Doomsday at APS

I want you to remember one thing before you read this post: remember the date you saw it. Right now, it's early 2011, and there's still time to stop this catastrophe from happening. When it does happen, all sorts of people (including our BOE, and our new superintendent) will wail about the suddenness of it, the unfairness of it, the tragedy of it.

But because none of the people in power at APS are doing anything about it now, the outcome predicted here is (in my mind) an inevitability. So I don't want to hear any of those gutless, infighting, scandal-plagued poseurs whine about it when that day comes.

One last thing: in the microscopically improbable chance that I'm wrong about this, I will not only publicly apologize on this blog, I will write personal emails to all the people I am about to embarrass here, apologizing to them personally. I might just as well pledge to send them each a check for $1,000, made out to their favorite charity. I'm that confident.

Here's what's going to happen.

The Atlanta Public Schools special-ed program known as the Program for Exceptional Children (full disclosure: our family has sued the PEC and had what we consider to be a wholly successful outcome) is about to lose its eligibility for federal funding. The district doesn't disclose how much special-ed funding it receives from the feds, but it is in the many millions of dollars per year--enough to fund arts classes, music programs, field trips....remember that, as you read on.

The PEC has either this year or this year plus one more year (this audit of the program fails to specify whether it's the former or the latter, but concedes it is at most a two-year period ending in 2012) to get its act together. (If you are not aware of the disastrously poor performance of the PEC, read down on this blog and you'll get the drift).

So, fine. We have time to fix things. That's what most people would conclude.

But here's the problem: the only way to fix the program is to fire some people, and the guy in charge won't fire them.

The PEC is made up of people. The only way to make the program better is to either change the personnel and get better people, or convince the current people that they should do their jobs better. (I hate to oversimplify the issue this way, because there are some very nice and competent people in the PEC, but they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the incompetent, racist fools on the staff).

You cannot reform this program and comply with federal law by writing some memos, implementing new rules and expecting your current shoddy workforce to suddenly wake up and decide they want to do things right. If it were possible to effect change via lawsuit, then extremely costly lawsuits like ours would have already done that. But APS has a curious business model for the PEC which is based, as far as our family could tell, on nothing more tangible than hope: the hope that more families won't sue like we did.

Hope is a fine quality; heck, we elected a president on it. But it is not a very good business model.

No, to reform the PEC you will have to change out the people who have failed the special-needs families of the Atlanta Public School system for oh-so-long. And the job of doing that falls to former middle-school principal Aaron Fernander, who spent time as a special-ed teacher before becoming a principal, but who never in his life expected to have to reform a deeply dysfunctional, legally complex system like APS special-ed. With all due respect to Fernander, who's actually a pretty nice guy, he's got no shot. Zero.

The reason? The last time he tried to fire a female employee, he screwed it up and got himself and the district sued. The Board of Education approved a $97,000 settlement to make the lawsuit go away.

Now, first of all, who pays $97,000 to avoid the cost of litigation? You can damn well litigate a case for under $100,000 if you didn't screw up.

But if you did screw up, and you got your ass sued, and the district had to pay nearly six figures to bail you out, how the hell do you get yourself promoted, the very next year, to a position of critical importance in APS, and where you will routinely have to make tough calls on personnel?

And yet, that is the legacy Beverly Hall is leaving us: not just the worst cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing, but a school-district hierarchy riddled with questionable hires.

So now we must ask ourselves a pretty obvious question: can we expect a guy who got himself sued last time he bungled an HR issue with a female employee to actually fire the middle-aged (and older) female employees who run the PEC? (Because they are all--and I mean all--middle-aged and older females).

Of course he's not going to fire them. He's going to stay as far away from employee terminations as he can for the remainder of his career.

So the APS will make rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic, and when it goes down, as it inevitably will, the district will have to take millions of dollars from mainstream programs and divert it to special ed (because APS will still have to follow federal special-ed laws no matter what).

And when that day comes, Aaron Fernander (if he has any spine at all) and our new superintendent of schools will stand in front of the microphones and look really sorry about how all of this has played out, and announce dramatic cutbacks in mainstream programs.

