Who Is A. J. Crabill (and why should you care)?

Why You Should Care

• Mr. Crabill has found quite the acolyte in Director Chandra Hampson. In the course of discussions over SOFG, she says his name over and over, "A.J .says we...." Now that's not too surprising given the direction the district is heading and that it is Mr. Crabill's work with the Council of Great City Schools is how we got here. But it appears that Mr. Crabill is working very closely with Hampson and we know she wields some amount of power over the majority of the Board.

• Mr. Crabill is going to continue to work with the Board as SOFG is instituted in SPS. In fact, his role may become more public as it did at one SPS Board meeting in the spring where he was on the phone during the meeting and suggested the Board stop the meeting to "self-reflect." I also noticed that in a district in South Carolina, when things weren't going to plan, he blamed the Board for not following SOFG to the letter. Look for that to happen here if Board members who are not so enthused get called out for that lack of enthusiasm.

• I also have to wonder what will happen to the Board's commitment to student voice. Will they be on mute if they are not part of the SOFG organization?

• It appears over the last several years that the Council of Great City Schools is making a push for districts to sign on to more and more of their initiatives and go to their conferences. They make the majority of the money they use to run their org from memberships and conference attendance. It appears that the SPS Board seems interested in being more invested in the CGCS.  

Who is A.J. Crabill?

A.J. Crabill is the Director of Governance at the Council of Great City Schools. Seattle Schools has been a member of CGCS for at least a decade but I have not received back info from public disclosure as to precisely when they did become members. Annual dues are about $25,000. Mr. Crabill's biography page at the CGCS' website does not work so I'm not sure what they have to say about him (more info on CGCS at the end of this post).

As Director of Governance, it appears that part of Mr. Crabill's job is to find ways to get more of their members to spend money with CGCS. One way appears to be adoption of their model of governance, Student Outcome Focused Governance. 

( I have filed a public disclosure request to try to find out how much SPS is spending on SOFG services which include Mr. Crabill being the Board's governance "coach," for at least nine months. As well, other costs to the district possibly include being part of the SOFG "Board Officers Cohort" which costs $2500 per board member per year, not including conference/travel costs incurred to be part of the cohort.)

What peaked my interest is that Mr. Crabill  has quite an absorbing work/experience history in the field of public education. 

He was born Airick Leonard West in about 1979. He had a tough, tough childhood in Kansas City, Missouri, bouncing from foster home to foster home, school to school.  He finally found good in Linda and Dick Crabill, who were his foster parents.

It is unclear if Mr. Crabill finished high school. He did briefly attend the University of Kansas.  He became a community activist in Kansas City. He says he was recruited away from school by a tech company but there is no evidence of that.

West became involved in the education scene in 2006 when he conceived and helped carry out a pilot program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Urban Education called “The Ivanhoe Project.” The program placed urban education students in inner-city living arrangements so they might better understand the environmental and social circumstances that affect the lives of their future students.

He served for eight years on the Kansas City (MO) school board, from July 2009 to April 2016.  It looks like he did many good things in that time including stabilizing their financial situation. But there were some oddities. In 2011, that board had a troubled relationship with their superintendent who had resigned. West/Crabill said the board didn't accept the resignation and the superintendent said he wasn't going to retract the resignation. From the Deseret News:

Covington became superintendent in 2009. His efforts to transform the district have included a school-closing plan shutting down nearly half of the buildings to avoid bankruptcy. Along the way, he and board president West have clashed. And many think the key to keeping Covington is to get West to resign instead. In fact, a coalition of black political leaders and city council members has been working to convince the board president to leave, school board member Arthur Benson said.

The district's accreditation is currently under review, even as its performance has continued to fall below accreditation standards. Last week, a preliminary report showed the district meeting just three of 14 state standards, compared with four a year ago. The district currently is provisionally accredited.

While on that board, however, he didn't report thousands of campaign dollars he received from Michael Casserly. Who is Casserly today? The executive director of the Council of Great City Schools. 

He applied for a job with Atlanta Public Schools in November 2014 as a governance trainer for school board members. In his bio for that job, he only listed just two school districts where he had done consultant work - Des Moines, Iowa and the district where he had been a board director, Kansas City. So he was "training" his own board. Hmm.

Then, just as he left the Kansas City School Board to move to a job in Texas in March 2016, he decided to change his name. There is nothing illegal nor wrong in changing your name but it does stand out if you do it as you are getting your first job  in a new state. He went from Airick West to Airick Journey Crabill.

The job he had in Texas was with the Texas Education Agency as Deputy of Governance at a salary of $180,000. The story from the Dallas Morning News. What is also eyebrow lifting is that the Dallas Morning News says that he changed his name as part of an "adult adoption" despite the fact that his foster mother, Linda Crabill, died in 2013.

What's also confusing is that there does not seem to be documentation in either Missouri or Texas for a legal change of name. As well, he filled out the job application with his old name, Airick West, but went to work as A. J. Crabill. He signed that Texas state job application with his old name.

