Every now and then I’ve got to get out of my office and visit some classrooms. I’m not talking about my planned visits for evaluation or the feedback visits I try to make to every single classroom during the school year. I’m talking about getting my butt out of the chair, off the NYSED portal, away from the calculator and just paying attention to our students. I needed some “kid” time this morning and I return refreshed.

One of the first classrooms I visited was a fourth grade class with one of our new teachers, Molly Wallschlaeger, at the helm. It took me by surprise when Mrs. Wallschlaeger asked her fourth grade friends if they knew who I was. . . and then I felt pretty good about myself as all of the students nodded “yes!” I realized that our newest teacher may not come to us with an expectation that the superintendent visits the classrooms or that the students know who I am. But hey, these fourth graders are my “peeps”! After all, we started here at RCS together. When they were in Kindergarten, I started my first year here as superintendent. I’m thinking I’ll retire when they graduate and we can move on to other things together.  😉

Seems like not much to brag about right? So the students and I know each other. But I’m bragging because like our teachers who are caught up in the maze of paperwork that is the new pre-assessment/SLOs (Student Learning Objectives) challenge–I can easily get caught up in reports and salary schedules and paperwork. For just a moment, I was just not enjoying the work yesterday. NOT like me at all! With deliberation, I planned a morning to bring me back to the reason we’re here, the moments that matter, our relationships with our students.

And the plus side of the SLO Challenge? I have to say that the student work I saw being completed was more rigorous than years past. Maybe we did need a bit of a wake up to expect more of our kids and ourselves? Thanks to the RCS students and teachers who reminded me of how good we already are and showed me a glimpse of how much better we’re getting!

This is an incredible week for me. Not only do I have access to Joanne Picone-Zocchia and Giselle Martin-Kniep who are willing to conference with me individually answering my questions and helping to guide my work, but there’s a wonderful group of educators here too. My work with them is making me a better leader. Why? Because we’re having rich conversations about the changes in our field and their honest insights  help me to see other points of view.

Jane and Kathy, both retired educators and continuing to work in the field, bring a thoughtful, caring and professional view to the work that we share with experiences in the ARCS and protocols of Communities for Learning that have helped me understand the structures of this community. The entire East Syracuse Minoa team has helped me with examples of best practice, ideas for communicating vision, wonderful peer review from Kathy, and Donna, a superintendent whom I wish I had worked with at some point in my career.

And then there’s Alex, a caring, creative, vibrant Kindergarten teacher who reminds me so much of our own RCS Kindergarten teachers that she could seamlessly fit in at RCS tomorrow. She’s been the teacher voice in my head all week. The clearly hard working, dedicated, caring professional who is saying, “okay, I’ll follow all of the mandates, I’ll teach new things in new ways but I’m really wondering what’s happening to our children?” I KNOW that we have teachers feeling that same way and so the power of what Alex is saying is that it reminds me that teaching and learning and this business of school is incredibly complex and there are a million important skills and things that we’ve always done that are still important for their development that must continue. I won’t forget that, I promise.

But I want it all. And I know we have the faculty, administrators and staff to get there. I want all of the fun, creative, developmentally appropriate activities and learning that have taken place all along right next to better student achievement in Math and ELA. I still want to dress up and participate in the PARP plays (maybe without the goose get-up next year please) and go on field trips and read stories for pleasure and play outside and do Science experiments and eat foods from foreign places in our SS studies units. I just want our Math and ELA curriculum aligned and rigorous at the same time. And our teachers are fantastic, so why can’t we have that? I know if anyone else can do it, then we certainly can. Why do I know this? Because our teachers—-YOU—-are incredibly gifted, dedicated, caring and capable and I trust you to figure it out with us.

Remember the telephone game from when you were a kid? Someone whispers a sentence into the first kid’s ear and it gets repeated through a group of students with the final student stating out loud what he heard. Remember how the final sentence was never the same as the first?

So it’s not just about test scores but I’m aware that it’s how I may sound at times.

