The bombshell comes near the end of a 90-minute interview. It comes unsolicited. After Edward Goldman, a 23-year veteran of the Clark County School District, has already criticized overbearing administrators, weak principals and lazy teachers. Now he’s trained his infamously sharp tongue on classroom culture. Not the normal shenanigans—the note-passing, the cheating and the goofing off. Something more serious. Like sex. He’s talking about sex. And not the sex being taught as the part of high-school curriculum, but the sex he says occurs in classes. Between students. In full view of their peers. Behind the teacher’s back.
A bombshell, indeed.
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Before we get to the sex, let’s get to Goldman. Having heard about the man—his peevishness, his irascibility—I thought he might be a real cad, self-possessed and, perhaps, intolerable.
Not so. Strolling into the downstairs waiting area of the Clark County School District’s Curriculum and Professional Development Building on Pecos-McLeod, dressed in dark gray slacks and a collared blue shirt, Goldman looks about as controversial as Dick Van Dyke. He’s associate superintendent of education services, overseeing the education of 40,000 of the district’s most at-risk students and determining the punishments of those recommended for expulsion.
He’s 56, with a paunch that slightly recedes when he stands. His forehead serves as landing strip for errant strands of tousled grayish hair, and his nose, generous but not bulbous, props up a pair of prescription bifocals equipped with dark, goggle-like coverings that, functionally, mimic sunglasses but, aesthetically, make him look dorky. There’s a manufactured quality to his breathless, low-intensity monotone; it’s a soft voice, perfect for coaxing a cat out of tree.
We’re here to talk about his penchant for controversy. He’s been sued for racism, for allegedly calling an employee a “camel jockey”; he was once branded by union supporters as a mortal enemy of Clark County teachers. Goldman’s worked under five superintendents and directly under three—and, in the last 10 years, has probably been quoted more than all of them, perhaps more than any district employee, on matters ranging from student discipline to school uniforms.
Ask him anything about the school district, and true to his mythos as someone who gives it to you straight, no chaser, Goldman says what’s on his mind. Because of the earnestness in his voice, you sense he’s telling you the same thing he’s told his bosses, and in the same acidic, take-it-how-you-wanna-take-it sort of way.
At each stop along his career trajectory (dean, assistant principal, chief contract negotiator, various superintendent posts), he’s been given more power, meaning he’s been given more and higher-profile opportunities to stir up controversy. As southeast regional superintendent from 2001-2004 he scrapped parent-teacher conferences, pushed back school start times and championed school uniforms—each act causing its share of ruckus. Now, as associate superintendent of education services, he’s taken bolder steps: starting schools and taking over programs.
The oldest of four siblings, Goldman says his parents encouraged him to think he could do anything, forming the basis for the mildly narcissistic personality he’s known for. Goldman can admit he’s wrong, but you’d better be willing to go through hell and back to prove it to him. Two district employees—one a principal, the other a high-level administrator; both requesting anonymity because they fear retaliation—say Goldman’s nerve and verve rubbed more than a few people the wrong way. There’s a line between being a straight shooter and a jerk, and he crossed it. Continually.
“Some people think he’s a bully,” the administrator says. “An asshole.”
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“I know I have a lot of critics,” Goldman says, not celebrating the fact but not exactly lamenting it either.
“I always felt I could build a better mousetrap, like I could do everything better, even when I was a kid,” he says of his days growing up in Rochester, New York. “I wanted to be the teacher because I felt the teacher was running the class wrong, and I could do it right. Whether it was watching a traffic cop trying to get the traffic going and screwing it all up ... I’d want to be the traffic cop. I was only 14, but I felt I could make the traffic run right, even though I didn’t technically know how to do it. I could learn, and once I learned, I’d do it better and do it my own way.”
Match that drive with the Clark County School District, the nation’s fifth-largest education system, rife as it is with problems (middling test scores, crumbling schools, rapidly diversifying and exploding student population) and you have the perfect forum for Goldman’s ego to run wild.
“I believe I can make things work, and if I can’t, then get someone in here who can. I’m an impatient administrator. A very child-centered administrator. I want things to get done that don’t get done because change moves at a snail’s pace and politics interfere. I don’t like going through committees and politics and all the rest of that nonsense.”
