Superintendent Cudeiro sent email to district staff Thursday night stating that she would be taking medical leave to care for a sick parent, effective Monday. Assistant Superintendent Eva Collins will take on the role of Interim Superintendent while Dr. Cudeiro is on leave. Here’s the letter.
We wish Dr. Cudeiro and her family well during this difficult time.
New ballots counted today went 3.77% in my favor, increasing my margin to 485 votes and a cumulative margin 1.84% in my favor. With later ballots trending more strongly toward me, the math has become inescapable, so I’m declaring victory!
I could not have won this election without tremendous support from many old friends and many new friends I’ve made throughout the campaign. I know that you have supported me because you care deeply about our students, and I am truly gratified at the trust you have placed in me. I am going to depend on you to hold me and the rest of the board accountable for honoring that trust.
Over the next few weeks I will be scheduling school visits to meet with parents, teachers, and administrators and hear your perspectives on the state of our district. For those of you I haven’t met yet, I look forward to meeting you at one of those visits.
I can’t wait to be sworn in on December 13 and begin working to bring more openness, accountability, and community engagement to the Bellevue School District!
At the end of last week the Bellevue School district launched a new website. It’s an improvement in terms of usability and, most important (to sound like a software guy), “discoverability” of its content. I imagine most parents and students will be happy with the improvements. It is mostly a visual refresh: it does not appear to have any new content, per se. For example, the only data listed on the so-called “Accountability” page is still just the district SAT scores plus links to the Washington state OSPI website.
Despite the many improvements throughout the updated website, when I saw the home page I had to laugh. The home page features a HUGE picture of the school board and superintendent, including, of course, my school board opponent. Here is the picture, a little smaller than actual size (the actual picture used on the BSD website is so large it won’t fit into my blog layout):
What pictures would you expect to see on the home page of a school district website? Kids learning? Teachers teaching? Parents volunteering? A school athletic event? A band or orchestra concert? But no. Our district’s lead picture is of the school board members and the superintendent. I don’t know whether this focus on the website came at the direction of the superintendent, the board, or both. Either way, I could not have asked for a better a symbol of how self-absorbed our district leadership has become.
I keep a list of links to other districts’ websites, so I quickly clicked through the home pages of the largest districts statewide to see what they emphasized on their home pages. Here are the links in case you want to try it yourself:
Other districts have what you would expect: pictures of students. The only other district that has any picture whatsoever of its board on its home page is Vancouver, which has a picture of its board honoring district employees for accomplishments in safety. That is quite a contrast to Bellevue’s new website, which features a picture of our district leadership basically honoring itself.
Update: as of the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2011, the school board/superintendent picture shown above has been removed and a more student-oriented picture has been substituted.
I’ll be at the Lake Hills Library Wednesday evening for my last Town Hall Meeting before the election November 8. Please bring your concerns and your ideas for improving our schools!
October 19, 2011 – Town Hall Meeting
Lake Hills Library, Meeting Room, 7:00-8:30 pm
In this post, I want to paint a picture showing how our school board should be providing effective governance over the Bellevue School District. Here is fictional year in the life of a school board of directors that is performing its governance job well.
January
Focus: Reading. The school board of directors reviews district-level reading scores, from grades K-12. This analysis includes the state’s standardized tests (MSP and HSPE exams) plus SAT data, reading-oriented AP test performance, and other relevant data. The board reviews trends in these scores over several years. The board reviews data on student progress from one grade to the next to see if any grade-level transitions are presenting difficulties.
The board looks at performance across different schools in the district to assess whether any particular school is being particularly effective, and whether other schools might be able to benefit from that school’s learnings.
The board also reviews effectiveness of specific programs. How much did scores increase in the schools that adopted ILTs/PLCs early on? How does that compare to schools that adopted ILTs/PLCs later?
February Continue reading
In running for a school board position, especially as a challenger, I feel that I need to focus on all the ways our district can be improved. But every once in a while it’s important to place all those calls for improvement into an overall context of a school district that is the envy of many others in the state. Here are some of the reasons I think that Bellevue is a great school district.
