Micromanaging Our Way To The Top

Kate Taylor in the NY Times on the principals union hammering de Blasio for micromanaging renewal schools:

Mr. Logan says he — and by extension, the 6,000 members of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators — has lost confidence in the de Blasio administration. In a column to be published in the union’s newsletter this month, Mr. Logan writes of the Education Department, “Sadly, in the timeworn tradition of the D.O.E., there are so many cooks running around in the kitchen, the chefs don’t know what kind of dish they’re concocting.” So many different mandates have been thrown at these schools, he writes, that “all we have is a recipe for disaster.”

...

In an interview last week, Mr. Logan said of the school-turnaround effort, “This became a political mess, because the mayor made this his political thing.”

He added, “They’ve lost their focus on kids.”

Mr. Logan said principals in the 94 schools were being overwhelmed with paperwork and meetings and micromanaged to the point that they could not do what they thought was best for their schools. He said he believed the mayor’s approach was destined to fail if the city did not change its strategy.

Hey, it's not just at renewal schools and it's not just de Blasio doing the micromanaging.

Cuomo's doing it with the 2015 education reform law.

SED is doing it with APPR.

The NYCDOE is doing it with Danielson.

Everything is micromanaged these days, everything overly controlled.

The more things "change" in education, the less they actually change.

Whether it's Bloomberg, de Blasio, Bush, Obama, Clinton, Paterson, or Cuomo - it's the same educrats running stuff.

The control freaks are in control.

Chancellor Farina Claims Almost A "Celebratory Attitude" Around Renewal Schools

Eliza Shapiro at Politico NY, writing about a joint appearance between NYSED Commissioner MaryEllen Elia and NYCDOE Chancellor Carmen Farina on school "turnaround" efforts

Fariña has also made Renewal schools a priority, and has said she is seeing improvement in many of them.

"There has almost been a celebratory attitude around Renewal schools," she said.

Huh?

Almost a "celebratory attitude"?

This is just anecdotal, but what I have heard from teachers at Renewal schools both here on the blog and in communication elsewhere is that the pressure and stress at these schools has reached toxic levels.

From what I am hearing the only people with the "celebratory attitude" are the charter operators who stand to benefit from the receivership law when Renewal schools get turned over to them.

Are you hearing anything different?

If so, I'd like to correct the record and help "celebrate" receivership too.

Chancellor Farina Knows Teachers' Evaluation Ratings Are In Jeopardy At "Struggling" Schools

Eliza Shapiro at Capital NY sat in on a meeting between NYCDOE Chancellor Farina and the superintendent of District 8, Karen Ames.

Here's an interesting bit of that report::

30 percent of students in one of the Renewal Schools are in temporary housing. Fariña closed her eyes and inhaled sharply when Ames described the school’s challenges, and said she wanted to put an “asterisk” next to city schools with extremely high levels of student poverty and homelessness.

Fariña also said she wants to establish a so-called asterisk for highly effective teachers who move to Renewal Schools. While Fariña said “it’s been easier to recruit teachers to Renewals than ever” because of strong professional development and a sense of mission, she’s concerned that effective teachers’ ratings will drop when they move from high-achieving schools to struggling ones.

Fariña said she was planning to follow one teacher who was leaving a high-performing school to teach at a Renewal School in Ames’ Bronx district.

“She’s going to do the same assessments, she’s going to do everything she did before,” Fariña said. “But the scores are only going to go to a certain point. How is that going to affect her rating? It’s not going to make her any less of a good teacher.”

Here's a question I have:

If "effective" teachers should get asterisks next to their names because they've chosen to work in a school with high poverty, high homelessness demographics next year, is it just possible that those "ineffective" or "developing" teachers that are already there working in that school might face the same challenges the new "effective" teachers are going to face next year and deserve asterisks too?

The dirty secret of education reform is that the problems in schools and districts with high poverty/high homelessness demographics are NOT caused by "bad teachers" - they're caused by all the effects that poverty has on the psychological, emotional, physical and social development of the children in those schools and districts.

Does that mean there's not some mismanagement in schools and/or districts that are "struggling"?

Of course not.

To that end, Shapiro reports that "Fariña asked Ames to outline consistency goals for all the schools in her district by October" to address the hodgepodge of programs that may not be the most effective way to educate children in the district.

But the truth is that most of the problem are not due to mismanagement, a lack of "consistency goals," or a plethora of "ineffective" teachers at those schools/districts, they're due to the effects of what Farina winced at - high rates of poverty and high rates of homelessness.

If Farina thinks the new "effective" teachers coming in to "struggling" schools deserve asterisks next to their names, then she also knows that a hell of a lot of the teachers already there deserve the same benefit of the doubt.