It doesn’t take long for latent memories of long ago lectures to resurface in a post traumatic stress disorder kind of way. Listening to Sal Corda skirt around any issue in a verbal fox trot triggered a Manchurian candidate programming response. Key word: Instructional Specialist. When I hear that term, I want to duck roll and cover, because the BS is about to be piled on thick.

So, where to begin in this tale of a three hour budget q & a? Firstly, the elected part of the Board of Ed was there! Perhaps they were there in support of Corda, but maybe, just maybe they were there to figure out why all these questions were being raised. One has to dream after all.

Corda opened with the defense of the $350k math textbook request. According to Corda, there were fundamental issues to be addressed with math curriculum at the elementary school level. Note that the preceding sentence, while a paraphrase contains the rhythym of Corda-speak. Zero calorie substance essentially.

What Issues? Why weren’t these issues addressed when the set of text books were purchased 3 years ago? What grade are we talking about here? I seem to remember a bit about elementary school math, and have many questions about the fundamental problem of math textbooks. I remember many of my math textbooks well. They had interesting word problems that went something like this. Farmer Brown needs to drive his wagon to Springfield and deliver 3 bushels of hay… As far as I could tell, automobiles hadn’t been invented yet when the math book was first written, and the edition that bore 17 student names on the inside cover was in pristine condition because for the most part, the textbook was rarely cracked open. Wiley math teachers had figured out the complex curriculum assessment tool of the blackboard, the student standing in front of it, and the solve the problem or die of embarrassment instructional specialty.

The BET skipped right past asking more in depth questions about the merits of the textbook purchase, and rightly so. They are not there to micromanage the educational curriculum content. But the elected BOE should, and somehow manage to convey that a redo of a bad textbook decision will have to wait, unless of course Corda wants to give up something else for that $350k. That is what we call in the corporate world budget compromise.

Things got more mind numbingly horrendous when Corda explained the complications of scheduling. As any manager knows, scheduling is the bane of any workplace. Scheduling people is part art, part science, part boot camp. The Corda philosophy is first to count all the gain of sand, er I mean students. Then produce reports. Then reevaluate, rinse, repeat and possibly, though I’m not sure, recycle. Elementary and middle school scheduling is easy he says, take the maximum student total and divide by 28, the contractual class size limit, and because all the subjects are required you get teacher totals. But, Corda, explained, that just won’t work at the High School level because of AP classes and electives.

Amazingly, it has not occurred to Corda and the bureaucratic administrators to let the students figure the scheduling out for them. This is accomplished by producing a rigid schedule year after year that rarely varies, producing generations of students that can say decades later that they took the same 2nd period AP British Lit class that their parent did often following the same schedule. The school administrators of the late 60’s and 70’s mastered this because they had that baby boom generation to cram through. With less students, you’d think that the current crop of administrators would take a look at how it was done in the pre-computerized scheduling days. I’m not doing justice to Corda’s lengthy, multi page response to scheduling. The only thing missing form his response was how the circumference of the earth affected scheduling. The question that was actually raised, was whether he could provide more detail behind the number of teachers required and whether there was a way to reduce study halls without hiring more teachers.

Corda bristled at the hint that he might be asking for more teachers to reduce study halls. Perhaps its because he prefers Central Office hires to actual teachers. Somehow this involved something called a “course matrix”. I immediately thought of the The Matrix, and the recent death of Jean Baudrillard and how Corda was exactly who Orwell was writing about. Corda demonstrated that he could pass a long division exam by demonstrating if you divided 1700 total enrollment by 130 maximum students that can be taught, you get 13 English teachers. Yes, I really wrote that down.

According to Corda there are maybe 5-6 students that really don’t live in Norwalk system-wide. Mayor Richard Moccia and BET chair Fred Wilms questioned this. “There are,” Moccia said, “rumors that the number is 100-200.” Corda said no, allegations are made, a detective gets hired and the case is documented. It is likely, Corda pointed out, that the high incidence of parents who are separated and live in different households may be contributing to the confusion. It is likely that Corda is right, however he might want to take up Moccia’s comment that there’s a stream of kids hopping off the train station on a daily basis. Yet, Corda failed to document his case here. Where is the year to year case investigations. how many investigations are started and not proved?

Now here’s an interesting number to think about. 71 special education students account for $4.1 of a $5.1 million budget. Corda was able to provide specific detail here, with the bottom line being that autism is up, State funding reimbursement is down, and Norwalk is legally required to provide education. And he happily produced examples of number of kids and the cost for each for different specialty schools that are available out of the district. He mentioned that the legal responsibility extends to the age of 21. When drilled about why the average cost per pupil is so much higher than in comparable school systems, Corda said it was because Norwalk had a more senior teaching staff. Er, wait, didn’t he just say that these kids were outsourced to other districts? Yes, he did. Anyone going to follow up on that one?

At long last, the subject turned to the beleaguered instruction specialist defense. Fred Wilms wanted to know why, if school enrollment was static, how did the central office increase over the same period? Corda began with his confident assessment that before he arrived, the Norwalk Public School System was failing. Now that he’s created the highly efficient spending machine, er, central office instructional specialist haven, things have never been better. At least until you start talking to the teachers, and the students and the cops who now have to patrol the school. But I digress, and so did he. The issue wasn’t his coveted instructional specialist positions, but how, in the most rapidly increased productivity due to technology period ever, does the central office grow?

Because, because, because, the wonderful wizard of oz says that its educational instruction infrastructure, as if this was a grand mechanical system piping out learning or something. No, Mr. Corda, this is administrative layers that have an expiration date. Corda claims, these administrative types, are simply not desk jockeys gazing at their navels. They are out in the field, expanding curriculum and leaping over tall buildings in a single bound. Well, the didn’t really say the last part about leaping over tall buildings.

Many more pages of notes were taken, but the detail is excruciatingly boring, and irrelevant. Corda doesn’t want to cut the central office, because then he’d actually have to deal with teachers himself and he would prefer to deal with a safety layer. The answer is simple, empower the school principals to do the job of administrating their schools, and have each report to Corda and one secretary. Cost savings? You betcha. Draconian? Sure. But it’s a start.

Moccia and Wilms had specific pages of 3 year increases that they wanted better detail on. Those included:

Pages 91, 93, 96, 98, 100 and 101. Some involved travel, other the wildly escalating maintenance and repair costs of supposedly refurbished schools. Things, in other words, that would make a good area to defer in light of restrictions placed by the cap. Corda would have none of them. Apparently the word compromise is not the in the Corda dictionary.

Afterwards I asked Fred Wilms how he thought it went. He said, “I appreciate that we had a full open discussion about the Board of Education budget. I think its the first time that this has ever happened. There were a number of answers where I’m not completely satisfied that we couldn’t trim the budget without harming the education of out students.”

In light of the fact that this is sunshine week, the week where newspapers commit to opening the doors hiding the inner workings of our government, this was a good first step.