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Editorial: New schools chief should embrace and drive change
February 19, 2012
The criteria for a new superintendent suggest Spokane Public Schools is looking for a superman, or woman, with a mortarboard instead of a cape.
The district’s board of directors and the consultants hired to manage the selection process did an admirable job of outreach to parents, staff and the community, and they received a wealth of comments as a result. Not all of the 900-plus commenters were on the same page.
The feedback was distilled to a list of 12 “desired characteristics,” an outline that will be difficult for any single human being to fill in. With luck, many will try.
Candidates will find a district that has improved student performance, stemmed the dropout rate and significantly upgraded school buildings. The consultant noted, and Tuesday’s levy election results affirmed, strong community support for K-12 education. Schools here do not have the resources available in wealthier, less diverse areas, but they still offer academic programs from special education to Advanced Placement and a broad array of arts and athletic programs, all to a student population that speaks dozens of languages in addition to, or besides, English.
There are failings, particularly a math curriculum that is either ill-conceived or ill-taught, but certainly ill thought of. As an organization, the district remains top-heavy in numbers and compensation. A superintendent willing to flatten the hierarchy should be given a steamroller.
And applicants may also have the opportunity to take over just as the state is finally changing the way teachers and principals are evaluated. As the week ended, the Legislature was close to an agreement that will give greater weight to performance when contracts come up for renewal. Eventually, charter schools may become an option.
A new superintendent should embrace the changes, and the potential they offer for more students to find the learning environment that works best for them. Once the board sets goals – presumably thoroughly discussed during candidate interviews – the superintendent should have a mandate to take what measures are necessary to reach them with as free a hand as possible.
The eventual pick will assess the principals who assess the teachers, who will be evaluated according to the progress made by their students. There should be a meritocracy from bottom to top, and that’s why picking the strongest candidate is so important. A 2006 study by a Denver education consultant concluded that “defined autonomy” – setting clear learning goals, then letting principals determine how they may best be achieved – correlated directly with student achievement.
Secondarily, the superintendent should be an excellent communicator, not just to constituencies within the district, and with its partners in higher education, but also in Olympia and even Washington, D.C.
The district, which expects to make a selection by April, has posted search information online at www.spokaneschools.org.
Stay tuned. Spokane children deserve the best.
To respond to this editorial online, go to www.spokesman.com and click on Opinion under the Topics menu.
The only way Spokane’s schools could be inproved would be to make them private. Then the $250,000 Super’s salary could be spent on children.
First off, as a teacher, I would like to say I hope the tone of this editorial portends a change from the Spokesman Review’s long standing position that everything at Spokane Public Schools is “just fine.”
Your paper’s almost syrup-like sweetness towards the district’s administrators and board members has caused many of us to view your paper’s staff with a jaundiced eye while dismissing your coverage of education-related issues as biased in the extreme. Your paper has seemed for some time to be little more than a Public Relations branch of the district.
So if you have awakened from your journalistic slumber and stand ready to assist a new superintendent in clearing the way for students to reach their potential - congratulations!
Good title, by the way. Any new schools chief should embrace and drive change. If our elected school board can see their way clear to accept the type of change required, and articulate that change to the new superintendent, then he or she should get the public, and your paper’s, support in making that change.
Change… Which changes are needed?
The public has articulated many areas where change is needed. The teachers have articulated many of the same areas. These areas-of-needed-change have been clear to the end-users of the district’s product for some time. The data have been clear for the same amount of time - our district is, and has been, failing its students, parents and community for quite a while. Remediation rates and drop out rates have steadily increased under Nancy Stowell and her predecessor.
Why?
Much of the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Superintendent. Advising the board on educational matters she, and to an extent, her predecessor, embraced a staff of advisors who are ideologically wed to a deleterious combination of constructivist pedagogy (teaching approach) and a level of micromanagement of teachers that has embittered teaching staff across the district.
The board bears their share of blame as well. They have either been taken in by this crowd of administrators along the way, or share their near-religious belief in discovery learning to the point of deafness where their constituents are concerned.
So, yes, the new superintendent should embrace and execute change:
Embrace outcomes-based measurement of the effectiveness of his or her administrative staff.
Embrace the classroom rather than the boardroom.
Embrace the taxpayer - Trim the ineffective staff AND unnecessary staff positions at the head of this organization.
Drive change, from a one-size-fits-all approach to instruction and curricula selection to a teacher-based system. Then let the chips fall where they may in the evaluation program.
But our board must first articulate the community’s desired changes to the new superintendent and require that he or she drive those changes through to completion.
I have serious doubts that the current board will act in that fashion - they love their administrators…
That leaves it to you, Spokesman Review, and local citizens, to stay on the case until the board expresses the will of the people to the new superintendent, and sees that he or she “gets it.”