Breaking the cycle of failure: Interview with Berkeley Tech principal Victor Diaz

When he was already 23, Victor Diaz says he was pretty much functionally illiterate. He had been kicked out of six high schools by age 16. Diaz’s story begins, sadly, like so many others, but this story has a very different ending than you might think. Today, Diaz has is practically collecting academic degrees. He’s got a Bachelor’s degree, a J.D., and is working towards his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. To top it all off, Diaz has found a permanent home in education—as the principal of Berkeley Technology Academy. It’s a continuation high school. So Diaz is working with students who remind him of himself: those who have fallen through the cracks of the conventional education system. KALW’s Holly Kernan sat down with Victor Diaz to talk about his nontraditional approach to education.  But first, she asked him when he realized he was actually a good student. 

INTERVIEW:

VICTOR DIAZ: It wasn’t until I was getting failing grades at the community college, and I had a professor there who was a Latino professor, and it was the first Latino professor I think I’d ever had, and he had failed me in a previous paper, so I went in to talk to him about the grade that I was going to get in the class. He assured me that even though the semester was only halfway done, that I was going to get an F in the class. He went on to tell me what a horrible student I was, and he did it with a lot of expletives and things that I wasn’t really ready for!

All this time I thought that because he’s Latino and I’m Latino, he’s going to let me slide—pretty much the way I had run my life prior to that, kind of just getting by. But he laid into me and cussed me out. And that was the aha moment. That was when I said, I was at a dead end, I came to what appeared to be my final option, and I was pretty much screwing that up. I was no longer 16 or 17 in high school, I was almost 25. So I think I was also at a place in my life where I knew I had to start turning things around, and he helped me realize that.

KERNAN: Why did you decide that you wanted to go into education? You’re now principal of Berkeley Technology Academy, or B Tech, why that route?

DIAZ: While I was in community college, my work-study job was to recruit kids for the community college, so I’d go out and talk about the school. In doing so, I would meet students who were probably not the best candidates for school, but we just hit it off and had a lot in common. I didn’t know it at the time, but I found myself repairing all the things that were broken before that. And through that process, as they were asking me questions about their application, the most very basic things I either couldn’t read or really understand, or I found myself with the inability to articulate myself in a way that would make any sense to anybody. So it became apparent that I needed to educate myself, that was the impetus for me wanting to further my education, and as I learned new things, it also became the fuel to want to re-teach it. But again, because I was burned so badly in public schools, I didn’t want that association with being a classroom teacher.

But I think I was drawn to it over time because of meeting more and more kids who had similar or even far worse experiences than I had in school, and really having no one to advocate on their behalf. When I came across that when I was in LA or San Diego, or San Jose or San Francisco, the stories were identical, identical to mine: a kid of color without a male role model in a school that was predominantly run by women, and pretty much the boys just being self-destructive and misguided. I felt like I needed to give back to that space.

KERNAN: So now you’re the principal of B-Tech, tell us what makes this school special?

DIAZ: Right off the bat I think it’s the relationships that the adults have with young people. It’s a place of caring and respect, first and foremost. And it doesn’t mean that we’re you know, quote unquote, trying to be their friends, as some educators I think will put it; It’s about being mentors and sometimes being counselors, and sometimes being teachers, but doing so in a way where we want to know the student and the student is operating from that point of view, that they know that they are known by us.

The second thing is that we have a staff that reflects the population of the students we serve. So the staff is young and all folks of color, and they all teach from that perspective of honoring the individual, the culture, the language, the community, the multi-racial/bi-racial aspects of our communities. Those things are woven throughout the curricula.

KERNAN: And I’ve heard that you have said that you, I’m going to quote you, “I am their warrior, I feel commanded by them to break the cycle of failure,” and then you’ve gone on to say, “I’m also motivated by the genius, the raw brilliance of our children; this is precisely what schools strip from our children.” Can you talk to me about that quote?

DIAZ: The first part of that quote about the cycle of failure is something that I’m just now starting to coin that phrase. It’s mostly because we’re now on our second generation of families that attended this very continuation school that I’m now the principal of. It just shows that there needs to be more done for families that have struggled here.

KERNAN: So, we are talking about breaking this cycle of failure that you mentioned, so what’s your recipe, how do you break the cycle of failure?

DIAZ: Again, many of our young people go through life feeling invisible. If a student is going to feel empowered to change a system, they have to feel like they are appreciated and valued by that same system. So that’s a big part of what we do. I think that when we give students the space to build a relationship to construct, to co-construct a relationship that’s based on mutual love and respect, they can start to take ownership of that space.

So that’s a big part of the recipe. The second part of the recipe are the other resiliency things that we try to teach them, that when those things fail, when you are met with racism or when you are met with low expectations, or when you are just not at the top of your game, we try to give them other resiliency kinds of skills. We do some of that work here with breathing, meditation, and yoga and stuff like that. So that is another part of the recipe for us, and again, teaching explicit critical thinking skills, critical reading skills, critical writing skills, those things are of course also embedded in the work that we do.

KERNAN: And let’s talk for a moment about the larger system, and imagine for a moment that you were to have larger systemic power in California, what do you think the main things that you would change about this state’s education system are?

DIAZ: The big piece that I’ve been connected to for the last twelve years, is more closely examining what are the county schools, alternative schools, the court schools, what are they doing with regard to education and professional development and training? I mean, there are over 100,000 kids in that system, and those very same kids are the ones that come back into comprehensive schools and either exacerbate or create some very deep-rooted problems. So, we have to look at the education system as a whole for this population that are way out on the margins.

Victor Diaz is the principal of Berkeley Technology Academy. You can hear Diaz's thoughts on the faults of the continuation system and the promise of charter schools in our web extra: http://kalwnews.org/audio/2010/02/25/berkeley-tech-principal-charter-sys...