Goldman relates a tale about his determination: “American students can’t speak multiple languages. European kids, who aren’t any smarter than American kids, speak four languages by the time they get to high school in some countries. When I had the opportunity to do something about this, I did. It’s called Walker International School. I said, we’re going to start a new school from scratch and every child will be taught in English and Spanish. This is not an ESL [English as a second language] school where we’re trying to teach Spanish-speaking students English or teaching Spanish-speaking students in their own tongue. This is to allow all students to speak dual languages. From kindergarten on, they have a half-day instruction in English and a half-day instruction in Spanish. From Day 1, they gave me a thousand reasons you can’t do this. I didn’t ask for their opinions. I said we’re doing it. Originally the principal wasn’t committed to the idea. He thought it was another one of my hare-brained schemes. I told him if you’re not going to do it, we’re going to find someone who will. He signed on.”
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A career in education wasn’t in the cards for Goldman, who studied political science at Columbia University and figured on a life in government work. Substitute teaching at a private school outside of New York City lit a fire. In the early 1970s, he left for the sunnier climate of Los Angeles, teaching math, government and history and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in poli-sci and a master’s in education administration from the California State University at Los Angeles. Goldman moved to Las Vegas to pursue his doctorate in education administration and higher education.
In 1984, he landed a job teaching government and history at the Community College of Southern Nevada and was hired as dean at Woodbury Junior High. Over the next two decades, dutiful ladder-climbing—positions at Western, Basic and Bonanza High Schools—led to increasingly powerful jobs. In 1989, he became the district’s assistant superintendent of administrative operations and staff relations, as well as its chief contract negotiator, a position he held until 2004, and one that gave him his biggest platform to date for stirring up controversy.
Though his title was negotiator, it could’ve just as easily been the “bearer of bad news.” Goldman negotiated contracts during a period of explosive growth. More students meant more money was needed to hire more teachers, more support staff, more cafeteria workers, more janitors and more cops. Normally completed in months—the district negotiates two contracts in the fall of odd-numbered years; things are usually finished by Christmas—1997 negotiations stretched into the next year. It was battle of give and take, and Goldman, who negotiated contracts for administrators, teachers, support staff and police, was in the middle. Unions demanded expanded benefits and steeper raises (for example, the 1997 Legislature approved a 6.5 percent raise over two years; the Clark County Classroom Teachers Association initially sought 16.6 percent).
For his part, Goldman says he understood union frustrations: “The unions were mad because I didn’t give away the store. I followed the mandates of the superintendent. If the negotiations aren’t going well, they attack the negotiator. That’s fine. Ironically, teachers got more then than they’re getting now [in terms of raises]. We’d say 3 percent; they [unions] wanted 5 percent. The arbitrator would say 4 percent, and we all leave happy. Recently, we’ve only got what the state has given us.”
Things turned personal when Steve Confer was hired as executive director of the Clark County Classroom Teachers Association (now the Clark County Education Association) in 1996. Throughout 1997, Confer held press conferences to update the public on negotiations—which, by law, are closed—and put out press releases attacking Goldman for “bad-faith bargaining.”
“He started to personalize everything,” Goldman says. “I was the reason the teachers couldn’t get 14 percent raises. He wouldn’t publicly criticize the superintendent, so I became his target.” Goldman claims union officials followed him, trying to dig up dirt. Confer resigned from the union in 1998 after pleading guilty to embezzlement— he wrote checks to himself totaling $53,000 while serving as treasurer of the Professional Service Organization, an affiliate of the Indiana State Teachers Association.
Goldman generally kept his cool amid the sniper fire, says John Jasonek, executive director of the Clark County Education Association, which represents more than 13,000 teachers. He was always firm but fair and did his job professionally: “Of course, some old wounds take long to heal. Many administrators perceived the school district as having a heavy-handed rule, and Goldman was the face of the district during the negotiations. He’s always been up-front with me. Quite obviously there’s still a lot of animosity. He also has his supporters as well. [But] our supporters are never as loud as our detractors.”
Though his tone indicated otherwise, if there’s lingering acrimony from Goldman’s negotiating days, Douglas McClain isn’t saying. He’s executive director of the Education Support Employees Association, which represents 11,000 clerical, food service, transportation, technical and trade employees. Pressed repeatedly, he offered the same refrain: “I’ve got nothing to say about Mr. Goldman. He’s not worth my time.”
