Julio Almanza, Superintendent of Schools for the Davenport School District, recently shared some thoughts with Hola America, ranging from interesting facts about the past to sound advice for the future, sometimes in the same breath. “We live in the present,” Almanza said, “and we want to recall the past, but we don’t look at the future.”
Superintendent Almanza is responsible for the education of the 16,000 children in the District – the children who are the future of Davenport. His very presence at the Davenport District office says something about the past, and the future. Being born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and ending up as a Superintendent of Schools here in the Quad Cities is a story in and of itself, and you could tell from his white hair and smiling face that he had a lot of stories to tell. Yet his words – and his heart – were not concerned with himself, but with the teachers and students he serves. “I tell the teachers,” he said, “to take the face of their child, and put it on the face of each student they teach; to have the same expectations they have for those children that they would for their own.”
It’s that kind of selflessness and impersonal attitude that defines good educational practices. “Everyone in education wants to make a difference to children, and sometimes we lose perspective. Sometimes we need to go back to that creative spark,” he added later on, referring to the desire to teach, to raise the leaders of tomorrow to be the best they can be.
He also proffered eager remarks on America’s ethnic heritage, and the effect that has on the individual child. He set two books down on the large meeting table in his office. One was a book of statistics, detailing the demographics of Iowa throughout the decades and comparing it to other nearby states. Some of the differences were striking. For one, the rate of population growth in Iowa is only 1.9 percent, which is very slow compared to the national average of 6.9 percent. On the other hand, the Latino population has swelled considerably. A lot of the population growth in Iowa was clearly due to Latino immigration – without it, Iowa’s population might well be decreasing.
The other book on the table was a large, thick volume all about African Americans in Iowa. In addition to information and statistics going all the way back to the 19th Century, there were photographs and first-hand accounts of African Americans living in Iowa.
Almanza talked about the boxcar community in Bettendorf of the 1920s, when Latino families lived by the railroad tracks in boxcars throughout Iowa. “Hispanic families have lived here for a long time, and there’s even greater ethnic diversity than before,” he said, partly referring to the large number of Asian immigrants that have been coming to the Quad Cities recently. “It’s different from big cities, like Chicago or New York, where you have pockets of ethnicity. Here in Davenport, you had Hispanic families spread out all over the city, dispersed, intermingled.” This is increasingly true in the modern world, he explained. “It’s socio-economic separation, rather than racial separation.”
But no matter where the separation is, the teacher has to look past it. “It doesn’t matter whether the barrier is socio-economic, religious, or ethnic,” Almanza said. “You take the face of your child and put it on that student.”
“A lot of people don’t know about this,” Almanza said regarding ethnic culture and history. “Everyone here has an ethnic background. They just need to discover it. We don’t spend enough time teaching children about their own history.” And the little that is taught is often downright wrong.
“I was reading an account of the Mexican-American War, and it was all lies,” he explained, smiling yet concerned at the same time. “You need to look hard to find the truth.” This is a kind of past – a personal past – which has significant application for the individual child’s future. “The better we understand our past, the better we anticipate the future,” Almanza said. That goes for children and teachers as well as whole nations and societies.
Lack of historical education isn’t the only thing that hampers a child’s self-learning. A lot of problems occur not at school, but in the home, before the kids ever get to school. “A child with a strong [ethnic] identity has a better chance of being successful. However, the nuclear family is changing significantly. When I was a child, the mother was at home. Now, that’s not the case. Either both parents are working, or the child is being raised by a working single parent. And we also have a fast-growing number of children being raised by their grandparents. It’s bad for the society.”
With the children seeing less of their parents, they lean more and more on the school for their personal development. It’s a grave responsibility and one hard to fill if you don’t understand the kids you’re responsible for.
“No Child Left Behind was a bad law,” Almanza went on. “But it’s done something for education that was never done with the civil rights movements. It made us look at education in a new way – it’s not fair or representative, but it makes people care about a subgroup, and don’t forget about that subgroup.”
Every child needs to be understood, to be served according to their unique needs – unique partly because of the great differences we have between each other in this immigrant culture. The United States, though built on the backs of immigrants, has a history of ignoring or resisting them. “For example, look at the Irish,” Almanza noted, “they were murdered in the streets.”
But it all comes back to objective leadership – leaders like Almanza, immigrants themselves, who look past all the barriers, all the prejudices, past the color of a child’s skin and the language they speak at home. Leaders who don’t think about themselves, and don’t want to when there’s someone to be served. Leaders who don’t want to be thought of, or recognized, or feared, but simply want the best for the people under them. “Leaders are best when people barely know they exist…of good leaders, who talk little, when their work is done and their aims fulfilled, the people will say ‘we did it ourselves.’”
Julio Almanza didn’t say that. That quote – of Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher – predates him by almost three thousand years, yet, proudly set on his wall, it was the first thing he called to my attention to after entering Almanza’s office – before the statistics, the history, and the changing philosophy of education. It explains a lot about the man. Education is what produces the leaders of tomorrow – and it takes a wise leader to make one.
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