Josh Starr, as superintendent of Montgomery County, took a strong stand against high-stakes testing. He won national acclaim, including being named to the honor roll of this blog. Montgomery County has been a national model for its Peer Assistance and Review program for teacher evaluation, which does not include test scores. Despite all this, the Board did not renew his contract. Josh Starr recently became leader of Phi Delta Kappa International.
The school board has chosen Larry Bowers, the school system’s business manager, as its interim superintendent.
Meanwhile, Maryland–long a Democratic stronghold–elected a Republican governor, who recently appointed two people to the state board. They are, of course, supporters of charters and reformsters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is more to this story than reported here…
The board announced a preferred candidate from houston who was similar to Starr, yet that candidate faced opposition siento his youth and lack of experience
bowers has been interim superintend my since Starr resigned in February….he has been a constant in MCPS for many years…
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This is another perfect example of the hostile take over of the United States. Studies clearly show that 91% of elections are won by who spent the most money. That is how the oligarchs are funding the hostile corporate take over of a democracy.
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Never count Marylanders out–they are often full of surprises on a wide array of issues! Although I live in New York now, Martland is my home state.
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Meant “Maryland,” of course!
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Not “WalMartland”???
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I wish our district would have hired him. I quest it is time to retire. As a local past President of PDK, I am proud of the fact that Joshua Starr is now the President.
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You haven’t even scratched the surface of the situation in Maryland. After running (and getting elected at least in part) on an anti-Common Core platform, the two men Hogan appointed to the State BoE are none other than Fordham darlings Checker Finn and Andy Smarick. This is on top of Broadie and PARCC member Lillian Lowery already as State Superintendent. A lot of people who voted for Hogan (I was not one of them) on that issue are now feeling very much betrayed.
And the saga of the new superintendent not-hire – wow. Just the idea that a guy with no experience as Superintendent at all who hadn’t been in any one position more than a year or two was the “preferred” candidate might be the one to take over the reins here got a LOT of emails and Tweets flying, a LOT of letters to editors and comments on WaPo articles on the topic. I may have my issues with Starr (and FWIW I’m glad he landed on his feet), but this would not have been an improvement.
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Maryland: Start channeling Pennsylvania, and vote these fools out before they do more harm.
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Part 1
I’ve been commenting on this blog for a while, lamenting the state of “leadership” in pubic education.
The fate of Joshua Starr in Montgomery County, MD is a good example. Starr was actually trying to bring more equity to the system, he wanted to de-emphasize testing, he opposed merit pay, and he was collaborative, generally. A teacher rep said Starr made sure teachers were “included in the decision-making process for most major decisions.” Still, Starr seemed to favor the Common Core, and in an interview with NPR he bragged about the county’s “SAT and AP scores.” Sigh.
Starr’s replacement was to have been Andrew Houlihan of Houston, who later withdrew his name from consideration.
Houlihan’s dissertation was on the use of data. He has described himself as “a big data person. I love using data to make decisions.” Except, apparently, Houlihan never really understood what the “data” said. He bragged about an Arnold Foundation grant that, he said, was “transforming” the recruitment of teachers. And he bragged about Houston’s merit pay program – ASPIRE – that, he said, rewarded “our most effective educators” for “accelerating student progress.”
The Arnold Foundation is a right-wing organization founded by a hedge-funder who resists accountability and transparency in derivatives markets but calls for them in education. Its executive director, Denis Cabrese was former chief of staff to DIck Armey, the Texas conservative who now heads up FreedomWorks, the group that helps to pull the Tea Party strings and gets funding from the billionaire arch-conservative Koch brothers.
Fairfax County recently hired Karen Garza, who was also in Houston. Garza led the ASPIRE program, a pay plan that was funded (in part) by the Broad, Gates and Dell foundations, the very same groups that fund corporate-style “reform” and that support the Common Core. And while researchers point out the dangers of value-added models, noting that they “cannot disentangle the many influences on student progress,” Garza said they were “proven methodology” that are both “valid and reliable.”
Fairfax and Montgomery, by the way, are considered two of the better school systems, nationally.
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ummm…lamenting the state of public education….
