A better way to hire elementary school principals

If we could do it all over again, here is how we could make it better.

First of all, tell all the applicants up-front that this is a grown-up job, a very public job. They are to have no expectation that their application will be kept a secret. They must be told to expect to have their credentials, their credit records and every other relevant fact about them scrutinized in a very thorough way, and that their CVs will be put on display for the entire parent community to review.

If you think this is going to scare away your most-qualified applicants, why? The rationalization I often hear from school officials is that the applicant "hasn't told his/her principal/superintendent" that they're applying for other jobs; therefore, we owe it to them to keep the process as private and secretive as possible.

Baloney.

If there is some protection we need to give excellent teachers and administrators so that they don't have to fear repercussions from their bosses when they go out and apply for top jobs elsewhere, we need to legislate that protection for them right now.

But the "right" of an applicant for an important government office not to have their CV publicly dissected during a high-profile job search (actually, there is no such right) would, even if it existed, be outweighed by the right of a parent community to know everything possible about a candidate for principal of their public elementary school. Period.

Next, I'd insist, if I were the parent committee advising the superintendent on the hire, that we would agree to agree on a list of three finalists, from which list the superintendent could select his or her favorite. This would, in essence, give parents a chance to take out of the running candidates who appeared to have been hand-picked for advancement by the superintendent of schools for reasons other than merit.

This is such an obvious and necessary safeguard against corruption that I can't believe we don't have it already.

Nobody is saying Bev Hall chose Yolonda Brown to be the principal of SPARK for any reason other than Ms. Brown's own professional achievements, which are considerable. But Bev Hall is not going to always be our superintendent, and, why would we let any superintendent have unchecked power? It's not like we're trying to prevent the super from hiring their choice. They still get to make that call. We're just saying, hey, you have to pick a winner from this pool of three.

Being asked to sit at the table with Bev Hall and "participate" in the selection process when you are given no real power to do anything at all to stop Dr. Hall from picking whomever she likes--well, that's not participation. That's being co-opted and neutered and placated and patted on the head. She can tell you all day long that she welcomes--really values--your advice, and then go out and pick whoever she damn well pleases.

That, my friends, is being treated like you are the tail, not the dog. Next time, don't settle for a seat at the table. Demand a vote.

Whining Vs. Complaining Smackdown

Whining is never okay. But complaining--pointing out a specific, real problem--and its accompanying obligation, suggesting a solution--is not only okay, it is a tool you are going to have to get used to using as your child progresses through one of the lowest-performing metro school districts in one of the lowest-performing states in the country.

If you are going to wrestle a good education out of this system, you are going to have to occasionally flex some muscle. And yet I see parents who would willingly run in front of a bus to save their child step meekly aside in confrontations with APS personnel for fear of being seen as a privileged white racist. That's just lame.

I complained long and loud about the selection process for the new Springdale Park Elementary principal. I pointed out that asking parents to serve on an advisory panel to Bev Hall without any actual power to approve or veto the final decision (which was always going be made by Bev Hall alone) was simply co-opting the parents who served on that committee; making them feel good but giving them no authority.

During that process, the "right" of the job applicants not to have their resumes reviewed by the parent community was placed above the much more compelling interest of the parent community to thoroughly review the CVs of all finalists.

Our parents should have insisted on publishing the CVs of the three finalists for the job and inviting vigorous parental participation in the selection process, as well as the power to veto any decision with which it did not concur. There are ways to get this power. One way is to demand it and say that if it is not given, the parent community will protest any hiring made over its objections. This would have the effect of forcing Bev Hall to collaborate more fully, because she would not dare drop a new principal into a pool of outraged parents.

Another way is to use the Georgia Open Records law to force APS to release the CVs, and challenge in court any APS refusal to do so. In the University System of Georgia, exactly this sort of legal challenge was made, with the result that now, college president applicants (and other crucial school officials) must expect their CVs to be released if they are named among the three finalists for a job.

Are not school principals the most important individuals in our entire public educational system? I would argue that they are. So much can go right--or wrong--for a school based on this one hire alone.

Here is the exact text from the law:

At least fourteen (14) calendar days prior the meeting at which final action or a vote is to be taken for a university president, school superintendent, or other similar executive, the public agency making such decision shall release all documents which came into its possession in connection with the three or more finalists for the position. Prior to the release of these documents, the public agency making the decision may allow a finalist to decline being considered further for the position rather than have documents pertaining to her or him released. In that event, the public agency shall release the documents of the next most qualified person under consideration who does not decline the position.

(See here for more).

Anyway, my point was that we should not have settled for a seat, we should have demanded a vote.