Strong Parent Volunteers. Bellevue schools enjoy an extraordinary level of parent involvement in the classroom. In many school districts the idea that each classroom would need one parent volunteer just to coordinate all the other parent volunteers would seem like a fantasy, but in Bellevue schools that does happen.
Strong Non-Parent Volunteers. Bellevue’s VIBES program supports adults who no longer have children in the schools (as well as others) volunteering in the schools. The program puts the VIBES volunteers on the schools that need them the most, and the program ends up benefitting both the students and the volunteers. This is a wonderful program that creates stronger school-community connections.
Parental Support Outside the School Day. Many families in Bellevue pay for extra math tutoring or tutoring in other subjects. The community as a whole places a high value on education. Continue reading
Two weeks ago the Bellevue School Board spent a few minutes sharing their evaluation of Superintendent Amalia Cudeiro’s performance review. This was a break from recent practice of not disclosing the superintendent’s evaluation. Their overall conclusion was that Cudeiro’s performance was “generally satisfactory,” and they also stated that their comments were based on Cudeiro’s June performance evaluation and they were not considering events that had happened more recently.
In this post I will explain my own assessment of Cudeiro’s performance, but first I want to explain why I think it is not only appropriate to comment on the superintendent’s performance, but essential for the democratic process. Continue reading
In my day job I’ve given a talk to executive software audiences for the past two years called “Seven Unbreakable Rules of Software Leadership.” You can see the talk on my company’s website here or on YouTube here.
After the Bellevue teachers’ 97% no confidence vote in Superintendent Cudeiro’s leadership, I’ve been looking for an objective way to critique Cudeiro’s leadership. Because I created this talk long before I had any interest in running for school board, and because people can easily see the public version of this talk, I thought the talk would provide a fair structure for a leadership critique. The talk focuses on software leadership, not school district leadership, so some of the emphases will not apply. But I think most of the Seven Unbreakable Rules are quite illuminating.
Several months ago I created a Facebook page called “Bellevue School Board.” I created the page because thousands of people in Bellevue use Facebook, and I thought the school board should have a Facebook page to communicate meeting agendas and other school board news to the public. If existing school board members weren’t going to do it, I would.
This is the logo, including disclaimer, that was used on the Facebook page when the Cudeiro administration's lawyers had the page shut down.
I also wanted to make a point: Why didn’t the Bellevue School Board have a Facebook page already? The board should be actively engaging with the community in ways the community likes to be engaged, including Facebook. I thought it was embarassing that our school board hadn’t already done this, so I created a Facebook page.
Because there are a half dozen Bellevue School Boards in the U.S., I displayed the Bellevue, Washington district logo on the page to identify which Bellevue School Board the page was about. I added a disclaimer to the logo that stated that it was for identification purposes only, and the page clearly stated that it was not officially sanctioned by the Bellevue School District administration or Bellevue School Board. I then proceeded to update the page with school board meeting information and other status updates. Continue reading
I continue to make my way through the 2010-2011 OSPI assessment data. As I try to assess exactly how well our district is performing, I thought it would be interesting to compare test scores on standardized tests prior to the arrival of our district superintendent vs. now, two years later. What effect has Dr. Amalia Cudeiro had on our schools’ test scores? The table below helps answer that by showing the scores for the ’09 school year vs. the ’11 school year. Continue reading
“Schools 2 Prison Pipeline” is a term that some educators have used to refer to disciplinary policies and practices that set certain children up for a lifetime of failure. Jerry Large had a nice summary column in Sunday’s Seattle Times that discussed recent actions by the League of Education Voters (LEV) and Our American Generation (OAG) to bring attention to this issue.
The issue, as Large says, is that school discipline is not always educational. Sometimes it focuses more on punishment that deflects children onto a path that leads to further failure, i.e., in the worst case, toward prison. Suspension is particularly problematic. Suspension does not help students learn to avoid the behavior that resulted in the suspension. It also leads to students missing school, which penalizes them academically relative to other students. And suspensions are often handed out disproportionately to special education students and minorities.