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After Starr’s nationally-read posts about standardized testing in EdWeek and elsewhere, our family felt that we might perhaps have an ally when it came to refusing the last year of MSA testing in MCPS.
Hah. He forwarded/deferred EVERYTHING to others and our younger one, the one least able to handle the long hours of silence and stillness, was tested against our wishes anyway. Our child was thrown under the bus by a man who could have taken that opportunity to Walk the Talk…..and didn’t.
Some good things happened and were beginning to happen here under his leadership, but not everything was roses; our family’s testing experience last Spring is testament to that. 😦
Houlihan would have been a disaster in MCPS IMO; it remains to be seen whether the current stopgap Interim Superintendent measure will be harmful or neutral, or perhaps even beneficial in the long run. (Hey, it could happen – I’m just not optimistic after the way this has gone so far.)
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forgot to make another edit…Dick Armey is the former head of FreedomWorks…he was forced out – okay, bought out – in exchange for an $8 million payment. Armey called his former organization “dishonest.”
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@ crunchy:
Yes, when push came to shove, Starr didn’t walk the talk. But he was better than Houlihan would have been.
I keep wondering why Houlihan withdrew his name. What was in the wind?
As I note in the context of my longer comment, many of our “leaders” in public education are not leaders at all. Not even close. They just roll along with the educational tide, making stuff up as they go.
Like in Virginia…the state superintendents award “the best” title to a superintendent who is not well-liked by teachers, who is still hiding nearly 300 emails related to a badly-flawed technology deal, and who reorganized schools into “academies” based on non-existent ‘research.’ And at their main event conference, they invite as featured speakers two people who really have nothing meaningful to say about making public education better.
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Part 2
Meanwhile, in the Commonwealth of Virginia the Virginia Association of School Superintendents (VASS) recently concluded its Spring conference, titled “Inspiring Leadership for Innovation.” The conference was focused on “college and career readiness,” “leadership skills essential to changing school cultures,” and “superintendent success stories.” The featured speakers were
JeanClaude Brizard and Marc Tucker.
Brizard has been a failure as a superintendent in Rochester and Chicago. According to a columnist who followed him closely, Brizard “engaged in gross misrepresentations of data and sometimes outright lied. He made promises he didn’t keep. He did one thing while saying another.” As to his two failed superintendencies, Brizard admits that “there were some mistakes made.”
Marc Tucker says that he wants high-stakes tests in grades 4, 8 and 10, and “the last exams would be set at an empirically determined college- and work-ready standard.” Additionally, “every other off year, the state would administer tests in English and mathematics beginning in grade 2, and, starting in middle school, in science too, on a sampling basis. Vulnerable groups would be oversampled to make sure that populations of such students in the schools would be accurately measured.” Tucker wants all schools systems to take PISA, because he thinks that the test scores of 15-year-olds are somehow tied tightly to economic growth and competitiveness. You know, jobs.
Sigh. Tucker just keeps regurgitating the same-old song, all over again: college and career “readiness.” To Tucker, that’s why public education exists. He says nary a word about citizenship.
And what about those jobs? The Bureau of Labor Statistics points out that most new jobs created in the United States over the next decade will NOT require postsecondary education. These are jobs like personal care aides, retail clerks, nursing assistants, janitors and maids, construction laborers, freight and stock movers, secretaries, carpenters, and fast food preparers.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm
In addition to its Spring fling, VASS selected its 2016 superintendent of the year. While the award comes from VASS, a VASS-selected panel –– comprised of the state superintendent of instruction, and the heads of the Virginia Education Association, state PTA and state school boards association, the state ASCD, and the directors of the state associations of secondary and elementary school principals –– picked the winner. In other words, the top education “leaders” in the state –– those who should be familiar with research and evidence –– were responsible for choosing the state’s “best” superintendent.
A few years back, this recently-named “superintendent of the year” forced a test-score-tracking software program called SchoolNet on teachers. She was advised against it because of its problems, but she went ahead anyway. It ended up being a $2 million-plus failure. SchoolNet was later bought by Pearson. The superintendent is still withholding 268 SchoolNet-related emails from public scrutiny, claiming they are “exempt” from the Freedom of Information Act.
