Albert Einstein Academies’ Identity Crisis Comes to a Head

On a late Tuesday afternoon, parents packed into a multi-purpose room on the bottom floor of the Albert Einstein Academy Charter Middle School campus in Grant Hill. A troop of children dressed in the school’s dark blue and red uniforms sat at a wooden folding table near the back of the room. 

The kids busied themselves coloring signs. One featured the horizontal black, red and yellow bars of the German flag. Other children were coloring in big blocky letters that said things like “Keep German Immersion,” and “We <3 German.” 

Despite the idyllic scene, the room was tense. A simmering conflict between parents and the charter school’s administration that had sparked now and again had officially come to a head.  

The school had long advertised its 50/50 German language immersion program, but recent communication from administrators laid out that they were reducing the German instructional time. As parents dug into the issue, they found that the 50/50 German immersion program hadn’t actually been so 50/50 for quite a while. Parents were there to protest what they viewed as a bait and switch. 

Their frustration was plain to see. When the charter’s board called the meeting to order, dozens of the parents silently raised printed signs. 

“We’ve been duped,” one sign read. “We’ve been misled for years,” read another. 

Over the next two hours, a score of parents and students also marched up to the microphone and made, often emotional, cases for the preservation of the program. Many said they’d been sold a false bill of goods. Members of the school’s administration have, at times, haltingly acknowledged the parents may be right. Where the positions differ, however, is on what comes next. 

The conflict, and the two opposing sides, underscore a deeper, and as of yet unanswered, question about the school: What is Einstein for? 

The Early Days 

Albert Einstein Academy opened its doors in the fall of 2002. At the time, the school’s 27 students were housed in the basement of a church in Rolando. From the moment the doors opened, the school featured two unique academic offerings – a German language immersion program and an International Baccalaureate curriculum. IB as it’s often referred to, is a rigorous, internationally recognized curriculum framework. 

Officials pitched the German program as being a 50/50, A/B week immersion model. That means that one week, students would receive all instruction from math to art to science in German. The week after, they’d receive all instruction in English. Leaders also wrote that model into the school’s charter. That’s essentially a contract between a charter school and the agency that authorizes it, laying out what educational programs the school will employ.  

Einstein’s German focus has been so central to its identity that administrators have in the past sparred with officials at San Diego Unified, the schools’ authorizer. As a condition of renewing the schools’ charter, San Diego Unified officials asked Einstein to drop a lottery stipulation that gave admissions preference to students who were fluent in German. The preference, officials argued, may violate state and federal equal protections clauses and expose the district to “legal liability.” 

Einstein administrators refused and the schools were reauthorized anyway. To this day, their enrollment lottery offers preference to students who are fluent in German. 

Despite struggling to find a permanent home, Einstein grew rapidly. In 2006, the school opened a middle school to accompany the already existing elementary school. A high school is also set to open in the coming years. 

All along the way, officials pitched Einstein as having a 50/50 German immersion program – the only public school in the county to have one. It drew families from all over. 

But, as parents recently discovered, Einstein doesn’t have a 50/50 immersion program – and it hasn’t for years.  

‘Parents Were Left in the Dark’ 

When parents learned changes could be coming to the German immersion program, the news didn’t come through a meeting. Instead, it landed in their inboxes at 7:29 p.m. on the Friday before school started. 

The email from administrators explained that due to a shortage of German teachers, some classrooms would move away from the traditional A/B week model. It didn’t include many other details.  

That explanation didn’t sit well with many parents, including Stephanie Measures, whose daughters both attend Einstein. Over the past several months, she’s helped lead the charge against what she has described as a breakdown in communication.  

“We immediately started asking questions,” Measures said.  

What she found was that Einstein actually hadn’t functioned as a 50/50 immersion school for years. She was shocked.  

“I felt like, ‘you’re telling me that my kid has been at this school for two years, and I don’t know that?’” Measures said. “It’s an astonishing lack of transparency.” 