I was so vocal that the then-president of the Morningside PTA, Susie Lazega, wrote me the following email, and here I quote her directly:

Dear Rick:

SHUT UP!
WE ARE SICK OF IT!!!

I got a good laugh out of that. I wasn't about to shut up, of course, nor be the least bit intimidated by Susie, but the fact that she thought she could order me to go over in the corner and take a time-out did give me some insight into how she viewed her role and her collaboration with parents.

I also got a phone call from the husband of our then-PTO-president, who wanted to tear me a new one for criticizing the process and "being negative."

And that's important, because it begs the question: is it important to be "positive" at the expense of insisting on what's right? Of course we'd all answer no to that question. But many of our PTO reps (with some notable exceptions, like the exceptional Bob Silvia when he was on the Morningside PTA) are waaayyyyy too deferential to APS.

APS counts on this. APS could not withstand the level of parental scrutiny we should be giving it. APS would improve a lot faster (much faster than Bev Hall can achieve on her own) if parents were more aggressive in overseeing their childrens' educations. But many parents--particularly low-income parents--shuffle their kids off to school and just hope for the best, figuring they can't affect the outcome and don't have the time or energy to try in any case.

As it turns out, we got an excellent principal after all. But Yolonda Brown is so talented and charismatic that she could have easily withstood all the additional scrutiny I'm talking about here and come out in front. So why did we feel we had to agree to protect her--and the other candidates--from it?

Look, if you're applying for an extremely important public job--the job of principal of an elementary school--you have no reasonable expectation that everyone is going to keep it hush-hush. Your interest in keeping your application quiet is massively, massively outweighed by the interest of a parent community in getting to vet you properly.

Complaining. Nobody likes the idea of it. But it is a tool in your toolbox as a parent with children in this district. We have a great school and a great principal. But our school lives in the swamp that is the APS. Bev Hall is wielding her little machete and trying to clear the swamp, but she's got years of work still ahead of her. Are you going to play nice or are you going to do what your kid needs you to do?

Is Fast ForWord right for your child?

With a little persistence and the help of the new PEC overseer Aaron Fernander, who seems to be a guy who's really on the ball, our son, Vance Lockridge, is about to become the first child (so they say) in the PEC to have Scientific Learning's Fast ForWord computer-based instructional software made part of his daily school routine.

If you've never heard of Fast ForWord, you can find more information here. Basically, it's a series of games based on the idea that the brain is very plastic, and weak connections can be improved. The software is used mostly to help kids who aren't reading very well for their age level, but I think an obvious and much higher-impact application is helping autistic kids like our son overcome a spoken-language deficit.

Here's a video of Vance that we made to show our IEP team. I'm very gung-ho about this particular product; it commanded our son's attention in a way that no human teacher or therapist has ever been able to do. Many autistic kids seem to have more of an affinity for computers (and, in Vance's case, the iPhone) than for people. Why not go with that, and ride it as far as you can take it?

What is the appropriate tone to take when dealing with school officials?

This is a tricky one. Race and class play a role here, as they do in all interactions between a mostly white constituency and a mostly black government bureaucracy. We all wish that it weren't so, but if you could read the thought bubbles above our heads in some of the school meetings I've suffered through, this is what you might see:

(Me): "I can't understand how this dude has this job. He can't write a sentence in clear English; he won't answer emails; he is just a passive-aggressive, do-nothing bureaucrat with a limp, damp handshake, and the fact that he somehow persuaded someone to give him a Ph.D only cements the truth that if you write enough tuition checks to certain colleges, eventually they will print you out whatever kind of degree you want."

(Him): "Why is this man so angry? I am just doing my job. My job is not to say yes to everything these rich white people ask for, not when poor black kids from East Atlanta ain't getting half as much resources as the kids at this midtown elementary school. He talks to me like I'm an idiot. But I have a Ph.D., and I have this job, and I am going to do it the way I'm going to do it."

(Me): "This guy and all his bosses have created a culture where nobody really has to push themselves too hard; nobody has to be uncomfortable, and where they're willing to declare themselves satisfied with a level of performance that I, as a fairly successful professional, would never accept from people who work for me or around me. So if you're wondering why I resent you, it's because your standards are too low, you expect too little of yourselves, and your number one goal is to protect your cozy little enclave."

(Him): "You don't get to tell us how to do our jobs. There are all sorts of historical and cultural reasons why you don't get to come in here and act all superior. We are running this operation, so get used to it."

This reminds me of a true story of an encounter I had with another City of Atlanta employee, right down the street from my house. I was coming home from an errand one mid-morning, and right in the middle of Greenwood was a garbage truck, positioned so nobody could pass it to either side.