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Part 3
This VASS-award-winner’s school division sent out what it called a “leadership” survey several years back. It was a skewed-question survey designed to produce pre-determined results. But it did allow for comments. And they were instructive. They included comments such as “..this is the worst leadership the county has ever had,” and “Honesty, integrity and fairness are lacking,” and “…teachers have very little voice, and “…the system does not care about me or most other employees as individuals, and “county schools leaders seem to be increasingly inept and far-removed from the day-to-day realities of public education.” Again and again and again, commenters said these things about the top “leadership:”
“does not listen to teachers…”
“does not ask what people think before it accepts major policies…”
* “…teachers are not listened to…our opinions have been requested and ignored…”
* “…when I offer my opinion, i has been dismissed.”
* “l..leaders seek input, but then usually, disregard the opinions of those not in agreement with the administration…decisions are made top-down before input is received.”
* “decision making is so top-down — stakeholders are seldom consulted…”
* “…decisions have already been made…”
* “…teachers feel that their professional judgment is not valued…”
* “most administrator are arrogant…and remove themselves with any type of collaborative dialogue with teachers.”
* “…they do not want to hear complaints, or you are labeled as a troublemaker…”
* “the county asks its employees for input but these requests are superficial…the decision have already been made by the people ‘downtown’…”
* “you ask people to think critically but we must toe the party line…”
* “We are not asked what we think…it is common knowledge here that you are not allowed to address concerns that may be negative…”
“I see few examples of teachers being involved in decision making.”
A blue ribbon resources utilization committee recommended a climate survey of the schools years earlier, noting that one had been done repeatedly in county government. Teachers asked for a climate survey in the schools too, and even offered to help write one. A climate survey still hasn’t been offered.
This “superintendent of the year” forced STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) “academies” on all of the county high schools. The original claim was that research showed a STEM “crisis” in America, and that this move was “visionary.” Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin – which has laid of thousands of STEM workers – was invited to the schools to make his STEM spiel. When asked for the “research,” the superintendent couldn’t produce any. There’s a reason for that. The research shows there is no “crisis,” no “shortage.” In fact, there’s a glut.
For example, Beryl Lieff Benderly wrote this stunning statement recently in the Columbia Journalism Review (see: http://www.cjr.org/reports/what_scientist_shortage.php?page=all ):
“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”
When VASS selected this “superintendent of the year” for 2016, it noted certain “indicators of success.” What were they? It cited an increase in the “number of students enrolled in AP courses” and SAT scores that were higher than the state average. Never mind that the SAT is not tied to the school curriculum and that this school division is one of the most affluent in the state. There is no better predictor of SAT score than family income.
The research on SAT – and ACT – and AP courses finds that they are mostly hype. The SAT and ACT just don’t do a good job of predicting success in college or life. Moreover, research finds that when demographic characteristics are controlled for, the oft-made claims made for AP disappear. In the ‘ToolBox Revisited’ (2006), a statistical analysis of the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.” Other research finds that while “students see AP courses on their transcripts as the ticket ensuring entry into the college of their choice…there is a shortage of evidence about the efficacy, cost, and value of these programs.”
This is the current state of public education’s “leadership.”
Unlike the Allstate commercial, I don’t think we’re in ‘good hands.’
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Thanks, democracy for the enlightening posts!!
TAGOj!!
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I have to confess that I’m taken aback that this is the only mention I’ve seen of the Finn/Smarick appointments to the Maryland State Board of Education anywhere in this blog. To those of us in Maryland, this is far FAR more insidious than “Maryland–long a Democratic stronghold–elected a Republican governor, who recently appointed two people to the state board. They are, of course, supporters of charters and reformsters.”
Categorizing Checker Finn and Andy Smarick as “supporters” of things like Common Core, Ed Reform, and charter schools is kind of like calling the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs “big.” These are people who’ve drawn paychecks grandstanding for Bill Gates’ vision of corporate ed reform, not mere “supporters!” Even Valerie Strauss, who named them by name, glossed over the extent of their “support” in her own post about Hogan’s appointments.
There are parents in Facebook groups already planning to homeschool next year after this; there are teachers talking about looking for work in other states. Our family was already looking at moving back to our home state in the next few years but are talking about accelerating that timeline.
“Supporters” indeed.
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