Bellevue is not immune to the issues that Large discusses. Continue reading
Earlier this summer I posted an “Eastside School District Comparison Matrix,” which I had been using as a reference for performance numbers for Bellevue and other Eastside school districts. Last month the Washington OSPI released the 2010-2011 performance numbers. Here is the 2010-2011 version of the Eastside Comparison Matrix:
(Click on the image to make it larger and more readable.) Continue reading
As I detailed in my last blog post, Bellevue’s improvement in test scores of low income students lagged Washington state’s improvement by a wide margin. Recently released 2010-2011 OSPI data provides another view of district performance through the lens of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) assessment.
Here is the school-by-school summary: Continue reading
Washington’s OSPI released data for the 2010-2011 school year about two weeks ago, and I’ve been slowly digesting it. Since this data reflects the second year of Amalia Cudeiro’s term as Bellevue School District Superintendent, I have been especially eager to see what influence her leadership has had on our district’s performance. Continue reading
We had an energetic Town Hall meeting last night at the Newport Way library. The parents who attended were fired up, and for good reason. The discussion included the administration’s openness to parent complaints (or lack thereof), accessibility of the current school board members, Superintendent Cudeiro’s leadership effectiveness, the exodus of experienced administrators from the district (including both resignations and firings), the appropriate level of emphasis on AP courses, current leadership on the school board, and what I will need to do to be most effective in leading changes in the board and in the district if elected.
I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to the parents who turned out last night. I appreciate your candor and your willingness to explore sensitive, personal, and emotional topics.
I’ll be at the Newport Way Library Wednesday evening for a Town Hall Meeting. I’ll share my thoughts about the teachers’ recent 97% “No Confidence” vote in our superintendent as well as many more thoughts about how we can make our district the best district possible. Please bring your concerns and your ideas for improving our schools!
September 14, 2011 – Town Hall Meeting
Newport Way Library, Meeting Room, 7:00-8:30 pm
On August 31, Bellevue teachers passed a vote of “no confidence” in Bellevue’s superintendent with 97% voting no confidence. The board responded nine days later by sending a letter to all teachers in the district. The letter was created during an executive session (i.e., closed) school board meeting, and all five board members voted in favor of sending it. Here’s the letter that was sent last Friday, September 9: Continue reading
Teachers voted 97% “no confidence” in Superintendent Cudeiro last night–a sobering commentary on current leadership in the Bellevue School District. BEA president, Michele Miller, expressed concerns about the Superintendent maintaining an outside consulting practice and questioned her long-term commitment to the district. Continue reading
There will be a big school board meeting tomorrow (Tuesday). Meeting starts at 7:00 pm at the WISC. Budget discussion is scheduled for 8:25 pm, but of course the “elephant in the room” will be the unresolved teacher contract. Public commentary is scheduled for 8:55 pm. Here’s the full agenda: http://bsd405.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=whQcVX5gk0w=&tabid=2286
There will be a teacher rally prior to the meeting at 6:00 pm. Many parents and teachers are planning to attend to provide comments on the teacher contract. There could easily lead to 1+ hours of public commentary, but the agenda allocates only 15 minutes. Will the board allow more than 15 minutes on this important topic? Will it support openness and seek community engagement? If ever there was a time for openness and community engagement, this is it. I hope that’s what we see, and in any event, we will find out tomorrow!
The Washington Post published a well-written essay by Michael Rochholz, a school board member in Michigan. The essay struck a chord with me because Rochholz discusses the difficulty of acknowledging all the things the schools are doing well while simultaneously being clear-eyed about needed improvements. Communicating both messages at the same time is challenging. Our natural tendency is to want to label our schools as “good” or “bad,” but of course, upon reflection, the situation is never that simple.
