May 4, 2008 - May 10, 2008 Archives

Larry Feldman is a devoted educator, a respected community leader, and—if he gets his way—he could be poorest principal in the country.

Feldman loves his job at Miami’s Devon Aire K-8 school so much that he’s willing to do it for a yearly salary of only $1.

Feldman, 58, is in his last year of Florida’s Deferred Retirement Option Program (DROP), which allows retiring educators to keep their jobs for up to five years while accumulating retirement benefits.

But budget cuts have forced officials in Miami-Dade County to reduce the number of principals and teachers returning to schools through DROP, reports the Miami Herald.

The district could save $13.9 million by no longer having to pay current salaries, says the Herald.

Miami-Dade offered to pay Feldman $120,000, but then withdrew their proposal after cutting DROP candidates. So Feldman made a surprising counteroffer.

The career principal told the district he would return for the cost of a Double Cheeseburger at McDonald’s.

“Do I know it’s going to end at one point? Of course, I do,” Feldman told the Herald. “But new life has been thrust into this old body. With one more year, I could take these kids to the next level.”

Although appealing, school board members and Miami-Dade’s superintendent turned down Feldman’s offer, saying they would never be able to hire another employee for $1 if Feldman ever left. The principal and a gaggle of mobilized parents hope the district will reconsider.

Although administrators like Feldman are few and far between, there are plenty of people in any community who want to help local schools by volunteering their time. Volunteers can assist teachers, help with school activities, and give students personalized attention.

Money-starved districts should take a look at the ways they are attracting and, more importantly, retaining volunteers.

Stacey Hollenbeck, Spring Intern

A principal at a low-performing school in Sacramento, Calif., changed the racial designation of four of his students—students who were classified as black but whose parents had actually marked “mixed race” or no race on their enrollment forms. By doing so, the principal avoided having his school dinged by No Child Left Behind sanctions because there were not enough students in the low-performing “black” category to count.

Obviously, this principal was gaming the system (apparently with the permission of the parents who were responsible for reporting their child’s race). But his actions raise a lot of questions about the use of race in school data and whether we should rely on strict categorizations or even use race as a factor when overwhelming evidence shows family income level and early childhood development has more bearing on a student’s success.

NCLB was designed in large part to expose the discrepancies between the academic performance of white and Asian students and their black and Hispanic peers. And it has done so. At the same time, we are seeing increasing numbers of mixed-race students enter our schools with no universal guidelines on how to categorize them.

A Sacramento Bee analysis showed the impact a few tweaks can make when using data to analyze a school’s performance. Two years of test data for some 6,000 California schools showed that 80 of those initially fell short of their annual NCLB benchmarks but met them after making “demographic corrections.” Of those, 12 schools had changed students’ racial classification, 50 had reclassified English language learners, and 11 had changed student demographics so that an entire group was rendered statistically insignificant.

Several years ago, when NCLB was first taking hold, I asked an elementary principal how she verified the race of her students. She said she didn’t—she couldn’t—because it was all self-reported by parents or guardians. Then she mentioned that even though she was white and her husband had both white and Hispanic ancestry, they classified their high-achieving children as Hispanic to help their schools meet NCLB requirements. It was just another example of how so many children do not fit neatly into racial categories—or in some cases, our assumptions.

We need to find better ways to focus on the truly disadvantaged students who are struggling -- regardless of their race.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

The guy gave the worst convocation speech I’ve ever heard. Granted, I haven’t heard that many, but in 1980, when Boston University’s pugnacious President John Silber addressed the student body at one of New England’s major research universities, he certainly wasn’t aiming for eloquence. Instead, he rambled on condescendingly, reminding the students to be sure to clean the hair from the shower drains and -- in a most unfortunate choice of words -- to “not commit suicide” by inadvertently walking in front of one of the Commonwealth Avenue trolleys.

It was tough love, Silber style.

I thought about Silber’s speech this week after reading an article in Bostonia, the university’s alumni magazine, about the 20th anniversary of BU’s unprecedented -- and, so far, unrepeated -- management agreement with the Chelsea public schools.

Say what you will about Silber’s negatives, he had the imagination and chutzpa to take on the project after Harvard refused. The man I so loathed as a BU grad student put the university’s reputation on the line for a small urban school system with a host of problems -- crumbling infrastructure; a highly transient, immigrant population; high poverty; and abysmal test scores. And if, early on, Silber and the district’s new management team were criticized for their “czarist tendencies,” well, maybe the place needed a little tough love.