In response, Measures leapt into action. She helped put together a letter-writing campaign, organized the protest at the board meeting, and collected signatures from more than 230 parents. She also wrote to San Diego Unified officials, arguing that Einstein was not following its charter, which specified 50 percent of instruction would be in German. Despite those efforts, Measures, like other parents, has felt like administration has been unresponsive to parents’ concerns. 

“The petition was not to make our school 50/50 German. The petition was for information and transparency, because we wanted to understand what was going on,” Measures said. 

A later email, sent out the Friday before Spring Break, left parents even more distressed. The email explained that the program would no longer be structured as an immersion model. Instead, it would shift to what the school called a “sustainable framework for German language acquisition.” 

Einstein’s leaders said the decision was based on input from a working group of teachers and cited an ongoing shortage of qualified bilingual teachers as the main reason for the change. 

Measures, and many other parents, felt shut out of the decision-making process.  

“We want to talk about this. We want to participate. We want to be involved — and instead, they make this major decision about a major educational focus school behind closed doors,” Measures said. “We feel dismissed, we feel excluded and we feel misled.” 

The German supporting parents aren’t a monolith. Some were drawn because they had a connection to the language, others because of the perceived benefits of the culture of German education and still others because of the benefits of immersion programs themselves.  

The schools’ potential pivot away from immersion has put those parents in a tricky position. Many immersion schools don’t accept students after first grade, meaning they likely don’t have the opportunity to choose a different school that actually offers an immersion program. 

The conflict has also spilled over into more systemic frustrations about Einstein, and charter schools in general. Einstein Superintendent David Sciaretta’s nearly $300,000 a year pay has been sharply criticized by some parents, for example. So has the fact that Einstein’s board, like all charter schools, is not elected by the public, but rather by other board members. That has felt to some parents that the school is governed by a group of people who don’t have to answer to stakeholders. 

But what has united many of them is the transparency piece. That’s what pushed Vanessa Klein to pull her child out of the school entirely.  

She chose Einstein because it offered something no other school could: the chance for her children to learn German. But when the program shifted and communication from the school broke down, Klein said it became clear this wasn’t the right place for her family. After touring a nearby immersion program, Klein was struck by how transparent the program was. She said it was a far cry from what she’d experienced at Einstein. 

“There were a lot of things that just weren’t being communicated, and it felt like it took a lot of manpower to get more information out of administration,” she said.  

Klein, who was a San Diego transplant, had become close with many of the parents Einstein. Leaving wasn’t an easy decision. 

“But as hard as it was for us to change, I had to do it.” 

Yousra Elbanna isn’t German, but she was so interested in the immersion program that she chose to commute 35 minutes each way to get her daughter to Einstein. Elbanna, who is Egyptian, has seen first-hand the value of being multilingual. She wanted those benefits for her daughter. 

She understands how difficult it may be to find German teachers in a place like San Diego. She’s even empathetic to it. What she can’t understand is why the situation was approached the way it was.  

“It’s not so much that there is going to be less German,” Elbanna said. “It’s that parents were left in the dark.” 

Einstein’s Identity Crisis 

Sciaretta actually agrees with some parents – but he has asterisks.  

The recent changes to Einstein’s model have been a necessary response to external challenges, he insists — particularly a shortage of German teachers. What were once fruitful partnerships – like working with the German government to bring over teachers – have largely dried up as that country faces a shortage of its own. Those shortages were exacerbated by the departure of a handful of Einstein’s German teachers.  

And as administrators scrambled to plug those holes, Sciaretta said they ended up creating a “patchwork,” of German instruction. Each grade level designed their own German instructional model, resulting in some grades having a lot of German instruction, while others had barely any.  

“Understandably at some level, elementary parents have been concerned about a lack of German and feel like they were given a bait and switch,” Sciaretta said. “We could have done a better job as an organization more accurately communicating to our parent population.” 