Rochholz’s comments apply to schools in Bellevue as much as in Michigan. The Bellevue School District is doing many things well, especially college prep in grades 9-12, and teachers contribute to hundreds of successes with individual students every day. However we can’t let our successes blind us to areas where we still need to improve.
In my day job, I’ve found that the most effective software companies are also the most self-critical. The least effective are often the most overconfident and complacent. In How the Mighty Fall, business guru Jim Collins observes that overconfidence is one common attribute of formerly-great organizations in decline. We need to recognize that self-criticism is a sign of strength, not weakness, and is a necessary component of healthy organizations, including school districts.
Parents and teachers have asked for my opinion about the current teacher contract negotiations. I’m campaigning in part on the basis of openness, so here’s what I think.
There are three unresolved issues, and I am sympathetic with the teacher’s union (BEA) on two of the three issues.
The first issue is that BEA wants secondary teachers to have up to four weeks to enter grades in the online gradebook. Four weeks to enter grades online is totally unacceptable to most parents; it gives us no basis for monitoring our kids’ work in a timely way. BEA is not going to get any sympathy from parents on this issue.
The second issue is that BEA wants to keep Wednesday afternoons for teacher planning, and the administration wants to be able to use most Wednesday afternoons for various kinds of training. I concur with the administration’s desire to find time for more training, but adding that to Wednesday afternoons, on top of existing work, is basically asking teachers to do more work uncompensated, which I think is unreasonable.
The third issue is a new teacher evaluation system. The state is requiring all districts to move to a 4-level evaluation system by 2013. The issue is whether Bellevue will conduct its own pilot program in 2011-2012 or whether it will participate only in the state-run pilot program. You can see more information about the state program at the T-PEP website. BEA makes the point that if the district goes its own way this year, we could be piloting something the state does not allow us to implement in 2013. I find that point compelling and agree with BEA that we should just participate in the state program. Continue reading
I was talking with a school director from another district about district missions, and she made the comment, “All school district missions are basically the same.” I respect the person I was talking to, but a review of several school district missions shows they are not in fact all the same.
Here is a sampling of school district missions:
Eastside School Districts
Bellevue: To provide all students with an exemplary college preparatory education to allow them to succeed in college, career, and life.
Issaquah: Our students will be prepared for and eager to accept the academic, occupational, personal, and practical challenges of life in a dynamic global environment.
Lake Washington: Each student will graduate prepared to lead a rewarding, responsible life as a contributing member of our community and greater society. Every student will be Future Ready: Prepared for College, Prepared for the Global Workplace, and Prepared for Personal Success. Continue reading
Last week Black Enterprise published an interview with Gates Foundation president Allan C. Golston about the Gates Foundation’s view of the current state of public education and prospects for its future. Most interesting to me was the report of a survey of 40,000 teachers. Golston said the survey found that most teachers are willing to have their performance measured, they just want the measures to be fair and reliable. He also makes some interesting comments about school funding.
PDC filings show that Dr. Amalia Cudeiro, through her husband, donated $500 to Betsy Johnson’s campaign for Bellevue School Board.
In her role as a private citizen, Dr. Cudeiro has the right to support any political candidate she wants to support. But what is she thinking in supporting a school board candidate? No matter who she supports, the other person could be elected, and then she’s going to find herself working with, reporting to, and being evaluated by, someone whose election she opposed. I’m not the kind of person who takes this sort of thing personally, but she doesn’t know that. A district superintendent getting involved in a school board race in any capacity other than telling people “please vote” shows poor judgment. That, I am concerned about.
Join me at a Town Hall Meeting to discuss school issues August 4, 2011 at the Newport Way Library, Meeting Room, 7:00-8:30 pm. Please bring your ideas and concerns, and let’s see what we can do to improve our schools!
Readers of this blog know that I’ve been actively comparing the Bellevue School District to other school districts both locally and statewide. To help myself keep track of the comparisions I created the comparison matrix below.
Join me at a Coffee Talk to discuss school issues at 3 Bellevue Center Starbucks, 601 108th Avenue NE Bellevue, 10:00-11:00 am. I look forward to hearing your thoughts about our schools!