I’m thinking a lot about our focus on the common core standards and improving academic success PK-12. We’ve focused on school improvement with our many changes last year and we will continue to focus on what our students are learning again this year. And we rocked it in MANY GRADE LEVELS! It’s important that we remember that paying attention to what we teach our students in Math at each grade level is MOST about making sure that all kids have access to the same content and high expectations as they move to each subsequent grade—so that by the time they’re in 7th grade, we don’t have a 7th grade Math teacher finding so many students who can’t do fractions or who can’t multiply in their heads. Why is that important? Because if they can’t manage the basic skills quickly and easily, they struggle to tackle more complex mathematics. Then they’re at a disadvantage and that’s the last thing we want. It’s also about making sure our students are prepared as well as or better than students in neighboring school districts and across NYS with whom they will be competing for college entrance or jobs. I want our Randolph students to come out on top in college and career readiness.

So as we continue to focus on school improvement, know that it isn’t just about test scores. It’s about our curriculum and how we make sure we’re all teaching what’s expected at our grade level with high expectations for all students, so that every child can maximize her success in the subsequent year because last year’s teacher made sure she learned all she needed to succeed. We’ve prepared our kids so well in a zillion other ways for many, many years—which we will continue to do—and now we’re maximizing learning in those common core areas as well.

Keeping our eye on that continuum of aligned curriculum and self reflecting about what each of us can do better.

We are talking about the ARCS framework, Alignment, Representation, Culture and Sustainability in a school system. And as you would expect, I’m making lots of connections to what we do at Randolph Central. The ARCS framework is embedded in the MPPR, or principal evaluation rubric, and it will help us to think about our own leadership as administrators but is also making me think a lot this week about distributed leadership.

The idea I’m learning and thinking so much about is this idea of a community that lasts. How do we strengthen our teacher leaders, our teachers and ultimately our students so that the changes we’re implementing in school improvement are aligned and sustained well after a single leader leaves? As I analyze this, I realize that if I was hit by a bus tomorrow, our BOE and Admin teams could clearly articulate our school improvement efforts and plans to my replacement. I don’t think our teachers and students could do so as clearly and I know it would be different depending upon who’s having the conversation. Room for improvement for me and my leadership? Check. Working on it.

The ARCS framework described above will give us a common language for developing and discussing a common vision and shared leadership. This conference is helping me improve my own leadership and will help me to strengthen our leadership teams as well. Bet you all can’t wait for me to return? 😉

My dad was a coal miner. He worked hard and became a foreman. His method of management? His plan for motivating the men? His fist.

As we look critically at our State and Federal leaders I’m thinking a lot about my own leadership and my father’s style of management. It’s my job to hold every employee accountable for a standard of performance that results in excellence for our students. I analyze every part of our organization constantly, looking for ways that we can improve, including my own performance. But at the same time I trust our employees to do their best every day. I want them to feel that trust and to feel empowered to take us where we need to go. It’s not very different from when I was teaching high school students at Pine Valley for ten years. Back then I was successful as a teacher not only because of my test scores (an 8th grade Proficiency exam and Regents exams) but because I tried to show every student that I believed in him, expected the best of her, would do everything in my power to help each find success, and would be first in line to call him out when he made a mistake. My students took a swift kick in the butt when needed because of all the pats on the back I’d already given them—and because they knew I truly cared about them.

As a leader, I expect the best of every student and employee in our District, I will do everything in my power to help us find success both in student achievement and in student learning. I don’t hesitate to have the hard conversations with people who need that swift kick in the butt. I care about everyone in the organization—I trust them until one shows me that I cannot.

This is not the leadership we’re getting from the State Education Department. They’re back to my father’s fist management. The policies and procedures being implemented are all about accountability and designed for the worst of our employees. One of the first lessons I learned as a young administrator, 12 years ago, was that I shouldn’t admonish the entire faculty for something only one or two teachers had done wrong. Why hasn’t the commissioner learned that yet? People don’t function at their best when working under a system of fear and stress. And our children feel all of this, despite the best intentions to keep a balance within our schools.

We do need to do a better job of aligning our curriculum as a system. The common core implementation is a good time to make that happen. We do need to make better decisions based on student data, not just on our own hunches or “feelings”. And we do need higher expectations for every child. What we do NOT need are these extreme accountability measures to make sure it all happens.

