New Superintendents, leaders?, why school reform fails

Stop Waiting for a Savior

By TIMOTHY A. HACSI

DID Cathleen P. Black, the former publishing executive who was removed last week after just three months as New York City’s schools chancellor, fail because she lacked a background in education?

In this respect, she has had quite a bit of company over the decades. In 1996, Washington hired a former three-star Army general, Julius W. Becton Jr., to take over its low-performing schools; he left, exhausted, after less than two years. For most of the last decade, the Los Angeles Unified School District was run by non-educators: a former governor of Colorado, Roy Romer, and then a retired vice admiral, David L. Brewer III. They got mixed reviews. Raj Manhas, who had a background in banking and utilities, ran Seattle’s schools from 2003 to 2007, balancing the budget but facing fierce opposition over his plans to close schools.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who had hired Ms. Black without public discussion, quickly replaced her with a deputy mayor steeped in education policy. But the real issue is not the superintendent’s or chancellor’s background, but the excessive emphasis that politicians, educators and parents place on the notion of leadership rather than on empirical evidence about what improves education.

Even as the specific fixes advocated for schools have changed, the role of school-district leaders has gotten greater attention — and the selection process has become more political.

It doesn’t always take actual success to be lauded and promoted, nor does an education background guarantee anything. Roderick R. Paigebecame superintendent of Houston schools in 1994 and in 2001 parlayed his “Houston miracle” to become President George W. Bush’s secretary of education, and the point man for the No Child Left Behind law. That Houston’s test-score increases and low dropout rates were mirages did not impede Mr. Paige’s ascent or the emphasis on testing as a magic bullet.

Perhaps the best-known school leader today is Michelle A. Rhee, who was schools chancellor in Washington from 2007 to 2010. She aggressively took on the teachers’ union, but made more headlines than lasting reforms.

Of course, judging success is difficult. It is not clear what a superintendent would have to do to be universally seen as successful by teachers, parents, politicians, businessmen and taxpayers. One person’s savior is another’s villain, just as in politics. And unlike in politics, superintendents often have second lives; look no further than two of Ms. Black’s predecessors, Ramon C. Cortines, now the superintendent in Los Angeles, and Rudolph F. Crew, who became superintendent in Miami.

The record shows, however, that serial superintendents tend to do worse — at least in public perception — in their later jobs, which would seem to argue against the importance of experience in the field of education.

Ms. Rhee’s predecessor in Washington, Clifford B. Janey, had run the schools in Rochester, where he seems to have had a positive impact on test scores and the achievement gap. From Washington he went to Newark, where after two years he was shown the door.

Paul G. Vallas’s tenure as the head of Chicago’s schools, from 1995 to 2001, was generally seen as a success. His later stint in Philadelphia was less triumphant, relying as it did on privatizing school management, an idea with ideological appeal but little supporting evidence. Now he runs the schools in New Orleans, a herculean task.

Americans’ forward-looking disposition has many advantages, but one downside is that we tend to avoid problems as they develop and then either rise to the occasion (think World War II), or take half-hearted steps before moving on (think of New Orleans). School reform requires long-term efforts, but instead we look for a George Washington to fix our schools through intelligence, strength of will and, more recently, going after the right enemies (namely unions).

The singular attention on school-district leaders is a consequence of developments over the last three decades or so. In 1978, Proposition 13, which capped property taxes in California, convinced politicians across the country that tax increases amounted to political suicide, thereby making it harder to increase school financing. In 1983, “A Nation at Risk,” a government report that was more publicized than read, declared our public schools to be failing. Since then education reform has been driven by a fear of international economic competition but also constrained financially; superintendents come and go, while the challenges mount.

Cathie Black lasted only three months instead of the more typical three years, but her failure seems more one of public relations than of educational leadership. The problem is all the time we spend talking about how the last leader failed, how the current leader is struggling, how the next leader must succeed.

Until the headlines and our attention focus on what the research shows can directly improve school performance — additional money, used wisely; longer school days; better-paid and better-prepared teachers; year-round schooling — instead of the latest savior/soon-to-be-failure, we, like Ms. Black and Mr. Bloomberg, are missing the point.

Timothy A. Hacsi, an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of “Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform.”

Michelle Rhee's claims fail the smell test

Check out this entry from Jay Matthews on how Rhee's claims of taking students to the 90th percentile have been totally debunked by G.F. Brandenburg.  Even better, check out the stinging rebukes  in the comments section...


