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BPS
Superintendent Dr. John J. Ramos, Sr.
Featured
in National
Magazine
Last month,
national magazine
Education
Executive
Magazine
sat down with Superintendent Dr. John J. Ramos,
Sr. as he shared some of the successes, as well as
the challenges Bridgeport Public Schools has faced
during his tenure. And after five years at the
helm, Dr. Ramos is proud to see BPS moving in the
right direction.
Bridgeport
Public Schools: Expect Great
Things
By
Mario Medina
Education
Executive
Sagging teacher morale. Dismal test scores from
students. Ongoing budget woes. A community beset
by pervasive poverty. A high school so troubled it
was deemed a “dropout factory” by Johns Hopkins University
researchers.
Those are
the kinds of seemingly insurmountable challenges
John Ramos,
Sr. faced when he took
the helm five years ago as superintendent of
Bridgeport Public Schools,
Connecticut’s
second-largest school system. And although these
titanic troubles have hardly been vanquished,
Ramos, along with his staff of 1,700, a student
population of 23,000, and, at least to some
degree, the Bridgeport
community at large is starting to right the
ship.
“This isn’t a
speedboat; it’s a liner; and you’re not going to
crank the steering wheel and have it take off in
another direction,” Ramos said. “This takes time,
but it’s coming. When you talk to people outside
about the day-to-day political and financial
craziness, they generally see the ship as moving
in the right direction.”
Areas of incremental improvement for the
beleaguered district include its graduation rate,
which has increased 8%, to 76.4%, and its
suspension rate, which has declined more than 30%
over the past four years, thanks, in part, to
reform programs such as Positive Behavioral
Supports. What’s more, five Bridgeport
schools have reached safe harbor, meaning that
although they haven’t yet met the goals of the No
Child Left Behind program, they are making
progress in student
achievement.
 Meanwhile,
proficiency scores in reading, writing, and math
have made noteworthy gains in the past year. “In
the last iteration of the state test, at the
elementary level, we showed a 5% bump in literacy,
a 10% bump in math, and a 12% bump in the
performance of our special education youngsters,”
Ramos said. “One year doesn’t make a trend, but
I’d argue that we are headed in the right
direction, and there’s nothing like a little
success to keep p eople
invested.”
Undergirding
the district’s steady improvements is an
increasingly positive attitude among faculty,
students, and community members, a far cry from
the gloom-and-doom perspective that was pervasive
in the district prior to Ramos’
arrival.
“There was a
certain despondency,” he recalled. “When I first
took the position, people approached me offering
their condolences. There was this attitude, ‘Ahh,
it’s Bridgeport, what
do you expect?’ I thought, no, it should be:
Bridgeport,
expect great things. And that theme has caught
on.”
A RALLYING
POINT
Tackling the daunting challenges of the Bridgeport
Public Schools system was something Ramos had been
preparing for his entire academic career, which
included a two-year term as superintendent of
Connecticut’s
Watertown Public Schools, where he earned the
nickname “the healer.” Later, he served as deputy
commissioner for educational programs and services
for the Connecticut State Department of Education
before being named Bridgeport’s
superinten dent in June
2005.
“I spent some of
my formative years here before going away to
college, so that was certainly a motivation to
come back and try to make a contribution,” Ramos
said. “My whole career was leading to this kind of
an opportunity, to be an urban superintendent, and
where better than what is essentially your
hometown.”
Still, Ramos took the position with  his
eyes wide open, well aware of Bridgeport’s
plight. “It’s a district that’s 95% free and
reduced lunch, which gives you a sense of the
city’s poverty level. We have all the issues
concomitant to poverty,” he said. “The city has
essentially lost most of its business and industry
base, leaving the taxpayers heavily burdened. It’s
not the typical tough situation you hear about
across the country because the economy’s gone
south. If the issue exists next door, you can
believe it’s that much worse
here.”
Ramos’ first
order of business as superintendent was to develop
a strategic plan that, among other things, would
buoy morale and give the community a rallying
point. “We needed a unifying vision in place for
the district that the various stakeholders would
buy into,” he said.
Armed with the results
of a fiscal, instructional, and organizational
audit he had conducted while
serving as deputy
commissioner, Ramos held a citywide education
summit and, with input from key stakeholders,
developed a plan that was unanimously adopted by
the Board of Education.
In cooperation with
the State Department of Education, Ramos next
focused the attention of his staff and the
community on three of the plan’s 10 points,
allowing Bridgeport to
apply its limited resources to the most critical
areas: instructional strategies, the use of data
to focus instruction and work cooperatively, and
the district’s social and emotional
health.
“We engaged the
administrators in a social contract that outlined
how we would work together, not just in meetings
but in between meetings,” Ramos said of efforts to
tackle social/emotional issues. “This began
changing the culture in terms of how people
interact with each other, so we rolled it out
further. Now, there are social contracts in the
schools among leadership teams and in
classrooms.”
RADICAL
STEPS
Ramos has taken some fairly radical steps to deal
with the district’s poorly performing high
schools. Bridgeport’s
Bassick High
School this year became
a CommPACT school, whereby key stakeholders
(community members, teachers, administrators,
parents, and students) reorganize the school for
shared decisionmaking and collaboration, working
cooperatively in its
operation.
The CommPACT
Schools Project is a reform program overseen by
the University of
Connecticut
and funded by the state government. “It’s the
unions’ answer to charter schools,” Ramos
explained. “The people who live and work in a
school have more ownership of the direction the
school takes. This is the first time in the state
that there’s a CommPACT high
school.”
Another
departure from the traditional is at
Warren Harding High
School, which is being
“restarted” with Global Partnership Schools, an
educational management organization running the
school. “The faculty is open and willing to try
it; everyone’s at the table,” Ramos said. “This
restart, along with the CommPACT school, presents
the possibility of changing the face of the
organization going
forward.”
Each of the
district’s positive changes, regardless of size
and scope, is cause for celebration, Ramos said.
“When a fifth-grader who was reading at the
second-grade level starts reading at his grade
level, he may not make the news, but those are the
victories,” he said.
“The work is hard, and we have our setbacks,
particularly when it comes to money, but we don’t
do this work for the personal aggrandizement. We
do it because we believe we can help change the
trajectory of the lives of the
students.”
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