One Latina’s Campaign to Turn Around a School
We have a fantastic staff that works together collaboratively. Unlike many schools that have felt pressure to increase scores after the No Child Left Behind Act, our focus is in the primary grades, if we do this it will ensure success for this year, next year and the following year, she explains. I think thats been compromised with our standardized testing focusing on upper grades, because you dont start testing until second grade. If youre always playing catch-up its really, really difficult.
Espinosa is planning to get back into the classroom within the next five years, the timeline for when she expects her school to get back over the magic 800 mark. Ive always thought of this position as a temporary position until they found someone suited to take on the challenge. My true calling is teaching, she says.
An Indirect Route
While Espinosa is at home in the academic world, she majored in sociology and planned to become a social worker after graduating from Wesleyan University in 1997. Because she had friends who worked in group homes, she soon realized, however, that once a child was in the system, and had been through such trauma, it was difficult to have as much influence on their lives as she would have liked.
I thought, Where can you reach kids before that happens? The logical choice was in school, of course, she recalls. It took me a while to get there. My mom was an educator and I was convinced I was not going to be a teacher.
After receiving her teaching degree, Espinosa taught for eight years in Fresno, Calif., working for a charter school company called Edison Learning. Because Edison managed schools throughout the state, she made the move to Brentwood in East Palo Alto. Eventually she moved from teaching students to teaching adults after Edison asked her to move into a role mentoring 23 new teachers.
Moving from teaching students to mentoring teachers was a whole different ballgame, she says, but she took on the role in an effort to thwart the high levels of turnover the school was experiencing.
