Given the plight of his colleagues in other metro Atlanta school districts, Cobb County superintendent Michael Hinojosa doesn’t have it so tough.
Unlike his colleague in Cherokee County, the 56-year-old Hinojosa has not been accused of trying to run down a board member, an allegation Cherokee police say was fabricated. And unlike former school chiefs in Atlanta and DeKalb County, he hasn’t been indicted.
Still, Hinojosa has had his struggles, most notably the sudden reversal by the Cobb school board on the Common Core State Standards, which has stranded the district’s 107,000 students without math textbooks when classes resume in 16 days.
And faced with a budget deficit of $86 million, Cobb resorted to the risky maneuver of pulling $45 million from its savings account of nearly $100 million. At the end of next year, the account is expected be at $71 million — a precarious position, as that amount barely covers the district’s salaries and utilities for a month.
Despite all that, Hinojosa portrayed himself as a man who loves his job in a recent conversation at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Hired in 2011, Hinojosa came to Cobb — the 24th largest school district in the nation — from Dallas, where he had been superintendent for six years. In his more than three decades in education, mostly in Texas, he has led six districts
“I really enjoy what I do,” he said. “Cobb is one of the top districts in the country. We have some schools that have some challenges, but I would have loved to have had those schools in Dallas when I was there.”
Hinojosa admits he was stunned when the school board refused to approve new math textbooks because the books reflected the Common Core standards.
“Certainly, I was surprised. There was no discussion at the work session. But I am not their boss. I can’t police the board,” he said. “Superintendents get in trouble when they try to do that. You get up, you dust yourself off and go back to work.”
“When I was a young superintendent, I wanted to die on every hill, and I wanted to win every battle,” he said. Now, he said, he understands the limits to a school chief’s powers.
The challenges in Cobb pale to what confronted him in Dallas, said Hinojosa. “In Dallas, we had issues of fraud, abuse, waste, corruption. We had to deal with a lot of that noise before we could even talk about student achievement.”
That doesn’t mean he’s comfortable with the Cobb board’s vote, which he believes was influenced by a small band of Common Core opponents, some of whom have no children in the schools.
He also understands the frustration of Cobb educators who researched and recommended the math textbooks and are now left without a crucial student resource. “School is going to start, and they are not going to have what they need,” he said. “So, we have to go and come up with some solutions.”
“When you ask people for their input, and then you don’t take it, they aren’t going to be so willing to give it again,” he said. “Typically, our board approves everything our committee comes forward with. I see this as an anomaly, but we are going to have some damage control with it.”
While Cobb is rich in talent, Hinojosa said, “We are resource poor, which gives me some concern going forward as to how we retain this talent we have.”
Here are some of his comments on other issues:
Reforms du jour: "Every bad idea that came to Georgia came from Texas. I was on the ground floor of those bad ideas."
Testing: "Everywhere we are taking too many tests. We have gone from accountability to account-abilism."
No Child Left Behind: "The best thing was that we couldn't hide in the aggregate performance of all students. You got held accountable for all your students. It was an improvement, but it went too far."
Charter schools: "I am not a fan of charter schools; I am a fan of great schools. Some charter schools happen to be great schools. I am a fan of those schools."
Score dip on the new state algebra test: "There is definitely an implementation dip. But you have to be very cautious about making excuses."
APS cheating: "Beverly Hall's big mistake was, she didn't jump on it and deal with it. That was a fatal mistake. We had cheating issues in Dallas. We found the cheating ourselves, self-reported it and dealt with it. But you can't throw out all the good Beverly Hall did. Atlanta schools are better than they were before."
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