The Function of the Central Office
Two things have got me thinking about the School District Central staff.
1) The unspeakable crime of standardized materials for the express purpose of committing the greater crime of scripted lessons. This is a natural result of Parkinson's Law and the incessant creeping growth of administrative systems.
2) The audit that found that Seattle Public Schools had significantly more supervisors and administrators than other districts and the way that cuts came to the Central office. First it was going to be $5 million, then $4 million, then $3.8 million. Now we learn that the positions cut were not the supervisors or administrators but clerks, janitors and copy machine repair people.
Here's what I'm thinking: We need to take a fresh look at the purpose of the Central Staff. Then we need to narrow their mission - severely - particularly when it comes to Learning and Teaching.
There are three legitimate roles for the Central Office in Learning and Teaching:
1) writing curricula
2) monitoring for quality and effectiveness
3) sending out targeted improvement teams to support struggling students, teachers, and principals
They should be able to do it all with a MUCH smaller staff. It should just be the CAO and five to eight education directors, the four program managers (Special Ed, Bilingual, Advanced Learning, and Intervention), and a few curriculum experts (reading, writing, math, science, art, music, P.E., CTE, international/world language)
After them, the Central Office should have some teacher and principal coaches - with expertise in the specific programs and curricula areas - to dispatch to identified trouble spots, and some teacher and principal coaches - again, with expertise in the specific programs and curricula areas - who are making a regular circuit - doing both checking for quality and effectiveness and coaching.
I don't know why they need anything more than that.
The only supervisors they need are the education directors and the only other administrators they need are the program managers and curriculum heads. Everyone else should be on the front line in the school buildings working with students, teachers, or principals.
Of course, the Central office will also have to have operations staff, such as HR people, IT people, legal, Enrollment, Facilities, Accounting, Transportation, and Nutrition Services and such to take care of those sorts of operational things, but really, not a lot more. It should be a really flat organization.
Is that how it is now? When Kathleen Vasquez spoke to the Board about the need to hire a consultant to come in and write the aligned curriculum she explained how few people each department had and how these folks did not have time to do this work. So maybe the District's Central Office is already this sparse - or sparser. Somehow I don't believe it.
Do we really need someone at the District level to head up programs like Gear Up! or IGNITE or Proyecto Saber? Could it be run out of the Intervention office? Do we really need someone specifically to take charge of Program Placement?
I wonder if there really is any place that we could cut if we sharply re-focused the purpose of the JSCEE. What do you all think?
1) The unspeakable crime of standardized materials for the express purpose of committing the greater crime of scripted lessons. This is a natural result of Parkinson's Law and the incessant creeping growth of administrative systems.
2) The audit that found that Seattle Public Schools had significantly more supervisors and administrators than other districts and the way that cuts came to the Central office. First it was going to be $5 million, then $4 million, then $3.8 million. Now we learn that the positions cut were not the supervisors or administrators but clerks, janitors and copy machine repair people.
Here's what I'm thinking: We need to take a fresh look at the purpose of the Central Staff. Then we need to narrow their mission - severely - particularly when it comes to Learning and Teaching.
There are three legitimate roles for the Central Office in Learning and Teaching:
1) writing curricula
2) monitoring for quality and effectiveness
3) sending out targeted improvement teams to support struggling students, teachers, and principals
They should be able to do it all with a MUCH smaller staff. It should just be the CAO and five to eight education directors, the four program managers (Special Ed, Bilingual, Advanced Learning, and Intervention), and a few curriculum experts (reading, writing, math, science, art, music, P.E., CTE, international/world language)
After them, the Central Office should have some teacher and principal coaches - with expertise in the specific programs and curricula areas - to dispatch to identified trouble spots, and some teacher and principal coaches - again, with expertise in the specific programs and curricula areas - who are making a regular circuit - doing both checking for quality and effectiveness and coaching.
I don't know why they need anything more than that.