If you are standing in a tunnel and a freight train is barreling at you at 100mph, it is not going out on a limb for you to predict that you're about to get squashed. The laws of inertia are not going to suddenly disappear because you really really want them to and you pledge to try harder and be smarter next time.

So it will be this time. There's no cavalry coming for the PEC, nobody to stop the program from going right over the cliff. The problem is, when the PEC crashes, we all go with it.

Remember the day you read this.

An open letter to my fellow SPARK parents

Dear Fellow SPARK parents:

Let's take a moment to hear from you parents who still believe that the only appropriate way to participate in your childrens' elementary-school education is to tirelessly and patiently collaborate with the municipal employees of the scandal-plagued Atlanta Public School System.

(Sound of crickets chirping).

Now, let's talk about your other options.

1. Stop believing people who tell you the Alpo they're serving you is really filet mignon. Be a forceful advocate for your child. (My mantra about this is: be as polite as possible, but as confrontational as necessary).

Or, if that doesn't work:

2. Take over the process and eliminate APS from any meaningful role in your child's daily life.

I've tried #1, but I think only #2 is likely to work.

Here's the argument for converting SPARK to a charter school:

SPARK will never be the high-achieving, best-of-class school we imagined so long as it is run by APS bureaucrats who have no interest in nor any background in managing a high-performing elementary school.

Look at the way the school is run today. We have a principal, Yolonda Brown, who was sold to us by Bev Hall on the basis of Brown's remarkable (and, as it would turn out, fraudulent) CRCT record at the traditionally low-performing (and now closed) CW Hill elementary school.

Even if Yolonda Brown had raised CW Hill's CRCT test scores honestly (I do not believe Ms. Brown cheated on any tests, but that doesn't change the fact that we can no longer believe the gains she supposedly achieved at Hill were valid), what does that have to do with running a school like SPARK?

We don't care about the CRCT (Platinum, schmatinum). Our kids should be able to pass the subminimal CRCT exam on the first day of school. But Yolonda Brown cares about the CRCT--that, in fact, is what she cares about most, because it has been her meal ticket thus far. When Yolonda Brown took this year's new kindergarten parents into the school cafeteria this year and showed them a PowerPoint focusing on--you guessed it--SPARK's exemplary CRCT scores, well, that told you everything you ever needed to know about Yolonda Brown.

She just doesn't get it. SPARK cannot be about CRCT scores. It should be a school with a very high ceiling.

This is why the CRCT cheating scandal matters. Because of the cheating that was going on, Beverly Hall was able to spread the myth that she was some sort of educational messiah. Because so many people on the initial SPARK principal selection committee bought into this myth, they accepted Hall's recommendation to hire Brown to be our principal.

If there hadn't been any cheating, Yolonda Brown's improbable CRCT test-score achievements at Hill would not have existed. Also without the cheating, Beverly Hall would not have had the messianic clout she had to push her protege Yolonda Brown onto the SPARK parent committee.

Now, we have Yolonda Brown as our principal. Let's take a look at how she's doing. To do that, let's examine the key duties of any principal:

1. Hiring and retaining only the best teachers and staffers. How's Yolonda Brown doing in that regard? Well, she hired a "technology specialist" who has not been able or willing to exploit even a fraction of SPARK's high-tech resources. She hired a friend's son to an important special-ed position, only to get the district sued. She administratively-transferred (AKA fired) one of SPARK's very best teachers, Julia Zahra, because Julia dared stand up to her. SPARK still has some great teachers. You know why? Because great teachers wanted to come to our beautiful new school and work with our actively involved parents and our high-achieving children. They didn't come because of Yolonda Brown.

2. Handling important construction projects. Anyone want to talk about the gym project this year? The parking lot project last year?

3. Special Ed: This is something our family is well-positioned to know about. There are many ways to mishandle special ed, and some of them get you sued. (We filed suit against APS this past summer, and the district quickly settled with us over their mistakes, one of the most serious of which was the hiring by Yolonda Brown of a friend's son with no relevant experience or credentials to work directly with our little boy).

