The Kentucky Department of Education announces that, “Terry Holliday, superintendent of the Iredell-Statesville school district in Statesville, North Carolina, has been selected as Kentucky’s fifth commissioner of education.”
Holliday brings some impressive accomplishments to the job. Under his tenure, his district won the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. These awards recognize companies, organizations, businesses and other entities that have shown long-term improvement in quality and productivity.
To earn that award – and many other accolades – Holliday closed achievement gaps and spurred marked improvement in graduation rates (both of which are badly needed in Kentucky!) and other student achievement measures.
I talked about Holliday with a newspaper staffer who serves the Iredell-Statesville school district area in North Carolina about a week ago. About the only complaints against Holliday seem to be from some teachers who claim Holliday made them work harder. This newspaper man will be sorry to see him leave.
Holliday brings some great skills to his new job.
As a North Carolina educator, he is intimately familiar with value added assessment programs. That is what we needed, but never got, from our now disbanded CATS assessments. As we rework CATS, Holliday’s background could be of inestimable value to that process.
As a data-oriented individual who even impressed the data hounds at Baldridge, Holliday understands issues we have pushed at the Bluegrass Institute for years.
This time, our Kentucky Board of Education might just have got it right. We look forward to meeting Dr. Holliday and watching what he can do for Kentucky.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Holliday selected as new Kentucky Commissioner of Education
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11 comments:
Dr. Holliday does have his supporters in Iredell County but that crack about teachers complaining because they had to work harder is an insult to all of the hard working teachers in the Iredell-Statesville Schools. What did concern the teachers was that the implementation of the Baldrige plan forced all the teachers to use one method of instruction. Teachers were not allowed to tailor their classes to meet the needs of the students. Teachers were not allowed to be creative. Dr. Holliday ruled by fear and intimidation. With Dr. Holliday it was all about collecting data so he could win the Baldrige Award. Speaking of the Baldrige Award, only eleven schools applied for that award. If the Baldrige method so great, why are so few schools using it. Dr. Holliday spent hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing his version of the Baldrige plan. Money that could have been much better spent for other programs. You can go to my blog at www.issreport.blogspot.com for more information.
As a teacher in the ISS district, most of the time that I could have been used planning creative instructions went into creating data charts to post up for high school students to look at and care nothing about. They would have, however, cared about me creating interesting lessons for them to help them in their educational quests. Unfortunately, that time was sucked away by doing things that they cared nothing about. Teachers working harder was never the issue; teachers working on things that are irrelevant to students WAS the issue. This blog post is insulting in the extreme. Another issue teachers had with Holliday was his pompous attitude who acted as though the success came from his method, which very few teachers truly invested in after realizing how irrelevant it actually was to real learning.
Couple of points:
1) ISS is not the first school district to win the Baldridge Award. I believe the first is a system in Oklahoma.
2) I would say the hate of Holliday comes more from a "his way or the highway" approach. There is no doubting the fact that success was obtained during his tenure. Many teachers, however, did not buy into his approach of studying data to identify and correct gaps. This is a major shift from traditional educational practices, and a shift that many set in their ways were not willing to accept. On the other hand, many others embraced his techniques and found success with them. In summary, I would say it is basically impossible to please the masses when it comes to education.
To the above poster-
Teachers of quality have always looked at students test scores to determine gap areas. What they didn't do was create charts, excel spreadsheets, and PDSA forms to address those gaps. Instead, they used to the time to create instruction to address the areas. Therefore, no time was wasted in between assessing the gap and addressing the gap.
Baldridge is trying to take the teachers who aren't quality teachers and turn them into quality teachers. However, it would be more monetarily affective to simply hire better staff or actually evaluate staff frequently. The evaluation of staff doesn't actually happen under the Baldridge system. Administrators only stop by looking for postings on a wall, most of which were simply wall paper made by teachers so that they "looked good." Real evaluation would be stopping into classrooms daily to see what teachers are really doing instead of what they posted on a wall. Another reason that can't happen is because currently the administration is too busy working on excel spreadsheets.