Cars started lining up in both directions over the next several minutes, and yet as the truck lurched down the street, the driver never made an effort to move a foot or two over to one side to let at least one of the backed-up lanes of traffic start to pass.

I finally got out of my own truck and confronted one of the workers. "Why can't you move over and let some of this traffic go by?" I asked him. He looked at me with a big grin, so that I could see his big stupid-looking gold front tooth, and said (and this is an exact quote):

"You on our schedule now."

I don't know why I'm reminded of this story now. Maybe it's because there has always been more than a whiff of payback, a whiff of "OJ justice" in the way I have perceived my treatment at the hands of certain City of Atlanta bureaucrats over the years, from DMV to Watershed Management (!) to APS.

However, while I know how I feel, I'm quite sure I've mischaracterized how the other side feels. Because I have no way of knowing how they really feel; I'm just guessing.

Given all the uncertainty and the tension, it's hard to know what tone to take when entering into a conversation with APS over, for example, the need to resolve the parking issue at DHUMP.

Our PTO leaders have decided to let the process play out at APS's pace, and to not be very aggressive. I would argue this is a good time to set a tone for our relationship now, and going forward: do not think you can jerk around our PTO, because this particular group of parents is not going to allow that.

It is not necessary to be uncivil or unreasonable to set the proper precedent and tone. All we need to do is go to APS, tell them that we have decided we are no longer going to embrace the position of waiting patiently for them to get around to doing something they should have done (and promised to do) many months ago, but that we want them to agree to a reasonable and utterly firm deadline for finishing the deal.

Then hold their feet to the fire.

In my 3+ years dealing with APS as an IEP parent (which is to say, dealing with APS on a constant, almost daily basis), I have seen that APS does not have a workplace culture that respects the deadlines it promises to parents and PTAs. It regards deadlines as casually as you might regard a to-do list of chores on your refrigerator. Sure, you'd like to get to them all in a timely way, but you probably won't, and when you don't, there probably won't be much of a backlash. So -- hey, let's hit the couch, and if somebody doesn't like my pace of accomplishment, they can kiss my ass.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your tax dollars at work!

The Big List of Things To Remember with APS

Here is the comprehensive list of things to remember as you mull over your profound obligation to your child.

1. You alone are responsible for your child's education. Not all the teachers who will encounter your child. Not the school district. Not Bev Hall. YOU.

2. You do not delegate this job to municipal employees working for the Atlanta Public School system. You collaborate with them but maintain your proper role as overseer of the project. You make changes and corrections as necessary, and you never forget who's in charge--you.

3. You do not have to feel guilty about having more resources than other parents, or demanding stuff for your kids that kids at other schools don't get. The Atlanta Public Schools spend more than $13,000 per year on each pupil. They waste a ton of that money on every kind of misguided management decision imaginable. There is enough money here for a good solid education. What's missing is the will, and the competency, and the culture of success. Or to put it another way: We just need to try harder.

4. You should always be polite with any APS employee with whom you have dealings. You should also always be firm, always follow up, and set the tone early on that you are the dog, not the tail, and you will not be wagged by anyone at APS. (You will see my tired old cliche about the dog and the tail over and over again on this blog).

5. Never allow APS to unilaterally break or "float" any deadline to which it has previously agreed. If you don't know what that leads to, just try parking over at DHUMP next time you need to pick up your kid. Insist on real-world standards of accountability with whomever you deal with, such as prompt email follow-ups and returned phone calls.

6. Understand that while SPARK is an oasis in the middle of the desert that is APS, it is still surrounded by all that desert, and operates in the midst of an overarching APS workplace culture that believes okay is good, good is great, and great is just not achievable. (The parent culture in the Springdale Park PTO, I would contend, believes okay is terrible, good is the absolute minimum, and great is definitely within our reach).

The best thing we can do for SPARK is to never compare it--or let its staff compare it--to anything else APS is doing. Let's keep it an oasis.

7. "Nine years of steady progress," the APS's mantra, is not the same as excellence. APS was in horrible shape when Bev Hall took over. Now it's only below average. Do you understand what that means? When you enroll your kid in a below-average public school system, you have to FIGHT to get your kid the education they need. Do NOT be satisfied with what APS ladles out to you. Do NOT be complacent because your school seems so much better than other schools. Trust me, there are thousands of public elementary schools elsewhere in this country performing at a higher level than SPARK. Our principal is overworked and has no assistant principal to help administer the school. That's an outrage. Our resource teacher, Ms. Williams, is mathematically incapable of fulfilling all the duties she has been assigned. We have no handicap access to parts of the building. The parking situation is atrocious. We have no front door security nor attendant. The buses leave school in the afternoon whenever they leave. These aren't trivial things, because if you want excellence, you have to have it across the board, not just here and there.