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Goldman will tell you that his ideas are sound, that he gathers research and marries that information with good principles and comes up with his ideas. His ideas, he says, are designed to help the district do better, “because we can improve in so many ways.”
Given the earnestness in his voice, you buy what he’s saying. He’s convincing, if anything.
When he was promoted to southeast regional superintendent in 2001, he rearranged parent conferences because they sheared two and a half days from instruction time.
“I asked one principal what his greatest accomplishment was, and he said 100 percent parent participation at the conferences. I said, so what. La di da. Your scores were in the toilet, so what did they produce?” he says. “When my daughter went through school—and I know this to be true for others from teachers I talked to and administrators who have children in the district—she missed two and a half days of instruction. I consider instruction sacrosanct. I don’t support staff development days, not at the expense of instruction. It has nothing to do with staff development days, per se. But my daughter missed two and a half days of school so I could attend a 15-minute conference with her teacher, who told me nothing I didn’t know. For those 15 minutes, how do you justify missing school for two and a half days? So what did the teacher do in 15 minutes? She gave me the report card and told me what I could read on there. My feeling was I restored two and a half days of instruction to students, and I’m proud of that.”
The move upset some teachers; but there wasn’t a groundswell of opposition, he says. The negative feedback he did get was expected: “They weren’t getting half days off. You know nothing gets done during half days, anyway.”
While school board trustees and then-superintendent Carlos Garcia took wait-and-see approaches, at least one teacher, Martha Gill, took umbrage at the change, venting in an October 5, 2001, letter to the editor in the Las Vegas Sun, “I am disheartened to learn from Dr. Edward Goldman, southeast regional superintendent for the Clark County School District, as quoted in your Sept. 14 article, that only about 10 people felt the issue was urgent enough to call him. The conferences I participated in were always scheduled for 20 minutes or more. It is interesting to note that school district officials were quoted in your article as saying that the conferences consumed about two days of instructional time. That amount of time divided by a class average of 28 students allows about 20 minutes for each conference. Hmmmm?! Is there a contradiction here?”
Teachers actually had more time to do the conferences, Goldman argues. During morning prep time, evenings, at open houses, over the phone, even in the spring—previous district regulations mandate fall meetings.
When Goldman decamped for the Education Services Division in 2004, most schools dumped the program. “Teachers wanted it back. It’s a classic case of doing something because it’s convenient to adults.”
Another of his programs fell by the wayside when he left. Because many high-school students were falling asleep in first period, Goldman experimented with staggered start times at various schools—nearly half the students would go to class at 8 a.m. instead of 7 a.m. Those who rode buses started earlier and ended earlier, making campuses less congested. He based his program on 1998’s Minneapolis Public Schools Start Time Study, which examined sleep data from three public high schools. According to the study, students who got an extra hour of sleep reported less sleepiness, less difficulty focusing on schoolwork, less fatigue during the day and less depression. Parents and teachers supported the staggered schedule. Opposition was minimal, Goldman says; their beefs were easily fixed. Or so he thought. Only Green Valley High still uses the program, a clearly irked Goldman says.
“You had people complaining that students couldn’t talk to teachers after class. If they rode the bus, they couldn’t talk to them anymore. There were some concerns with athletes on the earlier schedule, that if they get out at 1 p.m. and practice doesn’t start until 3, they’d be waiting two hours. Well, they could spend that time in the library.”
The Goldman reform that did stick—school uniforms—generated more controversy than even he could’ve imagined. The back story: Vandenberg Elementary Principal Carolyn Reedom (since retired) amassed research on the positive academic and behavioral benefits of uniforms. Parents, teachers and administrators backed the idea; so did Goldman: “This put everyone on an even keel, the kids whose parents could afford $100 tennis shoes and the poor students. When kids are in decent clothes they behave a certain way. I decided that when new schools opened up, this would be in place.”
When Liberty High opened in August 2004, Goldman saw an opportunity to exploit a loophole in school policy allowing principals leeway on deciding standard school attire. “I knew I was skating on thin ice, but at least I was on the ice,” he says. “I only fielded three complaints from parents who had a problem. Other schools started talking about it, and the board started talking about it.”
