Things to read from this week. Keep sharing. Keep posting. Keep putting the word out there. And don't forget to keep an eye on the bloglist in the right hand column. The more you read, the more you know.
When Will We Stop Blaming Teachers
Another look at TNTP's Opportunity Myth-- one more attempt to explain that education problems are teachers' fault.
Why Did Indiana Teachers Leave the Classroom
A survey looks at why Indiana teachers left the classroom. Zero surprises here, but one m ore confirmation that teaching conditions have finally gotten that bad.
Thoughts on the Graduation Exam Mess in New Jersey
New Jersey is wrestling with using the PARCC as a grad exam, something it was not remotely designed for. Let Jersey Jazzman sort out the foolishness.
Elementary Principal Reads Books To Students on Facebook Live
If you need a little lift, read about this principal who puts on her pj's and reads a story over Facebook live every Tuesday night.
In Many Charter Schools, Graduation Odds Are Slim
Another item from the Department of Unsurprising Results. Someone crunched some numbers and discovered that an awful lot of charter students don't make it to charter graduation day.
Invisible Champions of Student Justice
Wendy Lecker takes a look at how black teachers in Georgia were instrumental in the pursuit of desegregation. If you don't know Horace Tate's name, you should.
Virtual Charter School With 91% Failure Rate
This was a surprise-- a cyber charter school with even worse results than I imagined. 10,000 students went in- 851 stayed.
Skype A Scientist
More good news. Someone came up with a program that uses Skype and scientists to combat misinformation.
Last Night We Lay Down In The Streets
As Philadelphia transitions from state appointed commission to local school board, a battle is shaping up over whose local voices will be heard. It's citizens versus corporate once again.
Newsome Fast-Tracks Bill For Charter Standards
It looks like California may finally subject its wild-growth charter sector to some actual accountability.
The Hook of Standardization
From Ohio, an argument that "an educational system driven by standardized testing has run its course."
Choice Is a False Pretext For Draining Money From Public Schools
From Florida, the Sun-Sentinal editorial board calls out DeSantis' choicey plans as theft from the public system.
Sunday, March 3, 2019
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Will Florida Abolish The Common Core
This post ran at Forbes three weeks ago. Anyone notice anything happening since then that would change my mind? Didn't think so.
Newly-elected Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced last week that he will, via executive order, remove every "vestige" of Common Core from the state.
Unless he changes his announced plan, he probably won't.
Unless he changes his announced plan, he probably won't.
 |
| Yeah, probably not. |
Florida is unique in the US when it comes to education reform; they have embraced almost every idea to come down the pike. According to a report issued by the pro-choice, DeVos founded and funded, American Federation for Children, $2.4 billion was put into the three major types of voucher programs in the US, and $956 million of that was spent in Florida. They have generally ranked only behind California, Texas and Arizona for total number of charter schools. But they have never warmed up to the Common Core Standards.
When Rick Scott was governor, he promised that the state would have its own Florida standards to replace the Common Core. It was a cheap political stunt. As was the case in many states, the change was largely cosmetic with the actual substance of the standards remaining largely unaffected.
Governor DeSantis is promising a much more thorough purge. He announced that he has directed newly appointed education chief Richard Corcoran to get the whole business ripped out and replaced within a year. That's a problematic choice; Corcoran is seen as someone whose main educational interest has always been dismantling public education and selling off the parts; the St. Augustine Record, mincing no words, called him a hack. The notion that he will be in charge of designing that standards that public schools must live by is concerning; certainly, if I wanted to cripple public schools, sticking them with a sudden need to replace all their English and math textbooks would be one way to do it. But it's not the reason that DeSantis's plan is likely to fail. That can be found in this quote:
DeSantis said his executive order also calls for Corcoran to “streamline some of the testing”
Along with its love of other reform ideas, Florida has long belonged to the Cult of the Test. This is the state that refused to give a testing waiver to a dying child. This is the state that went to court to keep a third grader from passing on to fourth grade because although she had demonstrated mastery of reading, she hadn't done so on the Big Standardized Test. This is also the state that has had repeated problems getting a test adopted and functioning. But most importantly for DeSantis's initiative, this is the state where every school gets a grade based on its Big Standardized Test score (currently, in Florida, the FSA).
In Florida, as in all states, it is not the standards that drive curriculum--it is the Big Standardized Test. For example, the Common Core language standards include standards that address speaking and listening, but nobody worries about aligning to those standards because they won't be on the test. The standards about reading literature could be met by doing deep dives into complete works, but that's not how most schools are teaching those standards, because that's not how they're assessed on the Big Standardized Test.
If DeSantis and Corcoran do nothing except "streamline some of the testing," it will not matter a bit what they do to the standards. Florida schools live and die by the results of the FSA, and they will continue to teach to that test, the Common Core infused test, regardless of what the standards say.
If DeSantis really wants to rip out every last vestige of Common Core, here's what he needs to do.
End the test.
Don't streamline it, modify, shorten it or edit it. End it. Cancel it.
Then, completely change the way Florida evaluates schools. No letter grades, and certainly no school assessment based on student scores on a single standardized test.
Once teachers and schools no longer have their fates tied to that single standardized test, they will feel free to pay attention to a new set of standards or even--crazy idea here--use their professional judgment to chart a great curricular course for the children of Florida. But if DeSantis intends to leave the FSA and the school grading system essentially intact, then all his big talk about the Common Core is just another cheap political stunt.
When Rick Scott was governor, he promised that the state would have its own Florida standards to replace the Common Core. It was a cheap political stunt. As was the case in many states, the change was largely cosmetic with the actual substance of the standards remaining largely unaffected.
Governor DeSantis is promising a much more thorough purge. He announced that he has directed newly appointed education chief Richard Corcoran to get the whole business ripped out and replaced within a year. That's a problematic choice; Corcoran is seen as someone whose main educational interest has always been dismantling public education and selling off the parts; the St. Augustine Record, mincing no words, called him a hack. The notion that he will be in charge of designing that standards that public schools must live by is concerning; certainly, if I wanted to cripple public schools, sticking them with a sudden need to replace all their English and math textbooks would be one way to do it. But it's not the reason that DeSantis's plan is likely to fail. That can be found in this quote:
DeSantis said his executive order also calls for Corcoran to “streamline some of the testing”
Along with its love of other reform ideas, Florida has long belonged to the Cult of the Test. This is the state that refused to give a testing waiver to a dying child. This is the state that went to court to keep a third grader from passing on to fourth grade because although she had demonstrated mastery of reading, she hadn't done so on the Big Standardized Test. This is also the state that has had repeated problems getting a test adopted and functioning. But most importantly for DeSantis's initiative, this is the state where every school gets a grade based on its Big Standardized Test score (currently, in Florida, the FSA).
