Okay, okay, Opdhal is now yesterday’s news. So what has our enterprising BOE been up to? Well, there’s a skirmish of sorts between Corda and everyone except Jodi Bishop-Pullan and Susan Hamilton over whether the internal candidates applying for Lang’s and Opdahl’s positions will ever see the light of the BOE review. Corda naturally, wants executive privilege over who makes the final round of review. Normally I would agree with him, he’s the chief executive and its his executive team. But this is Corda, who essentially lost his executive privileges over how he handled the disaster that was Opdahl.
Other than education curriculum, the next biggest priority of a school district is managing finances. After months of review, that is thinking about the curriculum, test scores etc, I’ve awarded Corda a C+. In the end, he has improved things, but alienated his staff to get there. For every teacher riled at Corda there’s one who is not. So it’s very much a mixed bag. I think Corda would perform better if he had a better team around him. He apparently didn’t see it that way, which is why this issue of candidate review becomes so important. I have real questions about Corda’s ability to pick a great team. Left to his own inclinations, he picks people with poor people skills, in a very people oritented business. And then there’s the perplexity of defending Opdahl and fighting a finance director. Somehow, Corda never understood that having a real finance guru would end up delivering more, not less, educational dollars to the system.
So, here we are in May, and the BOE has begun to assert itself in the process of candidate review. A smart political move would be for Corda to get in front of the politics of picking the next COO/Finance candidate. But maybe all those years of educational business conference attending has frozen the brain cells that would fire up neurons in the direction of bold decisive action. Instead there’s some sort of study being bandied about as a way to determine if the position of COO and Finance should be one or two. Ahem, I’ll spend the 30 seconds required on this important decision, split the position. Now I’ll justify it in three words. Check and balance. You can see why I’d never cut it as a high priced educational consultant, that last phrase isn’t even a sentence.
The constraints of running a public school system are many but not insurmountable. If I were Corda I would assess the priorities of the 2009-2010 school year along the following lines.
Building morale.
The only way to get there is to decentralize decision making and get senior educational staff, more involved in the administration of the curriculum objectives. I’d reduce administration positions to free up some money to reward teaching staff that accepts more administrative responsibilities and structure department heads across feeder schools so that the curriculum objectives flow from elementary through secondary schools.
Financial Controls.
Opdahl essentially created a complicated system that required account transfers to pay for things at the last minute and with little review. Call it crisis finance management. The reason, imho, for this crisis was the lack of oversight of what was being spent. This is because Opdhal didn’t come from the school of finance where no penny is spent without undue inspection, in triplicate. Opdahl was “Mr. Document it after the fact.” Were I Corda, and the BOE, I’d be looking up the line at Yale, for a SOM graduate with a hankering for setting precedent on financial controls in public education. Nothing like a real world case study to gain insight that would otherwise take years to unravel. One of the things that the BOE must insist on is a forensic audit of the last 5 years. Corda will resist this, as he has since it was first mentioned in the Price Waterhouse report in 2001. Corda shouldn’t resist it, because the one maxim of good operations is that you can’t manage what you don’t know, and I don’t think anyone, not even Opdhal knows what the financial picture of capital and operational expenditures truly reflects. Too many account transfers to cover shortfalls is not a healthy sign.
Operations.
Looming in the short term is the volatility of energy and basic consumables. This is not an issue that should be left to a reactive response. The entire system needs to grapple with the reality of declining enrollment, doubling of energy costs, and then of course the economy. This means an assessment of operations costs by building, an analysis of energy consumption by program and building and some sort of planning in conjunction with curriculum on how to reduce or at least mitigate rising costs while keeping curriculum on track. Corda will have to tackle redistricting sooner rather than later, and not just from an enrollment standpoint. The construction costs incurred on the high schools have depleted the funds allocated to all the schools, at a time when boilers and electrical systems are going to drive the cost structure of operations even more than they do. Throw in transportation costs and the decisions about what the Norwalk school system should look like in 2010, 2015, and 2020 will be quite dramatic.
Education.
Last but not least is the educational aspects of the schools. I’m from the old school educational philosophy of read books, discuss and write about it and test less. Clearly I’m not in step with the modern test, test, test approaches. Plus I believe that dodgeball represents a core function of anyone’s educational curriculum. So rather than post my thoughts on this, I’ll let the educators out there tackle the what if you were Corda aspect of this one.
