Odds and Ends
Executive Director
Some readers have been doing some investigating and found a real puzzler: how did Bree Dusseault get her job? She doesn't meet the qualifications currently listed for someone to fill her old regional position:
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
Education:Master’s degree in education or closely related field
Experience:
Five (5) or more years of successful experience as a Principal, Supervisor or District Administrator
Preferred Qualifications:
Demonstrated experience across grade spans (Pre-K - 12)
She has one year of experience as a principal of a small charter middle school that had only 50 students and 5 teachers. She claims to have been Founding Principal of New Orleans Charter Middle School but checking, it looks like the school was founded in 1998. It was a good school until Hurricane Katrina wiped it out. She re-opened it in 2007 and left at the end of the school year.
She has had three years experience teaching high school math, one year as a middle school principal, and has no experience teaching in or administering elementary schools.
Granted, sometimes candidates can prove their worth beyond their qualifications but given her performance with the Ingraham situation, you have to wonder.
Budget
I'm hearing that 6 administrative employees in Nutrition Services got raises. This as we continue to cut counselors, teachers and maintenance staff. I wrote to the Board to ask this about this but no answers yet.
After the Legislative Session, we find our district still $4M in the hole. From the Super:
We will be discussing potential solutions to the $4 million gap during our June 8 work session with the School Board. We will bring a proposed budget to the Board on June 15, with scheduled action on July 6. There will be a public hearing on the proposed 2011-12 budget on Wednesday, June 22 in the John Stanford Center auditorium.
Ingraham
The Washington Policy Center's Liv Finne weighs in on the Ingraham situation at the Times.
Public schools are not organized to maximize the energy and talent of educators. For example, school principals in Seattle lack the authority they need to improve student learning. Instead, Seattle Public Schools has chosen a command-and-control strategy to run the schools, with the five-year strategic plan, Excellence for All.
This plan, now in its third year, has failed to raise student achievement. Its central feature is to require school principals to meet mountainous paperwork requirements, including the writing of Continuous School Improvement Plans, to name just one.
By now it's obvious that Excellence for All is not working.
She does get a few things wrong:
Consider Ingraham's staff. The principal cannot decide who does or does not teach at Ingraham.
Not true. The principals are part of the hiring committee. Can a principal prevent some assignments? Not all the time.
Further:
This plan, now in its third year, has failed to raise student achievement. Its central feature is to require school principals to meet mountainous paperwork requirements, including the writing of Continuous School Improvement Plans, to name just one.
By now it's obvious that Excellence for All is not working.
She does get a few things wrong:
Consider Ingraham's staff. The principal cannot decide who does or does not teach at Ingraham.
Not true. The principals are part of the hiring committee. Can a principal prevent some assignments? Not all the time.
Further:
Teachers at Ingraham High are micromanaged by the central district. For example, the district requires Ingraham's teachers to use the weak Discovery Series math curriculum, a curriculum judged "mathematically unsound" by the state Board of Education.
Interesting reading.
Playground
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Comments
I have heard that she had applied for a coach job, and that someone in HR pushed her up to the Exec Director position because they were having a tough time finding canidates that met the qualifications for that position, and thought that her research work could be substituted for actual experience.
No knock to her for taking the bigger job if offered to her. Let's hope that for the new NW Ex Director, they hire someone who is appropriately qualified and experienced. There has to be a principal or two out there who is deserving of a move up the ladder a la Phil Brockman. Thoughts?
UW Application for U-ACT
Sent back for re-do
UW-PESB emails
UW needs a tutorial and TFA's lawyer
Clearly NOT obvious to School Board ... budget still $4 million off ... and SE gets Bree as a ...... what? to do what? at what cost?
Humm how is the Central Admin reduction in spending going?
Any thoughts on how to improve student learning? it is highly unlikely that continuing to follow a very poor expensive and ineffective plan is warranted but the Board does nothing.
Michael DeBell has raised concerns as to whether the coaching model is working?
Hey Mr. DeBell as Liv Finne wrote:
"By now it's obvious that Excellence for All is not working."
So what is your response?
---- Oh gee I forgot about TfA and the new policy D43.00 with no mention of interventions ... I guess that must be your response.
-- Dan Dempsey
There is no mention of how to help students catch up. Instead of doing individualized plans for students in need of intervention,
Enfield's plan is to do individualized plans for the principals and, likely to follow, teachers.
Schools need warm bodies to help students get double doses of the coursework they are struggling with, the math curriculum needs to change (or let schools opt into Singapore), and Bree and Michael's time would be well-spent doing individual plans for the at-risk students they should be helping.
Instead, Susan Enfield's plan is to make the principals and staffs feel at-risk. When the schools are not successful (which they won't be without interventions for students), Enfield and Co. can pass the blame onto the schools.
This transparency is just too transparent.
Signed, Stop being MIA, Directors DeBell and Smith-Blum
"The districts in this partnership believe that teachers prepared through the partnership with Teach for America...will address regularly experienced shortages and bring a unique set of skills and perspectives that will help the districts close the achievement gap.
"We anticipate 35 candidates the first year and 50 in subsequent years."
