When a superintendent has integrity and community support, he can stand up to the Governor, to Washington, and to the winds of fashion.

That’s Michael McGill, the superintendent of the Scarsdale, New York, public schools.

Scarsdale is one of the most affluent communities in the nation. But there are plenty of other superintendents in affluent communities who are going along with absurd mandates.

McGill is not going along. He has spoken out eloquently against high stakes testing. Imagine a superintendent who write a “declaration of intellectual independence.”

He has spoken out against the state’s half-baked evaluation plan for teachers.

When I visited Scarsdale schools a year ago, Mr. McGill gave a speech to the faculty denouncing federal policies that undermined the pedagogical freedom of his teachers.

Michael McGill is a hero superintendent.

A  reader of this blog wrote thiis letter of support:

Dr. Michael McGill, Superintendent of Scarsdale Schools is a hero superintendent guiding  a hero school district with a long history of thoughtful school policy and innovation, sometimes in the face of powerful and regressive political forces (including successful resistance to attempts to limit access in the schools to information and ideas by advocates for McCarthyism in the 1950s).  Continuing that long tradition, Mr. McGill is a vocal opponent of high stakes testing and tying teacher evaluation to tests.

But, he’s not only a hero because of what he opposes; he’s a hero because of what he advocates. Under McGill’s leadership, Scarsdale is providing a thoughtful road map for school improvement that others might well emulate.  He consults with this teachers and community.  Programs and changes are considered thoughtfully and evaluated for their merit before being launched.  His expertise and thoughtful approach to the training and retaining of high quality teachers, his vision for the authentic education of children and his leadership style in the building of his community make him the kind of superintendent any school district would hope to have.

Admittedly, he’s in a district that supports education over measurement. In that way, Scarsdale is already at odds with the testing über alles approach.  In 2001, his parents stood up to the obsessive testing culture created by NCLB and refused to allow their children to take the test.  In 2005, in concert with his faculty, and after two years of researching the value and consequences of the changes under consideration, McGill led the Scarsdale community as it became the first high school in America to drop out of the AP program.  Some might question that policy. Doesn’t that mean that Scarsdale is foregoing a challenging curriculum?  No, it doesn’t. It means the exact opposite.  As he wrote in an article for the AASA, McGill realized that the imperative of test preparation determined both what and often how teachers taught. Although AP courses undeniably met a high standard, teachers wanted their pupils’ experience to be even better and not a cynical process of strategizing to amass the right number of points. Instead of continuing to pursue a test of excellence, he decided to build a course of excellence.  He brought in experts to work with his faculty to build advanced topics that would be superior to the AP and no longer beholden to the AP exams.  Students were still free to take AP exams, but he understood what those in the forefront of the reform movement do not, that learning is compromised when driven by a high stakes testing culture. Scarsdale set their standard higher than the state.

Under the leadership of Dr. McGill, Scarsdale continues a long tradition of educational excellence and innovation.  He surrounds himself with thoughtful, experienced educators and a  School Board dedicated to building better learning environments.  who work with him to continues to innovate and point the way for other school systems that want to set their sights higher as well.  This year, Scarsdale opened its Center for Innovation, the first innovation center to be hosted and supported by a K-12 school district… [b]ased on successful models of university and corporate technology R&D programs, such as the MIT Media Lab and Apple Advanced Technology Group, the Center… provide[s] opportunities for Scarsdale to continue its leadership role in demonstrating innovative instructional practices. The Center plans to partner with concerned others, fostering conversation and collaboration with teachers, students, community members, university researchers, corporate and university R&D departments and other school districts.

Scarsdale provides a principled and meaningful response to the misguided policies of the non-educator driven reform movement.   They are blazing a trail for public educators: a sustainable, well considered approach to practice and innovative, built on experience, expertise and an understanding of the challenges and opportunities ahead in public education.  What better reason for excitement? Informed reform you can believe in.

To the honor roll of superintendents who stand up for public education and their students and communities, I add the name of Joe Bruni, superintendent of the William Penn School District in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania.

He was nominated by Charlotte Hummel, who was president of the local school board.

I know Charlotte from our email contacts. She wrote a terrific piece for Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet about her district’s efforts to shield the schools and children from unwise “reforms.”

Charlotte writes:

Your next super hero superintendent should be Joe Bruni of the William Penn School District in Lansdowne, Delaware County, PA. He attended the SOS rally, walked the walk and stood in the blistering sun. He tells our faculty each year about the DeVoss and Koch connections and implores people to return any school related or other purchases back to Walmart and to NEVER try to sell him any Amway! You should interview him. By the way, most of the kids in our school district (98% minority; 85% poverty) know this superintendent on sight and by name. He is the kids’ hero.

If you want to nominate a superintendent or principal or school board member, send in supporting evidence, preferably something that has been printed and has a link.

Jere Hochman is superintendent of the Bedford School District in New York state. I am adding his name to the highly elite honor roll of superintendents. Hochman understands that a school functions best as a community. He has created an evaluation system for teachers that will take the pressure away from “teaching to the test.” New York State requires that all districts judge teachers in this way: 20% based on state tests; 20% on measures devised by the district; 60% on observations. Some districts are allocating 40% of the state tests because they don’t have the money to buy new tests. Jere Hochman decided that the second 20% would be based on the ELA test and that the whole school would dedicate its efforts to promoting literacy.

Here is his explanation:

• It’s the right thing to do for all students: literacy everywhere
• We are not writing (1,000s of hours and dollars) “SLOs” for teachers/class that do not have a state test.
• It saves hundreds of hours of class time lost to testing, local test grading, and teacher pull out of classroom
• Teachers who do not have a state test will not have to use/give TWO “local” tests to measure growth and achievement (one SLO and one local assessment)
• It rallies the entire school around writing, reading, thinking, and speaking across the disciplines – and everyone teaches vocabulary.
• It means every teacher gets the same “points” on the school-wide goal which clusters the total score, taking the stress off of it. 
• It lowers the parent scrutiny because a teacher’s “score” isn’t just about that one teacher.
• It gets us all focused on the foundation of everything no matter if it’s an Ivy-league bound kid or a non-English speaker: literacy!
• It reinforces the systemic approach to closing the achievement gap, raising all students instead of accusations of focusing more on “lower achieving kids”
• The union likes it (and teases me) because of all of the above and because they know I hate anything that is one-size-fits-all and they are getting pleasure out of this “union-like” approach of “one-size-fits all”