Two Charts Reflecting A Personal Reaction to Yesterday's Superintendent Candidate Forums

Sorry, I'm still trying to figure out how Blogger can do thumbnails. As I waste significant time this Saturday trying to figure that out (help, anyone?), try to figure out the following teeny-weeny charts....


Aha! It appears you can just click on the charts to see them full-sized. Let me know if you have problems...

P.S.: I will sum up my attendance at the "educator" portion of yesterday's show thusly:

4:04 p.m.: I drive into the sinister parking lot of the even-more sinister APS "twin towers"
4:06 p.m.: I almost get in an accident with another driver also wasting time trying in vain to find a parking space
4:07 p.m.: I park in front of a nearby apartment complex
4:08 p.m.: I get to the front doors of the highly sinister "twin towers" and see a mob of people arranged inartfully right at the door
4:09 p.m.: Upon opening the doors, I observe this mob of people is watching a smallish TV screen with superintendent candidate Miller on it talking about "free money". Some mob members have chairs, others stand, while other notice and rush over to the scant leftovers remaining on what must have once been a bulging tray of cookies.
4:10 p.m.: Your humble blogger bypasses the remaining cookie crumbs and wanders back and forth between an "overflow" room of folks watching candidate Miller on a big-screen TV, and a completely packed Board Room in which the actual physical form of Dr. Miller currently resides as he talks about "free money".
4:11 p.m.: Your humble blogger returns to the front doors of the sinister APS "twin towers", opens them with a feeling that must have been strikingly similar to that guy with the sledgehammer on top of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and walks to his car in front of the nearby apartment complex.
4:12 p.m.: While continuing the walk to his car, your humble blogger rationalizes that these forums are on KANW-FM and he can just listen to them in the car on the way home.
4:13 p.m.: Your humble blogger turns his car radio to KANW and discovers the forums are NOT on the radio. He continues driving anyway, waving at the sinister APS "twin towers" as he passes them and the mob within.

It's Superintendent Race Day, and Track Conditions Are Favoring Inside Speed

dog-and-po·ny show

n. Slang

An elaborate presentation orchestrated to gain approval, as for a policy or product.
-The Free Dictionary

We'll keep it short this morning. No Daily Racing Form in-depth analysis with speed ratings of the candidates or insights about whether a particular candidate is a "mudder" or not. Just a timetable for today's events, and an updated betting line (Note: no exacta/trifecta wagering...2nd place don't mean nothin')

The six finalists will be in Albuquerque for open meetings with the public on Friday— a day before the board is scheduled to select one of them as the new superintendent.
Here's whom the candidates will meet with on Friday at the John Milne Community Board Room, 6400 Uptown Blvd. N.E.:
6:30-8 a.m.— APS student body officers.
11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.— local business and government leaders.
4-5:30 p.m.— APS employees.
6-7:30 p.m.— APS parents and student family members.
-from the Albuquerque Journal (Note: Posted times have varied a bit I've noticed, these are taken from this morning's paper)

As you doubtlessly know, the "only paper you will ever need" has done profiles on each of the candidates (some including that little Q&A "have you ever been arrested" gotcha thing, some not). Armed with this information and little else, your humble blogger had adjusted the early morning line to the following:

Linda Sink: 1/3
Steve Flores: 7/2 (Note: a significant reduction in price from 50/1)
Winston Brooks: 4/1
Tom Miller: 15/1
Gary Norris: 35/1
Diego Gallegos: 99/1

It's still Sink's position to lose as we head into the Swimsuit Competition today (wait, wrong cheesy analogy, let's go with "today's Belmont Stakes" instead). I'm both cringing and looking forward to the APS Employee part of the shindig this afternoon. Teachers never seem to come off looking very good in this sort of forum, tending to resemble quite strongly a series of Geraldine Amatos in both the hyper-specificity of their bitterness and the indecipherable construction of their arguments.

I expect plenty of questions like "Remember that time that Johnny got lunch detention at (insert former President here) Middle School, and you let him out of lunch detention because his entire family had been wiped out in a typhoon and I told you then and I'll tell you now that the International Monetary Fund and Big Oil are responsible for student's "sagging" and using IPods and violating other school rules in a way that makes a teacher's job impossible. Impossible I tell ya! IMPOSSIBLE!"

Well, it's "Post Time"....somebody cue the trumpet player.

Other Voices, Other Padded Rooms: "News" of Other Superintendent Candidates

Humble Blogger's Note: I have no idea whatsoever of the veracity of the "facts" contained in the following quoted rant. Rational Discretion Advised...

