Superintendent Vitti's "who me" leadership. (rough draft)

Despite almost constant complaints about the unrealistic pacing guide and being told that teachers feel overwhelmed the superintendent routinely shrugs his shoulders and like Shaggy says, "it wasn't me".

He usually blames it on our principals, saying some may have interpreted the learning schedule as a set in stone document and he does this at the same time when he talks about releasing proven teachers from rigidness of the curriculum. This seems like an easy fix as we head into the 15th week of school.

And you know our principals right or what the super likes to call our shallow bench.

Meanwhile our principals are saying, its not us and friends I have to say being a principal in this day and age and district must suuuccckkk, the pressure must be unbearable, they say they are getting their orders from the cluster chiefs who must be getting their orders from the super right, I can't imagine any of them going rogue.

I am not just hearing from people at schools with poor principals either, I am hearing more and more from teachers at "good schools" that say they love their administrations. They lament the browbeating and intimidation that the district staff heaps upon them. They are saying teachers are talked down to and in a fashion that would get them written up if they would speak the same way to their students. They report being give zero leeway on the pacing guide, district tests, absences, or reteaching be damned.

I wonder if the district has ever considered helping and supporting our teachers rather than micromanaging and bullying them?

So whose fault is it? Principals? They say it's the district staff? The super says it is them.

Either way is this anyway to run a district? Shouldn't we expect more and better?

Principals should speak up and advocate for their children and staffs and I know that is a scary prospect and the super should dial back the pacing guide and tell the various chiefs to chill out and be leaders instead of bullies, I mean if that is what he really wants them to do.  

Then the super he should lead, if he wants it one way then he shouldn't hide behind shoulder shrugs and who mes. He should own what is going on rather than passing he buck. The truth is it is him whether he knows it or wants to admit it or not.

Teacher, the testing scrimmage is a huge disruption

From a reader:

The testing is a HUGE disruption. 

It trickles down into the rest of the day...the kids and faculty are unfocused and tired. Behavior problems increasing and that set in stone paving guide is ignored. 

More than s handful of times I saw teachers doing activities like walk the track or sit outside and read or watch an educational video because EVERYONE knew that the day was shot. 

I did see some teachers really try to rein the kids in, to pretend it was a normal day and get through what that guide said the lesson had to be I WILL NOT BE BEHIND was the conquering thought---and these classrooms had kids sent out left and right for behavior issues. 

Can't win.

No we can't.

Is anybody else tired of the district lying to us about testing?

The district over and over has said, look at us we have cut testing, we listened to teachers and parents and we're doing what they asked.

Except they didn't and the district is currently in it's second week of what they are calling a scrimmage designed to mirror the FSA test kids will have to take later in the school year. Ten full days of testing, more for schools without the resources to get it done during that window. Ten days of classes being disrupted.

This year weeks of testing have replaced last years end of quarter tests. Some people I have spoken to think we are testing more than ever despite the superintendents and districts assertions otherwise.

I get the tests too, the state hasn't given us much leeway, what I don't get is the district telling the public one thing and doing the exact opposite and I for one am tired of it.

Now for my regularly scheduled rant. The district doesn't get that if they make school miserable for students and teachers alike that we will never reach our potential, never. We also cannot alienate and push away parents, we have to be honest with them and we have to rally them behind our schools but why should they support them when they are told one thing while another happens.

Nobody likes bad news, but people hate being lied to worse. 

Florida's wacky school grading system

The district setting up more teachers to fail.

From a  reader:

We had a big meeting today at my elementary school. We aren't using i-Ready and Achieve3000 enough.Too bad most of our laptops on the big and expensive carts don't work. The District has told us repeatedly that they won't fix them because they no longer service Apple computers. In the meantime, my kids will be waiting ten minutes for the few working computers that we have to boot up and log in. That doesn't even include the time it takes for the web browser to open and for my kids to figure out their user name and password.

Testing over the past week has been fun as well. I had students sobbing because their computers stopped working in the middle of the test and they thought that they were going to be punished for not completing it. Seriously! Performance Matters kept having connection issues and caused a box to pop up that blocked text and wouldn't go away. I had a few browsers crash. The internet dropped out numerous times. The mice and keyboards randomly stopped working. I had one kid hit the exit button for Session One that completely ended his test. The list goes on and on. It was a complete fiasco. At least those students had a computer. I had several who didn't because there weren't enough to go around.

If the District wants to require our students to do an increased amount of work on the computer, then fine. However, they need to stop yelling at us until they give us what we need to do what they want.

Duval’s much acclaimed KIPP School projected to make a D

When the superintendent talks about charter schools he usually throws in, and the KIPP School is doing really well.  It’s a model of what charter schools can be.