The only supervisors they need are the education directors and the only other administrators they need are the program managers and curriculum heads. Everyone else should be on the front line in the school buildings working with students, teachers, or principals.
Of course, the Central office will also have to have operations staff, such as HR people, IT people, legal, Enrollment, Facilities, Accounting, Transportation, and Nutrition Services and such to take care of those sorts of operational things, but really, not a lot more. It should be a really flat organization.
Is that how it is now? When Kathleen Vasquez spoke to the Board about the need to hire a consultant to come in and write the aligned curriculum she explained how few people each department had and how these folks did not have time to do this work. So maybe the District's Central Office is already this sparse - or sparser. Somehow I don't believe it.
Do we really need someone at the District level to head up programs like Gear Up! or IGNITE or Proyecto Saber? Could it be run out of the Intervention office? Do we really need someone specifically to take charge of Program Placement?
I wonder if there really is any place that we could cut if we sharply re-focused the purpose of the JSCEE. What do you all think?
Comments
WV: unwayoff
I guess that means he is "wayon."
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/m_aboutus/index.dxml
I have not for the life of me figured out how to provide a direct link.
Sorry
The most intriguing thing about your comments is if we're really spending more centrally than other comparable districts, but in making that comparison I'd want to think hard about the comparableness of the other district, and whether we account for funds in the same way.
Check this for the largest drop in WASL 10 math history:
MATH
10th Grade .... Year to year
Year . : . State . : . change
1998-99 : 33.00%
1999-00 : 35.00% : 2.00%
2000-01 : 38.90% : 3.90%
2001-02 : 37.30% : -1.60%
2002-03 : 39.40% : 2.10%
2003-04 : 43.90% : 4.50%
2004-05 : 47.50% : 3.60%
2005-06 : 51.00% : 3.50%
2006-07 : 50.40% : -0.60%
2007-08 : 49.60% : -0.80%
2008-09 : 45.26% : -4.34%
There you have it a record setting drop of 4.34 points smashing the old record drop of 1.60
Perhaps the SPS Directors need to ignore OSPI Math director of learning Greta Bornemann's advice.
Patch fixes of the flawed centralized machine will not cut it.
Clearly the Central Admin believes they can not do the job without enormous resources ... but what is their record of accomplishment?
Much of what the JSCEE has done in the area of curriculum and instruction would have been better left undone.
Give me autonomous principals responsible to their school's trustees.
Decision making that is closer to the family level would be an enormous improvement to the misguide views from the JSCEE.
Nationally only 43% of those employed in public education are teachers.
Amazingly in many other countries that have national standards this scripting idea is rejected.
We've heard that line about "Fidelity of Implementation" and it is pure rubbish.
--------
Here is a link to a video from the Fordham Institute that hosted a symposium on how other countries arrived at their national standards.
Please pay particular attention to the lady from Germany. It resonates a lot with what we are going through.
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2009/05/video- national-standards-in-other- nations/
I found it particularly interesting that National Standards do not mean Federal Standards.
It sure appears this is the next coming wave ... and no I am not particularly enthusiastic ... but time will tell.
There's a lot of interesting information in there.
Let's start with the fact that THEY HAVE 22 NETWORK ANALYSTS ON STAFF!! WTF! They ought to be able to support 1/2 the state's schools! Plus the group manager makes 23. Wow! That doesn't count the Network Systems group, the Systems Operations group, the Help Desk team, the Tech Training team, and on and on it goes.
Here's something that I'm not sure how to mention without pissing off someone, but here goes...
Look at the Academic Technology Services group. Yes, this would appear to be the group responsible for technology related to student information and assignment. Where it's unclear why they can't get the damn data off the Vax and onto a cheap $3k server and call it a day.
Unless I'm misreading the names, both managers and 9 out of 10 dev/dba positions are women. Wow, let me say that again. 11 out of 12 positions in that department, including both managers, are women. In a field that is absolutely dominated by men.