From the district’s online communications survey:
Here are some of the most common questions and answers about school boards.
Q: What is the purpose of a school board?
A: School boards are a distinctly American institution that allow for local, community-level control over the education of our children.
The proper role of a school board is to define a mission related to promoting learning and success for all students, set policy, define measurable goals, define evaluation criteria for the superintendent (which should be closely tied to the measurable goals), evaluate the superintendent, find a new superintendent if necessary, and engage the community throughout the process. The school board is also responsible for financial governance of the school district.
A school board is very much like the board of directors of a corporation. Indeed, in Washington state the official name for a school board is “school directors.” The school board plays a leadership/governance role, but it is not supposed to involve itself in day-to-day administration of the district. Continue reading
My previous blog posts have referred to scorecards in use in other districts. At July 6′s town hall meeting I presented a draft of what such a scorecard might look like for the Bellevue district, which I’ve included in this post at left. The mockup is purely for illustration purposes. The data is fictitious, and I’m not necessarily proposing the specific entries listed. I offer the mockup to facilitate a discussion about accountability, openness, and community engagement in our district.
The rest of this blog post reviews some of the key benefits a district scorecard would provide to our district.
The entries on the scorecard summarize the district’s priorities. The items on the scorecard have high visibility. The school board periodically checks progress against each scorecard item, and the superintendent and the rest of the administration are expected to manage the district so that it performs well against the scorecard items.
On the scorecard mockup, I’ve included a line item for parent satisfaction. Parents are the district’s customers, and yet our district does not measure parent satisfaction. How can we be a world class district without measuring parent satisfaction? Continue reading
Last night’s town hall meeting brought a vigorous discussion of my campaign issues of openness, accountability, and community engagement. I presented a sample District Scorecard as an illustration of the openness and accountability I believe our district should provide. (I will blog in more detail about the scorecard soon.)
I am always impressed at how passionate and knowledgeable the parents I meet in Bellevue are about their children’s education. I learn a lot every time I speak with a parent about our schools.
I’m really looking forward to the next town hall meeting July 27, 7:00 – 8:30 pm at the Lake Hills library meeting room. I hope you’ll be able to attend that meeting or one of the coffee talks scheduled between now and then.
My first town hall meeting to discuss Bellevue School District issues is tomorrow, Wednesday, July 6, from 7:00-8:30 pm in Meeting Room 1 at the Bellevue Downtown Library. I hope to see you there!
Our district employs about 2000 employees and serves almost 18,000 students. Managing a school district is an amazingly complex task.
My company is much smaller than the Bellevue School District, but even at our small scale I have learned that you can’t achieve true accountability unless you also have openness — especially openness about performance. Openness is valuable in numerous respects.
Openness forms the foundation for accountability. People are accountable for something, and they are also accountable to someone. Our administration is officially (legally) accountable to the school board, and our school district is accountable to the public. The public has a right to know how our schools are performing, but it can’t very well hold the district accountable for performance if it doesn’t know how the district is performing. Likewise, the school board can’t very well hold the superintendent accountable if it doesn’t know how the superintendent is performing. Continue reading
One reason I am running for school board is to achieve a higher level of accountability in our schools and our district. The problem with talking about accountability is that, like motherhood and apple pie, everyone says they are for it. I’m sure if you asked existing school board members they would say they are for it too. Fifteen years of running my own business have taught me there is a huge difference between just saying you’re for accountability vs. taking the concrete steps needed to ensure you really achieve accountability. The devil is in the details, and if you’re not paying attention to the details, you’re not going to have real accountability.
The first step in achieving real accountability is to make clear what people are accountable for. You can’t hold someone accountable for achieving an objective if you haven’t defined the objective, and our school district has not defined its objectives clearly enough to support accountability. For example, one of our district’s three goals is “Eliminate the achievement gap.” How do you hold the superintendent accountable for a goal like that?