Here’s a personal example of accountability to others vs. internal accountability. The BOE members recently reviewed my evaluation with me, as they do every year. It is seven pages long and addresses 73 different competencies. What the BOE thinks and discusses with me is very important to me. I pay attention. I listen for what I can do better so I can improve. But you know what? If that BOE didn’t exist, I would work just as hard and I would endeavor to improve myself and this organization just as I do now. The majority of our teachers and administrators are just the same—they aren’t working hard every day because of a composite score but because they care about the quality of their work and their students.

We do this work because we want to make a significant difference in the lives and futures of our children. We do this work because we want our lives to have mattered when we reach the end. The only way that happens is if we do our work well, to the best of our abilities. I don’t do my best out of fear or intimidation from the State Education Department. And I surely don’t do my best work while feeling demeaned, demoralized, and distrusted. Neither do our children. What I’ve just described? That’s how the majority of our students feel while spending 90 minutes per day taking those tests. That’s NOT learning with passion, innovation and leadership. That’s not the way to motivate others to do their best work. And it’s not good leadership. Maybe NYSED will get results this way, but what will those results reap? And what will they cost? 

As a public school leader, I feel compelled to write again about the NYS testing debacle. Every day I’m reading more dissension from parents, teachers, administrators and community members on blog news articles, twitter, the opt-out movement web page and I’m seeing more interest in the news. If you’ve somehow missed this conversation, I can sum it up by saying our nation, and in particular for RCS, NYS State, has moved to spending a significant more time AND money on testing with high stakes for teachers and administrators.  As I wrote previously here, this creates a lot of churn over testing within a building.

The interesting thing for me as a leader, is this is exactly what I try NOT to create within the District. When our kids are testing, they’re NOT learning. When I began my superintendency four years ago, the BOE members and I spent a lot of time thinking about and discussing the leadership direction of the District. We agreed that our vision, our course we wanted to set, was “learning with passion, innovation and leadership”. I still believe in that vision for every Randolph student. One of the fundamental jobs that we have is to help our students become analytical learners who can make good decisions and who come to better understand themselves during their 13 years with us from PK-12. Learners who can find out what those things are that they’re really good at and enjoy, improve where needed, and determine an idea of where they are headed after us—you know, helping them to be more career and college ready. We want them to have rich opportunities in which they can create and think on their own and develop critical opinions. We want them to have all of the technology tools possible, similar to their peers who come from wealthier districts, so that they may compete in college and career. And we want them to be independent thinkers, leaders, who will make a difference in the world.

How far have our state and federal governments pushed us from that vision? With teacher and principal jobs on the line based on how our eight year olds perform on a test that lasts for 90 minutes per day, 3 days per week, in ELA and then again the next week in Math, what do you think teachers are spending their time on? TESTING. When children are testing they aren’t learning–this is too much time spent on testing. Add to the mix the questionable quality of the test questions and what validity will those results have?

We’re going to look back on these days in public education as very dark times. As the time when our state leadership may have started with what was a good idea—raise expectations for all teachers, administrators and students so that they will achieve more—and ended with a system based on suspicion, lack of trust in those doing the work, and accountability measures that demean good teachers and hurt our children.

It is unconscionable that we are allowing our youngest to test for this length of time, under these levels of stress, while they are judging themselves based on these measures. The NYS tests are not the full measure of our children. And we have to stop letting them be.

I want greater student achievement and better learning experiences for every child here. I’m committed to figuring out how we can improve and then setting that expectation for everyone. This is not the way. This is not what good leadership is about and it is not the way to make a meaningful difference in childrens’ lives or to best prepare them to be the analytical thinkers that we need for career and college readiness.

If I want every child to learn to think and to speak out when something is wrong, how can I not do the same? If we could OPT OUT of this testing mania as a District, I would be the first in line to raise my hand and say, “We’ve got this. I believe in the talent we have here, we will improve, and our children will succeed.” WITHOUT first testing our children right into stress induced mania.