In Florida, as in all states, it is not the standards that drive curriculum--it is the Big Standardized Test. For example, the Common Core language standards include standards that address speaking and listening, but nobody worries about aligning to those standards because they won't be on the test. The standards about reading literature could be met by doing deep dives into complete works, but that's not how most schools are teaching those standards, because that's not how they're assessed on the Big Standardized Test.
If DeSantis and Corcoran do nothing except "streamline some of the testing," it will not matter a bit what they do to the standards. Florida schools live and die by the results of the FSA, and they will continue to teach to that test, the Common Core infused test, regardless of what the standards say.
If DeSantis really wants to rip out every last vestige of Common Core, here's what he needs to do.
End the test.
Don't streamline it, modify, shorten it or edit it. End it. Cancel it.
Then, completely change the way Florida evaluates schools. No letter grades, and certainly no school assessment based on student scores on a single standardized test.
Once teachers and schools no longer have their fates tied to that single standardized test, they will feel free to pay attention to a new set of standards or even--crazy idea here--use their professional judgment to chart a great curricular course for the children of Florida. But if DeSantis intends to leave the FSA and the school grading system essentially intact, then all his big talk about the Common Core is just another cheap political stunt.
Friday, March 1, 2019
Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching
Teach for America has always been a work in progress, an evolving enterprise in search of a reason to keep existing. Once upon a time it was all about teaching and plugging holes in the system. Then it was about supplanting traditional teachers (and trying not to say out loud that they needed to be supplanted because they sucked and the Best and the Brightest had better swoop in like a shining white cavalry to rescue the poor children). And then maybe were about building a resume and getting yourself prepped for your real career (their slogan at one point was literally "change and be changed"). And then, sensitive about that shining white cavalry thing, they decided to be a force for diversity in the teaching force.
But I recently was hanging about the TFA website and discovered that more morphing of a sort has occurred, and TFA is now leaning into what has always been one of their missions. It was just never a part of the mission that they expressed so directly.
Here's some copy from their front page:
Teach For America is looking for promising leaders to take on educational inequity.
The Challenge
In America today, the circumstances children are born into predict the opportunities they will have in life. Our education system was not designed to enable all children to realize their potential or achieve their dreams.
The Opportunity
While no single solution is enough to bring about an equitable and excellent education for all children, Teach For America has learned over three decades that dramatic progress is possible. Lasting change takes bold, grounded leaders working together, inside and outside of schools, fighting for the aspirations of children and their families.
Our Approach
Teach For America finds outstanding leaders who commit to expanding educational opportunity, beginning with at least two years teaching in an under-resourced public school. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, educators, and community members, corps members go beyond traditional expectations to support the academic and personal growth of their students. The impact corps members have in the classroom fuels a lifelong commitment to their students and shapes the trajectory of their lives and careers.
Impacting Lives & Communities
Since 1990, nearly 60,000 leaders have impacted millions of students as Teach For America corps members, many of them returning to teach in the communities in which they grew up. More than 84% continue to work in education or in fields that impact the communities where our students and their families live.
Teach for America is not creating teachers, but leaders. Bold leaders. Outstanding leaders. Leaders who can claim that they started out as classroom teachers, so that they can have instant credibility as they implement whatever piece of reformy awesomeness they've been hired to drop on people. And TFA subscribes to the "charter schools are public school" dodge, so their two years in "public" schools may actually be some time in a charter.
First, TFA wanted to be teachers' co-workers. Then they wanted to be teachers' replacements. Now they're focusing on their other goal-- they'd like to be teachers' bosses.
The "84% continue to work in education or fields that impact the communities where our students and their families live" is a meaningless stat-- I'm actually really curious what the other 16% are doing that has no impact on education or communities where students and families live. Astronauts? Video-game testers? Brazilian cattle farmers?
I know that the disclaimer has become cliche in TFA pieces, but it does need to be said-- some people who go into TFA do so with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts, and some who emerge from the program go on to become great teachers.
But TFA alums keep turning up in other places, like Lorain Ohio, where the turnaround CEO, two building principals, and the human resources chief are all TFA grads who are now responsible for running an entire troubled district even though they have less actual public school teaching experience than almost every single other person working in the district. You find them running districts, running state agencies, running education flavored businesses, with their biographies always making reference to the lessons they learned from "their time in the classroom."
The original TFA insulting pitch was that with five weeks of training, you were ready to run a classroom. The new insulting pitch (which was always there, but in the background instead of on the front page of the website) was that with two years in a classroom, you are ready to run a school, district or state.
So when the new gunslinger comes to town, promising transformational change based on their insights from their time in the classroom-- check. They won't always list TFA on, say, their LinkedIn page (though they will likely have a LinkedIn page), but you can still ask three questions:
1) What's your actual college degree?
2) How long did you teach, and in which school?
3) What have you been doing between then and now?
Most importantly, remember that just because someone on a higher level put this person in charge, that doesn't mean this person knows what the hell they're talking about. There are so many TFA grads out there, leading their little hearts out and basing their decisions on favored reform theories of action (because if you have little or no real experience, what else do you have to go on except hat other reformsters have told you are winning policies). The TFA network has spread like kudzu, and where one gets a leadership position, they will tap the TFA network to find other like-minded folks to bring in.
Pay attention. A TFA connection is no reason to automatically assume that the person doesn't know what they're doing, but it is reason to make sure their decisions and choices hold up to scrutiny.
 |
| Kudzu. |
But I recently was hanging about the TFA website and discovered that more morphing of a sort has occurred, and TFA is now leaning into what has always been one of their missions. It was just never a part of the mission that they expressed so directly.
Here's some copy from their front page:
Teach For America is looking for promising leaders to take on educational inequity.
The Challenge
In America today, the circumstances children are born into predict the opportunities they will have in life. Our education system was not designed to enable all children to realize their potential or achieve their dreams.
The Opportunity
While no single solution is enough to bring about an equitable and excellent education for all children, Teach For America has learned over three decades that dramatic progress is possible. Lasting change takes bold, grounded leaders working together, inside and outside of schools, fighting for the aspirations of children and their families.
Our Approach
Teach For America finds outstanding leaders who commit to expanding educational opportunity, beginning with at least two years teaching in an under-resourced public school. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, educators, and community members, corps members go beyond traditional expectations to support the academic and personal growth of their students. The impact corps members have in the classroom fuels a lifelong commitment to their students and shapes the trajectory of their lives and careers.