Vague goals give rise to scenarios like the following:
SCENE: District Superintendent’s Annual Performance Review Meeting Continue reading
I received email this morning announcing that my School Board opponent, Betsy Johnson, has scheduled three community meetings modeled on the series I announced several weeks ago. I think this kind of dialog is great, and I’m glad I was able to provide some leadership in this area. If elected, I look forward to providing similar leadership to the school board in the areas of community engagement, openness, and accountability–all leading to greater student success.
Here are the meetings Betsy has scheduled (current as of the email I received the morning of June 27):
Neighborhood Chat
Thursday, June 30th
10:00 am – 11:00 am
Downtown Bellevue Library – Room 3
Town Hall Meeting
Thursday, July 21st
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Newport Way Library, Meeting Room, 14250 SE Newport Way
Neighborhood Chat
Thursday, August 18th
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Crossroads, 15600 NE 8th Street
(This was all the information that was provided — the notice didn’t indicate where at Crossroads the chat will be held.)
You can see my schedule of town hall meetings and coffee talks here.
The following is reprinted from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, June 2007. I think it’s worth reflecting on the degree to which our district already exhibits these attributes and the areas in which we still have room for improvement.
Research has shown that there is no silver bullet, no single thing that schools can do to ensure high student performance. Rather, high performing schools tend to have the following nine characteristics:
1. Clear and Shared Focus–Everybody knows where they are going and why. The focus is on achieving a shared vision, and all understand their role in achieving the vision. The focus and vision are developed from common beliefs and values, creating a consistent direction for all involved. Continue reading
With 35-40% more students than Bellevue, Lake Washington is the largest nearby district that operates at roughly the same level of effectiveness as Bellevue. As with other effective districts, I believe we can learn some valuable lessons by studying Lake Washington. This post describes some strengths of that district.
Live Video. What first caught my eye about Lake Washington is the availability of video of school board meetings. Video is streamed live during the meeting.
Archived Video. Shortly after each school board meeting a video archive is posted. They are conveniently indexed by the meeting agenda; you can click on the part of the agenda you’re interested in and go straight to the video of that part of the meeting.
Timeliness. The videos are posted promptly. For example, as of today (June 18), Lake Washington has posted the video of its June 6 meeting, whereas Bellevue has not yet posted written minutes of its June 7 meeting. Continue reading
This week I officially declared my candidacy for the Bellevue school board, position 1. Readers of this blog will understand why! Here’s the announcement from my campaign website:
My priorities for Bellevue’s School Board are:
(1) Fully engage our diverse community through town hall meetings, annual school district satisfaction surveys, coffee talks with school board members, focus groups, school board blog, easy-to-read school board recaps, Facebook, Twitter, and video.
(2) Maximize the excellence of our school district for all students, competing with the best schools anywhere. This includes gifted students, special ed students, and every student in the middle as well as accommodating different learning styles. Continue reading
The following is a guest editorial by EastBellevueDad.
Below is a copy of a letter I sent to each of the Bellevue School Board members. Policy 1460 if enforced would prevent parents from donating money to their local school to be used for hiring additional teachers.
Background on the issue:
http://www.is-ptsa.org/ptsaprograms.cfm?subpage=1323782
A decision on 1460 is supposed to be announced in June. I urge you to contact the school board members and let them know your opinion on the matter. The superintendent has made it clear she wants 1460 enforced. If you oppose it, act now.
=========================
Dear Bellevue School Board Member: Continue reading
Vancouver, Washington’s School Board received the WSSDA’s 2010 School Board of the Year Award. The Vancouver Public Schools (VPS) district is about 30% larger than Bellevue (22,700 students vs. 17,600) and presents a useful comparison to Bellevue.
Checking out the VPS Board’s website shows a very different level of board engagement with the community than we see in Bellevue.
Budget Information. VPS posts its school budget on its website. I challenge any Bellevue resident to find our district’s 2010-2011 budget on the school district website in less than 5 minutes. It’s there, but not easy to find.