According to the Computing Research Association, the number of women receiving bachelor's degrees in the computing professions is less than 20% (used to be a bit higher, but not much). Now I applaud and encourage women in technology, and I wish that number was higher, but it isn't. And to be quite frank, in the software world, the women are ON AVERAGE not on par with the men (and the TOP women devs generally agree with this). There are some outstanding women developers, but they are rare (and if you find one keep her at all costs!).
So what are the odds that this very strange imbalance could happen by random chance? Let's say 25% of devs overall are female. The odds of the first seat being filled by a woman is 1/4. The first and second, 1/8. The first 11 seats? less than 1 in 4,000. Yes, the one male in the last seat reduces that a bit, but I'm not going to do that math right now.
Something is really wrong with this picture. I don't know any of these people personally, and some of them may be excellent devs. But from an external, results-oriented standpoint, the group does not seem to be effective or well run.
A common problem in technical management is that when mediocre people move up to management roles they either don't recognize or understand the unique talent requirements and/or they are intimidated by them. So they have a tendency to hire people at or below their own competency level. Eventually things implode, often with a lot of collateral damage. Perhaps the blame should roll all the way up the CIO?
It feels a bit dirty to bring something like this up in public, since these people have real names, and lives, and any one of them might be a hidden gem. But something is very strange in that department - a department that is going to be under a great deal of scrutiny in the coming months.
Here's the direct link:
SPS Org Charts
To do the link, you use HTML tags (referred to just below the box where you enter comments). The easiest ones are bold and italics. You just put (b) before and (/b) after what you want in bold--BUT you use the pointy brackets instead of curved parentheses. The link requires that you use an anchor (a) with pointy brackets. If you google HTML help anchor you should be able to find some directions like here: HTML Help.
(I can't use the pointy brackets --or whatever they're called--in my explanation because the text would just be bolded and you wouldn't see the brackets. I don't really speak html--I'm just plugging in as I have been told! There may be better help out there--I just picked one that came up.)
dan dempsey said...
Sahila....
If these instructions are unclear
You can write me at
dempsey_dan@yahoo.com
it is much easier to write this in an email.
to blog write the following I had to substitue "{" and "}" for "<" and ">"
---------------
to construct a hot link linking http://www.this.com to the word here
use anchor link tags in the following way:
{a href="
then the address after the quotation mark http://www.this.com
close it with
"}
then comes the anchor word here
which is followed by {/a}
remember that "{" and "}"
must be replaced with "<" and ">"
for this to work.
As I was watching that bit, I couldn't help but think back to my day, when we had counselors in the schools who spent a significant amount of their time working with with college representatives, and state and district personnel to ensure students were college ready when they graduated. A couple meetings back, as they were talking excitedly about the MAP or NAP or whatever, they were all looking forward to the day, at long last, when they could get "real-time feedback" to see how kids were doing, then provide any necessary "interventions."
Are these new concepts to this group? Why do we need to bring in a bunch of Gates Foundation Alumni at a cost of almost a million bucks to ensure our kids are college ready, and why do we need computers and software to tell us how kids are doing? How about asking the teacher in the classroom who knows first-hand how a kid is doing?
What drives me nuts is how they speak about this stuff as if its all new, and isn't already being done, to justify huge expenditures for the latest, greatest technology. Come On! I-Phones are great, but how many of us really NEED one? And how much ACTUAL WORK do we perform with them? They are spending our tax dollars on Neato-Gizmos that could very well be the next VAX - which somehow translates to "the perfect excuse for everything we haven't done."
22 Analysts? I agree with none111, WTF is right!
If so, that wasn't Kathleen, that was someone higher up that particular food chain.
Kathleen is under orders to identify common texts. She has been working with LA teachers to do this. I'm not sure she has much to do with the consultant hiring.
But maybe you mean Kathleen spoke at some other time?