Impacting Lives & Communities
Since 1990, nearly 60,000 leaders have impacted millions of students as Teach For America corps members, many of them returning to teach in the communities in which they grew up. More than 84% continue to work in education or in fields that impact the communities where our students and their families live.
Teach for America is not creating teachers, but leaders. Bold leaders. Outstanding leaders. Leaders who can claim that they started out as classroom teachers, so that they can have instant credibility as they implement whatever piece of reformy awesomeness they've been hired to drop on people. And TFA subscribes to the "charter schools are public school" dodge, so their two years in "public" schools may actually be some time in a charter.
First, TFA wanted to be teachers' co-workers. Then they wanted to be teachers' replacements. Now they're focusing on their other goal-- they'd like to be teachers' bosses.
The "84% continue to work in education or fields that impact the communities where our students and their families live" is a meaningless stat-- I'm actually really curious what the other 16% are doing that has no impact on education or communities where students and families live. Astronauts? Video-game testers? Brazilian cattle farmers?
I know that the disclaimer has become cliche in TFA pieces, but it does need to be said-- some people who go into TFA do so with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts, and some who emerge from the program go on to become great teachers.
But TFA alums keep turning up in other places, like Lorain Ohio, where the turnaround CEO, two building principals, and the human resources chief are all TFA grads who are now responsible for running an entire troubled district even though they have less actual public school teaching experience than almost every single other person working in the district. You find them running districts, running state agencies, running education flavored businesses, with their biographies always making reference to the lessons they learned from "their time in the classroom."
The original TFA insulting pitch was that with five weeks of training, you were ready to run a classroom. The new insulting pitch (which was always there, but in the background instead of on the front page of the website) was that with two years in a classroom, you are ready to run a school, district or state.
So when the new gunslinger comes to town, promising transformational change based on their insights from their time in the classroom-- check. They won't always list TFA on, say, their LinkedIn page (though they will likely have a LinkedIn page), but you can still ask three questions:
1) What's your actual college degree?
2) How long did you teach, and in which school?
3) What have you been doing between then and now?
Most importantly, remember that just because someone on a higher level put this person in charge, that doesn't mean this person knows what the hell they're talking about. There are so many TFA grads out there, leading their little hearts out and basing their decisions on favored reform theories of action (because if you have little or no real experience, what else do you have to go on except hat other reformsters have told you are winning policies). The TFA network has spread like kudzu, and where one gets a leadership position, they will tap the TFA network to find other like-minded folks to bring in.
Pay attention. A TFA connection is no reason to automatically assume that the person doesn't know what they're doing, but it is reason to make sure their decisions and choices hold up to scrutiny.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
OK: Voting With 60,000 Feet
Fans of market dynamics have a deep and abiding faith in the power of the podiatric plebiscite. When parents vote with their feet, schools will get better. Unions and minimum wage are not necessary, because if workers vote with their feet, employers will be forced to improve their offer.
And yet, we have Oklahoma and teachers.
The red flags have been numerous. The Oklahoma State School Boards Association has crunched some numbers. A massive increase in student population over the last twenty-five years. Spending far less per pupil than any states in the region, as well as the lowest teacher salary, which might explain the increasingly huge number of emergency certificates-- almost 3,000 this year, which as about 1,000 more than last year. The Network for Public Education gave them one of the worst grades for privatization in the country. And after teachers were pushed to the point of striking, some legislators thought the problem revealed by the strike was that teachers have too much freedom to speak.
But it turns out that the teacher walkout was even bigger than reported.
The 2018 Teacher Supply and Demand report has just been issued, and among the pages of information is a stunning data point-- over the last six years, 30,000 Oklahoma teachers have walked out. Over six years, Oklahoma has lost 30,000 teachers. To put that in perspective, there are just under 42,000 teachers in the state.
The report considers many possible factors, and cites an interesting source-- an October 2017 survey of people holding an Oklahoma teaching certificate who were not using it. One third said a pay increase would be enough to tempt them back to the classroom, but two thirds said it would take something more. In Oklahoma, it's not just the low pay, but the low support, the low respect, and the ever-increasing workload.
But 30,000 teachers voted with their feet. 30,000 teachers walked away from the job. That's a lot of feet.
As I understand it, what's supposed to happen next is that the legislators and other leaderly types are supposed to meet market demand by improving their offer. And yet, we have Oklahoma's legislators.
I suppose there are some factors that could cause the market forces to malfunction, most notably people in charge who don't care whether they can hire and retain all the nest teachers or not. Or who want the whole business to fail, because then charters and vouchers and other reformy businesses would have a better shot at the plating field. Or who are just so hostile to teachers that they'd rather see schools collapse then give those damned teachers one more cent.
Whatever the case, Oklahoma is totally screwing up the whole market forces thing. Let's hope they figure it out soon.
And yet, we have Oklahoma and teachers.
But it turns out that the teacher walkout was even bigger than reported.
The 2018 Teacher Supply and Demand report has just been issued, and among the pages of information is a stunning data point-- over the last six years, 30,000 Oklahoma teachers have walked out. Over six years, Oklahoma has lost 30,000 teachers. To put that in perspective, there are just under 42,000 teachers in the state.
The report considers many possible factors, and cites an interesting source-- an October 2017 survey of people holding an Oklahoma teaching certificate who were not using it. One third said a pay increase would be enough to tempt them back to the classroom, but two thirds said it would take something more. In Oklahoma, it's not just the low pay, but the low support, the low respect, and the ever-increasing workload.
But 30,000 teachers voted with their feet. 30,000 teachers walked away from the job. That's a lot of feet.
As I understand it, what's supposed to happen next is that the legislators and other leaderly types are supposed to meet market demand by improving their offer. And yet, we have Oklahoma's legislators.
I suppose there are some factors that could cause the market forces to malfunction, most notably people in charge who don't care whether they can hire and retain all the nest teachers or not. Or who want the whole business to fail, because then charters and vouchers and other reformy businesses would have a better shot at the plating field. Or who are just so hostile to teachers that they'd rather see schools collapse then give those damned teachers one more cent.
Whatever the case, Oklahoma is totally screwing up the whole market forces thing. Let's hope they figure it out soon.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
OH: Lorain Schools In State Of Emergency
The state takeover of Lorain City Schools continues to spiral out of control (if you are joining us for this ongoing mess, you can start the story here).
Here's what has happened in the last couple of days.