Did it work? As the Chelsea School Committee prepares to take control again after two decades, Bostonia makes the case that it largely did. BU revamped the schools’ curriculum. It consolidated and improved early childhood programs. It provided student teachers though the university’s education school, opened a health clinic at Chelsea High School, and provided free dental screenings through its School of Dental Medicine. BU also created a foundation that has raised $12 million for the schools, and perhaps most importantly, used its influence to help secure $116 million for school construction, most of it state money.

Test scores are climbing. The proportion of 10th graders passing the math section of Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Tests (MCAS) rose from 10 percent in 1998 to 37 percent in last year; in English, the passing rate rose from 19 percent to 42 percent. Yet in many subject tests, Chelsea schools still rank near the bottom of the state’s urban districts.

The Chelsea School Committee could have ended the partnership years ago; instead it voted twice to extend the original 10-year agreement. The BU experiment illustrates both the successes and the continuing challenges of urban school reform. And while the university isn’t going away -- it will maintain some ties with the district -- building on its reforms will now be the responsibility of the local school committee.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

If you’re a school board member looking to protect taxpayer dollars, you can learn a few lessons from the Dallas Morning News about school district spending.

Speaking at the Education Writers Association’s annual conference in Chicago last month, reporter Kent Fischer shared some eye-opening tips about how his newspaper uncovered millions of dollars of questionable spending within the Dallas Independent School District (DISD)—just by looking at records available to the public.

Imagine what you could do with the records available to you as a board member.

You could start by examining what’s being purchased with district credit cards. After looking at more than 150,000 credit card transactions over two years, Fischer and his colleagues uncovered millions of dollars in purchases that the newspaper claimed “violated state procurement laws or district policy.”

All of these purchases had been buried and lost in vast amounts of paperwork. But, citing Texas’ open records law, the newspaper requested electronic records on purchase orders, written checks, credit card bills, payrolls, and other financial data, including budget program codes and purchase order numbers.

By cross-referencing data, Fischer said lots of interesting transactions popped up, including purchases of blanket and pillow sets, Star Trek DVDs, iPods, and a subscription to an online dating service. One former district employee already has been sent to prison.

Another fertile area for scrutiny is employee stipends, Fischer said. The newspaper discovered that the school district had, as one article last fall reported, “doled out millions of dollars a year in stipends and extra pay not included in the district’s compensation manual.”

“Look beyond the ‘average teacher’s salary’ and look at stipend and supplemental pay,” he said. “Get overtime itemized.”

One story cited a high school band director who “collected nearly $40,000 between 2003 and 2006 for long hours on band trips that should not have qualified for extra pay.” Meanwhile, school police ran up $2.5 million in overtime for three years straight—yet kept budgeting only $250,000 for overtime.

Questions also might arise about employee travel stipends, he said. Thousands of employees were receiving such stipends, including those whose job descriptions didn’t demand travel. One secretary received a $1,200-a-year car allowance, and she didn’t have a driver’s license.

Fischer said it also pays to look closer at contract language. One multimillion-dollar computer contract was written so strictly—demanding a specific internal processor, for example—that only one product could meet the bid specifications. In another contract, school administrators arranged free entry into a major golf tournament.

When exposed on the front page of the local newspaper, such discoveries are a public relations nightmare for a school board. Indeed, DISD leaders spent much of last year modifying their financial processes in response to headline after headline of bad news.

But why leave it to your local paper? You represent your community. Why not look for such improprieties yourself? Through their example, the Dallas Mornings News and Kent Fischer perhaps have done you a favor.

Just follow this last admonishment that Fischer shared with his fellow journalists: “Follow the money—what is spent, not [just] what’s budgeted.”

Del Stover, Senior Editor

If you are a frequent visitor to this blog, you may have noticed that a new voice joined our group of writers in early February. In hindsight, I probably should’ve formally introduced our spring intern, Stacey Hollenbeck. But the lapse wasn’t entirely my fault.

Efficient and unassuming, Stacey was a self-contained dynamo from her very first day--- no doubt a product of the education she is getting from the University of Maryland, where she is a senior and a journalism major, and her prior reporting experience, which included stints at a wire service and various university publications.

Stacey was the kind of intern every supervisor dreams of getting (I’m sure I’m going to embarrass her here): energetic and self-directed, she knew when to ask for help, but rarely did because could usually find the answer on her own. Creative and tech-savvy, she even showed a few of us “old-timers” a few cool tricks we didn’t know.

In an era of concern over how American education is falling behind other nations, Stacey (wow, I should get paid for this ringing endorsement) proves public education (she went to public schools and a state college) continues to produce quality students who possess those critical 21st century skills. We will miss her and her contributions, but wish her well in her next assignment with the Editorial Projects in Education.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor