Well this meeting certainly sounded interesting:
A meeting Tuesday night between the Board of Education and the state’s education commissioner got off to a hostile start and went downhill thereafter.
The program’s negative tone was set when Commissioner Mark K. McQuillan said he perceives the board is going through a period of instability and a sense of disunity.
So who is Mark K. McQuillan? Since April of 2007, he’s the secretary of the state board of education for Connecticut. And his background is pure education:
Mark K. McQuillan was appointed as Commissioner of Education by the Connecticut State Board of Education, effective April 16, 2007. Having spent his entire career in education, Dr. McQuillan holds advanced degrees from Harvard University and has served in a number of administrative capacities: Secondary Curriculum Coordinator, Assistant Superintendent, Superintendent, and Deputy Commissioner of Education and Chief Operating Officer of the Massachusetts Department of Education from 2002-2004. From 2004 until his appointment as Commissioner, Dr. McQuillan served as Executive Director/President of EDCO, the Education . The author of several publications, Dr. McQuillan has written extensively about curriculum and staff development, leadership training, and strategic planning. He is co-editor of Thought and Language/ Language and Reading, published by the Harvard Educational Review; a major contributor to Massachusetts curriculum frameworks for English Language Arts, and English Language Learning; and he is the editor and producer of No Child Left Behind, A Toolkit for Massachusetts, a DVD and CD information kit explaining the broad provisions of the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). While serving as Deputy Commissioner of Education, Dr. McQuillan wrote the Department of Education’s multiyear strategic plan, SP2005, and successfully implemented a major administrative reorganization of the agency and its various divisions. Dr. McQuillan began his career as a teacher in the Newton Public Schools where he taught English at the F.A. Day Middle School from 1971-1974.
Massachusetts btw, is one of those ahead of the curve bastions of high achieving public schools states. How else can you explain ZOOM, 0-2-1-3-4? But I digress. The dude has credentials. And The Hour continues:
McQuillan said he based his observations on a meeting he had two weeks ago with the board’s three-member executive committee and on e-mails he’s received from the PTO and the general public.
McQuillan said the board has been involved in public disagreements “that have been fairly vehement,” and the sense of disunity among board members are important signs that things are not quite what they would hope to be when the Norwalk school district will be appearing before the state Department of Education next month to present a District Improvement Plan.
Of course I’m curious about what’s in the District Improvement Plan that is so un-eharmony like.
“I have to say … that the seeming drifting that I’m seeing the district going through is a source of concern to me because what I have to say is no matter what’s going
on ultimately it is the District Improvement Plan that I care most about, to get it implemented well and with the fidelity I think it warrants.”McQuillan made clear that a new state law obligates him to become actively involved in school districts that need improvement, “of which Norwalk is one,” and so he can’t be in a position of telling the board it’s OK just to have a difficult year. Instead, he said, he had to insist on figuring out a way to correct the problem and bring the board’s members into agreement so they can implement the improvement plan well.
“We’re pretty unified,” said board member Jack Chiaramonte, starting off the responses to McQuillan’s remarks. “We’re not bucking the system here, but we want to work together, but we don’t like to be told how we should do our job.”
Board member Migdalia Rivas said she was shocked by McQuillan’s remarks because for the first time the board was working together and are demanding accountability.
Later, Rivas said McQuillan was judging her just by looking at her and demanded to know what she had done wrong.
“I have clearly touched the wrong chord, and I’m sorry that I have offended you,” McQuillan said. “This isn’t about blame, and I’m sure it still feels that way.”
WTF, are we in grade school here? Did Rivas really say that McQuillan looked at her funny?
Board member Shirley Mosby said the board is also starting to work with the community and implement what the community wants. Mosby said the board has the best interests of the community’s children in mind.
McQuillan said he would ask the board if they are functioning in the capacity to completely unify the work of supporting the superintendent and the school system’s administration.
“We do work with our superintendent to the point where we are questioning him, we are holding him accountable, and if something is not right, we are putting it on the table,” Mosby replied.
Mosby said McQuillan made it sound as if the board was fighting with School Superintendent Salvatore Corda. which, she said, is not true.
Oh geez. The BOE not fighting with the superintendent?
“It is true,” McQuillan replied. “In June you had a knock-down, drag-out fight with your superintendent that is well documented.”
Zing.
When Mosby said the business of the board is sometimes held up by Corda returning to issues he favors that have already been voted down or by his failing to provide requested information, McQuillan said her remarks confirmed his belief that the board must work with Corda in a different way.
Ah, well here’s the nub of it. Corda in his imperious way doesn’t exactly make it easy to foster a working relationship. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong 100% of the time. So the battles of accountability must begin with setting guidelines and measuring progress. Unfortunately that’s not quite the tact that the BOE has adopted.
McQuillan was joined before the board by Deborah Richards, bureau chief of the state Department of Education’s Office of Accounting Compliance and Monitoring. Richards said her position was created last year to help the state comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Richards said it was clear from the meeting that the board had “an incredible amount of distrust” in the District Improvement Plan, a core document, she said, the board must rally around to move the district forward. “That tells me there’s a huge disconnect in trust and how you’re working as a board,” Richards said.
Or perhaps its because the district has needed improvement for a number of years and no progress has been made so the BOE is exasperated.
Richards said implementing the plan will be harder than preparing it, and the board must be aligned to accomplish that.
Richards also said e-mails she has received indicate there is confusion on how PTO members and the general public should communicate with the board.
After the meeting, Richards said the state education department is working with 12 school districts it perceives require intervention with three more to be added.
McQuillan said the state education department is trying to be more visibly involved in school district improvement and be seen as “critical friends in the process.” It’s designed to put pressure on districts that are struggling to help them grow stronger, he said.
The meeting concluded with McQuillan saying he will recommend consultants the board can work with to improve its communications with each other and Corda, and that he expects the board to cooperate in working with the state education department over the next seven months to bring about improvements.
What a mess. If I were a BOE member, I’d be asking McQuillan for case studies of how turn arounds were achieved in Massachusetts and then comparing those plans with Norwalk’s.
source: The Hour, State ed chief confronts BOE, September, 3, 2008
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