After announcing last Thursday that teachers at Lorain High School would have to reapply for their jobs, CEO David Hardy went on the television box to do an interview to try to-- well, it's not clear what he was trying to do. The video has a glitch in the middle, but there are a couple of points worth noting:
The interviewer explains the state-appointed job as a "dictator," and Hardy doesn't love the word, but he doesn't have a better one. I like "tsar," but that didn't come up.
The interviewer asks some fine questions, like whether the selection process is just a way to get rid of all the high-cost teachers. Hardy says, kind of, that it's not. The interviewer also brings up the 98% no confidence vote from the staff and asks, in effect, doesn't this indicate you have some problems between leadership and your people, to which Hardy replies, "I don't give a shit." Okay, I'm paraphrasing; the reformspeak version he uses is that he's here to just focus on the students and that's what he's going to focus on. This is not a great way to run a-- well, anything.
Hardy does finally answer the question of whether people can lose their jobs over this-- the answer is "yes." And he tries to expand the criteria beyond the original "prove that you'll be supportive of my vision for the district." But mostly he waffles and gives answers that aren't actually answers to the question that was asked.
But none of that actually matters because--
Tuesday, Hardy announced that the whole "reapply for your job thing" was off the table.
I left our conversation Friday deeply moved by your statements. Your statements expressed a number of emotions, valid points, and perspectives. I was encouraged by the dialogue. I have also been in consultation with our State Superintendent, Paolo DeMaria. I want to reconsider how best to achieve the excellence that I know is possible at Lorain High School. For that reason, I will suspend the selection process previously announced. I created a very different understanding of what I was intending to accomplish, and I apologize for that. Suspending the process will allow us to collectively and collaboratively identify and implement the changes necessary to ensure our scholars succeed.
He also allows that he expected a round of absence in response. Then he sort of loses control of the whole language thing:
I will be the first to tell you that I take decisions like this seriously, but I take your words equally as serious. Our scholars deserve the best from all of us, something that can only happen with your voices at the table. My ask of you is that we continue our conversation and come together around solutions to create the Lorain High we all want. One that is full of love and high expectations for scholars, teachers, staff, and leaders alike; one that is focused on our kids and the well being of all; one that raises our collective belief in what is possible; one that is led by a solution-orientation that suspends disbelief; one that allocates our energy on positivity ; one that leads us to a level of collaboration that will bring us to what is truly possible for all of our scholars.
If one things is clear, it's that Hardy loves sweeping visionary-ish prose more than he loves actual specifics.
Was this a win? Did he blink? Did somebody in Columbus tell him to get his house in order? Board President Mark Ballard has a theory:
“The big story is the big boys down in Columbus called him and said, ‘You’ve got to fix this now,’” he said. “They know he’s out of control, as we do. Now he apologizes and said he changed his mind.”
Maybe, but I find the change of course pretty disturbing, because it indicates just how little thought went into the original proposal.
Look, if someone is going to use the nuclear option in any situation, I actually want it to be a little difficult to talk him out of it, because that at least means I'm dealing with someone who's thought long and hard about what he's doing. If he can change his mind quickly and easily, that means he pulled that nuke out on a thoughtless whim, and that's scary. Either Hardy didn't understand the enormity of his decision to make everyone at the high school reapply, or he just didn't care, and neither one is very comforting going forward. Remember, ten days before he dropped the bomb, he assured the union everyone's jobs were secure. My initial reaction was that ten days prior he just plain lied, but now it seems possible that he really didn't know what he was going to do. A guy who can make decisions this large with such little refection doesn't belong in charge of a lemonade stand, let alone an entire school district. It's also possible that big boys in Columbus did call him on the carpet, which means this is not his idea and everybody had better watch their backs-- a former Hardy co-worker has told me that he can be "as vindictive af." If these folks have made him look bad in front of his bosses, he will be stewing. (There is one other even worse possibility-- that every step of this has been a plan to kick the teachers in their collective guts to say, "Do I have your attention now?" But that would mean Hardy is a sociopath of frightening proportions, so let's assume that's not it.)
However, the community was already primed for a meeting last evening, and so the Academic Distress Commission (well, part of it) and the school board and a few other dignitaries and lawyers and a whole lot of community members gathered in the "media center" (that's "library" for you older folks) to share alarm over a variety of issues. Then they declared a state of emergency for the Lorain City Schools. After that, a whole lot of folks stepped up to the mic to express concerns while other folks chimed in on Facebook Live (you can find the video at the bottom of this story.)
What does this formal resolution proclaiming a state of emergency actually do? It's a good question; it would seem that what the folks want most immediately is to have their school system back, and under HB 70 that's not going to happen. It's also fair to note that, as several on-line commenters have pointed out, the district wasn't exactly going great guns under previous management. However, there's no sign that a state takeover is working, at all.
You can say that the principle of state takeover is sound, and that the problem is that the state made a Very Bad Hire in David Hardy. I don't think that's true. Yes, Hardy is really bad at this job. But I'm trying to imagine what someone who was both good at it and willing to take it would look like, and I don't think it can be done. Ohio has created a terrible job that can't be done-- come into a community from outside, strip people of their representative democracy, take over one of their most beloved and valued community assets, make them like it, and operate a large multi-faceted complicated organization that runs on a myriad of relationships that the state kicked in the face just by sending you here. This is already an impossible job, and when it's created by a reform-minded state like Ohio, the assumption is that the tsar should be an outsider who lacks the training and experience to have any idea how to do it. David Hardy is a terrible choice for this job-- but he's exactly what the people who created this job had in mind.
Meanwhile, there are more developments to watch.
The state is sending another head for the academic distress commission (the mostly-state-appointed group that now theoretically is responsible for the school system). That guy is Dr. Randall Sampson, and he, too, is steeped in reformy baloney. He spent one year in the classroom, a few years in administration, and a whole lotta years in consulting and running a school turnaround business that he started. And he's a big fan of some Common Core standards based data-driven value-added stuff. If Lorain is hoping the ADC will now be run by someone who will rein in Hardy--well, I would not bet the farm or any of the dirt on it.
Annnnd then there's this. I'll do a capture of part of the page because presumably it will update with time, but what we're looking at is nine want ads for teachers for Teach for America in Lorain, most with an application deadline of March 1st.
Stay tuned.
Here's what has happened in the last couple of days.
After announcing last Thursday that teachers at Lorain High School would have to reapply for their jobs, CEO David Hardy went on the television box to do an interview to try to-- well, it's not clear what he was trying to do. The video has a glitch in the middle, but there are a couple of points worth noting:
The interviewer explains the state-appointed job as a "dictator," and Hardy doesn't love the word, but he doesn't have a better one. I like "tsar," but that didn't come up.