The application claims SPS and Fed Way may need TFA-ers for Special Ed and ELL programs as well as math and science.
The UW Dean of Ed (Tom Stritikus) signed the application May 20. There was no sig from Enfield at that time.
-skeptical-
Bree has the "correct" ideological beliefs, which overrides any other requirements.
If the directors would start breathing this "house of cards" would collapse. This pathetic structure would then be correctly aligned with the ground.
from the linked article:
We contrast the strategies that appear to be driving the policy agendas of the most successful countries with the strategies that appear to be driving the current agenda for education reform in the United States. We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States, and, conversely, that the education strategies now most popular in the United States are conspicuous by their absence in the countries with the most successful education systems.
Many will be quick to point to exceptions to our characterizations of American practice. In fact, examples of excellent practice in almost every arena of importance can be found in the United States. But our aim here is not to focus on isolated examples of good practice but rather on the policy systems that make for effective education systems at scale, for it is there that the United States comes up short.
--------
And Seattle Schools comes up incredibly short ... check the data.
Conclusion ... four new school directors need to be elected in 2011. Dr. Susan Enfield needs to become former Seattle Schools Superintendent ASAP.
OK so there are NO SHORTAGES at this time ..... but additionally ...
This confirms Charlie's thought that the District believes that TfA teachers contain special powers that border on Voodoo magic.
You will note that the SPS Math Achievement Gaps are at historically high levels. At grade 10 they keep on expanding after School Board decisions, NSF funded projects ($200,000 per year for multiple years), UW advice, UW help, SPS coaching plans, SPS professional development ($400,000 worth in one year for High School with new "Discovering Adoption")...... Pretty damn clear the District either ...
A: Has no clue how to do anything positive about reducing math achievement gap .... or
B: District knows how to close the achievement gaps but chooses not to.
.....
Yet TfAers will bring a unique set of skills and perspectives that will help the districts close the achievement gap."
=========
Clearly this is just the usual drivel that gets written and no one either reads it or believes it .... but something needs to be written in support of the fairytale so this is what is produced.
Patu is normally voting against the mess.
Carr, Sundquist, Martin-Morris, Maier always vote for more mess.
Is there an end in sight?
Apparently not. Arne Duncan is a mess maker and the SPS drone directors do their alignment dance to follow their Big money leaders ... and relevant data be damned.
"...Neither of the letters provided address the requirement of this section that asks that the districts to identify that they are currently experiencing, anticipate experiencing or are planning for addressing teacher shortages in endorsement areas for which the Alternative Route program is preparing interns..."
http://www.scribd.com/doc/57105366/PESB-Comments-UW-Seattle-Form-2A
It is EXACTLY what the teaching force and smart parents have been saying.
-skeptical-
http://www.scribd.com/doc/57103225/UW-TFA-PESB-U-ACT-Emails-Batch-1
So what has happened? Did the UW satisfy the state or not?
Totally looks like Stritikus launched this program with NO operational planning and hung the UW Managing Director -- biz guy -- out to dry with trying to meet state compliance in time.
-critical-
-CT
<a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BzFnDSPMMw3yMmNiMDdkNjUtMDAzZC00OGJhLWIyNjctNzFjZjA0YzkzNjcz&hl=en” > earlier e-mails </a>
-CT
City U, Saint Martin's U, PLU, they all have their sh*t together compared to this dreck.
Thank goodness the PESB staff feel required to do a professional job. They rightfully ask "where is your market analysis of need? Just saying see district's letter is not sufficient".
The UW's response to PESB's cutting comments will be posted soon.
Stritikus' first perhaps only priority appears to be getting TFA into UW. Wow. NO initial strategic thought for existing students, faculty, local school districts and most of all our kids in our schools.
Quote Stritikus: "I think we have a great opportunity here that would be attractive to donors, help TFA move into Washington state, and do a great service to the nation."
Is there a period of probation for a Dean? Because these emails are an embarrassment.
-skeptical-
I have been told that you can add Seattle U to the ed colleges with their act together. Apparently someone from the faculty (the head?) testified AGAINST rolling out TFA in Seattle, based on no teacher shortage, when it came before the school board for a vote last year.
And the TFA stuff is just, well, frighteningly incompentent - but since much of what happens at SPS seems equally idiotic, I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Sometimes I really honestly wonder if there is a way out of this mess...
-CT
Seattle's Education Reform Hypocrisy
"Seattle and Federal Way districts have done internal assessments of their anticipated shortage areas (exact needs assessment data requested from districts). In response to their assessments, districtsentered into agreements with Teach for America (TFA) that will allow placement of TFACorps Members into locally identified teacher shortage areas. In both cases the districts will work with TFA to request conditional certification as per their district needs
What is curious is that a UW COE professor said they had been "working" on this proposal for a long time which isn't true as the doc to the Professional Educator board clearly show. Or, if this is their best work, UW is in trouble.
The UW has been totally schooled by their competition and by their regulators.
Decisions are made based on ideological alignment with what the deciders would like to have work. Need for services or products and evidence of effectiveness is never needed..... hope for a brighter future and belief in fairytales trump evidence.