Digging Into Joe Gothard’s Record

The selection of Joe Gothard as Madison’s next public schools superintendent has met with widespread praise, including from me. But digging a little deeper into his record raises some concerns. 

Let’s start with the good stuff. Gothard has led the St. Paul school district since 2017. That district is bigger and more diverse than ours and so he should be up to the task here. In fact, Gothard was named Minnesota Superintendent of the Year and then won National Superintendent of the Year just  before he was selected for the Madison job in late February. 

In addition, Gothard is well known in Madison and, apparently, well-respected by many. He grew up here, went to Madison public schools, got his education degrees from Edgewood College, started his teaching career with MMSD, and had administration experience in the Doyle Building. In fact, he was a runner-up for the top job when the board picked Jen Cheatham instead back in 2013. 

Now for the concerns. 

Let’s start with that Superintendent of the Year award. It’s given out by the School Superintendents Association. The criteria for selection include leadership, communication, professionalism and community involvement. Notice what’s missing? None of the criteria for that award have anything to do with the actual success of students. And, in fact, the criteria the Madison school board developed for selecting the new superintendent didn’t include that either. 

That was lucky for Gothard because St. Paul students are not performing well. Numbers available as of August 2023 showed that only 26% of St. Paul third through eighth graders were proficient in math, only 34% in reading and only 24% in science. In addition, only 57% of St. Paul students were showing up in school at least 90% of the time, compared to almost 70% statewide in Minnesota. The St. Paul math scores are even worse than Madison’s, and those lag both the state and national averages. 

That could be because of a lack of focus, again, on actual educational achievement. 

After Goddard was selected, the Wisconsin State Journal found a quote from a podcast Gothard did regarding building “systemic equity” into a school district. According to the story, among the initiatives he discussed was embedding a graduation requirement for “critical ethnic studies,” which he described as, “a way for students to understand who they are as individuals and to see their place in society through their history, through their lived experiences, how that has intersected with their education, with their community.”

That sounds a lot like critical race theory to me. Public school students need to learn how to read and write and do math. They need to acquire the basic skills needed to think critically for themselves. It’s not the job of the public schools to create revolutionaries. That’s what the University of Wisconsin is for. (And no, CRT is neither a figment of conservative imaginations nor simply teaching about diversity and presenting a more accurate American history. As Black, center-left New York Times columnist John McWhorter has written, “To insist that ‘CRT’ must properly refer only to the contents of obscure law review articles from decades ago is a debate team stunt, not serious engagement with a dynamic and distressing reality.”)

Along these lines, the school board said that Gothard was hired in part to tackle the district’s stubborn racial achievement gap. And yet, at least as late as 2021, that gap was growing in St. Paul. According to a story from early 2021 in the St. Paul alternative newspaper Monitor: “Nearly half of all St. Paul Public School students (grades 6-12) failed a class in the first quarter of the 2020-2021 school year. Failing grades are two and a half times more common than last year, and students of color are more than twice as likely to be failing a class as their white counterparts.”

My last concern has to do with communication, which was one of the criteria for national Superintendent of the Year and something that is badly needed at MMSD. Previous Superintendent Carlton Jenkins was all but invisible and the district was forced to fire its longtime communications director, Tim LeMonds, who stonewalled the press when he wasn’t berating them or belittling them to his staff. 

And yet, as far as I can tell, Gothard has yet to give his first interview to any Madison media outlet. He wouldn’t talk to the press during the hiring process and he wouldn’t even take a call from a reporter on the day he got the job. It’s not enough to go to community forums organized (and tightly controlled) by the district. Those interactions are fine, but sooner or later he’s going to have to answer questions from people trained to ask hard ones. 

What all this adds up to is a growing sense on my part that Gothard may have done so well in his career by learning how to press all the right political, bureaucratic and ideological buttons in a public schools establishment that is failing where it counts. 

Gothard was certainly the best of the three finalists on offer. He certainly promises to be better than Jenkins. He has a track record of being good at the internal management stuff. He knows Madison and those in Madison who know him seem to like him. But the only thing that really matters is student achievement. And on that score we’ve got reason to wait and see. 

A version of this piece originally appeared in Isthmus.

And, by the way, I didn’t notice it when it happened, but last Friday we published our 1000th post here on YSDA. We continue to stand by at least half of those opinions.