8. Only the parents in a school community should define what "excellent" means, and they must get the buy-in of the teachers and staff. That's the way it should work, not the other way around.


Okay. I've gotten you started. Now add some of your own!

Bev Hall's clay feet

Bev Hall has won a lot of awards and a lot of recognition, and she did take a school district that was as bad as a big metro district can be and, in nine years, bring it up to the level of so-so. Don't laugh, that's a big accomplishment. But don't get too excited, either, because your kid is going to school in a district that, at very best, is so-so.

And you probably hoped for better.

This is one of my pet peeves, so digress for just a moment. Being much, much better than you were nine years ago is not the same thing as being great. APS is not great. It's not even very good.

And yet when you start whining about some small item such as, for example, the district's addiction to breaking every possible corner of the IDEA law when it comes to IEPs, here's what you hear--it's like a mantra, a chant:

"But we have come SUCH a long way--nine years of continuous upward progress!"

Well, it may sound ungracious but I don't care how you are now relative to what a radioactive mess you were during the Bill Campbell administration. I only care how you are now relative to what I need you to be for my kid.


Anyway, let me get back to Bev Hall. My first problem with her is that she's a bureaucrat with a capital B. Evidence: during the selection process for our new principal at Springdale Park, she placed the interests of the bureaucracy and--yes, all of the job applicants-- ahead of the interests of the parents. That's exactly backwards. If any of you want to see my dissection of that process and its many flaws, I'll be happy to share those documents with you.

(Luckily for us, we got a great principal despite the process. But it should have happened because we participated in the actual decision, not just as sworn-to-secrecy "consultants" with no voting power).

My second problem with her--and this is a big one--is that when confronted with substantial evidence of test-score cheating by APS teachers, her first instinct was to protect the accused, not to move quickly to protect the parents and the kids who were the victims of this increasingly common crime.

Even Gov. Perdue called Hall's stance "outrageous," saying "any reasonable person" could see cheating had occurred. This criticism would have had more bite to it were Perdue not a bible-thumping, beer-hating moron himself.

Hall has now moved to correct this egregious lapse of judgment, but it comes too late for me. Her first obligation as superintendent is not to protect her felonious employees. It's to protect children and reassure parents. The appropriate response would have been to condemn the cheating immediately, promise due process to those accused of it, but acknowledge the overwhelming evidence rather than dispute it.

Instead, she reacted like it was just impossible anyone working for her could be a crook.

What hubris. There are all sorts of deadbeats and cheats still working for APS. Two of them have worked on our son's IEP.

If Bev Hall really wanted to know whose fingerprints were on those altered Deerwood tests, she would have found out.

Congratulations, Bev, on 9 years of progress. I hope you're around for many more. I want you to work harder on rooting out the bad people in APS. But I understand the system is weighted against you.

It's possible to complain without being a racist. So do it.

I've written several times about the tricky issue of being a relatively affluent white homeowner-taxpayer with children in Atlanta public schools. It's tricky because Atlanta schools basically suck, and the Atlanta Public School system, despite the efforts of the above-average but certainly not superhuman Bev Hall, is overpopulated with administrators who are just not very good at what they do.

But if you complain about the poor statistical performance of the district, or the inability of administrators to compose a sentence in clear English, then you're just racist, and that's all there is to it.

But it's not really a race-based problem. It's such a simple economics problem, really, that the only way race could sneak into and subsequently come to dominate the conversation is if the accusers were poorly educated and unsophisticated citizens; products of, for example, a low-performing municipal school system.

It's a perfect feedback loop. Kids go into the execrable Georgia public schools and emerge poorly educated and with a deeply unrealistic idea of the kind of effort and performance required to be successful in the larger world. Those kids eventually trickle up into every part of our public bureaucracy, from the DMV to the school system. The schools never get better, and the next generation of kids graduates no better-equipped than their predecessors.

The reason it's an economics problem is because (a) Atlanta public schools, although they pay better than suburban schools, carry with them large disincentives to talented teachers, such as poor parent participation, lax disciplinary standards, etc; (b) teacher unions and municipal job contracts protect weak and incompetent employees who would be flushed out in the private sector; and (c) even if we could solve (a) and (b) with the application of more money, which we can't, there is no possibility of further City of Atlanta property tax increases in the near term to fund school initiatives, nor is the Georgia Legislature likely to shift that burden to other taxes.

