Jesse Melgares runs a TK-12 charter school network in South Los Angeles, and he argues teacher retention is not a teacher problem. It is a systems problem, and most school systems never built the systems.
In this episode of The Stronger Podcast, Mike Montoya sits down with Jesse, CEO of The Accelerated Schools, to talk about making good instruction repeatable instead of lucky.
Jesse grew up in East Hollywood, a first generation Salvadoran-American in LAUSD schools in the nineties. He started as an English learner, reclassified in third grade, then tested into the gifted program, which he mostly remembers as the Thursdays when a few kids got pulled out to play with Legos in another classroom. He is blunt about what that sorting told the other 90 percent. A high school Spanish teacher put the community college transfer path in his head, he went from Glendale to UCLA, and he joined Teach For America in 2006.
Twenty years later, two years into the CEO job, he describes the work almost like engineering. His teams build the master schedule by rostering English learners and students with disabilities first, because scheduling is usually what blocks that support. On the adult side, HR benchmarked pay across LA school systems against the top quartile, and operations replaced seven separate email addresses with a single help desk ticket carrying a 48 hour response commitment. The payoff he points to: English learners and students with disabilities posted the same gains as everyone else last year, which he says almost never happens.
Tune in to hear about the broken camera that sat on a bureaucrat's desk for months, and what Jesse says it cost.
Chapters:
🎓
01:56 Meet Jesse Melgares: East Hollywood to UCLA by way of community college
🧩
04:39 Gifted programs decide who gets a chance and who does not
🍎
11:04 A complex profession that a 22 year old cannot just walk into
🌆
17:47 Building the Black and Brown middle class in South LA
⚙️
23:14 The unglamorous systems work that breaks down silos
🗓️
28:46 Build the master schedule around English learners first
🚧
33:09 Why the teacher gets blamed when the system was never built
💵
38:15 Benchmarking teacher pay against the top quartile in Los Angeles
📹
43:06 The broken camera that sat on a bureaucrat's desk for months
🤔
49:34 Anyone who says they have the one answer probably does not
Links:
Connect with Jesse Melgares on LinkedIn to talk about building school systems that support teachers well enough that they stay, and follow The Accelerated Schools to see the TK-12 work happening in South Los Angeles.
Stay strong.
Episode 43