Kathleen is short, dark hair; the woman speaking at the board meeting 6.17.09 was not her.
Kathleen is a very knowledgeable literacy expert.
I have heard no discussion of this. It came as a complete surprise. Does anyone have any information on the centralization of the lunch program?
Thanks. I found it.
Here is his reply:
"Thank you for the suggested reading. I have not read the book by Mr Dimmock. There are several books that all the board have copies of and have read and are reading they include:
"What School Boards Can Do" by Donald McAdams
"School Reform from the Inside Out" by Richard F. Elmore
" a framework for Understanding Poverty" by Ruby K. Payne"
Has anyone read any of these works and is what the Board/Super doing at all aligned with the contents of same? I am still (vainly?) trying to understand why they are doing what they are doing, when it flies in the face of international developments which have been going on for more than two decades...
"Unless I'm misreading the names, both managers and 9 out of 10 dev/dba positions are women. Wow, let me say that again. 11 out of 12 positions in that department, including both managers, are women. In a field that is absolutely dominated by men.
According to the Computing Research Association, the number of women receiving bachelor's degrees in the computing professions is less than 20% (used to be a bit higher, but not much)."
This is the sort of question that I love to give to my AP Stats students. If the true proportion of women in this field is 20%, the probability of 11 out of the 12 positions being filled by women is .000000004096. In other words pretty darn small.
Surely the proportion of women varies according to the specific area they work in, though? I would expect to see more women programmers in education- and government-related jobs. Also, once you have more than a certain number of women in one department, that in itself becomes proof that the department isn't hostile to hiring women, and more women than average are likely to apply for that reason.
Incidentally, there are more than 16,000 school districts in this country. It's pretty depressing if it's not reasonable for even *one* of them to have a tech department that's mostly women. (My sister once worked in an office that was nearly all left-handed people; as only about 12 percent of the population is left-handed, that was just about as unlikely a statistical result as this one, and there was no obvious selection mechanism.)
I completely agree about the bloat in the department and about the kind of forces that may be leading to mediocrity and worse, but I don't see any reason at all to blame that on the sex of the software developers. It is not as if there were any shortage of incompetent male software developers, goodness knows.
I'm told by cynical friends in the field that there are few really, really good developers or database analysts out there, and the best ones have their pick and are highly unlikely to end up in jobs like this. And many people who write good code are rather egotistical about it and aren't good at working in cooperation with a larger system, or at managing others.
I also wonder what proportion of these jobs are done by people whose main degrees aren't in computer science (who therefore aren't represented by the breakdown of the sexes in CS degrees). Certainly in IT as a whole lots of folks have no CS degree at all. In any case, the percentage has changed a good deal over the years (and surely varies widely from one institution to another): in 1984 women earned 37% of bachelor's degrees in computer science in the US.
Helen Schinske
Some of the ego-centric write good code, more likely they don't really write good code, but they and their manager might think so, thus allowing them to remain ego-centric in ways that hurt the overall effort.
I'd say that there's a strong likelihood that these aren't the top performers in their field, especially the managers, because a good manager can work for much more pay. And since this isn't a computer company, their bosses don't know who is good either or what to expect, to ensure that work is being done well.
I never understood why the VAX surprise hit during the earlier phase of SAP work. Why oh why didn't someone with some initiative, some thinking and planning ahead, some knowledge of the field, some drive, something, hadn't developed a plan to modernize the hardware/software. It just stikes me that it is likely similar to other complaints about district HQ, that it is fiefdoms more involved in hunkering down and protecting their jobs than seeing what's good for the district long term.
They have done that with building maintenance and now more buildings are in more need of maintenance beyond basic maintenance.
And I also think that while none1111's reasoning may be a little gender biased and rudely put, but I think there's an element of truth. There's something to it not being a department with a lot of strong assertive knowledgeable people, especially managers.
A strong (and may I say it, male) manager would have argued to modernize the hardware and software and cut staff years ago. Cutting staff would have saved way more money than the cost of the equipment.