I've noticed in recent days (from looking at the little "sitemeter" hit counter that all bloggers are obsessed about, but won't admit it) that ever since I started posting about the finalists for the APS Superintendent's job, I've been getting almost as many hits from Sarasota, Florida as I have Albuquerque. One of the candidates, Dr. Gary Norris, is currently Superintendent there. I wrote a little something specifically about Dr. Norris a couple of days ago, but it hasn't mattered..anything having to do with the APS job has led to numerous visits/views from Sarasota.

Then this morning I wake up and see the following comment to a post of last weekend. I post it for two reasons: 1. if your sense of humor runs to this sort of thing, it's pretty darn funny, and even possibly informative; 2. having the following signed "anonymous" demonstrates how much more powerful the tirade would be if it had an actual real name attached to it.

So, primarily for entertainment purposes only, here's the comment in toto:

Concerning Dr. Norris of Florida: He says he's looking for a school district with cultural diversity. Someone should ask him, "If this is true, why, after firing the principal of Booker High School (a predominantly African-American school in Sarasota), did you hide out in your office like a little girl, refusing to talk to the students and faculty?" Also, School Board members may want to ask about the lies and deception centered around the Sarasota school referendum vote of 2006. Why did the faculty and staff of the Sarasota schools send over 800 emails to the School Board requesting that Dr. Norris be fired? Two of the three School Board members who voted to retain him had been on the board for only two weeks. Two former board members stated that, if they had still been on the board, they would have voted to fire him. Dr. Norris's communication skills were deemed so poor that the School Board had to hire a Communications Director to do the job that he was unable to do. Someone should ask the principals and teachers at the Sarasota schools if he has ever visited their schools. Most would say he has never been to their schools. On a lighter note, someone might ask him about the speeding ticket he received for driving 20+ mph over the limit in a school zone.

Again, I have no idea about the "truthiness" of the above allegations. If I had more time this morning before work I'd love to check some of the juicier details out. Perhaps a reader can do that for me.


P.S.: The above rant also confirms, in my mind, how difficult a superintendent's job must be. A few days back I made the comparison between running a school district and being a college basketball coach. The similarities are there: high pay, high pressure to succeed, lots of job mobility, tendency to look like used car salesmen and/or preachers.

But there's a big, big difference. College basketball coaches oversee a small group of young men/women and only have to get them to win basketball games (and graduate from school, if you're into that sort of thing). It's fairly simple: basketball team goes 20-7 and gets into the NCAA tournament = great coach; team goes 7-20 = time to get a new coach.

Being a superintendent means overseeing "success" of thousands and thousands of students. But what makes it even harder is that there's no agreed criteria for "success". There's no single scoreboard. Some/many are trying to make standardized testing just such a "scoreboard", but it's far too complicated for that.

In other words, I think the whole idea of "superintendent" as currently constituted is flawed and needs to be scrapped/overhauled. I'd like to see/hear some new thinking on the subject and I'd like to hear it in the next 72 hours before we fly through the tail-end of this hiring process and end up just repeating the ultra-short life cycle of the "mayfly" superintendent just because we've always done it this way.

And no, my feelings on the difficulty of the superintendent's job doesn't mean I take back my comments about Linda Sink yesterday. In my own little version of "scoreboard" she lost the game v. the Journal, and helped make all of us losers in that little situation.

What Those Infamous Jefferson MS Letters Teach Us About Linda Sink

Back on February 20th the Albuquerque Journal published a bunch of unedited "letters to the editor" from kids at Jefferson Middle School. The letters were in response to a February 11th Journal story citing an APS plan to eliminate/reduce electives for students who don't show "proficiency" on standardized tests and replace electives with remedial classes to get kids up to "proficient".

There is about a 99.9% chance that you already know this. Chances are also exceedingly good you know that the student letters were filled with grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors.

And you also very likely know that on February 21st, the day after the Journal published those student LTEs (letters to the editor), Interim Superintendent Linda Sink wrote a district-wide email/press release publicly castigating the teacher who allowed such "first draft" letters to be published.

We pretty much all know the aforementioned facts, but one fact I've learned from this little "viral" brouhaha is this: Linda Sink will very likely make a lousy APS Superintendent.

I readily admit making this assumption without really knowing Ms. Sink. I've never met the woman, and didn't even know what she looked like until I found the above photo at the APS website. Over the years I have heard some things about Ms. Sink. No, not all of the things I've heard have been positive. Some have been both positive and negative, depending on your views of things.