But there are other ways special-ed can affect mainstream classrooms. Many parents of special-ed kids, including us, want their children "mainstreamed" as much as possible. But if this isn't done carefully and thoughtfully, it can be (and, in our case, was) devastatingly disruptive to mainstream classrooms. I am very sorry to say that our child was the cause of many such disruptions in his mainstream classroom, a fact that left us, his parents, positively mortified when we learned about it. None of that had to happen. But when we needed leadership from Ms. Brown on anything having to do with special ed, all we got was excuses.

4. Technology. Nothing galls me more than SPARK's underutilization of its comparative wealth of high-tech resources. We literally have more tech in our school than any other elementary school in the system (including MES), and yet we don't exploit it as we should. Where are the keyboarding classes? (Keyboarding is offered as a standard part of the curriculum at Woodward Academy starting in the 3rd grade). Where are the classroom blogs? Where are the videos shot by our students and edited in iMovie in our fantastic Mac lab? Where are the original music creations our kids could have done using GarageBand? Where are the digital photo slideshows? Why do we have a "technology specialist" who actually has no capacity to teach the software we went to such great lengths to obtain and install at SPARK?

In every key test of leadership: managing construction projects to completion; professionally managing personnel; tackling special ed; using technology to create a "high ceiling" for our high-performing student population, what grade would you give Ms. Brown right now?

This job--the job of SPARK principal--is too important a position for us to allow it to be occupied by an employee who's not up to it. Employees can be changed. And changing one employee, in this particular case, would lead to a cascade of other changes: better teachers. No more nepotism. Creative leadership on the technology front. Better management of special-ed issues.

It's an employee issue, folks. It's not personal. It's not racial. It's about the fact that SPARK needs and deserves a world-class principal who comes from a school where expectations were through the roof---not a school like CW Hill where the teachers were just doing anything they could to keep kids from failing the subminimal CRCT exam.

These are your children, and they deserve an experienced, standout principal with valid, verified credentials. Yolonda Brown can and should do fine things at schools like CW Hill. Maybe someday she'll learn how to professionally manage people and will become a principal worthy of a school like SPARK. I hope so.

Remember this: SPARK does not necessarily belong in perpetuity to APS and you do not have to let them run it any way they feel like. This school can be yours to run if you have the tenacity and the desire to do the job right.

The iPad test, and how we flunked it.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that equipping our SPARK kids with a few dozen iPads would be lead to some very interesting possibilities. I know, because I thought of it in late 2009, even before iPads debuted, and I presented it to the SPARK technology committee shortly thereafter (I'll tell you how that went over in a minute).

Suddenly it's a year and a half later, and that same totally obvious idea is rapidly catching on elsewhere, as reported in the New York Times and elsewhere this week: New York City schools have ordered thousands of iPads; meanwhile, there's a whoops-the-reporter-totally-missed-the-whole-point article in the Times on the usefulness of giving every student an iPad instead of making them all tote around a bunch of textbooks.

In my mind, the whole point of giving kids at least some regular access to iPads was never about replacing textbooks or using them as a teaching aid. The point of an iPad in the hands of an elementary school student is to give them a way to create and communicate, not just another way to ingest the stuff we want to cram into their little heads.

Elementary school education can't be all about ingesting facts and spitting them back out onto test sheets, and yet at SPARK and other APS schools, that is indeed what it is about, because teachers are teaching to a test. In the (all too many) bad APS schools, teachers are threatened with all kinds of dire consequences if they don't get badly-parented and underprepared children up to the level where those kids can pass the ridiculously easy CRCT test. So the culture at APS is that you teach to the test and you follow the rote curriculum and if you have any time left over you let the kids make something out of paper and glue.

But it's 2011, people. Our children should be encouraged to create digital works of music and art and photography and video; they should publish blogs and make slideshows and do all sorts of other tasks in the digital environment where they will live and make a living their entire adult lives. If I have to persuade you that providing children with creative outlets is part of your job as a parent, you are definitely reading the wrong blog right now.