Here's the link:
http://www.cgcs.org/publications/Seattle_operations.pdf
And here's the district's assessment of that review:
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/board/050708agenda/cgcspeerreview.pdf
Of HR, the council noted, among MANY other issues (page 5) that "the most basic personnel information... is not compiled, tracked, monitored or reported."
For finance (p15) "Most of the work of financial staff members is transctional in nature rather than strategic or analytic." (Duh. We could have told them that and spared them the expense of flying in a bunch of people and putting them up at the Hotel Vintage Plaza). Also of finance (again p15): "the culture appears to be one in which it is easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission."
And for DoTS? Oy. Their total budget supports a staff of 101 FTEs (p24). I have no idea where to start on the criticisms of the department, but will point out that the feeling here that they're waay over-staffed is also noted in the peer review (p28), in which they note the ratio of DoTS employees to students enrolled in the district, compare it to other districts and rather tactfully note DoTS doed not appear to be EITHER under-staffed or under-resourced (and don't move to the next point, which is that its myriad problems, then, cannot be blamed on a lack of any kind of resources). Also, it's probably safe to say that any review that includes the phrase "redundancies, confusion and a lack of accountability" (also p28) is NOT a good review.
There are interesting and unsettling differences between the original review and the district presentation summarizing it.
Of the audit's "commendations."
"Positive, “can-do” attitude of DoTSstaff"
Please note that the district presentation of the audit ended with this bullet point regarding Dept of Technology Services:
Detailed analysis of each finding and associated corrective action being planned. Will create a comprehensive plan as a part of the rollout of the strategic plan
Wow, more promises for that Strategic Plan. Whatever happened to that Plan?
Here's a list of the management tree. And this isn't all of them, there's preschool and birth to 3 (another management/consultant tree), there's a whole related services management team too. And these aren't published on the website at this point. Notice: managers of consultants, managing a whopping 2 reports. Notice: managers "managing" K-8's... What? There's like 5 schools? And then, she's got a supervisor just managing her and the middle school consulting teacher. That's heavy lifting.
These people do exactly 1 job, place kids in schools. They never actually "consult" on educational matters, they never advise teachers, they never make "best practice recommendations", they don't deal with students at all. And, they don't train anybody either. Supposedly, that one job, placement, is going away. ??? They switch them around so often, they often know absolutely nothing about the programs they supposedly place and consult for. I spoke to one managing consultant that didn't even know which schools were on her caseload, or what the program or schools were like. Zip. Ridiculous. Further, we have de-centralized decision-making, so these people actually don't even have authority to improve the quality of education for any kid, even if they wanted to. Principal just does what he wants. Ok, so bag the consultants.
We're talking 6 figures a pop here (or near abouts).
"Allow recruiters to contract with highly qualified applicants."
Really, seriously that needed to be recommended?
Based on other comments, I have to go with SPS HQ culture as generally incompetent. You have stand outs like Tracy Libros, who knows her job inside out and is a beacon in an otherwise craptacular fiefdom, but this VAX situation has been kicked around for a decade. Plenty of money has gone down the rabbit hole. SPS could've done 2 upgrades by now. Did someone from the failed KC conversion sign on as a consultant?
I wonder what things would look like if someone like Libros were elevated to sup?
I think we are being sidetracked by the gender thing.
People like Chris Jackins and others have been complaining for years about the size of the central office. The audit just makes it completely 100% clear. And completely in keeping with the Central Office culture and behavior to simply tell the board that they plan to offer a detailed analysis of the conclusions and actions along with the Strategic Plan. Remember that scene at the very end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That's where all the Central Office plans end up too.
I've worked with VAXen. I've also got several years of database management/query experience. There's no question that the VAX (running, I assume, VMS) is a freakin' dinosaur, and the frequently expressed view of our readership that "well, just slap it over onto a modern server!" is ludicrous.