Here is a short list of solid to vague things I've heard:

• Linda Sink is big on public relations and not so big on actual accomplishments
  
• Linda Sink is not a big fan of "gifted education"
  
• Linda Sink is not a big fan of people who are not big fans of Linda Sink
  
• Linda Sink has done a good job of recruiting people, particularly students, to go to Albuquerque High School
• Linda Sink has some interesting ideas, such as the one requiring non-proficient third graders to attend summer school
• Linda Sink really, really wants to be APS superintendent
• Linda Sink could definitely use an editor in her public correspondence
• Linda Sink, like almost all high school principals in APS, really had little to no idea what was going on in her classrooms while principal at AHS
• Lastly, Linda Sink got promoted to Assistant Superintendent around the same time many APS principals got shuffled around. There is a feeling, possibly unwarranted, that Ms. Sink had quite a bit to do with the principal shuffle, and this shuffle included the former principal at my school of employ, Jefferson Middle School. Small world, isn't it?

So let's get back to that previous statement, namely: Linda Sink will very likely make a lousy APS Superintendent.

I grant you that my feeling on the subject is, to an extent, influenced by the solid to vague points listed above. Especially the last one, frankly, as the removal of my previous principal, Ivy Langan, from Jefferson was a move far, far more deleterious to my school than any Journal publication of poorly written Jefferson MS student LTEs could ever be.

Still, given the vagueness of it all, I never definitively considered Ms. Sink wrong for the superintendent's job until I read her public response to those LTEs.

Here's what it showed me. Ms. Sink is the kind of leader whose response to a negative situation is to go public, wrap herself in indignation and throw her employees, schools and students under a bus. Instead of first going to the teacher involved, or possibly visiting the kids who wrote the letters and assuring them that they are not to blame, she goes to the blanket email/press release.

Instead of defusing at the school level, she inflames via the media.

As I mentioned above, I might be biased. Just so you know, that bias doesn't extend to the fact Ms. Sink chose to crap on Jefferson MS and a certain teacher there. I don't really even know the teacher directly involved, and I never got that "hometown" gene that makes one defend a school just because one attends or teaches there. Jefferson is fine, but I don't root for it like a basketball team or anything. I don't feel personally besmirched just because Jefferson MS has been allegedly tarnished by this whole thing.

No, all I feel from the whole imbroglio is that Linda Sink is the kind of boss who puts media/public perception over the real needs of schools and their students. We don't have much to go by in her short reign as "Interim Superintendent", but we do know that when a quick decision needed to be made, she decided to fling a poorly written email/press release at the world instead of really dealing with the situation on the ground.

And that's why I think Linda Sink will very likely make a lousy APS Superintendent.


P.S.: This is not to say there isn't plenty more stupid to go around concerning those LTEs. The teacher most definitely did a stupid thing. No doubt about it. The Journal is culpable, too, preying on kids inability to write clean copy (and trust me, the kids involved KNOW who's being laughed at here) to supposedly prove a point. Icky.

In the past I've had student work published and the publishing entity worked very well with me to make sure everybody was happy with the finished product. Seems the Journal no longer plays by those rules. Enjoy "proving" your point o' sleazy ones...just don't expect much from us K-12 folks anytime soon, including trust in what you print.

The Problem Might Not Be Finding a Superintendent, It's Having a Superintendent

From what I read the average urban school superintendent stays at a job, on average, only 2.75 years.

A 2000 Time Magazine piece on the subject is entitled "Is Superintendent....A Job For a Superhero?", then goes on to say:

"The pool of applicants is shrinking, leaving millions of America's poorest kids--in cities that include New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore and Las Vegas--in school systems run by the managerial equivalent of a substitute teacher."

A 2003 Wallace Foundation funded study by the "Center on Reinventing Public Education" entitled "An Impossible Job? The View From the Superintendent's Chair" interviews 140 current and past large district superintendents and concludes that "the structure of the position virtually precludes them from doing what they were hired to do". One interviewed superintendent sums up the findings of the study in his remark that "the superintendency as now structured is undoable."

The above is just a metaphorical snowflake of an avalanche of white papers, research and op/ed pieces one can read on the subject of the urban superintendent.

My reading of the above and other sources in the last 24 hours has left me with one question regarding the hiring of a new APS Superintendent: Why should we care?

I appreciate and commend the diligence of the search process (although I still think Linda Sink is getting the job, and that the Board decision to let Beth Everitt out of her contract early and appoint Sink "interim" was just about the stupidest decision ever made by a Board known for its stupid decisions).

But after all these public meetings, hiring advisory board sessions, job-recruitment pitches, preliminary interviews, we conclude the process with a veritable NBA All-Star Weekend of public meet & greets and still more interviews.

