Just a reminder, other than Gloria Talley, virtually the entire Crawford Lewis Central Office administration is still in place today. Yes, the same exact bloated, festering, inefficient, morally corrupt administration is still intact.
That's you Audria Berry, Bob Moseley, Alice Thompson, Marcus Turk, Jamie Wilson, Tim Freeman, Ralph Simpson, Robert Tucker, and the worst of all offenders, State Senator/Head of DCSS Infernal Affairs/persecutor of teachers Ron Ramsey. Ramona Tyson has made NOT ONE personnel changes of note. Sorry, but she could not be more unimpressive.
So DeKalb County went through the unprecedented scandal of having its Superintendent and Chief Operating Officer indicted for criminal enterprise, and the (feckless) Tom Bowen-led Board of Education has allowed the Crawford Lewis selected Central Office cabal to stay in place. Heck, Tom purposedly made a show of hugging Crawford at one of his many courtroom appearances.
Kudo's to the Atlanta BOE and interim Supt. Errol Davis for firing its four asst. superintendents under the disgraced Beverly Hall.
(Did anyone see the clown co-PTA chair of Fernbank Elem. singing the BOE's praises on Monday night? Hey, it's easy to sell your soul in exchange for no re-districting.)
7 comments:
And Gloria Talley left by choice!
"List of toppled leaders grows at Atlanta schools" reads a headline today in the AJC.
Wishful thinking reads it as "List of toppled leaders grows at DCSS."
Ah, but alas, 'tis not so.
Well, this is a report from someone who attended the AYP transfer meeting yesterday. I heard the same thing from several others -
I attended the Public School Choice meeting last night. Ms. Tyson was present. The parent questions/comments fell into two clear groups 1) parents from two receiving schools questioning the chronic failure of DCSS to plan in advance for the annual migration of NCLB students and the subsequent gross overcrowding of the same receiving schools year after year, and 2) parents who wanted to know how they could get their children out of a rotten school and into a good school.
Towards the end of the Q&A, Ms. Tyson took the mike from Bob Mosley and began with the comment "my staff is sitting in the back of the room and I promised them that I only came to observe and not to say anything but after hearing some of the parent comments about the ... (quality of education in their children's schools), I cannot sit silent. " She then proceeded to say that she is the mother of two young children and made it clear that she is weary of the Interim Superintendent role. She concentrated on trying to clean up the mess and crises so that the new Superintendent could hit the ground running and concentrate on academics and instruction. However, since there is no hire and she agreed to stay for 90 more days she will not ignore the core role of the school system which is to provide a quality education to the students. She said she tasked the staff to come up with new ideas and that on Friday morning she plans to unveil her plan for instructional improvement. She acknowledged that the CRCT scores are poor.
She gave a few insights into the plan. She said she wants to "return the teacher to teaching and to eliminate all busy work." She said "chasing data for the sake of data" is a waste of time and she wants it stopped. She wants to stop buying products "off the shelf" and to focus on teacher training. It was clearly an unrehearsed talk and came from the hear BTW - Beasley was not there.
If you can, plan to attend the 10:00 a.m. meeting on Friday and report on her plan. Any plan is better than no plan which is what DCSS has had for the last 4 or 5 years.
I am not sure DCSS has ever had a plan.
Remember how Tom Bowen jumped when the redistricting was announced and told Tyson to tell everyone that noone would lose their job.
I'm beginning to think Bowen is the biggest roadblock to progress in the district.
"She (Ms. Tyson) wants ......to focus on teacher training."
All the teacher training in the world cannot do anything about 35+ students in a classroom. Until DCSS brings down class sizes to reasonable levels, teachers will not be able to give students the individual attention they need. It's simple mathematics. There are only so many minutes in a day. The more students you have, the less time you have for anyone who is on the low or high spectrum.
Plus, we need strong top leadership with a streamlined administration who see their roles as supporting the classroom rather than critiquing the teachers.
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