February 12, 2010
I’ve heard from teachers and central office office staff that Superintendent Smith stays behind closed doors and only her “team” is allowed access to her. The superintendent is invisible to most people. When the Superintendent appears at public meetings, she’s always reading from a script. She presents and announces but she doesn’t just talk.
Last night I decided to write Superintendent Smith to share my concerns about the high school redesign. I discovered that the Superintendent is also difficult to find on the PPS website. It used to be that you could find the Superintendent’s link attached to many of her statements. Now, they all link to the Communications office.
Below is my note to the Superintendent and the response that I received from Sarah Carlin Ames (PPS Public Affairs representative) less than an hour after I sent my email:
I’m helping Carole respond to some of her many e-mails.
You are absolutely right that it’s going to take a multi-faceted effort to truly confront our achievement gap. We know that effective teachers, excellent curriculum and support are all critical, along with a structure that better meets student needs.
We need to keep moving on all of these fronts. I am cc’ing Xavier Botana, our chief academic officer, because I know that he agrees. We have not resolved how to meet the needs of English Language Learners to the standards we should, at any level. We are continuing our equity work and engaging in “courageous conversations” about race, and working to change our institutional practices that fail to educate so many of our students and which consign too many students of color to special education and define too many as discipline issues.
The community school program we have described is important, however. It allows all students better access to challenging courses, IB and AP, no matter where they live — opportunity we have denied many. It commits every community school to offer programs such as AVID, and to offer on-line credit recovery, credit by proficiency and other support to help students keep up and catch up. It increases the counselor services (not enough, but a start) and commits to working with community partners to offer other wrap-around services on-site. We also plan to incorporate lessons (and perhaps staff and programs) from our small schools into our focus school strategy — so that our focus schools truly meet the needs of different learners, and don’t become boutique schools for a self-selected elite.
There is no one silver bullet in closing the achievement gap — but by offering a community comprehensive school with a broad range of challenge and support in every neighborhood, along with well-designed focus schools, should be a positive step forward in a multi-pronged approach.
Sarah Carlin Ames
PPS Public Affairs
>>> “Carrie Adams” 02/10/10 9:39 PM >>>
Dear Superintendent Smith,
Your introduction to the resolution states:
“Let’s look at Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln and Wilson , our largest schools, and the ones that routinely post the highest aggregate test scores. At those four schools together, 70 percent of white students enter 10th grade on track to graduate. But only half as many – 36 percent – of their black students are on track.”
If those schools have the resources that we’re now saying all of our schools should have and yet black students are not doing well in those schools, maybe there’s a different kind of problem.
Has the district identified why black students at those schools are not doing as well as white students? What is the high school redesign team’s plan to address that?
How does the proposed high school system design address the district’s decades long failure to serve ELL students?
What’s in the high school design to address the over-representation of black and hispanic student discipline rates?
What’s in the high school design plan to close the achievement gap?
Sarah Carlin Ames deserves credit for her responsiveness and for working 24/7 but as you can see, my questions still haven’t been answered.
So why is the Superintendent being shielded from the public? Why doesn’t she speak for herself? Does the board have so little confidence in her ability to lead the district that they allow the Communications department to speak for her?
Note: I originally published this post with a different title. After second thoughts, I feel it was a mistake. The point of the posting remains….the public needs to hear from the Superintendent in her own words. We’ve heard enough canned public relations speeches to last for years. Parents are long overdue for some candor, honesty, integrity and sincerity.
Carrie Adams blogs at Cheating in Class.