And for what? So we can hire somebody for a couple of years at $27ok to do an impossible job and then have them leave or get rid of them in some ugly professional death ritual?

And yes, I'm am saying this in part after seeing and reading about the six APS finalists. I could be wrong, but I don't see any superheroes in the bunch. I do see a number of folks who will very likely stick around for right at 2.75 years.

As the overwhelming problems of the superintendent/school board framework aren't a secret, I'm hoping significant discussion about alternatives to this framework took place during the advisory board meetings. In a brief review around the 'Net I don't see any record of such a discussion, and would love to hear the details if one or more, in fact, occurred.

It's late in the game, granted, but there's still time to ask a few questions before having Dr. 2.75 Years sign on the $270k dotted line.

1. Is there a more workable arrangement for school district success than the "unworkable" Superintendent-Board system?
2. Many scoff at the idea of splitting APS up, but wouldn't doing that now make sense and provide at least a slightly better chance of success on the part of a traditional "superintendent"?
3. Or should we keep APS intact, ditch the current job of superintendent, and really install "site-based management" in a way that empowers individual schools and helps reduce what almost everyone agrees is the biggest problem with APS, and large school districts in general. its bureaucracy?

Those are just a few questions, and, to be honest, every time I go back over the list of finalists for the job the list of questions just gets longer. Oh well, maybe we can get back to these questions the next time around in 2011, or 2014, or 2017....

P.S.: Essay Round

Elected superintendent?
Discuss. Cite examples.

Bonus Question (a blast from the past): Feudal Prince Marty runs the schools?
Discuss. Cite examples.

Rating the Superintendent Choices: Dr. Gary Norris

One could certainly argue that APS Superintendent candidate Dr. Gary Norris looks like a Southern Baptist preacher, or the host of a television game show. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

More importantly, we are above the superficiality of looks here at Burque Babble. No, we plunge deeper and instead focus on the superficiality of slogans like "NeXt Generation Learning", Dr. Norris' totally rad initiative to make his Sarasota Public Schools better. Perhaps it is our inherent cynicism that makes us leery of something called "NeXt Generation Learning", or perhaps it's our disdain for the use of old Pepsi ad campaigns to promote school improvement initiatives. Mainly it's that upper case "X". That's just about making me choke on my Cheerios this morning.

Anyway, "NeXt Generation Learning" is about more than an upper-case "X". It's about $350 million of education buzzwords to promote a "NeXt Generation" classroom (teacher included) that does the following (unlike a bad, horrible evil 1950s classroom...not to mention the segregation angle):

1950s Classroom
Passive
Receive Knowledge
Learn Alone
Learning Content
Replicate
Teach all the time

"NeXt Generation" Classroom"
Active
Construct Knowledge
Learn Together
Learning to Learn
Innovate
Adapt to Learning Styles

The sales brochures for "NeXt Generation" say the "NeXt Generation" will consist of longer school days, a bunch of technology and creation of a teacher certification process that is like National Board Certification but different enough to cost Sarasota taxpayers $20 million over four years.

And now comes the clincher from a Sarasota Herald-Tribune story about Dr. Norris' status for the APS job:

Norris is credited with overseeing sweeping changes in Sarasota's 42,000-student school system, but his impending departure comes at a time when the district's ambitious academic reform, the $350 million Next Generation Learning plan, is being implemented.

Outside of having a terribly uncool name "NeXt Generation Learning" doesn't look like that bad of a concept. Sure it is full of the same buzzwords that make any education initiative difficult to assess, but things like increased technology and teachers adapting to their students is fine. What irritates is that the "inventor" of these particular buzzwords is leaving, or wants to leave, just as the thing gets started.

Perhaps my expectations are too high, but I want my radical reformer administrators to stick around for the tough days of radical reform implementation. I don't want somebody to just sell me a marching band or "monorail" and then head out to the next Shelbyville or Albuquerque.

I'm still rooting for an "out-of-towner" to be hired, but why does this process have to so closely mimic the hiring of a college basketball coach? Hundreds of thousands in pay to lure somebody who either wants to use the job as a stepping stone or, like Dr. Norris, is somewhere deep into the back nine of a career and wants to max out on his/her retirement?

Maybe I'm being naive, but I was kinda hoping we could find somebody who wanted to innovate here and stick around for the years it will take to make it happen. I don't know if Dr. Gary Norris is that guy (maybe none of them are). Add to this the fact Norris, in true college basketball coach fashion, already held the Sarasota schools hostage by threatening to quit back in 2006 and we basically have a 68 year-old, or so, Steve Alford on our hands.

