Alberto Carvalho is leaving to become L.A. Unified School District superintendent
Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced Thursday he is leaving the job he has held for the past 14 years to head the Los Angeles Unified School District in California, the second-largest school district in the country.
Carvalho, 57, has been Miami-Dade superintendent since 2008. He confirmed that he is accepting the job Thursday afternoon during a press conference at the school district’s headquarters in downtown Miami.
“Even though I will be calling Los Angeles home, Miami will always have a special place in my heart,” Carvalho said.
The seven-member Los Angeles Unified Board of Education unanimously approved Carvalho’s employment agreement Thursday morning.
“Alberto Carvalho brings the deep experience we need as an educator and leader of a large urban district to manage L.A. Unified’s ongoing response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Board President Kelly Gonez said in a statement.
The Los Angeles district has about 450,000 students and over 1,000 schools. Miami-Dade has about 350,000 students between its about 400 traditional public and charter schools.
Carvalho, whose annual Miami-Dade salary is around $350,000, said he was in contract negotiations with the Los Angeles school district. He did not immediately respond to questions about when his last day of work will be in South Florida.
On Thursday night, the office of Miami-Dade’s mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, released a statement from her calling Carvalho a “visionary leader who led our county’s school district with courage and compassion through one of the most challenging times in our history. ... I am certain he will continue to make his mark on the national stage.”
Defying DeSantis over masks in schools
Carvalho, as head of the nation’s fourth-largest school district and the state’s largest, has become a well-known public official, especially this year as he battled with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over mask mandates.
The governor issued an executive order prohibiting mask requirements for public school children, but Carvalho implemented one late in the summer as the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus rampaged through the state. At the time, he said he was following the guidance of medical experts convened by the district.
Miami-Dade was among about a dozen districts that defied Tallahassee over masks. In August, a Leon County judge ruled DeSantis and his administration had acted “without legal authority” when they barred universal mask mandates in schools.
The case is winding its way through the courts, but Miami-Dade eased its mask policy last month after COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths significantly fell across the state.
In becoming the Los Angeles superintendent, Carvalho is moving to a state run by a Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who, using emergency authority, has imposed a statewide requirement that all students, faculty and staff wear masks indoors at K-12 schools, which a California judge upheld last month.
Newsom also announced in October that California public schools will add the COVID-19 vaccine to the list of required vaccines to attend school, the first such state in the nation to do so.
Miami-Dade School Board Vice Chair Steve Gallon III said that with the superintendent’s success in Miami-Dade, he’s not surprised Carvalho was sought after by other large districts like Los Angeles.
“His selection and acceptance of the superintendent of L.A. Unified School District affirms his decades of service to our district, and will be an asset to the City of Angels,” Gallon said.
Aventura Mayor Enid Weisman, who first met Carvalho in 1990 when she was an assistant principal at Miami Jackson Senior High and hired him as a young science teacher, told the Herald in a 2019 profile of Carvalho that he had “chutzpah.” (All of 25 and never before in a classroom, he told Weisman then that he wanted to be superintendent.)
“How lucky for the kids in L.A.’’ she said Thursday.
Spurning of New York City superintendent’s job
This is not the first time Carvalho considered taking another leadership role at a school district in another state.
In February 2018, Carvalho told New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio that he would accept the job as head of the city’s school district, only to turn it down during an emergency meeting of the Miami-Dade County School Board. The issue became how much freedom Carvalho would have in picking his staff, in addition to an all-out push by local leaders to keep him here.
This time, however, things are different. For one, Carvalho’s contract is set to expire in 2023 and the nine-member school board had three new members elected in November 2020: Luisa Santos, Lucia Baez-Geller and Christi Fraga.
And there have been some bumps over the past few years, including an investigation last year by the district’s Office of the Inspector General that found that Carvalho’s solicitation of a $1.57 million donation — through his foundation — from the company that created the district’s disastrous online learning platform “created an appearance of impropriety.”
The money was to reward teachers for their struggles with learning the platform at the start of the 2020-21 school year.
Carvalho also came under fire last year when an Instagram account surfaced, named “I have a lover,” with the handle of @superintendentofmiami. The account, which has since been deleted, featured intimate selfies of Carvalho and accused him of cheating on his wife.
This is the second time during Carvalho’s tenure he has been accused of having an affair. On the eve of being named superintendent in 2008, emails surfaced showing love letters written by Tania deLuzuriaga, the Miami Herald’s former education reporter, to Carvalho, who was then an associate superintendent. At the time, Carvalho questioned the emails’ authenticity but later said his emails were inappropriate.
Carvalho survived these embarrassments and has been recognized locally and nationally for his leadership in education.
Among his awards: National Superintendent of the Year, Florida Superintendent of the Year, National Urban Superintendent of the Year. Under his leadership the district won the 2012 Broad Prize for Education for its academic achievements in Black and Hispanic students, one of the most prestigious prizes in education, which brought more than $500,000 in scholarships to Miami-Dade students.
Carvalho is also credited with turning around a struggling district with a graduation rate of below 60% when he took over as superintendent in 2008 to more than 91% now.
Teachers saddened by the news
The news of his departure struck teachers and parents hard.
“I’m heartbroken,” said Teresa Murphy, 2022 Francisco R. Walker Teacher of the Year, and a third-grade teacher at Spanish Lake Elementary School in Hialeah.