But years before the latest changes, the school’s design had already started drifting away from the 50/50 model outlined in its charter. For example, some grade levels decided to stop teaching German in math more than a decade ago. 

Despite the bevy of ad hoc changes, officials kept advertising its program as a 50/50 immersion model. As recently as April 9, the school’s website boasted that students in kindergarten through fifth grade “receive 50% of instruction in German and 50% in English, including all core subjects.” Administrators have since scrubbed all mention of a 50/50 immersion. 

Sciaretta insists there hasn’t been some sort of conspiracy to erase German. 

“I don’t have a hard answer of like, ‘Oh, well, we knew it was happening and we decided to not tell the community, and we wanted to be dishonest in our marketing.’ That’s not the case,” Sciaretta said. 

Instead, despite its charter, the school just hadn’t been measuring “exactly what percent of the instruction is English and what percent of instruction is … German,” Sciaretta said.  

“In hindsight … it’s absolutely something we should have been more closely hewing to,” he added. 

Administrators have been working on bigger, long-term changes. At the board meeting, they explained the proposal to ditch 50/50 immersion model and move toward one where German was taught every day but as a foreign language. They also revealed that administrators had conducted a survey that found 82 percent of staff supported the move. Sciaretta was careful to add that if the changes are implemented Einstein will always retain its “German flavor,” both through daily instruction and through things like German-centric events. 

Parents were skeptical of the proposal. It’s especially distressing to them because San Diego only features one purported German immersion program – Einstein. So, its disappearance would hit hard. For some parents, the response is that they need to be included during the planning process.  

There’s still time for that. The proposal is yet to be certified by the board, which also has an even bigger question to answer – what to do about its charter, which Sciaretta freely acknowledges is inaccurate. 

“What’s written in our charter and what’s happening on our campuses don’t match,” Sciaretta said. “When parents see the charter says 50/50 and then do the calculations and find out its 8 percent in a day, I get that – that’s not acceptable.” 

San Diego Unified spokesperson James Canning wrote in an email that when the district’s board renewed Einstein’s charter in late 2020, “there were no known issues with the implementation of the German program.”  

For some parents, the prospect of a change to the charter alters something very important about the school – what they thought it was for.  

Is this a school that specializes in German language immersion? Or is this a school that’s set apart by its IB curriculum?  

As it stands, Sciaretta said the IB program is what still extends across the campuses. But historically, that answer hasn’t been all that clear. 

“The identity of Einstein depends on who you ask,” Sciaretta said.  

If you asked someone who drove down from Poway every day, it’s a school with a 50/50 German immersion program. If you asked a student who lives near the middle school’s Sherman Heights campus who started in sixth grade, it’s a school that’s close and safe and has caring professionals. For yet others, the IB program is what drew them to Einstein. 

But those answers have been evolving over the years. As Einstein grew from those 27 kids in a church basement, the schools’ population has also changed drastically. Its students have become less White and more Latino, reflecting the demographics of the neighborhood it serves. The share of English language learners has also increased significantly, and a greater proportion of those students have no connection to – or interest in – the German program that was once its calling card.  

As a public school, Einstein’s also required to “accept anybody who walks through the door,” Sciaretta said. 

That tension – between what Einstein promised parents, and what it’s evolving into – was on full display during the final public comment of the meeting. Up to that point, every single commenter took the charter’s board, and its superintendent to task. 

But Rita Gonzalez, an educator at Einstein, had a different perspective. 

“In the audience we have representation of a certain segment of the AEA community family. However, who is here to represent or embrace the rest of our student body? Are we here to support an unsustainable program at AEA due to the German staff shortage?” Gonzalez asked, not so subtly referencing the growing portion of Einstein’s student body who are not involved in the German program. 

The school’s demographics have changed significantly over the past 10 years, she said. In her view, common core subjects like math and science should all be taught in English, not in a language some students may not yet understand.  

“I’m asking the board takes into consideration all the current students we’re currently serving at AEA. I know that change is hard but it’s possible,” Gonzalez said.