Board Recap. The board publishes a recap of each meeting in an easy-to-read format. Bellevue does nothing comparable. We publish school board minutes, but they contain a full record of every comment, and they are scans of hard copy which means it isn’t possible to search for topics of interest.
Report to the Community. VPS publishes a report to the community approximately 3 times per school year. The publication reports on matters of interest including teacher awards, student accomplishments, district initiatives, issues of concern, and so on.
In my view the Bellevue School Board could do a much better job of engaging our community. One of WSSDA’s four attributes of effective school boards is “Engage the communities they serve.” We should be doing this at a much deeper level, including:
To me most of these ideas seem obvious, and yet the current school board is not doing any of them. That needs to change.
Last Monday’s PTA email from our school was fascinating and, upon deeper reflection, disturbing. There were no fewer than 4 parent-initiated websites listed that are all outside the normal Bellevue Schools leadership structure.
There were several fascinating implications of these websites–and the implied activity and interest behind them. Continue reading
In my earlier article More on Test Scores: How Much Does the Bellevue School District Outperform Expectations? I proposed a method for evaluating district performance relative to expectations. The district that earned the #1 spot on the list was Naselle-Grays River Valley, with an enrollment of 424 students.
Some people asked, Is that just a fluke? Do small school districts enjoy some kind of advantage in this sort of ranking? The answer is “no.” It turns out that Naselle-Grays River Valley has been recognized for excellence. The WSSDA (Washington State School Directors’ Association” recognized NGRV as “School Board of the Year” in 2004. Continue reading
My friends and co-workers will tell you that I am all about accountability. At my company “Accountability” is one of our seven stated values. For most of our employees, 25%-50% or more of their pay is determined by performance. We hold management just as accountable as staff, and pay is also based on performance. I do not believe in pay for seniority; I believe in pay for high-quality output. Indeed, I think it’s irrational to run a business any other way.
Considering the way I run my company, most people would probably think I would be in favor of pay for performance for teachers, but I am not. I agree that pay for teacher performance is a good idea in theory, and I am all for it, in theory. But sometimes ideas that are good in theory are subject to so many problems in practice that they are just not implementable. I think teacher pay for performance at the present time is one of those ideas.
Measuring effectiveness is one of my areas of expertise in my day job, and I have blogged extensively about the challenges of measuring individual computer programmer performance. The issues involved with programmers seem strongly analogous to the issues involved with measuring teacher performance, so here are the difficulties I see in measuring teacher performance. Continue reading
I had the opportunity last night to participate in a round table discussion with members of the Issaquah school board. The Issaquah board’s focus is markedly different than the Bellevue board’s focus. They have moved to an approach known as Policy Governance in which the board voluntarily limits its detailed oversight of the superintendent.
In this approach, a clear distinction is made between Means and Ends, with a sharp focus on Ends (otherwise known as goals). The board defines the Ends as clearly as it can, and then restricts its management of the superintendent to evaluating his performance in achieving the Ends. The superintendent is then free to use the Means he sees fit to accomplish the Ends without the school board armchair quarterbacking the details.
Although this approach might seem to limit board influence, in practice it forces a clarity about the Ends that provide clearer direction for the superintendent and a better ability to evaluate the superintendent’s performance. Here are Issaquah’s Ends statements:
Notice how specific the Ends are. The links for most of the Ends provide additional details that make them even more specific.
In contrast with Issaquah’s Ends, here are the stated goals of the Bellevue school district, in their entirety:
While these goals seem good as far as they go, in contrast with Issaquah’s Ends, the Bellevue district’s goals seem (1) overly focused on academics to the exclusion of everything else, (2) not very specific, (3) not supported by any further detail.
A school board is, by law, very much like a corporation’s board of directors, whose main job is to hire the CEO, evaluate the CEO’s performance, and if necessary, replace the CEO. In Washington State the legal name for the school board is not “school board” but “school directors,” which emphasizes the intended function of the school board.
A properly functioning school board’s main job is to manage the superintendent. It does this through defining clear vision, goals, and performance standards for the superintendent as well as for other certificated and non-certificated staff (which is all is required by law in our state.)