“What he represents to our county, someone who has struggled to be where he is … he’s just a really good representation of resilience, working hard and opportunity,” said Murphy, a 29-year veteran of Miami-Dade Schools.
“I have to be less selfless and be very happy that another group of teachers and students and community leaders are going to be able to reap the benefits of his leadership and that part makes me proud as a teacher,” Murphy said. “They’re lucky.”
Martha Cabrera, admissions director and lead teacher for the visual and performing arts at Coral Reef Senior High School, said Carvalho has “always been a champion for the arts.”
“All of the arts have flourished under him,” said Cabrera, who is one of Coral Reef’s founding members and has been employed by the school district for 34 years.
Whenever Carvalho visited Coral Reef, he made a point to see the kids in visual and performing arts. He wanted to meet the students, talk with them and learn what new creative endeavors they were working on, she said.
Molly Winters Diallo, Miami-Dade County’s 2019 Francisco R. Walker Teacher of the Year who is now part of the Bay Harbor Islands Town council, was shocked by the news.
“I still can’t believe this is happening,” she said. “His empathy really defines his leadership,” she added, recalling how during the pandemic Carvalho would hand out food to families.
“His actions match his words and that is what makes him such an extraordinary leader,” said Winters Diallo, who is the department chair for social studies and lead mentor for new teachers at Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High in North Miami. “He speaks up for what he believes is right.”
Parents praise Carvalho for his leadership
Jamie Adams Bonham, who has 11- and 13-year-old boys, said Carvalho leaving is “a loss to the community.”
“If you say the name Carvalho, everyone knows who you are talking about,” she said. “It’s like a brand.”
Bonham said her boys — one is in fifth grade at Treasure Island Elementary in North Bay Village and the other is in seventh grade at Miami Beach Nautilus — have had “an excellent education experience.” She said Carvalho has a “presence” and has represented the district well.
She said the new superintendent has “big shoes to fill.” For her, she wants to see a leader who continues to prioritize school safety, communication with parents and teacher pay.
“Knowing that my kids are going to come home safe is the most important thing,” she said.
Haydee Polo, a Parent Teacher Students Association officer, had two kids in Miami-Dade public schools and both graduated from Coral Gables High. She praised Carvalho for standing up to DeSantis over masks and being able to manage both the district staff and school board.
“He kept schools open and implemented a mask mandate in a state with DeSantis as governor. He got the schools bond passed and got the projects going — not always smoothly. Most importantly, he got the school board under control. Under the previous superintendent, the board was a disaster — full of infighting and unable to get anything done. That has mostly been suppressed with Carvalho as superintendent.”
Marcela Tampied has two children who went to Sunset Elementary, G.W. Carver Middle and Coral Gables High (one graduated, one a freshman). She’s also a PTSA officer at Carver and Gables High.
“I’m in shock. He’s someone you can rely on. When Ron DeSantis said he was going to cut funds or salary for those who imposed a mask mandate, Carvalho showed more respect for our kids than the governor,” Tampied said. “He will be missed. My only hope is his replacement won’t be a politicized choice.”
The president of Florida International University, Mark Rosenberg, said Carvalho’s pending departure is Los Angeles’ gain and Miami’s loss.
“I am saddened that the superintendent is leaving,” he said. “We are losing one of the finest public servants that we have seen in the 305 in decades.”
Carvalho’s rise from immigrant to educator
Carvalho came to the United States from Portugal alone at the age of 17. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He described Thursday how he worked his way up through the system, with his first job when he came to the States as a dishwasher and his second as a day laborer.
After graduating from Barry University, he became a science teacher in the Dade school system, then ascending through the ranks to assistant principal to superintendent of one of the country’s largest school districts.
When he took over from former Miami-Dade Superintendent Rudy Crew, whom the school board fired, he said the district was in “financial bankruptcy” and “academic bankruptcy” with dozens of schools receiving D and F ratings from the state.
Under his leadership, that changed, although hardships seemed to come one after the other, starting with the Great Recession of 2008, the federal government threatening undocumented students and their families, hurricanes like 2017’s Irma and finally, the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In the process, we elevated this school district to the highest possible level in this country today, widely seen as the highest-performing urban school district in America, with zero D- or F-rated schools,” Carvalho said.
Replacement process not yet determined
The school board has not determined the process to choose Carvalho’s successor.
Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of United Teachers of Dade, said the new superintendent should “come from our education community and be knowledgeable of our culture and needs.”
“We do not want our hard-earned achievements to be dismantled by opportunists with a political agenda,” Hernandez-Mats said. “Our next leader must exhibit the same upbeat, working relationship with the various unions and all stakeholders that will continue to inspire our teachers and students.”
Weisman, the Aventura mayor, said of the transition: “We need to know a little more about how the board is planning on moving forward.”
She said, though, the process could be seamless.
“He’s not leaving the district in the disarray and distress he found it in,” she said, adding that the district is in good financial and academic standing. “All of the things that he’s accomplished makes it easier for the next administration because they are not having to start out with disasters.”
Miami Herald Staff Writer Douglas Hanks and Miami Herald research director Monika Leal contributed to this report.
This story was originally published December 9, 2021 at 10:58 AM.