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2011/02/michelle_rhees_early_test_scor.html#more_/
 

Rhee, budgets, and "school reform"

Rhee, smoke and mirrors in the D.C. schools budget

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s mantra is performance and accountability, and more performance and more accountability.

She is, in fact, getting ready to judge teachers under her new IMPACT evaluation system, and, presumably, will lop off, figuratively, the professional heads of those who don’t score high enough. That’s accountability in action.

But what about Rhee’s own performance?

To look at the unnecessary and damaging mess over the proposed contract that she negotiated over two-plus years with the teachers union is to wonder whether she could pass an evaluation as tough as the one she set for teachers.

Reaching a contract with the teachers after years of painful negotiations was seen by many as excellent sign that Rhee, and the teachers union, were both able to make painful concessions. Rhee, with her take-no-prisoners, I-am-always-right style, saw the value of compromise.

To fund teachers’ raises in the contract, she secured private funding from foundations--apparently without checking whether the city’s finance folks would sign off on such an arrangement.

Unfortunately, school advocates in the city say that Rhee is the most secretive superintendent in memory, as well as the one who demonstrates the least understanding of budgeting. In the past, the public had a chance to see proposed school budgets early in the process and comment on them. Under Rhee, information is tightly held and only those around Rhee see the budget until she has to formally give it to the D.C. Council.

Even something as routine as releasing enrollment projections for the District became a drawn-out affair; it took my colleague Bill Turque, who covers Rhee, months to get them. Why? Nobody knows.

Figures from the D.C. Council show that under Rhee, there has been an increase of $60 million, or 28 percent (from $217 million to $277 million) in expenditures in private school tuition, transportation and fees paid to lawyers who handle cases of students who need to be evaluated by the system. (The city pays to transport special education students to school, whether they are in public or private schools, a program that for years suffered from huge cost overruns.)

And there is this, which speaks to Rhee’s unrealistic budgeting: The projected overrun for this in the current year is about $50 million. But Rhee’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2011 is $6 million less than the projected cost for this year.

That’s just one example of bad budgeting. The list is long.

So what have we got? A powerhouse of a superintendent who is bent on doing whatever she thinks she has to do to achieve her goals.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to understand--still--that reforms only work when the people who have to implement them are on board. She can make bold pronouncements and she can start all kinds of new programs. But if she keeps damaging her own credibility, it is not likely that she will be in the city for the very long term to see that the reforms are put in place.

And yet again, D.C. school kids will be left behind. 



Read the entire piece at:  washingtonpost.com/answersheet

School life with "reformers"

'Feels Like My Heart Has Been Broken'
New and Veteran Teachers in D.C. Stunned By Their Dismissal, as Well as Handling of It
By Michael Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 8, 2009


A neat row of X's stretches down Eve McCarey's performance evaluation, showing that in category after category, she is someone who "exceeds expectations." With three years of experience as a special education teacher at Anacostia High School, she is hardworking, well-spoken and now unemployed.
McCarey seems to be the sort of teacher any hard-charging, reformist schools chancellor would want in a classroom. But despite layoff rules designed to help the system retain high-performing teachers, McCarey found herself out of a job Friday, along with other educators who range from idealistic Teach for America newcomers to a 32-year guidance counselor who is praised by parents as uncommonly effective.
"It just feels like my heart has been broken," said counselor Sheila Gill, 57, of McKinley Technology High School. "I have been trying to process all of what's going on. It happened so quickly and so suddenly."