Hardy does finally answer the question of whether people can lose their jobs over this-- the answer is "yes." And he tries to expand the criteria beyond the original "prove that you'll be supportive of my vision for the district." But mostly he waffles and gives answers that aren't actually answers to the question that was asked.
But none of that actually matters because--
Tuesday, Hardy announced that the whole "reapply for your job thing" was off the table.
I left our conversation Friday deeply moved by your statements. Your statements expressed a number of emotions, valid points, and perspectives. I was encouraged by the dialogue. I have also been in consultation with our State Superintendent, Paolo DeMaria. I want to reconsider how best to achieve the excellence that I know is possible at Lorain High School. For that reason, I will suspend the selection process previously announced. I created a very different understanding of what I was intending to accomplish, and I apologize for that. Suspending the process will allow us to collectively and collaboratively identify and implement the changes necessary to ensure our scholars succeed.
He also allows that he expected a round of absence in response. Then he sort of loses control of the whole language thing:
I will be the first to tell you that I take decisions like this seriously, but I take your words equally as serious. Our scholars deserve the best from all of us, something that can only happen with your voices at the table. My ask of you is that we continue our conversation and come together around solutions to create the Lorain High we all want. One that is full of love and high expectations for scholars, teachers, staff, and leaders alike; one that is focused on our kids and the well being of all; one that raises our collective belief in what is possible; one that is led by a solution-orientation that suspends disbelief; one that allocates our energy on positivity ; one that leads us to a level of collaboration that will bring us to what is truly possible for all of our scholars.
If one things is clear, it's that Hardy loves sweeping visionary-ish prose more than he loves actual specifics.
Was this a win? Did he blink? Did somebody in Columbus tell him to get his house in order? Board President Mark Ballard has a theory:
“The big story is the big boys down in Columbus called him and said, ‘You’ve got to fix this now,’” he said. “They know he’s out of control, as we do. Now he apologizes and said he changed his mind.”
Maybe, but I find the change of course pretty disturbing, because it indicates just how little thought went into the original proposal.
Look, if someone is going to use the nuclear option in any situation, I actually want it to be a little difficult to talk him out of it, because that at least means I'm dealing with someone who's thought long and hard about what he's doing. If he can change his mind quickly and easily, that means he pulled that nuke out on a thoughtless whim, and that's scary. Either Hardy didn't understand the enormity of his decision to make everyone at the high school reapply, or he just didn't care, and neither one is very comforting going forward. Remember, ten days before he dropped the bomb, he assured the union everyone's jobs were secure. My initial reaction was that ten days prior he just plain lied, but now it seems possible that he really didn't know what he was going to do. A guy who can make decisions this large with such little refection doesn't belong in charge of a lemonade stand, let alone an entire school district. It's also possible that big boys in Columbus did call him on the carpet, which means this is not his idea and everybody had better watch their backs-- a former Hardy co-worker has told me that he can be "as vindictive af." If these folks have made him look bad in front of his bosses, he will be stewing. (There is one other even worse possibility-- that every step of this has been a plan to kick the teachers in their collective guts to say, "Do I have your attention now?" But that would mean Hardy is a sociopath of frightening proportions, so let's assume that's not it.)
However, the community was already primed for a meeting last evening, and so the Academic Distress Commission (well, part of it) and the school board and a few other dignitaries and lawyers and a whole lot of community members gathered in the "media center" (that's "library" for you older folks) to share alarm over a variety of issues. Then they declared a state of emergency for the Lorain City Schools. After that, a whole lot of folks stepped up to the mic to express concerns while other folks chimed in on Facebook Live (you can find the video at the bottom of this story.)
What does this formal resolution proclaiming a state of emergency actually do? It's a good question; it would seem that what the folks want most immediately is to have their school system back, and under HB 70 that's not going to happen. It's also fair to note that, as several on-line commenters have pointed out, the district wasn't exactly going great guns under previous management. However, there's no sign that a state takeover is working, at all.
You can say that the principle of state takeover is sound, and that the problem is that the state made a Very Bad Hire in David Hardy. I don't think that's true. Yes, Hardy is really bad at this job. But I'm trying to imagine what someone who was both good at it and willing to take it would look like, and I don't think it can be done. Ohio has created a terrible job that can't be done-- come into a community from outside, strip people of their representative democracy, take over one of their most beloved and valued community assets, make them like it, and operate a large multi-faceted complicated organization that runs on a myriad of relationships that the state kicked in the face just by sending you here. This is already an impossible job, and when it's created by a reform-minded state like Ohio, the assumption is that the tsar should be an outsider who lacks the training and experience to have any idea how to do it. David Hardy is a terrible choice for this job-- but he's exactly what the people who created this job had in mind.
Meanwhile, there are more developments to watch.
The state is sending another head for the academic distress commission (the mostly-state-appointed group that now theoretically is responsible for the school system). That guy is Dr. Randall Sampson, and he, too, is steeped in reformy baloney. He spent one year in the classroom, a few years in administration, and a whole lotta years in consulting and running a school turnaround business that he started. And he's a big fan of some Common Core standards based data-driven value-added stuff. If Lorain is hoping the ADC will now be run by someone who will rein in Hardy--well, I would not bet the farm or any of the dirt on it.
Annnnd then there's this. I'll do a capture of part of the page because presumably it will update with time, but what we're looking at is nine want ads for teachers for Teach for America in Lorain, most with an application deadline of March 1st.
Stay tuned.
Monday, February 25, 2019
FL: Further Dismantling Public Education
Here are two not-entirely-academic questions:
Is it possible to end public education in an entire state?
Can Florida become any more hostile to public education than it already is?
Newly-minted Governor Ron DeSantis and a wild cast of privatization cronies seem to answer a resounding "yes" to both questions.
But how would you do it? What resources would you need? What tactical moves would you make? Well, as always, there's more bad education news in Florida than you can shake a "Swampland For Sale" sign at (the Tampa Bay Tims is now doing almost-daily education update columns). Remember-- Florida already has a head start with more vouchery choicey baloney than any other state, by far. But here are a couple of trends that point us in toward further privatization.
Fresh Astro-turf
Since at least the days of Governor Jeb and FEE, Florida has been fertile ground for growing well-heeled, widely-connected fake grassroots groups, and Florida's favorite face of privatization is back with yet an other group. The group is School Choice Movement, and the face is Erika Donalds.