He may wish it was a model school because his benefactor Gary Chartrand is so connected to it but the reality is it’s not no matter how hard he might wish it was to be.

Their school grades have been F, worse grade in northeast Florida, a Miraculous B, a grade protected C, it would have been a D but the state of Florida had a school can only drop one letter grade at a time rule, another B and according to the state of Florida another D this year as there is no grade protection anymore.  A yo-yo has less up and downs than this school. If we are being honest the school's grades have been F-B-D-B-D.

This is considered to be the gold standard of charter schools in Duval, the one that gives all the other crappy ones cover, the ones that public school haters on the board, Fischer and Shine can point to and say, see they aren’t all that bad.

Our school board has outsourced the responsibility of educating our children and those children and the city are paying the price.

To see its and other schools projected grades, click the link: http://www.tampabay.com/resources/documents/2015/12/grade_simulation_chart_14-15.pdf

Is a center school for autism really a good thing?

There is a healthy conversation about should there or shouldn't there be a center school dedicated to autism.

Here is the thing about autism, it's a spectrum disorder, you can go from children who aren't toilet trained and frequently exhibit huge, disruptive and violent behaviors to highly intelligent and generally well adjusted and everything in between.
 
When the district throws out autism center but is light on the details it gives a lot of people angst.

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2015-11-27/story/duval-plan-autism-center-draws-cheers-caution-some-parents

My two cents is if there are children who can't be mainstreamed then a center schools with small classes and intensive services can be a good thing, though I have to say strapping an autistic kid to a seat on a bus and keeping them there for an hour or longer which is what will happen if there is just one central location.

Another concern is where are they going to find enough kids to make it work? I don't think they can do it even stripping the center schools of the autistic kids there, I just don't think there are enough of the kids who would benefit to make it feasible, now there are enough autistic kids but some of those kids would be hurt not helped by a center just for autistic kids. Evidence below.



http://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/news/local/peer-buddy-program-helping-jacksonville-kids-autis/nkNwj/

Finally, it has to be done right and I have reservations that the district, that this administration can pull that off.

The difference between good news and just news

Now this is good news. I know some schools, mine included have already been doing this but the more kids we can make sure start the day with a meal the better.

This on the other hand is just news.

From the Times Union:

The most surprising finding, he (Trey Csar, president of the Jacksonville Public education fund) said, came from a new question on the poll: People were asked to guess Duval County schools graduation rate.

The guesses ranged broadly and averaged to 61 percent. That’s far lower than reality - 74 percent in 2013-14, the last year of data. Vitti said he expects the rate for the Class of 2014-15 to be higher.

Csar said he doesn’t know why people assume Duvals’ graduation rate is worse than it is, considering that on-time graduates have increased steadily for Duval each year in recent years and were last at 62 percent in 2011.

“They’re four years behind reality,” he said. “That points to a sizable perception gap in how the community views schools.”

He said Duval needs to do a better job trumpeting its graduation rate.

“The district doesn’t have to spin anything; they can just use the facts,” he said.

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2015-12-01/story/poll-shows-more-duval-residents-stand-ready-raise-school-taxes

http://www.jaxpef.org/news/2015-public-education-perceptions-poll/?utm_source=hootsuite

Trey Csar seems really excited about this and I might be too except graduation rates are up and up tremendously everywhere, literally everywhere.

There are a bunch of reasons why and where I get it, lets acknowledge it, it's really not that special when everyone is doing it.

Furthermore Csar might not know it but graduation rates don't always correlate to a quality education but hey lets have a party anyways right? 

How the state of Florida used bad data to almost destroy a teacher's life.

Emily Litella and Duval County or the State of Florida

From a Reader

Recently I heard from a Civics teacher about the student data piece of an evaluation from a prior year. It brought to mind the brilliant Gilda Radner and her character, Emily Litella.

You might enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qatwRUt2RoA

Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz0z3J-vWsk

The teacher received an email that said an error had been made in the VAM score for the year 2013 – 2014. Seems that the score wasn’t below 25% of students making growth and that the NEEDS IMPROVEMENT rating was in error. In actuality, the teacher is EFFECTIVE.

The teacher was told: Recently, it was discovered that there was an error in the posting of scores for the 2013-2014 Civics’ Assessment for CAST, which resulted in a miscalculation of student growth scores in the Civic silo.  As a result, there has been a change in your final Summative Evaluation score for that year and your final rating went up a level.  Below, you will find both your previous and revised final scores and ratings. You have the option to not take any action or to sign a corrected copy of your 2013-2014 evaluation.  Should you desire to sign a corrected copy, please notify me via e-mail by Wednesday, November 18^th.  If you choose not to take any action, then a copy of this report is being attached to your 2013-2014 Summative Evaluation and forwarded to the Florida Department of Education. 