The iPad isn't necessarily the best vehicle for creative expression--I would much rather do all of that stuff I just mentioned on my Macbook. But kids think it is cool; many creative iPad apps are cool, and it is not up to us to tell children what means of creative expression they prefer, it is our job to listen to them and figure out what they'd like to do and then provide them with those tools if at all possible.

Part of this discussion must be about SPARK's curriculum. We emphatically do NOT have a good curriculum for SPARK. It may or may not be a good curriculum for the underserved, poorly parented children of typical APS schools, but even that point is arguable. It is inarguable that any curriculum for high-ceiling children must have room for teacher inspiration and teacher improvisation (and ours does not); it is inarguable that any curriculum for high-ceiling children may not use as its goal proficiency on the subminimal CRCT test, and our curriculum does.

But let's get back to the creative stuff. We all want our children to explore their creativity. We live in a digital world and on the Web. That's just the way things are now. Therefore, it falls to us as parents to make sure our kids have access to great digital tools and to those parts of the Web that are useful and safe.

That's where the iPad comes back into the equation.

When I brought up the idea of supplying our kids with, say, an iPad cart (which could be checked out by teachers and travel from room to room), I was under the assumption that our iBook cart and our iPad Touch cart--won from the tight-fisted and unimaginative APS bureaucrats only after a mighty struggle--were already in daily use around the school. But that turned out to be more than a little naive on my part.

When I asked the SPARK "technology specialist" (and I'm always going to put quotes around that phrase when I talk about her) exactly how many times the iBook cart had been checked out and used by teachers, I was told the answer was exactly zero.

Zero times. In four months of school.

Why isn't it being checked out? She couldn't give me an answer. But when I put a little blurb in the school newsletter asking for parent volunteers to help us figure out a way to get those iBooks used more often, she took it as a direct personal attack and asked her bosses to call me to retract the article.

Why do you want me to retract it? I asked. I was only relaying what you told me, and it wasn't like I was accusing you of being the reason we don't utilize the resource, I was just trying to ask parents how they would suggest we create more demand for the cart.

No, she said, you are blaming me and I want the article withdrawn.

But your name isn't in the article, and I never even mention you by title. How can you feel this is personal? Still, in the interest of maintaining a good relationship, I changed the article to be more "positive." (Looking back, this was a mistake on my part; our "technology specialist" is in fact a great hindrance to SPARK and to our children and I should never have considered trying to spare her the embarrassment she would diligently continue to earn).

Once again I will ask you to follow me back to this now-tortuous narrative about the iPad: after we'd had our little discussion about the iBook, I could not manage to get any of my fellow committee members, including the laptop-toting but totally useless "data specialists" from APS HQ to reply in any meaningful way about planning for the impact of iPads on our culture. It was as if I had suggested we all start training our children to breathe methane instead of air. They thought I was crazy.

This is exactly my point about the way SPARK is being managed. Of COURSE our school should have been among the first to try out iPads. We have some wonderfully tech-savvy parents and we have plenty of fundraising muscle. There is no chance we would have failed to raise the $20,000 or so it would have cost to do a pilot program, and there is no chance we would have failed to find creative ways to use iPads to enrich the classroom experience.

We could have blazed the trail for many other schools while giving our kids a fantastic new toolkit.

But there is such a failure of imagination among APS employees assigned to our school that the idea was never seriously considered.

It's the circle of life. Many of these APS employees went to dismal public schools and diploma-mill colleges and then were recruited by APS where they would come learn the Data-Driven Gospel According to Beverly Hall, and as a result any imagination they might have once had has vanished.

This is what will happen to your kids if they are not encouraged to create but are instead asked to absorb a bunch of stuff that's going to appear on a test. That's not learning; it's preparation for a life of mediocrity and drudgery.

There is a direct connection between the empty closet at SPARK where our iPad cart should now sit, and the quality of education your kids are now receiving. It may seem like not having iPads is a small thing. But it's not about having them or not having them; it's about failing to see the possibilities. The people to whom you are delegating the job of educating your children--your second-most important responsibility as a parent (after feeding and clothing them and keeping your children safe)--lack imagination.

They are the low ceiling over your child's future.

When you are ready for something better; when you are ready to go to work, let me know and we'll do better.