"NeXt"!

You, They and Everybody Sucks. Sincerely, "Anonymous"

Sorry to bring it up, but occasionally your humble blogger contemplates the "anonymous" comment question. Basically, I'm torn: I don't like comments being "anonymous", but I don't like the idea of having to register for something like a "Google account". Yes, I think Gmail is the greatest thing since the metal filing cabinet circa 1953. Yes, I currently have 2,887 messages in my Gmail inbox (actual figure).

But I just don't like the idea of having to register for something just to speak one's mind.

Hmmm...a dilemma. And sure, it's been a dilemma for forever, but from time to time the "anonymous" comment thing bothers me, and this Superintendent selection process is one of those times.

Personally, I think we should all be upfront and identifiably public on the issue of a new APS leader. Same goes with the recent "6thgraderscan'twriteGate" at my place of employ, Jefferson Middle School. Hiding behind anonymity on subjects like this just seems wrong.

Having blathered on via 'Burque Babble for almost three years now, I'm sure at least one APS personage has been upset that some APS teacher has been publicly trashing APS decision this or political position that. I say this despite the fact that I have NEVER received any request to stop talking about said issues, not from my Principals, the District, nothing.

And that's the way it should be, because if it wasn't that way, and attempts were made to stifle public discussion of education issues by teachers, that would simply force this blog (and others) to go "anonymous" and underground and say far, far nastier things.

There is a responsibility to having your real name on something, even something as silly as a blog, and when it comes to these issues I'd personally prefer that everyone commenting here took on a bit of the same responsibility.

On the other hand, I detest avatars and only have the "frannyzoo" name because way back in the distant, pre You-Tube Internet past everyone thought it was a bad idea to have your real name on the Internet (remember those days?). And I'll change the "frannyzoo" as soon as I stop being lazy about it, and get the gumption to start throwing new link emails to those who choose to link here.

Maybe I should do that today, instead of writing rambling incoherent ambivalent calls for less internet anonymity on educational issues. Point taken. The whole "anonymous" thing is also less of an issue here than on more popular blogs, where trolling is far more rampant.

So why even bring it up? Again, point well taken, but sometimes it just bothers me and it's a windy Sunday morning and I think this is my fourth cup of coffee and there's been about 11 "anonymous" comments in a row.

Grouchy. I think the term here is grouchy.

P.S.: I plan on putting something together about the whole Jefferson MS kids can't write good situation, but think a 10-day or so moratorium on the subject is in order. I'll get around to that later this week.

Saturday Night's Alright For Superintendent Candidate Googling

Late night on a Saturday and here I am trying to dig up dirt on the "finalists" for APS Superintendent.

Pathetic, surely, but I'm probably not the only one so occupied.

Anybody found anything good on:

Winston Brooks, Superintendent, Wichita Public Schools, Wichita, Kan.

Steve Flores, Chief of Staff, Dallas Independent School District, Dallas, Texas

Diego Gallegos, Assistant Superintendent, Albuquerque Public Schools

Thomas Miller, Chief of Staff (Acting Superintendent), Ysleta Independent School District, El Paso, Texas

Gary Norris, Superintendent, Sarasota County School District, Sarasota, Fla.

Linda Sink, Interim Superintendent, Albuquerque Public Schools

yet?

Google is already turning up some interesting tidbits on Brooks (hmm...but this "Frontline" interview is more interesting), Flores (and yes the blog looks even more tawdry than Burque Babble, but the terms "deposition" and "Superintendent candidate" should not go together) and Norris (I like computers, and sure I'd like $350 million of them in my classroom, why not?). Not much on Miller at this point.

For Gallegos and SIW (Super-in-Waiting) Sink we don't need no stinkin' Google.

I am completely uninformed here (like that ever stops me), but I'm putting the early morning line at:

Chances of being next APS Superintendent:

Sink: 1/5
Gallegos: 9/2
Brooks: 5/1
Norris: 5/1
Miller: 10/1
Flores: 50/1 (unfairly high, most probably, but there's the "deposition" and the fact he is currently in Dallas...a fact that needs no further explanation to anyone who, like me, has ever lived anywhere close to the place)
Field (anybody but Sink): 4/1

Wagers, anyone?

Okay, back to more late night Saturday digging, Philly Joe Jones, Dexter Gordon, George Cables and friends helping me on the music side. Am I a party animal or what? In fact, I'm so zany I just might show up at next Friday's swinging Superintendent candidate "Happy Hour" soiree. Move over Amy Winehouse, you got nothing on me.