In other words, ever since the ERRONEOUS rating, the teacher went through 9 kinds of hell as district people flooded the classroom to show what was wrong and how to do it right. (Sorry for the awkward phrasing, but I am not using pronouns to narrow down the gender. So admins on all levels, stop trying to guess who this is.) The teacher worried about not only losing the job, but the career if the state continued to get erroneous evaluations and the law mandated that the teaching certificate be invalidated through non-renewal.

But a year and a half later, the teacher gets a ‘My Bad,’ and … well, Emily LItella said it best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYoNL4g5Vg

I thought that was the end of this piece, but the teacher tells me that in spite of complying with the District to go in to Prudential Drive and sign a correct version of the evaluation, the District isn’t fussed enough to tell the teacher when to come in and do so.

An Emily Litella ending indeed. Oh go ahead and watch it one more time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYoNL4g5Vg

It’s the best a teacher is going to get.

The stages of cancer, err make that school accountability in Florida

By Greg Sampson

The Stages of Cancer

Stage One Precancerous: You have a growth.

The State of Florida has, for some years, been committed to perfecting a workable system of accountability for the public schools. The Florida Statewide Assessment Program, begun in 1971, has been an important element in this accountability effort. The program was designed to assess students' academic strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the basic skills. (Quoted from the FLDOE website.)

But the FLDOE website links serve up blank pages when I click on them for their official history of testing in the State.

Let’s move ahead to 1998, when the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test—did I get that right? Because the last two words are redundant) began.

The purpose was to see how students performed against the Sunshine State Standards.

The standards themselves were rather vague and eventually the Department of Education had to specify Grade Level Expectations to tell us what each standard meant as students progressed through school. Few people knew of the Grade Level Expectations: an early warning sign that the testing regime was flawed.

Stage Two Cancer: Your growth is malignant, but it has not spread.

School grades began. In the early years, it was only ranking schools according to test performance. Besides the embarrassment of a low grade, there were no penalties for schools except then there were changes of principal and staff, conversion to a charter, takeover by a school management firm, or closure.

NCLB, the signature education initiative of the George W. Bush administration, used federal ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) dollars to force states into the idea that all schools had to make Adequate Yearly Progress to get all subgroups, i.e. racial, ethnic, ESE, and ED (economically disadvantaged—geesh, I’m getting tired of the euphimisms—the poor!), up to scratch. In the first years of NCLB, schools found it rather easy to hit the targets or get into the ‘safe harbor’ provisions.

Schools with the wrong zip code—a nice way of saying they were in poor, disadvantaged, minority neighborhoods—struggled to meet the targets, but everyone else was fine.

Districts focused resources on healing these few failing schools.

Stage Three Cancer: Your malignancy has spread, but with chemotherapy and radiation we can arrest it.

People who have had cancer or had close family members who have had cancer know these treatments for what they are. Doctors are going to do things to your body to almost kill you, but not quite, in the hope that they will kill the cancer but you will survive.

Every school is under threat. Next Generation Standards emerge. Teachers give in to test preparation and convince themselves that when students pass a test that presumably matches the standards, somehow they have taught the standards. The test looms over everything.

“Throw your book down,” cry principals. “Teach them to pass the test.”

Computer programs are bought. All is preparation for the all-important test. Students stress over how to pick the right answer choice on the test.

Principals are fired; teachers are threatened. Children bawl.

Test results become part of the annual evaluation of school-based personnel. Invalid statistical measurements based on a best-selling book about baseball are used to decide hiring and firing of teachers. Denounced by professional statisticians, the measurements nevertheless are forced upon teachers.

Tests are everywhere. If everyone must be measured by data, data must be had. Districts are commanded to produce a test for every subject at every grade level to answer the criticism that teachers are being measured by data that is irrelevant to their job. Reading data for art teachers is one example. Now we have testing without end, every subject, every teacher, every child.

Public reaction. Too much testing. Tests are dropped, but now we are back to measuring teachers by tests that have nothing to do with the subject they teach. When did a student have to read in order to pass Physical Education?

Technology is put into classrooms despite the inappropriateness for authentic student learning. It is there to produce data—the chemotherapy of education. A steady drip of data will destroy the cancer.

Stage Four Cancer: The disease has metastasized in all the organs of your body. The prognosis is terminal. You will die.

New standards, new tests, new cut scores—those arbitrary levels that pass judgment on whether a student is a failure or not. States deliberately set those levels to fail most students—70% or higher.

Public schools must die.

“They kill horses, don’t they?”

(A reference from a movie about horses that break legs and cannot be healed. The humane thing is deemed to be euthanization.)

Public schools are at Stage Four by design of politicians, the rich, and misguided reformers. But wait, public schools are not really at Stage Four cancer, they have no broken legs and they don’t need to be killed. But the big money needs you to believe that.