The group launched at the start of this year (you know-- concurrently with DeSantis's term). Donalds is the lead on this group, but it also includes Shawn Frost, who graduated from Eastern Oregon University in 2006 with a BS in Experimental Psychology and a minor in philosophy. Then he picked up an MBA from Florida's Nova Southeastern University (website text- "Prepare To Dominate") and then he taught high school science for just two years at Sebastian River High School, a high-rated IBS school. There he did things like "leveraged personal network to create 'wow factor' learning experiences" and "conducted customer focus groups and survey research on student motivators and created a 'meritocracy based' incentives program." And then he got out of the classroom and back into corporate marketing work, got on a school board in part with help from Betsy DeVos's American Federation of Children and DeVos herself (this was in 2014), and from there moved to Erika Donalds's "alternative" school board group, the Florida Coalition of School Board Members. He fully intended to leap from there to the Florida Board of Education. He's also a senior strategy consultant with MVP Strategy and Policy, a group that can, among other things, "make you profitable/well-known and profitable." They also specialize in helping with school board races. Frost once taught a class based on The Art of War. I find no evidence that he was TFA, but he certainly fits the profile, and he does love to say that he was a classroom teacher (without mentioning that his "career" lasted two years. And I can report first hand that he has a feisty Twitter style.
Also in the group is Scot Shine, "named by Jacksonville Magazine as one of the First Coast's most influential people." He's also a marketing and politics guy who served briefly on a school board and joined the Donalds upstart group.
Donalds is a Tea Partier who used to be an investment banker in New York. Now she is a well-connected player in Florida. Her husband Byron Donalds is the legislator who gave Florida the law that says all textbooks must be "balanced" and that any taxpayer can challenge course content. Donalds is buds with Patty Levesque, the woman who has been Jeb Bush's right-hand woman on ed reform, and FCSBM includes other well-connected players. In the interest of space, I'm going to skip over the many Florida power couples in which he writes laws about education and she runs a charter school. Donalds landed a seat on the Florida Constitution Revision Commission, from which she helped launch Amendment 8, a three piece amendment that would have added civic education, term limits for school board members, and-- oh, yeah-- also a part that eviscerated school boards and allowed charters to do an end run around local voters so they could pick the taxpayers' pockets. The attempt to just kind of slip that last part past everybody helped kill Amendment 8 in court.
These three are the guts of SCM. The group's advocacy priorities are-- well, they're Amendment 8 without the civics. Term limits for school board members so they can chase pro-public ed people away before the gather too much power. Transportation innovation and funding-- because charters could recruit better if someone else was footing the transportation bill. Education scholarship accounts-- Florida already has these super-vouchers, but SCM would like to see them expanded to everyone. And charter independence-- because it sucks that charters still have to answer to elected representatives of the taxpayers who foot the bill, and charters would be much happier to not have to answer to anyone.
SCM is not thinking small. Combined, these policies would cut the throat of public education. Charters could soak the taxpayers for piles of money, and the only way school boards could relieve the pressure would be to cut public school budgets past the bone. This has been one of effective charter marketing tools in Florida-- hobble public schools so badly that charters start to look good by comparison.
Expanding Schools of Hope And More Vouchers
Of all the policies that pull back the mask of lies that (barely) cover some policies in Florida, nothing is more cynical than the so-called Schools of Hope.
The accountability wing of the reformsters has, mostly, that the purpose of evaluating schools is to get help to the staff, teachers and students . But Schools of Hope reveal Florida's school grading policy as a jackal's method for targeting the weakest members of the herd. Schools of Hope unmask Florida's school grading system as a marketing tool for privatizers.
The principle is simple. Use the grading system to identify schools that are having trouble aka schools that have beaten down enough that charters are starting to look good to the families who attend. Then let charters set up shop right across the street.
There is no fanciful spin that could make this look like a policy that will help or improve struggling schools. But then, that's what all this rhetoric about "putting children's concerns ahead of adult concerns" is too often about-- people who want strong public schools are just trying to save union teachers fat paychecks, and they should be happy to let the public system go down in flames. This will be a stronger argument the day a charter operator says, "Well, good business sense says we should close right now, but these kids are depending on us, so I guess we'll just lose money" or "Give us every kid you've lives nearby-- we don't care how much of a challenge they might be" or even when a legislator says "As long as there's one kid left in that public school, we need to make sure that school gets the best resources we can get to it."
Schools of Hope are a direct assault on public schools. And DeSantis thinks he's come up with a clever way to make more of them. Connect up Schools ofPredators Hope to Opportunity Zones to the truckload of money being directed to Opportunity Zones, and you've got the gravy train running right to downtown Fat City. The governor will even throw in a pile of taxpayer money to help the Schools of Hope build.
Currently, just under 50 communities are eligible to Schools ofVultures Hope; the DeSantis plan would up that to just under 250.
Redefine Public
I've long said that charter school boosters insist on co-opting the word "public" as a marketing strategy, that they are trying to get families to ascribe certain characteristics to charters that charters simply do not have. Still, it seems curious that some charter cheerleaders are really, really adamant that charters are really public schools. After this piece ran at Forbes, the folks from School Choice Movement wanted to chastise me severely over this very point.
Then I read this editorial from the Tampa Bay Times- "DeSantis redefines public education"--, and while I may be slow, the penny finally dropped.
Yes, there are people who really think charters are public. There are those who co-opt its marketing power. There are charter operators who cynically choose "public" or "private" as it suits their purposes. But for those like DeSantis, the objective is to redefine the term.
He's made his redefinition clear-- "If the taxpayer is paying for the education, it's public education." Oddly enough, that is exactly the argument the School Choice Movement tweeted at me.
Note that this skips over who owns it, who controls it (and whether or not that who is elected), to whom it is responsible (if anybody), who regulates it (if anybody) and most especially who profits from it (answer: "Who cares as long as it's not those lousy unions and their lousy teachers").
Calling charter schools public creates a nice batch of smoke and mirrors, allowing DeSantis and his cronies to privatize giant chunks of Florida's school system while still proclaiming, "No need to worry. You still have public schools!" You could completely shift the education system to privately owned and operated schools while still reassuring parents, taxpayers, and, perhaps, courts, that you haven't done a thing because it's still all public schools.
It's not just marketing. It's stealing the Mona Lisa and hanging up a Polaroid picture of the painting in its place. It's kidnapping your spouse and replacing them with an inflatable doll. It is a gaslighting of epic proportions.
In the meantime, Florida taxpayers, you probably should not try to just stroll into the public governor's mansion you paid for or borrow one of those public vehicles that you bought for officials to drive around in (especially don't try to commandeer a public army tank). Instead, I would keep a close eye on your public schools while you've still got them. And if it's already too late in your county, don't be sad-- your loss of public education has at least made some of your leaders really wealthy.
