he spent in previous stints in Oklahoma City and, before that, in Eugene, Ore., “make it much harder to discern any real legacy” in those districts.

At bottom, Payzant has survived a decade because of his ability to work well with his bosses, the five trustees on the board of education.

“He’s an attractive, personable guy,” said Larry Lester, a former board member who clashed often with Payzant over district educational philosophy. “Despite all our disagreements, I never felt any personal animosity.”

Two-term former trustee Kay Davis, a strong Payzant backer, attributed his longevity to “being a straight-shooter. No board member ever felt he or she wasn’t getting all the facts, that there was a Payzant district and then the real district, a facade versus the nitty-gritty.”

Current trustee John De Beck, a retired teacher who ran because he disagrees with many Payzant policies, agreed.

“I’m a strong critic, but working with him is a positive experiment,” De Beck said. “So I ask myself, ‘Am I being shined on?’ and answer, ‘Yes, in a way I am.’ Payzant’s like a nice kid who smiles at you, like he would at a teacher, and does everything right, but somehow you know he’s getting his own way.”

But beyond board politics, praise of Payzant becomes more mixed.

The 5-year-old core curriculum policy, which requires all students to take tougher courses as preparation for the 21st Century--whether or not they express academic ambition--is as symbolic as any in terms of the conflicting views it generates about Payzant.

“It’s another one of his beliefs that there can be social solutions to educational problems,” said J. Tarvin, La Jolla High principal.

Tarvin voiced the concern of many teachers who say the policy has become a hollow shell without smaller class sizes, remedial tutoring and other programs necessary for students ill-prepared to suddenly be thrust into more demanding science, math and English courses.

“It’s not the idea of core curriculum itself but the fact that we as teachers knew the district would not provide the resources” just as with so many other policies in the past, said La Jolla math teacher William Cowperthwaite, a 34-year veteran. “Maybe Payzant and his assistant superintendents should come to our classes and find out what the reality is.”

Trustee De Beck reflects the view of many in the district who say Payzant is unrealistic in believing the school can compensate for problems such as broken homes, lack of parental discipline or drugs and other health issues.

But former trustee Smith and union President Boyle say, instead, that Payzant hasn’t found the key to persuading enough teachers and principals that they can make a difference.

“You have to be hard on him in asking why he hasn’t gotten more of those in the classroom to believe in his policies,” said Smith, who has just completed a doctorate on how to improve teacher training. Smith co-sponsored the original board policy on common core curriculum as a way to improve academic performance of black and Latino students by ending so-called “remedial” classes where minorities predominated.

“I’d like to see his ideas get to teachers, for him to spend time with new teachers. He hopes for the trickle-down theory, and it hasn’t worked that way,” Smith said.

Boyle, along with his wife Gail--a former union president--find part of the communications problem lying in a residue of bitterness among teachers who remember the tough negotiation battles of the mid-1980s before the union and the board agreed to a multi-year pact.

“Teachers are surprised today when I say, ‘I like him!’ ” Gail Boyle said. “Teachers say to me, ‘What??!!’ ”

Added Hugh Boyle: “He’s not charismatic. He understands teaching intellectually, but he doesn’t have the gut level feeling so that teachers believe he knows what they go through day after day.”

A San Diego State professor argues that much of the rank-and-file criticisms of Payzant come from those who feel threatened by the wide-ranging reforms that the superintendent wants. Thomas Nagel, a professor of education who supervises student teachers, said, “He’s threatening to a lot of those comfortable with the status quo.”

Payzant makes no apologies for his philosophy but concedes that he has underestimated the depth of dissatisfaction with many of the district’s policies. He recently held a series of meetings with principals to try and clear the air.

“I’ve been accused of not being very expressive in my emotions, so at one meeting I told them that at times I’d like to give many of them a swift kick in the butt,” he said. “I get frustrated too, so I opened up and was more candid than I normally would be.

“But my point to them was that all of us are anxious about whether we have the skills to move in the direction that the district must move in terms of restructuring and making all students succeed, in assuming the broader role that we have been given by default” by society.

“I realize that my power today is based on influence, on the extent to which I can use information, logic, and intellectual persuasion to get people to go one way rather than another.”

Yet for all his activism, Payzant confesses ambivalence about his ultimate success, conceding it depends on factors that may well remain impervious to all his efforts and those of district employees.

“Our society has got to go beyond the rhetoric that school is important, to impress upon young people that they really have to work hard to do well,” he said.

“Tom Payzant was never a whiz kid on standardized tests, and a lot of things didn’t come easy for him. But he did as well as he did in school because he worked hard.

“I see a lot of adults and kids today, and I don’t see that work ethic. But I do see it in a lot of other countries,” Payzant said. “I don’t think it is a value that is very much ingrained in Americans in general today. I don’t know how to make the quantum leap in improving education with some slick school strategies without persuading kids and their parents that they will have to work harder.”