Paul Krugman wrote an Op-Ed piece yesterday in the NY Times
with this title about the way that Britain is dealing with their economy,
writing: “Mr. Osborne isn’t offering the wrong answer to
Britain’s problems; he’s offering an answer to problems Britain doesn’t have,
while ignoring and exacerbating the problems it does.” I’ve read through the materials on the
Montclair Kids First site and what was mailed home and it is clear that the
same could be said about them.
For each problem they identify, they suggest solutions that
would not only not improve the situation, but make it worse. I spent 21 years in the Montclair
Schools. I gave my heart and soul to the
students and the school and believed that students were getting a great
education there. I still believe they
are, but not because of what is being done administratively, but despite it.
The biggest straw man and red herring is looking at the union
as a core problem in the schools. To be
honest, I rarely had much to do with the union.
I rarely sought their assistance and did not even belong to the district
union for my last 7 years. But the union
and the administration had great relationships for most of my time there. When Joe Macaluso and Dennis Murray were in
leadership positions and Michael Osnato and Frank Alverez were superintendents,
the union and the administration worked productively together. The poor relations with the union did not
begin until the Board hired an inexperienced, dogmatic and confrontational leader
to run the schools.
MKF writes that we pay too high taxes and faults the union
for this. This is wrong and
misguided. The costs are high because
the Board of Education is now doing catch-up controlling costs that they should
have gotten a handle on long ago.
Frankly, I was shocked at how little oversight was given to controlling
costs at the school. Until just a few
years ago, almost a quarter of the teachers in the high school taught four
classes, including all the English teachers and all the teachers in small
learning communities.
The oversight of Special Education is abysmal. The costs are unbelievable. Families consistently tell me that they moved
to Montclair because their children had disabilities and that the district was
known to send students out-of-district, at a cost (including transportation) of
about $70,000 per student. There was
virtually nothing done to improve the Special Education teachers’ instructional
ability or oversee what was going on in the classroom. African American students, particularly
males, continue to be classified at an incredibly high rate yet little was ever
done to actually meet their needs except profligate spending. The school is extremely heavy in case
managers, psychologists, social workers, therapists, etc., and they generally
were quite good, but left the oversight of the teachers to a weak
administrator. The result was, and
continues to be, a huge expenditure without any oversight of instruction.
The answer from MKF is using the PARCC test to assess teacher
performance. This is another red herring
for all students (more on this later)
but absurd for the Special Education students.
The test is not designed for and totally inappropriate for students with
intellectual disabilities. Depending on
tests to determine teacher performance is like expecting your children to do
their laundry well and punishing them for doing it poorly, or not at all, when
you never did any work showing them how to do the laundry, not overseeing what
they were doing and not doing the hard word day by day, making sure they are
improving what they are doing.
It is insulting to imply, as MKF does, that the parent PARCC opt
out movement is union led. Why do
parents object to the PARCC? Because it
does nothing to help their kids! It
takes tens of hours out of instruction for every student, not to mention
millions of dollars out of the school budgets and hundreds of hours of
administration time, to give a test that is used as a cudgel on teachers
without holding accountable the administrators who are asleep at the switch. The results provide little to help teachers
work with their children.
The issue at Montclair schools is not that there is not enough
management and control. There is too
much management and control of behavior and woefully inadequate oversight of
education. Where I work, we have peace
with the union. All teachers teach 6
classes. Special Education instruction
is strong and costs are controlled. We
have high school supervisors for each academic area and there are excellent
relations between the Board, the superintendent, the teachers and the
community. Why? Because the emphasis is where it should
be: on the needs of students and on the
quality of education.
Montclair has good education going on for economic
reasons. Schools, including mine, are
not hiring expensive teachers. Thus the
teaching staff is stuck where they are.
Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to work together with a staff,
Montclair, particularly the high school, has chosen the route of
confrontation. It is insulting that most
of administrators in the high school are overseeing departments that they have
no experience in. The English
Department, after pushing out of the nation’s top administrators, Jim Aquavia
(also a National Teacher of the Year), was led by Shirlene Powell-Sanders and
James Earle, who each had no experience (or talent) in overseeing English
instruction. Imagine being an English teacher
and being told what to teach and how to teach by persons who never taught
English, knew nothing about the subject and considered hands-on oversight of
the education as their last priority. It
was like having your plumber do eye surgery and your eye surgeon doing your
plumbing.
The morale of the teachers is as poor as one can
imagine. The teachers have taken to
seeking refuge in their classrooms.
There is no sense of community in the high school. It does not have to be, but this is the path
that the administration has chosen and MKF is advocating. The Board certainly needs to have oversight
of what is going on in the schools and this does not mean hiring more leaders
who are managers. They need to hire
leaders who are educators and team builders.
Here, they have fallen down on the job and should be held accountable.
The poor relations between the teachers/union and the
administration is not a consequence of the leadership not achieving what they
wanted to do, but a direct result of what Penny MacCormack and the Board, in
hiring her, wanted to achieve. The
irony was amazing in the letter from
Susan Weintraub in the Montclair Times.
She wrote that “state and national union activists [are] using Montclair
as a testing ground for their agendas, contrary to the interests of Montclair
students”. This is exactly what was done
in the hiring of Penny MacCormack in the attempt to take the urban schools
initiative from the Broad Superintendent Academy into the suburbs. We see how the Broad methodology is playing
out in Newark and it is unsurprising that hostility and conflict emerged in
Montclair.
Montclair Cares About Schools arose out of opposition to a
lazy and misguided approach to leadership.
Having good schools is hard work.
It is daily work to oversee and improve teaching and education. It is responding to things that will not come
to your attention. The administration of
the Montclair Schools are seeking to improve education by rubrics, by demanding
rather than earning loyalty, by expecting improvement without leadership or
mentoring. Educational research has
shown time and again that the way to improve the achievement gap is by
encouraging a meaningful relationship between teachers and students. This has been ignored as a value in Montclair
and the “reform” movement.
So why is there a problem with Montclair Kids First? For one, it is an exclusive group of white
residents, none of whom are educators, purporting to know what is best for
education, particularly for closing the achievement gap while fighting for
lower taxes. MCAS was developed in
response to the misguided mistake of hiring a dogmatic ideologue to run our
schools. She is gone. It is time to move on and hire an
inspirational leader and educator. We
need someone who does not have an ideology to implement other than on improving
the education of students, the morale of the community and the financial
security of our schools and town. We
need someone who is a healer and works to unite the community, not divide it.
MKF grew out of support for Dr. MacCormack and the Board that
hired her. It was an error in
judgment. It is time to move on and seek
to heal the wounds. MKF seeks to not
only continue the disunity, but make it worse.
They are using legal means to obtain and publish e-mails of Michelle
Fine and David Cummings, those they see as opponents. They do not seek to support the schools but
to undermine them. If you want good
schools, seek the support of the teachers in a common purpose. If you want to prove that public schools are
failing, you undermine teachers by challenging their professionalism, their job
security and their integrity and make them feel that their worth is determined
by tests results and the judgments of those who have no expertise in their
subject.
MKF is not about improving schools and education. It is time to move on.