McCarey, 28, a graduate of D.C. public schools who once helped develop curricula in Sudan, shared Gill's bruised feelings about the decision to lay her off and the manner in which her dismissal was executed. Nearly 400 school employees, including 229 teachers, lost their jobs.
"It was just the most disrespectful thing," McCarey said. Teachers were interrupted in the middle of class, escorted to the principal's office and read a script by their soon-to-be-ex-boss. The office of Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee told principals not to give laid-off employees specific reasons for their dismissals.
The reasons for McCarey's dismissal from Anacostia High couldn't have been based on much observation, she said. The administration was new this school year. Her contact with her new supervisors was limited to an interview over the summer, after which she was rehired, and a five-minute classroom visit the week before the layoff, she said.
Her June 1 job evaluation, a copy of which she shared with The Washington Post, gave her 28 of 30 possible points.
Now McCarey is worried about her students, some of whom don't adapt well to change, she said. She's also worried about her family. Her 4-month-old child and her husband, a freelance Web designer, were both on her health insurance.
An uncle of one of McCarey's students credited her for his nephew's improved grades and attitude. "This really makes me burn on the insides," said James Toon, the primary caregiver of his nephew, a senior. "If it wasn't for her, I don't know how I could have pulled this off."
School officials have said the layoffs were necessary to close a $43.9 million gap in their 2010 budget caused by D.C. Council spending cuts in July. Critics, including council members, students and the teachers' union, have questioned the timing and underlying math of the layoffs.
Rhee said Wednesday that, faced with the council's cuts, she sought to minimize the effect on individual schools and to protect the system's best teachers. "Arguably in [Anacostia High] you were in the position where you were letting go of some people where you wouldn't want to let them go," Rhee said.
At elementary schools that cut one or two people, "a lot of principals said they felt good about being able to remove ineffective teachers," she said. Gill, the McKinley guidance counselor, had been with D.C. schools for 32 years and is a member of the executive committee of the Washington Teachers' Union. Her dismissal, and those of 14 other staff members at McKinley, helped spark a protest Monday that brought about 200 students to the school system's headquarters and the John A. Wilson Building.
Gill said she was inspired in part by the idea of teaching children who were affected by the drug epidemic of the 1980s. She held out hope that she might work at McKinley again.
"I'm confident that I'll get my job back. I haven't done anything wrong," Gill said. Numerous parents and students praised Gill for helping students navigate high school and making sure they got into college.
"She's probably one of the most awesome and caring and loving counselors in this city," Lynne Holcomb said. She credited Gill with helping her son track down many of the 28 scholarships that together have helped pave the way to a full ride at N.C. State University this year.
Gill said that she had received excellent job evaluations in the past but that she hadn't had one in the two years since Principal David Pinder arrived at McKinley. Pinder and other principals contacted for this report declined to comment, citing personnel rules.
Rhee revamped the evaluation system last month, noting that most teachers are stamped with "satisfactory" ratings.
The layoffs also caught the young, although Rhee and the union disagree on the extent. Rhee said that, overall, less-experienced teachers were more likely to have been laid off. But she declined to release the numbers, saying they were being reviewed by District lawyers. The union has expressed concerns that veteran teachers might have been disproportionately affected by the cuts and filed suit Wednesday in D.C. Superior Court.
One laid-off teacher had taught in D.C. schools for six weeks. Brian Mokoro, 23, who graduated from Duke University last spring, joined Teach for America and moved to D.C. four months ago, taught math at Spingarn High School. He was one of six Teach for America teachers laid off out of 170 in the system, said Rhonda Stewart, a spokeswoman for the organization, which places high-achieving graduates into struggling districts nationwide.
Mokoro, who taught two classes of algebra and one of geometry to freshmen, said he was drawn to the District after double-majoring in public policy and economics.
"I think the only way to understand education reform is to teach," he said. "I hope that teaching is my calling."

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

Upgrade Teaching ?

National Panel Urges Upgrades to Teacher Workforce

By Lesli A. Maxwell

Washington

A report from a high-powered education task force that calls for states and school districts to overhaul how they recruit, prepare, evaluate, and compensate teachers has raised the hackles of the American Federation of Teachers, which dismissed many of its recommendations as “top-down” and disrespectful of the profession.

AFT President Randi Weingarten’s sharp criticism of the report, released Tuesday by Strategic Management of Human Capital, came despite the participation of Ms. Weingarten and two other AFT officers in the 30-member task force that helped shape a series of 20 policy recommendations to improve the teaching corps in the nation’s 100 largest school districts. Some recommendations are aimed at improving the effectiveness of principals, but teachers are the overwhelming focus of the report.

“There weren’t many of us on the task force speaking for teachers, and I think the report reflects that, especially in the lack of emphasis on principal effectiveness,” said Francine Lawrence, the president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, an AFT affiliate, and a member of the panel. “It doesn’t speak to the professionalization of teaching at all, which is a real disappointment.”

Other high-profile members of the task force included District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who served as a vice chair of the panel, and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein.

The ‘People Side’

In its recommendations to states, the task force calls for several sweeping changes in teacher policy.

It said raising the bar for who can enter undergraduate-level teacher education programs—perhaps by requiring a minimum score on the SAT or the ACT—is necessary to improve the talent that enters the profession. States also should require a rigorous content test before prospective teachers can earn an initial teaching license, it says. In addition, states should support, with policy and funding, more alternative pathways into teaching, such as Teach For America and the New Teacher Project, and should require all new teachers to go through an intensive induction or an internship experience that resembles a medical residency.