And the rest of us need to pay attention, too. Remember-- Betsy DeVos is among the many people who think Florida is an educational exemplar.
Is it possible to end public education in an entire state?
Can Florida become any more hostile to public education than it already is?
Newly-minted Governor Ron DeSantis and a wild cast of privatization cronies seem to answer a resounding "yes" to both questions.
But how would you do it? What resources would you need? What tactical moves would you make? Well, as always, there's more bad education news in Florida than you can shake a "Swampland For Sale" sign at (the Tampa Bay Tims is now doing almost-daily education update columns). Remember-- Florida already has a head start with more vouchery choicey baloney than any other state, by far. But here are a couple of trends that point us in toward further privatization.
Fresh Astro-turf
Since at least the days of Governor Jeb and FEE, Florida has been fertile ground for growing well-heeled, widely-connected fake grassroots groups, and Florida's favorite face of privatization is back with yet an other group. The group is School Choice Movement, and the face is Erika Donalds.
Also in the group is Scot Shine, "named by Jacksonville Magazine as one of the First Coast's most influential people." He's also a marketing and politics guy who served briefly on a school board and joined the Donalds upstart group.
Donalds is a Tea Partier who used to be an investment banker in New York. Now she is a well-connected player in Florida. Her husband Byron Donalds is the legislator who gave Florida the law that says all textbooks must be "balanced" and that any taxpayer can challenge course content. Donalds is buds with Patty Levesque, the woman who has been Jeb Bush's right-hand woman on ed reform, and FCSBM includes other well-connected players. In the interest of space, I'm going to skip over the many Florida power couples in which he writes laws about education and she runs a charter school. Donalds landed a seat on the Florida Constitution Revision Commission, from which she helped launch Amendment 8, a three piece amendment that would have added civic education, term limits for school board members, and-- oh, yeah-- also a part that eviscerated school boards and allowed charters to do an end run around local voters so they could pick the taxpayers' pockets. The attempt to just kind of slip that last part past everybody helped kill Amendment 8 in court.
These three are the guts of SCM. The group's advocacy priorities are-- well, they're Amendment 8 without the civics. Term limits for school board members so they can chase pro-public ed people away before the gather too much power. Transportation innovation and funding-- because charters could recruit better if someone else was footing the transportation bill. Education scholarship accounts-- Florida already has these super-vouchers, but SCM would like to see them expanded to everyone. And charter independence-- because it sucks that charters still have to answer to elected representatives of the taxpayers who foot the bill, and charters would be much happier to not have to answer to anyone.
SCM is not thinking small. Combined, these policies would cut the throat of public education. Charters could soak the taxpayers for piles of money, and the only way school boards could relieve the pressure would be to cut public school budgets past the bone. This has been one of effective charter marketing tools in Florida-- hobble public schools so badly that charters start to look good by comparison.
Expanding Schools of Hope And More Vouchers
Of all the policies that pull back the mask of lies that (barely) cover some policies in Florida, nothing is more cynical than the so-called Schools of Hope.
The accountability wing of the reformsters has, mostly, that the purpose of evaluating schools is to get help to the staff, teachers and students . But Schools of Hope reveal Florida's school grading policy as a jackal's method for targeting the weakest members of the herd. Schools of Hope unmask Florida's school grading system as a marketing tool for privatizers.
The principle is simple. Use the grading system to identify schools that are having trouble aka schools that have beaten down enough that charters are starting to look good to the families who attend. Then let charters set up shop right across the street.
There is no fanciful spin that could make this look like a policy that will help or improve struggling schools. But then, that's what all this rhetoric about "putting children's concerns ahead of adult concerns" is too often about-- people who want strong public schools are just trying to save union teachers fat paychecks, and they should be happy to let the public system go down in flames. This will be a stronger argument the day a charter operator says, "Well, good business sense says we should close right now, but these kids are depending on us, so I guess we'll just lose money" or "Give us every kid you've lives nearby-- we don't care how much of a challenge they might be" or even when a legislator says "As long as there's one kid left in that public school, we need to make sure that school gets the best resources we can get to it."
Schools of Hope are a direct assault on public schools. And DeSantis thinks he's come up with a clever way to make more of them. Connect up Schools of
Currently, just under 50 communities are eligible to Schools of
DeSantis has also cleared away the obstacle of the courts for another reform dream. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court found that Bush's voucher program ("Opportunity Scholarships") was unconstitutional. DeSantis has just replaced three of the five justices who signed that ruling-- and proposed the "Equal Opportunity Scholarship." It's more vouchers, on top of the many vouchery programs Florida already has.
Redefine Public
I've long said that charter school boosters insist on co-opting the word "public" as a marketing strategy, that they are trying to get families to ascribe certain characteristics to charters that charters simply do not have. Still, it seems curious that some charter cheerleaders are really, really adamant that charters are really public schools. After this piece ran at Forbes, the folks from School Choice Movement wanted to chastise me severely over this very point.
Then I read this editorial from the Tampa Bay Times- "DeSantis redefines public education"--, and while I may be slow, the penny finally dropped.
Yes, there are people who really think charters are public. There are those who co-opt its marketing power. There are charter operators who cynically choose "public" or "private" as it suits their purposes. But for those like DeSantis, the objective is to redefine the term.
He's made his redefinition clear-- "If the taxpayer is paying for the education, it's public education." Oddly enough, that is exactly the argument the School Choice Movement tweeted at me.
Read the statute: farm analogies aside, charter schools are public schools, UNLESS your opinion of “public” begins and ends at union operated schools. Public education is the education of the public, not a single building, or delivery model. pic.twitter.com/GPPqcQt8Gm— School Choice Movement (@SchoolChoiceMVT) February 15, 2019
Note that this skips over who owns it, who controls it (and whether or not that who is elected), to whom it is responsible (if anybody), who regulates it (if anybody) and most especially who profits from it (answer: "Who cares as long as it's not those lousy unions and their lousy teachers").
Calling charter schools public creates a nice batch of smoke and mirrors, allowing DeSantis and his cronies to privatize giant chunks of Florida's school system while still proclaiming, "No need to worry. You still have public schools!" You could completely shift the education system to privately owned and operated schools while still reassuring parents, taxpayers, and, perhaps, courts, that you haven't done a thing because it's still all public schools.
It's not just marketing. It's stealing the Mona Lisa and hanging up a Polaroid picture of the painting in its place. It's kidnapping your spouse and replacing them with an inflatable doll. It is a gaslighting of epic proportions.