I want to thank all of the respondents to this blog item.
We appreciate your inputs and will certainly watch for problems, as well as successes, as Dr. Holliday begins his service in Kentucky.
Regarding the comment that teachers were upset about working harder -- that came from down Iredell-Statesville way, not here.
That said, the Bluegrass Institute is very interested in solid metrics for performance in all areas of government. We have a management expert on our staff, and he makes a great case for the need for better metrics.
However, there are metrics and there are metrics. If any of you have specific ideas about how the analysis of student needs can be done better, and in a manner that would allow capturing success in a way that others could recognize and use it, we would love to hear that.
That's the problem...they have nothing better I'm sure. If they did, they would have come out with it already. "Baldrige" is an accountability system that is a challenge to the very fabric of a traditional teacher. No more worksheet after boring worksheet with this system. And the data is used to prove who is getting the job done. Heaven help that people are held accountable. When that happens, you see the response. Not a very popular thing among teachers as you see. As a parent, I'm disgusted by these comments. In the business world, most of them would not survive. Working 12 months and held accountable for your performance is something totally foreign to a teacher. They get tenure and have a contract for life. I would buck if someone challenged me and tried to take that away too. What a deal!
To the parent poster above, please don't feel as though this is the belief of all teachers. There isn't a system alive that all teachers will be happy with, you will always some that complain.
To the other poster about wasting time with spreadsheets. My kids colored in a bar graph with a crayon weekly which took about 10 seconds. Not a waste of time, b/c they loved seeing the progress, they were quick to point out weak areas and strengths, and they felt a greater sense of purpose for school.
Kentucky will be very pleased with the upcoming progess to be made under Holliday.
Data can be and was manipulated in ISS. Teachers were told by administration to make their PDSA tests easier because the graph looked bad. At some schools, every teacher in the same grade level, make their own PDSA test. At other schools, PDSAs were the same for each grade level. How can you compare data when the test is not the same? CFA tests were all the same for the grade level, but again created by teachers. PA tests (yes, it's a lot of tests) were standardized district wide, but again created by teachers. Teachers are only as accountable as they want to be, since they are the ones creating all the tests. If your going to use tests as a metric, the first thing you need to do is make them standardized.
By the way, children guess on tests! They can't guess when a teacher is next to them with base ten blocks watching them add or subtract. That's the way we should be accessing our students. We need to create oppurtunities to use the knowledge they are recieving, not just a 5 or 10 question test.
RE: Anonymous July 19, 2009 12:14 PM, comment that ISS District was not the first school system to win the Baldridge Award.
The Oklahoma school wasn't the first, either.
It looks like the first school to win the award in the NIST listing, which goes back to 1988, was the Pearl River School District, Pearl River, N.Y. in 2001.
You can check out the award winners at: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/mbnqa.htm.
You spoke to a local newspaper person. I suppose it was the SR&L. That paper is considered to be a local joke. That paper has denied the citizens their rights to be heard regarding school issues through their letters to the editor feature and the newspaper's blog site. It has certainly been a staunch supporter and the Holliday regime. Unfortunately much of the news people hear today is biased.
Dr. Holliday was a supporter of teachers and students. His push down approach was the problem however I-SS is now one of the top ten systems in the state. There were many teachers already using the quality tools although they may not have called it by Baldrige terms. Also the "lead teacher" program wasn't successful because it was not driven by individual school gaps/needs rather the system coaches desires. In the schools where the lead teacher/IF wasn't afraid to help teachers in the classroom or deviate from "their contract" it was more successful and better received. In our school, the IF/AP spends more time sitting at her laptop with her IPOD finding "sites" for us to explore, like when do we have time. She should be helping with assessments, bubbling in bubbles on the answer sheets, etc. You are only as good as those you are surrounded by and in some cases - that was also a problem.
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