… “These recommendations are intended to be a framework for states, and we hope that they will use it, especially as they prepare their Race to the Top applications,” said Mr. Odden.

“There is a high congruence of these issues with what Secretary Duncan has outlined for the Race to the Top,” said Mr. Kelly. “I think we are seeing widening acceptance among many education leaders on these issues.”

‘No Vision’?

But union officials said the report ignored much of the input they offered. Chiefly, said Ms. Lawrence of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, the task force’s recommendations don’t reflect what she said is the need to treat teachers as professional partners in school improvement efforts. Without that, she said, keeping the best people in the profession and enticing them to work in the highest-need schools will remain an unfulfilled goal.

“We need to design a variety of roles for teachers, especially when it comes to making decisions about how we are going to turn around our lowest-performing schools,” she said. “There’s no vision for that in this report.”

While agreeing with the report’s call for radically changing the way teachers are evaluated, Ms. Lawrence said she was disappointed that the task force gave no nod to the peer-review system that’s been in use in Toledo since the early 1980s. That system, she said, has probably “dismissed more teachers for incompetence” than all of the traditional evaluation systems being used in most urban districts.

One superintendent took issue with what he saw as the report’s main thrust: recruiting “the best and the brightest” people to become teachers.

“In our profession, not everyone can teach regardless of how smart they may be,” said David C. Ring Jr., the superintendent in Delmar, Del. “We need people who can relate to children.”

Gov. Pawlenty said that districts need to strike a better balance between teachers who are experts in their subject areas and those who are skilled in running their classrooms and relating to children.

“I don’t think we are in any danger at the moment of overemphasizing smart people going into teaching,” he said.

From: Ed Week.

Michelle Rhee- Advisor to the Mayor

Michelle Rhee
The Sacramento Bee on Sat. Dec.6 has an important education story on B1 concerning the role of Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools and her role in advising and staff selection for new Mayor Kevin Johnson. It is a valuable piece, however it tells less than half of the story. What makes Michelle Rhee a story is that she is the leader of the Washington D.C. public schools, one of two or three school systems which regularly score below those of California if reading, math, high school graduation and other basics.

As described in the article, Ms. Rhee came to the job of Chancellor from leading the New Teacher Project which has placed lots of teachers in urban districts. However, these teachers have not improved student achievement because the new teachers are minimally prepared to teach and they leave their positions at a very high rate before they learn to teach well.

From this position Michelle Rhee was selected to run the Washington D.C. schools. The article by Mary Lynne Vellinga describes some of the major issues there. It is correct and useful to say that these are difficult schools traditionally failing students. This is a tough job.
Chancellor Rhee uses a management style currently advocated by a number of school business managers including Joel Klien of New York City and others.
The administration of Michelle Rhee as Chancellor of Schools in is representative of a particular rigid approach to school change promoted by NCLB which I oppose because it assaults teachers and does not improve schools. Rather than take the advice of educators, Chancellor Rhee repeatedly championed and implemented policies that support corporate interests as opposed to children. The Department of Education under Rhee has been run like a ruthless dictatorship – with no input from parents or educators. Teachers have not been respected, consulted, nor listened to. You can not improve schools without working with – not against the teachers.
The bottom line is that this form of arbitrary management has not worked to improve student achievement. Yes, she has closed schools and fired teachers, but have the students scores have not improved? This brand of drive by school reform produces headlines but has not improved the schools. The pattern is clear, generate a lot of controversy, impose harsh conditions, make claims based upon one or two years data, and then move on quickly before the data from several years of failed efforts catches up with you. A new “leader” is brought in and the process starts all over again.
Sacramento has had several years of this kind of faux “reform” not only at Sacramento High ( with Rhee’s participation) but in the reform cycles of Terry Greer ( currently in San Diego), John Sweeney, and others. This “business approach” was also the driving force behind Alan Bersin in San Diego before he left and became Secretary of Education for the entire state of California. And, is the current mantra of the failing Superintendent in Los Angeles Unified.
The press should look at the data. These management approaches have not worked.
So now, according to the story, Michelle Rhee is consulting in Sacramento to the new Kevin Johnson Administration. She has worked here before as a hands-on advisor in the transition of Sacramento High to a Charter School. Look at the data.
By the way, while Michelle Rhee consults in Sacramento the Washington D.C. schools have not improved achievement for the students. Perhaps she hopes to bring the achievement scores of all of Sacramento students down to the level of those of Washington D.C.
If I were her boss, I would counsel that it is time for her to pay attention to her day job.
Duane Campbell