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The local news is filled with reactions from Irvington's many & myriad administrators and assorted higher-ups (2000 kids; 11 administrators; 2 Teaching-Learning Facilitators; 1 Chief Information Officer & Technology Coordinator*).
My favorite commentator thus far: the soon-to-be-tenured Athletic Director, who is quoted in the high school newspaper saying, "For me it’s not about having the best sports programs, but being able to give our students the first-rate facilities that they have in all their other school-related activities."
First rate facilities, so-so programs -- makes sense to me.
Then tonight I found this letter to the editor, which I'd missed.
The budget process has begun, and it won't be pretty. The district will raise taxes as high as it is legally able to do without voter consent, and it will spend the money on the things administrators want, not the things parents and taxpayers want. Thus our 11 administrators and our 3 tenured non-administrators will devote their time to infusing 21st century skills & media literacy -- both of which appear in our newly approved 20-page Strategic Plan -- into the curriculum.
College preparation & SAT skills will be left to the tutors, as per custom.
That's not good.
from the letter:
Irvington must focus on attracting home buyers to our village. I sold real estate for ten years. The prevailing reason young families want to buy a home in a community is based on the school's academic programs and SAT scores. Never did a buyer ask me about the condition of a field. They also weigh the tax burden.I have made that very point to the board! College prep and SAT scores, I said: win-win. Good for kids, good for parents, good for taxpayers who don't have kids in the schools. Put 'em on the Plan.
Nope. No such luck.
Twenty pages of Goals, Objectives, Activities, Resources, Person(s) Responsible, Timelines, and Evidences of Attainment, and there's no room for college prep.
* Who has tenured Technology Coordinators?
the sky is falling
5 comments:
My husband attended a Poudre school district public info meeting last night. Seems they're short of money. The parents were the ones thinking sensibly here:
More than half of the 40 people attending a community budget meeting Wednesday said small schools with low enrollment are inefficient and would benefit the district financially if they were closed immediately. District officials said PSD would not close small - if any - schools until at least 2010.
The district said that they were "talking" about that option. They can't commit to anything. Next year the school configurations are changing, so these small elementary schools will be losing 6th graders to the middle schools, which will be losing 9th graders to the high schools.
But maybe not all parents were sensible. One man used the forum to complain about how "bad" his son's P.E. teacher was.
What exactly does a a teaching-learning facilitator do? How much are we paying these two?
That's a good strong letter to the editor.
That's a good strong letter to the editor.
No kidding.
It's wonderful.
A teaching-learning facilitator is a teacher who teaches the teachers. Full-time, with tenure (and I assume with a teacher's salary as opposed to an administrator's - though I don't know).
The usual term for this role is "instructional coach." The idea for instructional coaching comes from Jim Knight at the University of Kansas, and is being enthusiastically adopted by school districts everywhere in the country. Parents & taxpayers have no idea this is going on.
I've searched the ERIC database & haven't found a single study showing positive effects of instructional coaches on student achievement, and I don't expect to see such studies any time soon. The teachers with whom I've spoken (in other districts) scoff at instructional coaches, and that's putting it mildly.
Even if the instructional coach were brilliant, the fact is that teachers don't have to do what an instructional coach asks them to do. Instructional coaches have no authority over teachers, and teachers have tenure, which gives them a fair amount of freedom to ignore advice they disagree with.
Last but not least, the instructional coach model conflicts with the one model of school improvement I've been able to find that has worked in an affluent suburban school district -- and which can be adopted with NO further spending at all: "professional learning communities."
I've been meaning for months to get some posts up about professional learning communities, which seem to have been invented by Robert DuFour when he was principal of Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, IL.
The "professional learning community" is simply the teachers in an academic department (math, ELA, science, etc.) working together to improve student achievement.
Teachers meet as a team, pick which state standards they're going to be teaching & when, and write common assessments they're all going to give their students on a certain day.
Then they go teach the material, and administer the assessments.
They go over the assessments together and analyze the results -- and when they see differences in student performance, they can start to adopt each other's approaches.
Over time, DuFour (and others) say, you get steady improvement in teaching AND in student achievement. Apparently Adlai Stevenson High School made massive gains in SAT scores, AP tests, etc., and this was a school where the kids were high-performing to begin with.
One other critical element: when a school adopts a "PLC" approach, it also creates a school-wide plan for dealing with students who, in spite of good teaching & curriculum, aren't learning (due to any factor at all: illness, emotional or behavioral problems, etc.) Adlai Stevenson High School had a clearly spelled-out "3-tier" intervention plan. (Each stage of intervention was more intensive until the 3rd stage where I think students did all homework under supervision.)
The critical factor in a PLC is that THE TEACHERS ARE IN CHARGE.
It's the opposite of a top-down approach to improvement, which is what instructional coaching amounts to (although Knight claims it doesn't).
PLCs are "bottom up"; the analysis & planning & troubleshooting come from the teachers.
The administration's role in this is important: PLCs don't just happen on their own, and a good principal gets it all happening & keeps things on track.
But the real teaching & the real improvement of teaching (&, I would hope, of curriculum) comes from the teachers.
They are the experts.
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