The problem is that school districts are organized to provide a service (education) that is delivered primarily by the classroom teachers, with other employees playing supportive roles. I think one has to spend a certain amount of time as a teacher to really understand the corporate culture and school community politics. The biggest mistake that a supervisor / administrator can make is to start making changes without knowing why things are being done a certain way. And Jennings is under pressure to make changes.
The administration of Carol Johnson cooked the data on student achievement to show that the district has made progress toward "closing the gap" and that on average its students have been making gains above the national norm in reading and math. (I noted how this is done in a recent post re the Strib op-ed piece written by Titi Bediako.) Those fraudulent claims were first made by Dr. David Heistad (research and evaluation dept.) in a November 24, 1998 report to the board and in the 1998 Better Schools Report Card, dated January 1999. And I've heard the same thing repeated over and over since then. Jennings obviously has the kind of expertise that the current administration and school board are looking for. His public relations skills served him well as a schwann's executive, where he had to deal with the serious public and employee relations problems resulting from sales of tainted products (ice cream?), at the legislature, as a booster for the "better schools referendum" and as assistant wielder of the budget cutting ax as the district's COO. The Minneapolis School district is a mess because it has been used as a laboratory for educational experiments promoted by the MN and federal departments of education, such as the profiles of learning and a "flexible" curriculum tracking system in which students are segregated according perceived ability into different classrooms on at least a part-time basis as early as Kindergarten, etc. Ramsey Fine Arts had 8 levels of algebra a few years ago! By the way, small schools that do the kind of curriculum tracking described above are a lot more expensive to run than a one-track (college bound) school. That's why the district can't afford to run small schools (except for the non-tracking schools, such as Barton and the Montessori schools). That's part of the reason that the operating budget of the Minneapolis school district is way above average (per pupil). About half of MN school districts don't do curriculum tracking, and those that do generally don't have as many tiers in their educational caste system. -Doug Mann REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
