I am particularly interested in maintaining as much independence as possible for the AAPS. I appreciate the potential path you describe in your post very much, which is why fund equity is so important to our district. Not only is it good financial management, but having maintained adequate levels in the past has allowed the AAPS to weather the current financial crisis much better than other districts. There are other districts around us that have already passed deficit budgets (e.g., Saline). It will be very interesting to see how that unfolds around us, especially if K12 funding is anywhere in line with Governor Snyder’s proposal – making next year even more dismal than this year and last year for public schools.

I will do what I can to ensure that AAPS does not deplete our fund equity this year or next year, especially given the funding outlook portrayed in Governor Snyders FY13 and FY14 proposed budgets.

Moreover, how will Dr. Ball’s recommendation be squared with the requirement, already written into law, that a minimum of 50% of a teacher’s evaluation be based on value added models of student growth? As long as that provision remains, and there is little reason to think the legislature would backtrack at this point, all the efforts to build better evaluation systems and do a good job evaluating teaching methods is a sideshow compared to the VAM calculations. Look at what it has done to New York public schools, and they don’t even use VAM for a majority of the evaluation.

We have not agreed on this in the past, but I still think that reductions in the pay of the top tier of school administrators has to be part of the solution. This would not make a large dent in the deficit, but it would: 1) create some savings. The increase in the superintendent’s salary over the prior incumbent’s was a teacher’s FTE. This is not trivial. No evidence has yet been presented that a high salary for the superintendent improves education – much less that it improves education more than the money equal to the increase would provide in the classroom. Same goes – but for lessor dollars – for the other top positions in administration. It’s OK for public school administrators to make an above-average wage-after all, it is a big, important job. However, we all might be better served if people who are driven by salary, rather than by the mission of educating, went into the private sector. Nothing wrong with wanting a high income – that’s the American Dream. It’s just that to be effective in education, some part of you has to feel called to educate – to be mission-driven, not salary-driven. We need Wall Street, but that’s not who should be running the schools; 2) The idea of “Shared Sacrifice” rings hollow when not everyone is sacrificing. In this context, part of effective leadership is being willing to lead in sacrifice. There needs to be some leadership around sacrifice before asking the community to sacrifice via higher school taxes or contributions, and especially before asking those who actually have contact with students – those who do the work of educating – to sacrifice. To me, getting kids to school is more important than having “the best” superintendent (and for the reasons expressed above, I don’t think you can equate “highest paid” with “the best”). If kids aren’t at the school, the schools are irrelevant – and no one will be more irrelevant than the superintendent.

And I totally agree about ending Proposal A.

We need to think long-term, not just for the next year. This test will be replaced very soon. We’ve lived quite well without it for decades. I can’t understand why suddenly it’s so indispensable. We could do much better things with that money, and especially with the resources and classroom time it takes up.

Teacher evaluation methodologies are still being developed and are behind their timeline. In the meantime, we have a law to comply with and have to move on.

I anticipate that there will be some good thinking that occurs regarding RC this next year which will be led by improvements to supports and curriculum that help improve the students in that program. I cannot speak to whether it will be more or less, but education is our primary mission. We need to reflect that in how we go about changing programs.

Next year is not going to be pleasant from a budget reduction perspective. However, we will continue to work hard on ways to reduce costs while improving and protecting education. Other services and costs may need to be collectively provided by our broader community if we continue defunding public K12 education, as is our current trend.

Personally, I would like to see local levy authority returned so that communities would be able to invest in education, if they felt that it reflected their community’s priorities. Our current law seems undemocratic, and it subjects our education infrastructure to partisan politics.

In any event, I think it’s a little bit dangerous (can something be a “little bit” dangerous?) to assume that the teacher evaluation system Ann Arbor sets up is going to be better. . . or kinder, gentler. . . than the state’s system. I’m very appreciative of how careful Deborah Ball and the state committee is being, and that makes me think they will come up with a good product.

I don’t want to go on too long about the NWEA because I’ve been doing plenty of blogging about it already (and will do more at a2schoolsmuse.blogspot.com!), and
in any event, there are many other things in this report that interest me too. For instance, according to the report, in the most viable plans, the savings from closing Roberto Clemente were not the $400,000 initially projected but closer to $200,000. In part, that shows that the initial plan was half-baked. But it also takes me down a different train of thought.

If there are 100 kids at RC costing $19,000 each (OBVIOUSLY a very expensive program), and we wanted to save $2,000/student (for a total savings of $200,000), why don’t we just tell RC that they have to cut that much in their per-capita costs? It might mean slightly larger classes, but their classes are quite small now; and I’ll bet they could get creative.

One part of the COTW meeting was a review of how AAPS can provide differentiated instruction to all kinds of learners, including our high performers. An important aspect is a ‘no ceilings’ component, which is consistent with the way NWEA is constructed.

Earlier in the year, the Board also received a video presentation that covered how the NWEA was being used in classrooms already do develop a more differentiated learning environment within our classrooms. The reporting and analytic capabilities that the test provides to our teachers was demonstrated during this meeting, and how the teachers were using that information right away. It was very compelling.

I see this as a tool that can be useful in many areas, beyond just complying with the latest sets of mandates from the state. My impression is that the NWEA is being used currently to help in identifying differentiated instruction opportunities in classrooms, and progress can be tracked from there. The ‘no ceilings’ aspect is very important, in this case, to ensure that all students are progressing and that we don’t have a group of students reaching the top and then not making progress.