A PRIVATE MATTER

from a retiring neighboring Superintendent....
Doing “it” to ourselves
Col­leagues,
I have become weary think­ing of why oth­ers are try­ing to the ‘con­trol’ of our schools. We need to con­tinue to assume the account­abil­ity and redesign com­po­nents of what we do to stop the pri­va­ti­za­tion of our pro­fes­sion. We must keep chang­ing the way we do busi­ness, or Busi­ness is going to take over our schools. Our efforts for a num­ber of years has been rooted in the phi­los­o­phy of doing ‘it’ to our­selves rather hav­ing ‘it’ done to us. The big ‘it’ is redesign and change. We have done much with ELT, Inno­va­tion School, re-design tech­nol­ogy, 5dp, part­ners like BSRI, etc. that leads to suc­cess of a model that gen­er­ates gap clos­ing and increased stu­dent achieve­ment. When looked at by the Char­ter world com­mu­nity (the pri­va­ti­za­tion com­mu­nity) they see a strong dis­trict and as a result less mar­ketabil­ity. If an edu­ca­tion enter­prise did have a vision of com­ing in, our suc­cess would be the evi­dence that could stop an effort at the ESE or State Board of Ed level. Con­sid­er­ing the fact that all our neigh­bor­ing com­mu­ni­ties have Char­ter Schools, the strat­egy and the hard work you all are doing has thus far led to our inde­pen­dence. Level 2 sta­tus foun­da­tions that even more. So, my rea­son for writ­ing here is to help bol­ster your resilience in a time where every­one feels over­loaded. Our neigh­bor­ing dis­tricts have that over­loaded feel­ing too, but not the suc­cess we have achieved.