Many school boards extend their reach beyond the board’s intended function and begin involving themselves in decisions as detailed as choosing school names, approving school mascots, picking out bleachers, and so on.
Involvement at this level of detail creates two problems. First, the school board isn’t really qualified to participate in those decisions. That’s micromanagement of the worst kind. Second, by spending time on relatively minor details, the school board takes time and focus away from its main function, which is setting overall direction for the district, focusing laser-like on the district mission, and ensuring the superintendent does the same. This leads to getting the details right (“Wow, our new bleachers look great”), but missing the mark on more important issues (“A third of our kids aren’t going to college”).
Anyone who has ever attended a Bellevue school board meeting or read the school board minutes can see the potential benefit a sharper focus on governance would have for Bellevue. Our current school board spends time on details like approving individual field trips (which is on almost every agenda), and other matters that have little to do with vision, direction, or performance of the superintendent. That is not the role of a healthy school board, and I believe the Bellevue school board should take a hard look at where it’s currently spending its time vs. where it should be spending its time.
There were some other valuable takeaways from the meeting with Issaquah board members, which I will blog about at a later time.
The staff and students at Bridgeport High School were disappointed to learn that President Obama will not be speaking at their commencement this year. The students, families, teachers, and administration at BHS still have a lot to be proud of.
Erik Lacitus has a very nice writeup about it: “[The students] mostly are the children of migrant workers who came to work in the fruit orchards and stayed. The families live in poverty, with a median annual family income of $30,633 — about one-third as much as Seattle’s $85,432; 100 percent of the kids are on the reduced-price and free lunch program. But every one of the 37 seniors has been accepted to a college.”
Truly an accomplishment to be proud of!
I am happy to announce a new blog and website to support the Bellevue School Board: Bellevue School Board | Issues. As I’ve written on this site, our school district faces numerous issues ranging from overconfidence about district performance to lack of administrative transparency to underperformance in special education to a district mission that overlooks one-third of our students and many other issues.
As we head into the Fall 2011 School Board election, we have a chance to reshape our school board and improve our school district. Three of the five school board seats are up for reelection. School board members serve four year terms, so the choices we make this fall will affect our children’s education for years to come.
The next few years will not be the same as the past few years. Because of federal and state budget cuts, funding issues will be prevalent. Cuts will need to be made, and that will increase the importance of strong school board leadership and administrative transparency–both of which have been lacking.
I hope you will join me in helping to create a better Bellevue school system. Together, we can create the district that our children deserve.
Bellevue has posted preliminary calendars (subject to finalization of the teachers contract) for 2011-2012 and 2012-2013.
In the public records request I filed last October I asked the district to produce “policies, manuals, administrative instructions, and similar materials” that document the district’s approach to special education and to the job of principal. The original reason I asked for the materials was that I had grown frustrated with administrative staff citing non-existent policies, and I wanted to familiarize myself with all of the district’s policies, not just the school board policies published on the district’s website.
The district’s response to my public records request has raised a concern much larger than my original concern: namely, does the district actually have any basis for believing it is a “leading school district,” a “top performer,” or “visionary?”
First I’ll give the gist of the district’s response to my public records request and then I’ll explain why it’s so concerning. Continue reading
I want our district to be a visionary, state-leading district. Test scores provide one vantage point for assessing how well we are succeeding in that mission.
In my last blog post I summarized the Bellevue School District’s test scores relative to our level of affluence. The Bellevue School District test scores are better than you’d expect, even accounting for our level of affluence. The key question is, Exactly how much better are the test scores than you would expect, given our level of affluence? Continue reading
This is a continuation of my earlier Bellevue School District Facts blog post. We all know Bellevue has great test scores, which is why Bellevue School District High School ratings are recognized by magazines like US News & World Report. I was interested to see how Bellevue schools stack up when you account for affluence level vs. other schools in the state.
Here is how the Bellevue school district ranks compared to other school districts statewide. Continue reading
