Leadership Audits Catch JCPS Off Guard

Leadership audits target

10 Kentucky schools

A couple of weeks ago, I had a nice chat with an inquisitor - oops, I mean "auditor" - on one of the state's new leadership audit teams. This former K-12 and higher ed educator has been on audit teams before. But this one, he says, is different. This one's out for blood.

Perhaps this is exactly what should happen. Some of our state's lowest performing schools have been that way for a long time now. Proposed changes that work at the margins have not shown success in moving student achievement in a positive direction. Maybe it's time, in some cases, to close or restructure schools, fire leadership and ineffective teachers...to consider new options.

This is clearly where the Obama administration is driving school reform and Kentucky is on the bus.

Politics K-12 reported that part of President Barack Obama's plan for reauthorizing NCLB includes a menu of interventions he would like to see states use in the schools struggling the most. "All of the options call for fairly dramatic interventions, and nearly all of them would require that a failing school get rid of its principal." The feds encourage differentiated consequences that involve a more nuanced look at a low-performing school's performance. For example, schools where students are struggling across the board would be subject to a different set of consequences than schools that are having trouble with only one NCLB target. It's a "tiered" approach to judging how schools are doing and an enhanced set of remedies for fixing their shortcomings.

Last week leadership assessments got underway at 10 of Kentucky's lowest-performing schools, including Fern Creek, Shawnee, Western, and Valley high schools, Frost Western Middle in Jefferson County.

This from Toni Konz at C-J:

“This is some very serious stuff,” said Lisa Gross, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Education. “It's quite different from the kind of assistance we've provided in the past — the consequences are much higher.”

Under House Bill 176, which the General Assembly passed in January, the state had to identify its lowest-performing middle and high schools, based on last year's test scores, and outline a range of interventions aimed at turning them around.

Those interventions include: replacing the principal and site-based decision-making council, replacing more than half the faculty, closing the school and transferring its students to higher-performing schools or restarting the schools under the management of a private or nonprofit operator.

The Kentucky auditors will scour every inch of the school community and recommend one of four intervention options. Then it will be up to Superintendent Sheldon Berman to select which of the four options Jefferson County will implement during the 2010-11 school year.

Recently, Obama and Duncan applauded a decision made in Rhode Island to fire an entire faculty that failed to agree to a restructuring plan.

JCPS Director of Testing and Accountability Bob Rodosky told C-J he was caught off guard by the audits. “It came as a surprise to us," he said.

Rodosky said he hopes the auditors will take into consideration some of the improvement strategies the district has already put in place at several of the schools affected.

“We understand that some of these schools have struggled, and we've tried to find solutions,” he said. “We just want to make sure that the solutions we've tried have been given a chance.”

But Rodosky said the district isn't sure what the outcome will be.“The auditors are looking at things differently than what they've done in the past, so we aren't sure what to expect,” he said.

My sources suggest that good intentions and modest efforts are not likely to earn much sympathy from the auditors.

KDE spokeswoman Lisa Gross told C-J that Kentucky is asking for approximately $50 million in School Improvement Grants. Each of the 10 schools are eligible to receive $500,000 per year for up to three years to implement the improvement strategies outlined in the new law but only if they agreed to participate in the leadership-assessment process this year. This is a lot like volunteering for a root canal, or perhaps a colonoscopy.

Western High principal David Mike said Friday he was preparing for the auditors visit to his school, which takes place next week.

“I am very worried about it,” he said.

He should be.

Photo from Monty Python: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"