Some parents balked—they wanted say-so in determining if a school went to standard attire and, if so, what that attire would be. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada sued on First Amendment grounds. (“I don’t think any social science evidence support the claims that uniforms create a better environment,” ACLU executive director Gary Peck says. “We filed a lawsuit and are now at loggerheads. The lawsuit is pending at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.”) Some trustees balked that schools were acting unilaterally and not consulting the board. The school board adopted a policy allowing schools to implement attire policies provided that 55 percent of parents agreed on it.
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When did you become so outspoken?
It developed over time. When I was teaching in Los Angeles, I could see that things weren’t always done in the interest of children. For example, a kid working on a semester project and really puts his heart and soul into it, and some teacher says you’re getting a zero because he left it in his locker and the kids says he’ll go to his locker and get it and the teacher says nope. I just want to scream. The purpose is to teach them, they’re children. And to grade the quality of their work. Why would you do something like that? It’s not just personally offensive, but it’s pervasive. I’d ask why this was allowed and was told, they need to learn life’s lessons. I thought, okay, how about from now on, when you’re late with your lesson plan, we should institute life’s lessons on you. They didn’t want those rules to apply to me. You can discipline a kid for being late, but don’t take it out on his academic work.
Why can you do and say things others won’t and can’t?
I like to think it’s credibility. I know what I’m talking about. But it’s a catch-22. I get things done and gain credibility, and when you gain credibility, you’re expected to get things done. If I can’t get things done, then they need to find somebody who can.
Some of these things I can do something about, some of these things I can’t. As a parent, one of the things that rankles me is that some bureaucrats dismiss me as a parent because I work for the district. I don’t lose my rights as a parent because I work in the district. I get to see things and feel things as a parent. But as an employee, sometimes you bite your lip because you don’t want your child affected.
You were sued in 1998 for allegedly disparaging ethnic minorities. You allegedly called someone a camel jockey.
I never disparaged any blacks, Hispanics or Asians. The attorney who filed the lawsuit, Richard Segerblom, made everything up.
So everything in the lawsuit was a lie?
Yes. The attorney who filed the lawsuit, Richard Segerblom, made everything up. You can look at the files, at the amended complaint. The witnesses couldn’t even cite specific things that I supposedly said. Attorneys wanted to make the case into a racial animus case and me into a lightning rod.
(Segerblom failed to return a call for comment.)
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For a long time, Alternative Education was as a throwaway division; it was where you were banished to if you didn’t do well. Taking it over was an opportunity to stump for at-risk students. Around long enough to know the bureaucracy and how to get to people in power, Goldman knew he could be as good an advocate for them as any. He got that chance in 2004 when Garcia melded Alternative Education into Education Services and tapped Goldman as associate superintendent.
Without his permission.
Goldman goes off the record about the specifics of why he didn’t fight. He speaks in hushed tones, as if someone’s eavesdropping. Mr. Candid is censoring himself. The gist of the reason has to do with not feeling up to fighting Garcia anymore. Theirs was a rocky relationship, Goldman insists. He says Garcia was jealous of his budding reputation among Hispanics—for creating Walker International School and adding an acculturation program for students with limited English skills at Morris Behavioral Academy. Through a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Unified School District (he was hired as superintendent in July), Garcia declined repeated requests for comment.
“My employee evaluations were outstanding, so there was no reason for me to be punished,” Goldman says. “He and I disagreed on a lot of things, and I wasn’t afraid to call him on it. He said it takes five to seven years to learn another language and didn’t think we should be wasting resources on Walker International. I told him it didn’t take five years, and if kids start early, like in kindergarten, they have the capacity to absorb two languages. We were constantly battling.”
Shortly after creating the acculturation program at Morris Academy, Goldman says the district’s lawyers told him the federal Office of Civil Rights was concerned that students were intentionally isolated from mainstream students.
“I know damn well they [administrators] did this on purpose,” Goldman says of the alleged federal inquiry. “This is a school of choice, nobody has to go. But nobody bothered to ask me about it. The lawyer was trying to cover for my friends in the district who didn’t want the school in the first place because it’s a behavioral school, and some people see these as throwaway kids or as lesser than kids at other schools.”
