Esteemed Interim Superintendent:
At our
latest faculty meeting, it was brought to our attention that all district
principals had the opportunity to meet you. Although several of your qualities
and qualifications were discussed, three stood out as most relevant in terms of
the impact that you could make in our school district.
The first
of the qualities, which stood out, is that you have an open-door policy, hence
my audacity in addressing you with my concerns and input about the proceeding
issue.
Secondly,
it has been touted that you are stronger than most superintendents in the area
of curriculum and instruction and more specifically, you come with a very real
working knowledge of our district’s core curriculum. I am partial to this
document, because, although its contents have been tweaked and restructured, I
worked for six months with our education service center and other teachers
across the region to help develop the original second grade exemplar lessons
that have now been eliminated due to state board of education politics. Teachers
in our district are in an upheaval with this abrupt change. I have been told as
much as it has been recently demonstrated, a school district must and can
continue to function without a superintendent at the helm. Along those lines,
it has also been stated that it is the day-to-day classroom instruction by
excellent teachers that is at the heart of student learning. That may be true,
but the majority of our teachers are greatly affected by recent changes and
even more so by the appearance of no leadership and accountability. I am
encouraged by said credentials in the area of curriculum and instruction and
hope that you tackle the challenges that we face not only in academics, but also
in student home, social, and economic environments. I believe the district is
in desperate need of a self-worth curriculum to supplement the academic ones.
Perhaps even one that could be interweaved into the existing curricula and that
would also call for a more assertive parental involvement program. We cannot
tackle the issues of low academic performance without the real buy-in from the
home environment of education as a highly valuable commodity. I bring this
forth, not to lay blame on parents, but to make them aware and teach them that
their comments and attitudes about issues such as education, social status,
language, and sexual orientation have more staying power with their children,
our students, than what we teach at school eight hours a day for one hundred
eighty-eight days a year.
The third quality
that was highly regarded our campus principal is that you are data driven. I
take issue with this because I do not yet understand what data means to you.
Are data numbers that lead to new directives about improving them, or are data
sets of information that should lead to investigating their true causes and
implementing honest and valuable changes? I do not dispute the notion of data.
My concern is that we are not using the data to any real advantage nor as an
instrument to implement real changes or improvements for our district, for our
schools, and at the base of it all, those we service: our students. My
experience with data, as part of the district’s Reading Task Force and having
received two days worth of Kilgo training, is that we take these numbers, plug
them in to some spread sheet, shake our heads at the unfavorable passing
percentages, and then sit back and dole out demands for added rigor and changes
to produce different results the next time around. But the data alone do not
provide us with much information. I know that we live in a testing world where
in the end it is only the numbers that matter (not the student as is so often
said is the center of our business). However, there needs to be a movement to
look beyond the data and instead focus on the content that produces the data. A
spreadsheet will not tell us, particularly teachers, what led to results. Teachers
need to be aware of how tested information is presented, how questions are
asked, and even how answers are written. If we are to streamline our daily
instruction to attain overall success on state testing, then we need to know
what we’re facing. We need more than data.
It is not
my intention to solely present these concerns and walk away from the situation that
they bring to the forefront. I hope that your strength in curriculum and
instruction will allow for a strong correlation about how we desperately need
one to improve the other. I welcome any opportunity to be an active participant
in any concerted efforts to work toward a revamping of how data is used to
drive how TEKS are addressed and taught based on what could actually be
invaluable data.
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