It's like taking grandpa's Model A and saying, "well, just slap a hybrid gas/electric engine in it!" Really. It's just like that.
Now, I don't know what DB program the district uses. One would think they could export the various databases in some importable format. But without knowing that for sure, we're all just complaining that they're using old, old, REALLY REALLY OLD, technology. Yeah they are.
That said: Migrating to a real system, with modern db software, should be no more than a pain in the tuckus. If they can't manage this in, say, 3-6 months, heads should roll. Based on my professional experience, this sounds like the kind of job you hire a handful of jobbers to do in three months. Bear in mind, I don't know the current software specs or capabilities. Still, it's hard to believe it'd take more than that.
As an example, ten years ago our db manager took several disparate data sets, on different platforms, with tens of millions of records, and migrated them all onto a single accessible platform, in about six months. Working by herself. It can be done, if the client wants it done.
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/newassign/faq_computersystem.html#currentcomp
There are some here who have said ludicrous things like get some grad students to do it in a weekend or something, but there are others who have some knowledge of what it would take. The hardware needed is not exorbitant. The time and expertise needed is not exorbitant. Afterwards the number of developers and DBA people needed to maintain the new system is not exorbitant. Wouldn't you agree that it would not take 8 developers plus two managers? Cut three salaries and there you go, you pay for the hardware, the three months of getting help in the port of the data and purchasing/configuring the new software AND have ongoing savings.
Going to WenG's analogy to Microsoft. Another reason why Microsoft can have a strong leader is that they are accountable to people who are informed. If some department at Microsoft had a department still writing and maintaining DOS programs because they don't have the money to upgrade, how long do you think that manager would last? How long would those employees last, that only know DOS and can't or won't adapt to modern technology?
I wish the superintendent would turn her laser focus on her own building for a change, read these reports and clean some house.
--> Bingo! You get the prize! They would have (should have) saved enough money by moving off that system long ago that it's not funny. It's about little fiefdoms.
Dorothy: "They are writing and maintaining support software for one district. That's not full-time work for 8 plus people, not at all. "
Actually 12 positions, including the 2 managers, plus they have an open req!
And Dorothy: "And I also think that while none1111's reasoning may be a little gender biased and rudely put, but I think there's an element of truth. There's something to it not being a department with a lot of strong assertive knowledgeable people, especially managers."
Yes, I probably was a little less "gentle" about it than I could have been, but there's something wrong in that department, there has been for a long time, and the gender balance is very, very odd. I suspect that the managers are not top notch, and have hired people at or below their own competency level.
Look, all the talk about how hard this migration is is total BS. The data IS being backed up, isn't it? That means the data can already be exported from the Vax itself. If the data is not being backed up (and off-site) then there is a massive problem to the degree that the management should be sacked immediately.
The new system is basically going to be comprised of 3 parts, the student data, the map data, and the algorithms. You can get the student data off in effing plain comma delimited text, if you need to, that cannot be hard! Get it off there via whatever means - plug a damn serial cable in and print the records out student by student via serial port if you need to! Just get the data off the box. It's 50k records, that's nothing. 50 million records would be cause for some concern.
The map data is a little more interesting. I suspect that this type of data is readily available for purchase, and that the price is small relative to salaries, and for an organization the size of SPS, but I don't have specific knowledge.
The last part is the logic behind the assignments. And that needs to be written essentially from scratch, and has nothing at all to do with the Vax. It shouldn't be more than 3-4 months for a (one!) seasoned professional, maybe a bit more if the map data is not easy to work with -- but this is all once the process has been solidified and documented! Of course that will take some time, but it's not strictly a software development issue, it's more of a rules/process document.
I'm just getting steamed up because it's ridiculous that this has gone on for so long, and the staff is pulling the wool over the Board's eyes. This is NOT rocket science!
They HAVE the names and addresses on other computers. What else is there in the student data?
Helen Schinske