In the next few weeks, there will be a tremendous amount of pressure on Bev Hall to step down. The CRCT cheating investigation report is just one reason. There's also the e-Rate scandal, and the news today that Atlanta leads the Metro (by a wide margin) in the percentage of elementary students who fail basic math. The PEC audit, which will also be released in the next couple of weeks, will be very damaging to Hall if it is an honest accounting of that disastrously dysfunctional program.
If you've been reading the AJC (particularly the Get Schooled blog) you see that anger over Hall's performance is rising, and it is now almost impossible to find anyone standing in support of her. This is not the sole gauge one would use to determine if she can survive these scandals, of course, but it is a gauge.
During the hunt for a new superintendent, I feel SPARK parents will have an opportunity to lobby--and obtain--some promises worth obtaining.
1. The Assistant Principal position at SPARK must be guaranteed and fully funded and parents must have the opportunity to participate in--and APPROVE THE HIRING OF--the permanent assistant principal.
This must not be like the principal-hiring process under Bev Hall, in which parents were invited to (under cloak of secrecy) give their opinions, but did not have any sway over the decision itself, which was entirely Bev Hall's to make.
SPARK parents must be allowed to veto any candidate they do not find suitable. The reason we need to ask for this, and the reason we should get it, are as follows:
We didn't get a say in the hiring of Yolonda Brown, who is an energetic principal, and who seems to be generally well-liked, but who was hired on the basis of test score improvements at her prior posting which are now going to be shown to have been fraudulent.
This does not mean Ms. Brown is a fraud. But it does mean that we hired someone who, by no fault of her own (I'm assuming), delivered a resume that was inaccurate.
So we really don't know what we have with Ms. Brown. Is she really a gifted principal, or just a Bev Hall loyalist who benefitted from the CRCT cheating that went on under her watch (if not with her participation)?
We deserve to be able to give her the support of a very capable fully vetted assistant principal and we should demand this. Not suggest it, not push for it, but absolutely demand it. Our leverage here would be to call for the ouster of Ms. Brown, and that's something the Hall administration (or its successor) would very much want to avoid.
2. The administration of SPARK and the key liaisons between SPARK personnel and the APS central office should be summoned to a meeting at which we, the parents, lay down some new rules of the road. SPARK parents should use this opportunity to make it clear that they (the parents) are going to be heavily involved in the day-to-day management of our community public school and that all APS employees had better get used to that way of doing business. The PTO should talk to parent members about what forms this new involvement would take, but it seems clear to me that parent oversight of school processes must be greatly ramped up. School employees resist this with all their might, but we must not be pushed back.
3. The current spokesman for the Atlanta Public Schools, Keith Bromery, must resign or be fired. He has been outrageously disingenuous with the parent/stakeholders of the Atlanta Public Schools. This cannot be tolerated. We must insist to the Board that it hire a spokesperson for the district who will accurately convey the truth, as unpleasant as it may sometimes be, to parents with children in the district. That is the spokesperson's responsibility--to tell the truth. Not to insist that the biggest cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing was due to a few disadvantaged kids who were just trying to correct their own answers "as they'd been instructed to do."
I had a conversation with Keith in late 2009 in which I called him out for his shameless playing of the race card, and I will be happy to talk to the parents about what I see as his dereliction of duty. As a journalist, I am offended by his lack of honesty in dealing with the press, but as a parent, I'm outraged at his willingness to lie to parents.
4. We need to tell our Board that we want the Superintendent selection process to be much more transparent and open to parental input than it has ever been before, and actually follow through by attending Board meetings and confronting our elected Board reps when necessary.