After the for-profit Edison Schools failed, after five years, to lift scores at West Academy and after Desert Pines High went without a principal for six months, Goldman convinced superintendent Walt Rulffes to give him a shot at resurrecting them. The idea was to implement the Foshay model—intense curriculum, focus on health and social services—and to build a K-12 campus, so students could spend their entire secondary careers on one campus. “If I have them until eighth grade why, in the ninth grade, do I want to send them to the gangs at Western High?”
The bigger issue was getting buy-in from the surrounding black community and folks like activist Marzette Lewis, who’s largely credited with getting West built. (When it opened in 1998, it was the first middle school built in West Las Vegas in 30 years.) Goldman selected Mike Barton, whom he’d seen grow as administrator over eight years, as the principal. He immediately set about introducing Barton to community leaders, understanding that racial politics (West is predominantly black and Barton is white) will play a role in the school’s hoped-for turnaround.
“I understand that children need to see black educators,” Goldman says. “I met with the black ministers, and I told them that not all folks hired will be African-American. We all played together. The ministers said they just wanted the best principal for their kids, and I think I gave them the best principal we have in this district for that school. I expected progress. Not zero to 60, but zero to 15.”
Once Barton was approved, Goldman got out of the way and let Barton remake the school. Fifty-four of the 67 teachers were let go. Added were longer school days and a third semester/voluntary summer session.
“The pressure was on, and it’s still on,” Barton says, “but it’s positive pressure. Dr. Goldman is very impatient, gets stuff done and will force it along if he needs to. If you have an idea counter to his, you better be able to back it up. He’ll let you try something, but he’ll also let you fail. But he won’t let you do some cockamamie idea that will ruin a school. He really likes instructional time. When you try to change something so drastically, it can be crazy. You have to get used to his style. He wants it done now.”
Goldman’s aura can be both energizing and unnerving, Desert Pines Principal Timothy Stephens says. Goldman convinced superintendent Walt Rulffes to let him run Desert Pines, then appointed Stephens as principal for the 2006-07 academic year. The school recorded the second-highest rate of increase in graduation in the district—as one of the worst-performing schools in the state, it essentially had nowhere to go but up. “He doesn’t tell me how to do anything, but he will call me in if he thinks there’s a better way,” Stephens says.
Another of Goldman’s duties in Education Services is examining recommendations for expulsions. Since 2004, requests have doubled from 2,500 a year to nearly 5,000 last year. Increasingly, Goldman says, more elementary-school students are behaving badly. It’s in this capacity that Goldman’s soft side shines through. Actual expulsions have dropped from 70 three years ago to two in the last academic year. Punishment must be commensurate with the crime, Goldman says. “If a student says ‘I wish you were dead,’ that’s inappropriate, but it’s not a threat. If a student says ‘I’m going to kill you,’ that’s a threat, and you can’t make threats,” Goldman says. “I’m for discipline, but I don’t want kids’ academic careers threatened for no reason.”
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Before we get to students having sex in class, Goldman offers a story that illustrates how little control some teachers have: “I get this progress note from a teacher, and she says [the student in question] would be a very good student, but he spends most of his time talking on the cell phone. The parent complained about taking the phone away. I told her that the teacher is the problem, not the student. I asked the student how he could talk on the cell phone the entire period, and he said the teacher lets us, but please don’t say anything, he’s cool. I said he’s not cool. He’s ruining your education, and he’s not doing his job.”
Occasionally, Goldman gets expulsion recommendations for students having sex in class. It sounds too lascivious to be true, but Goldman says it is. The numbers are comparatively low, he says, between five and 10 a year. More than half of the incidents don’t occur in class; students are caught in bathrooms and in the dugout on the baseball field. But sometimes it does happen in class. The times he’s queried busted students, he’s asked why them the all-important why (the thrill of it). Teachers don’t escape questioning, either. (The principal, not Goldman, is responsible for disciplining the educators.)
“It’s mind-boggling this could even happen,” Goldman says. “They [students] say the teacher was turned the other way. Well, you know what, I was a teacher and I could assure you that no students were having sex in my classroom, even when my back was turned. It’s not that the teacher allowed it or permitted it to happen, it’s that the teacher wasn’t paying attention to what’s going on in her classroom.”
Damon Hodge is a Weekly staff writer.