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06/24/2005: "Minneapolis' Superintendent of Schools"

OHMIGOD do we have a School Superintendent issue?


Now just lets just calm down for a second. We need to put the current flap about Superintendent Peebles into a little bit of perspective here. First of all, I am aware that memory is short, and as I approach the end of my fifties, it is driven home to me quite often, but still this is the Star Trib that we are getting our information from.

The Star Tribune likes nothing more than a Superintendent controversy. The paper ran one Superintendent (Robert Ferrara) out of office with a front page headline per day for 40 days, followed by a poll. The Tribune played a significant role in the “Quality Education Coalition” which drove Richard Green out of the city. This requires us to look closely at the “criticisms” of the current superintendent.

Remember the criticisms of Richard Green? He was rude, not sufficiently deferential to other elected officials, non accessible, and employees were leaving the district because they didn’t want to work with him. Sound familiar? Ditto for Ferrara, but since there were some actual management problems in the later’s case, he was more vulnerable.

It is generally accepted knowledge (which doesn’t mean true) that the public schools are in need of significant reform. Most parents will agree, as long as the reform does not touch their school. It seems to me that every school except the ones that have students in them are going down the tubes. God help any school administrator who tries to change my school.

Superintendent Peebles was hired not quite a year ago, inheriting a botched superintendent hiring process, a totally botched school closing scheme, and a school board with two new members, both with big expectations to play a big role in improving things. She was tasked with improving test scores for the worse performing students in the system.

Now many of us may have problems with the task given to the Superintendent, I don’t believe that improving test scores is the be all and end all of school improvement, but the superintendent does work for the board, so she has to do her job. This is a difficult job, and in only one year, there is some significant improvement. The downward trend has been reversed for several populations and several grade levels. Wow, neither Superintendent Hutchenson, Johnson, or interim Jennings has been able to accomplish this. She must have really raised some hell, kicked some serious butt and taken names to get this done. I’ll bet some administrators decided to quit or retire. If the law permitted it, she should be eligible for a raise.

But that is not what happened. Some employees (by all means not all) some parents, (by all means not all) and some other elected officials, and, lets not forget the editorial board of the local paper felt she has been too “pushy”. She has been called rude, unavailable (busy perhaps?), short. It is said that schools fear her visit, (they might actually have to be held accountable for what they are doing to their boss). We are also told that lots of good administrators are leaving the district, although no one, not even the HR department at the school district can confirm this.

If a white man acted like she did, he would be a “strong leader” but a woman gets called something that rhymes with switch, and a black woman, well, in the old days, we just ran them out of town. Is that what the Tribune is trying to do? Give me a break people.

It is certainly totally appropriate and, of course, necessary for the Board to evaluate, and even criticize the superintendent and make goals for improvement. This should be done often, and I commend Joe Erickson for initiating this process. This should be done but done in private. Privacy insures candor, and the lack of red meat for the vultures who are always circling public education these days. No superintendent can make significant changes unless they have the boards full public support. Just send out the message that the board is standing ready to second guess the superintendent, and watch her effectiveness start to plunge.

Well we don’t know who leaked the details of this evaluation to the paper, nor do we know why, but it certainly was not someone with the districts or the students interests at heart. I hope it was not one of the Board members.

I am not necessarily a fan of Superintendent Peebles, it will take some more years of performance for me to make that judgment, but it does seem to me that she has made the correct enemies, and the correct friends. I hope the board gets it together to support her.

This will be difficult for the board. The people who are angry at her are those people who write checks to elected officials, write, call and socialize with writers for the paper, and generally have more political power. That means the rest of us have to do something out of character. Be vocal when we like something, not just when we don’t.