Spotlight on Success: The Career of Superintendent Carl A. Cohn

Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) is losing its superintendent of the last ten years. Superintendent Carl A. Cohn is leaving the school district to train the next generation of urban school superintendents at the University of Southern California. What he leaves behind is an illustrious career of service and improvements in Long Beach public schools. Under Superintendent Cohn's leadership LBUSD has received many state and national awards as well as having record attendance levels (with the lowest absenteeism in the last two decades), lowest rates of suspensions, fewer high school dropouts, more students taking college preparatory courses, and safer schools. Further, Superintendent Cohn was the first to implement public school uniforms in grades K-8, the first to require summer school for third-graders who needed help in reading, and the first to require failing eighth-graders to attend a preparatory school for a year before high school. Currently the district is piloting an extended school day and year.

Superintendent Cohn is a native of Long Beach's inner city. He battled poverty and other disadvantages as a child. As a young man deeply disillusioned by the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, he transformed his dismay into his life's mission: giving poor children a brighter future.

Among the most visible of his reforms was the trailblazing 1994 requirement that all K-8 students wear uniforms. The move resulted in a 1996 visit by former President Bill Clinton, and since then, school districts nationwide have used school uniforms to make sure children arrive at school ready to learn.

Much of Superintendent Cohn's attention has centered on improving middle school education. As Cohn himself acknowledges, 'Now, middle schools are on the radar screen because this is the level that really prepares kids for our state's new high school exit exam.' To improve middle schools Superintendent Cohn created the position of administrative assistant for middle school reform and the Middle School Advisory Committee. Middle school teachers are supported through more interaction with principals, and portfolio nights where teachers, students, and parents meet to discuss the grade standards and how the student is meeting those standards, and ways to improve the performance of students. Further, Cohn required students to spend a year at a public preparatory school for eighth-grade students with two or more F's on their report card.

The results of Long Beach's reforms are real. In 2000, most of his schools reached or exceeded the state's achievement growth targets after the first year of California's new school accountability system.

While some in Long Beach worry about the loss of Superintendent Cohn, he believes his departure is a good thing, saying, 'I honestly feel organizations need this kind of change. … There's a lot of strength in this school district, and I fully expect it to become even better.'