In the meantime, Florida taxpayers, you probably should not try to just stroll into the public governor's mansion you paid for or borrow one of those public vehicles that you bought for officials to drive around in (especially don't try to commandeer a public army tank). Instead, I would keep a close eye on your public schools while you've still got them. And if it's already too late in your county, don't be sad-- your loss of public education has at least made some of your leaders really wealthy.
And the rest of us need to pay attention, too. Remember-- Betsy DeVos is among the many people who think Florida is an educational exemplar.
Sunday, February 24, 2019
OH: Lorain CEO's Purge Announcement Raises Fury
Last Thursday night, David Hardy, the state-appointed takeover CEO for Lorain City Schools told the public that all teachers at the high school would have to reapply for their jobs.
If you want to read about how they arrived at this point, that story is here. This is just the next chapter in the story.
Why exactly do teachers need to re-apply? Per the letter:
"...because we know that transformations this large can only happen with a completely unified and committed team, we’re giving leaders at Empowerment Schools the autonomy to choose their staff. "
At the high school, that would be the team led by Executive Director Daniel Garvey.* Garvey is one of Hardy's hires; he graduated from Ohio State with a BA in International/Global studies then, spent two years Teach for America as an English teacher, then three years handling phone interviews for TFA, and six and a half years doing a variety of education-related jobs in the Dominican Republic. Now he's going to take point on deciding if the teachers of Lorain High should get to keep their jobs or not.
Because the corporate reform playbook says that school leaders should be like CEOs who get to pick their teams, even if that means firing people who know far more about the job than the CEO does.
But look at another line from the letter:
This means all teachers and staff members who wish to remain at LHS next school year will need to participate in a selection process to determine whether their experience, commitment and belief in the potential of our scholars are the right fit for the school going forward.
Hardy's argument is that LHS has to break "patterns of low academic achievement stretching back many years," but he's not going to evaluate teachers based on their academic strength, their teaching skills, their content knowledge-- they are going to be judged on whether they have the right commitment and belief, whether they are, in fact, team players. Is this about the "no confidence" vote that 98% of the staff made public last week? The board vice-president and the teacher union president both think so.
The purge letter also has a paragraph encouraging "educators and staff who do not have a direct ort immediate impact by the process" to keep working hard. That is a bone stupid thing to say-- as if any teacher anywhere in the district could not be immediately affected that at any moment, the CEO could announce that they, too, must do a song and dance to keep the job they already have. Every person who works in the Lorain district is now affected. Only a deeply incompetent manager could expect otherwise.
The purge announcement comes wrapped in plenty of confusion. The letter itself sends mixed messages. "I have seen first hand how hard LHS teachers work every day to do right by their scholars" Hardy writes. And then, "I hope many will decide to be part of the selection process." That process is loaded with unanswered questions. Per Jay Pickering, union president:
They can’t tell you who’s interviewing people, what positions — when you put in your request to stay, there’s not ‘what am I going to teach.’ It was very vague as far as whatever this process is going to be. The only thing, and I made sure that I asked the CEO clearly, if throughout this process if a teacher’s not chosen, could they lose their job in Lorain, yes or no. And he just refused to answer the question.
But then, Pickering has no reason to listen to Hardy's words on the subject anyway-- just ten days before the announcement, Pickering asked Hardy to quell rumors in the district, and Hardy assured him that no teachers were going to be moved. Now Hardy says that tenured teachers who aren't kept at the high school will be placed elsewhere in the district; he does not offer an explanation of how that will work for teachers who are only high school certified.
Hardy called teachers in for a two hour meeting on Friday to discuss the selection process, which apparently will start in a week. The meeting was billed as an announcement of Hardy's plan, but simply outlined him timeline. "It was a really bizarre meeting and he didn’t really answer any questions directly. There were a lot of tears by teachers today."
The process of announcing intent has begun immediately, as covered by the Chronicle-Telegram:
In an email shared with The Chronicle-Telegram, the district’s People Office sent staff an invitation to complete a “non-binding Declaration of Intent survey,” 6:15 p.m. Friday. Survey questions were not accessible without starting the application process, but the letter states those who wish to remain at the high school must “exemplify our district core values at all times; abide by the district policy, protocols, and identified expectations; abide by the district’s shared expectations outlined in The Lorain Way; uphold the expectations outlined in the Lorain teacher job descriptions; and believe in the limitless potential of all scholars.”
The invitation states “all staff” must submit the form, but only includes a link to the teacher job descriptions. The form is due March 1 and those who complete it will be contacted by a member of the People Office by March 5 to learn of the next steps and schedule a formal interview.
Hardy's public comments continue to be word salads of corporate gobbledegook.
“It was a conversation that we had as a team to talk about the future to give our teachers space to ask questions and think through things they’re grappling with and make sure they understand the process that ensued," Hardy said. "And to ensure we have a space to understand what challenges we’re facing and move forward.”
And
“We know that their lives and days are extremely busy, so we wanted to make sure it is something that allows them to showcase the wonderful things they already do and have conversations with the leadership team about being a part of this transformation,” he said. “Or maybe there are folks who decide they would like to be somewhere else in the district, then we would invite folks who are external to be a part of that selection process.
"But not until we have exhausted all of our opportunities to really talk to our teachers, to understand our teachers who are in this high school and ask them to be a part of what is necessary to move to the next level. At that point, our school leadership team will make decisions on who they would like to see be a part of Lorain High going into the 2019-2020 school year.”
It's an astonishing parade of baloney, and it makes me angry for the teachers of Lorain just to read through this. Though it appears that there may be nobody madder than School Board President Mark Ballard, who argues in a letter sent Friday that Hardy should have to reapply for his own job. Nor did Ballard mince words when talking to the paper.
“Grades got worse, morale got worse, enrollment got worse,” Ballard said the district since Hardy took over 18 months ago. “… I think there’s probably about 60,000 people in the city of Lorain and he’s probably No. 60,001 that deserve that job based on how he’s been doing it.”
“What I think is he’s just going to go through his games,” Ballard said. “And the people who’s not buying into his program and dancing to his music, whether they’re right or wrong or whether they’re good at their jobs or not, he just wants them out of there so he can have additional puppets to do what he wants them to do.”
The state takeover of Lorain schools is turning into a clusterfarphegnugen of epic proportions. The idea of giving a CEO all the powers of a superintendent and a school board is a dumb idea. Giving that position to someone who lacks the experience and skills to even sort of manage it makes things exponentially worse. For Reformsters who think the corporate takeover CEO model has potential, Lorain is shaping up to be a model for how bad an idea that is, a sort of disproof of concept. We'll keep following this tale as we wait to see just how bad things can get.
And here's the next chapter.
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