(You could argue, as I would, that no more money should be necessary on top of the $13,150 per year per student we're already spending (more than $4k above the state average), but it's a moot issue because no more money is coming, period).

But it becomes a race problem because the majority of the people complaining are white and the majority of the people hearing the complaints are black.

I can take it if it's the DMV. I can take it if it's somebody in Watershed Management. (And it is, by the way). But this is my kid we're talking about, so no, I'm not going to just go with the flow.

Inertia (And Why You People Piss Me Off)

You're looking at this beautiful new school with the driven, articulate principal (Ms. Brown probably wouldn't infer it from the things I say about SPARK on this blog, but I'm a fan) and the hand-picked teachers, all of whom seem to be really on the ball, and you're thinking, wow, we really got lucky, it could have been so much worse.

And you declare yourself satisfied and pack your kids off to school each day confident things are just peachy, and in doing so you do them a big disservice.

Because you are not pushing hard enough. YOU.

Here's why you don't push.

1. You're busy. You have to make a living, after all.

2. You'd feel guilty demanding more, because already you seem to have so much more than many Atlantans.

3. You don't want to offend the teachers and administrators at SPARK, and you are afraid of being seen as classist (or, worse, racist) if you even raise the idea that things at SPARK could be better.

Well, stop whining and start doing your job, because your job is to secure for your children the best possible education, not worry about what anybody else is getting, or what some teacher or administrator might think of you. Your job is to get in there and, in this order:

1. Figure out the upper limit of what's possible, given our resources and parent community.

2. Insist on setting the bar at that height--the limit of what's possible.

3. Vigilantly monitor progress in all areas, and fulfill your proper role as taxpaying steward of the public schools when the public school bureaucracy falls short.

4. Ask nicely whenever possible, but be demanding whenever necessary.

Admit it. Most of you who are reading this are thrilled to have SPARK as it is. You have let yourselves be persuaded that it's truly an excellent public elementary school, and you go to GREAT pains to make sure you don't come across as infringing on the turf of the teachers or admins.

But it's not their turf. It's your turf. It's your child we're talking about, not theirs.

Be polite, by all means. Be solicitous and kind. But remember that you are the dog and they are the tail, not the other way around, and don't let yourself get wagged.

No, we're gonna use MY dictionary, thank you.

We all want excellence from our gorgeous new school but who gets to define what that is, and how will we know when we get there?

Don't fall into the trap of thinking this school has already met the bar we parents wish to set for it. It hasn't. I like to think of it as a school that has the potential for excellence, but we're not there yet.

You know what the biggest obstacle for us is, on our way to excellence? Ourselves. Our own complacency.

That's because we have already persuaded ourselves that excellence has been achieved, or is a foregone conclusion. Just listen to some of the internal rationalizing that's going on:

"Well, we're just feeding off of Morningside's already-established excellence, and besides, we have this beautiful building and it has--gasp!--actual geothermal wells! And it's LEED-eligible! (sound of hyperventilating).


You know what? A green school is not going to get your kid into Georgia Tech.


"We have an awesome principal, and the teachers are great."

(True. But --this is the crucial thing to remember: excellent by APS standards is not how we should define excellence).

And this is where we're going to hurt some feelings.

Saying SPARK is excellent by APS standards is exactly like saying a McDonald's hamburger is excellent by fast-food standards, or the winner of a county beauty pageant in eastern Iowa (I actually dated one such girl in college; her title (and I swear I am not making this up) was "Pork Queen") is pretty-- by rural agricultural Midwestern standards.

It's damning with faint praise. It's factually correct, perhaps, but meaningless, because the standard cited is not the standard we, as parents, would choose to use.

We should set the standard for SPARK based on the standards we have set for ourselves as (let's not feel guilty about it) relatively high-achieving, relatively affluent Americans.

I go to the parent events and I see almost all of you are college-educated, hard-working responsible people. I have yet to meet one of you whose success in life, to this point, was due to any other factors other than hard work, persistence and setting a high bar for yourselves. That's why your level of inertia when it comes to agitating for excellence bothers me so much (see more about that in the post called "Inertia, And Why You People Piss Me Off."

We do not have to apologize for having a different definition of excellence from Bev Hall's definition, or even Yolonda Brown's definition. Yolonda Brown may think she's successful if she hits a certain test score mark, schoolwide. I would not think that was an indicator of excellence. I would expect that from her as a minimum; a floor-level achievement, not a ceiling.

We cannot let anybody but ourselves decide what excellence is, and we sure as hell can't let anybody tell us that SPARK is excellent "compared to APS and Georgia public elementary schools." Please, let's agree on one thing upfront: you can be pretty awful and still compare favorably to most APS and Georgia public schools.