He said on his application that he had been self-employed as a "Governance & Cultural Competency Consultant from 2005 to 2016.  Previous to that, in 2003, he owned a company - StrategicHERO - which he said failed. From 1999 to 2001, he owned a tech company called PixSoul that did e-commerce work. He claimed he sold it to a Fortune 500 company but again, there don't appear to be records for that sale.

There is no education record listed.  Not high school, not higher education. He left that entire area blank on the application.

In a check of state records in Kansas and Missouri, it appears he failed to list several companies that he formed on the application, some that failed or were sanctioned. One was a for-profit company, the other a non-profit. As well, it looks like he served as an officer for several PACs and was sanctioned by the Missouri Ethics Commission for violations.

It doesn't appear that anyone at the Texas Education Agency checked any of the statements on Crabill's application. 

In 2015, Crabill sent an invoice to the Dallas ISD for "coaching and training" and billed them $24K for four days he said he worked (with no dates on the invoice). He then asked them to send him a tax receipt for the work as a "donation" to the district. He said on this invoice that they could contact "Airick Leonard West" even as he said he had changed his name to A.J. Crabill. That's a pretty high rate for someone who has no educational background in public education or certification or even a college degree. 

Plus, at the time of that invoice, he was still an elected board member of Kansas City Public Schools and served on the board of...the Council of Great City Schools. Some might call that a conflict of interest.

At his Linkedin page, he calls himself a "Student Outcomes Evangelist." He says that he is currently

"the Conservator (Receiver) for DeSoto Independent School District in DeSoto, TX, leads school board governance nationwide at the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) in Washington, DC, is on faculty at the Leadership Institute of Nevada in Las Vegas, NV, is a collaborator with the Effective School Board Initiative, and is a CASA volunteer." 

He is still the Conservator for the DeSoto ISD but now in a "passive role." Interestingly, Texas has what they call "Lone Star Governance" that looks like SOFG lite. Wonder if Crabill started that there. That Leadership Institute of Nevada looks a lot like CGCS for Nevada. He sure juggles a lot of balls in the air. 

The last paragraph of his LinkedIn page says this:

Raised in and out of foster care from birth until high school, Crabill bounced around enough to have attended 11 schools prior to graduation. He attended urban, suburban and rural schools; private, public, and parochial schools; lived with white families and families of color; lived in racist communities and inclusive communities; experienced loving homes and homelessness. Guided by the idea that student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change and drawing on his intimate familiarity with the triumphs and terrors of America's safety nets for children, he has devoted much of his adult life to advocating for the well-being of our nation’s most vulnerable youth.

What again I find odd is that he did many good things as Airick West and yet he doesn't acknowledge that name at LinkedIn but rather just the work. I think that would be confusing to anyone who reads his page. 

Mr. Crabill is currently working with several districts including Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. From WFAE's article:

The contract calls for CMS to pay $10,000 plus Crabill’s travel expenses — but that’s only if they meet the timetable they agreed on. If they fall short, they’ll pay up to $75,000, based on his hourly work.

I'm asking if SPS has a similar contract with Crabill.

 The board moved the governance work sessions to the start of meetings, earning jeers from some audience members who had to wait longer for public comment sessions.

You can expect that to happen to Seattle School Board meetings as well plus the insertion of Work Sessions in the middle of the meetings.

“So while I can’t opine on the superintendent or staff’s capability, I can opine on the process which school boards should use to make that assertion themselves. And that involves being very clear about what are the outcomes for our students.”

“To the extent that we don’t see those, even if we absolutely love the superintendent and feel wonderful and fuzzy about them, that’s not evidence that we should retain them,” Crabill said.

Uh oh, maybe Superintendent Jones should watch out. 

He has a website with a current biography that says he has a book coming out in 2023. 

 

Council of Great City Schools

The Council of Great City Schools is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, founded in 1956.

The Council of the Great City Schools brings together the nation’s largest urban public
school systems in a coalition dedicated to the improvement of education for children in the
inner cities. The Council and its member school districts work to help our schoolchildren
meet the highest standards and become successful and productive members of society.
The Council keeps the nation’s lawmakers, the media, and the public informed about the
progress and problems in big-city schools. The organization does this through legislation,
communications, research, and technical assistance.

The organization also helps to build capacity in urban education with programs to boost
academic performance and narrow achievement gaps; improve professional development;
and strengthen leadership, governance, and management.

School districts located in cities with populations over 250,000 and student enrollments over 35,000 are
eligible for membership in the Council of the Great City Schools. Membership is also open to those districts serving a state’s largest city, depending on its urban characteristics.

Looking at CGCS fiscal year 2020 IRS filing, they appear to get most of their income from "program services" at a whopping 63% which I would think includes membership dues, conferences, consultations with members districts and the like. It also shows that it was running in the red. Hmm.