McCreary Superintendent evaluation includes student achievement

The most recent performance evaluation of the McCreary County Public Schools superintendent includes a section devoted to "student achievement". This is huge step forward with regards to holding district leadership accountable for poor performance.

In the 2010 evaluation, there is no such mention. You can view the 2011 evaluation here. Both of these evaluations were obtained via the Kentucky Open Records Act. If you look closely on the "Student Achievement & Learning" page, you will notice there is an asterisk with the title. At the bottom of the page you will see that this section of the evaluation was recommended by "education support groups". Yes! yes it was!

Rewarding superintendents while the students in their district suffer through underperformance is an issue that has been plaguing Kentucky for quite sometime. For full analysis of this issue, be sure to check out Rewarding Failure: The rubber-stamping of Kentucky superintendent evaluations.

JCPS school board admits disappointment in superintendent evaluation

The Bluegrass Institute recently submitted a records request to obtain the most recent (2009-2010) performance evaluation for former Jefferson County Public Schools superintendent Sheldon Berman. You can read/ download this evaluation here. This was a follow up to a previous request that was a part of the investigative report, "Rewarding Failure".

In that report we criticized the school board for providing a glowing review for Berman's performance while failing to even MENTION the incredible number of underperforming schools in the district. This time around it was at least mentioned...

Considering very few school boards across the state even mention student performance in superintendent evaluations, the fact that disappointment was expressed by the JCPS school board is a significant step forward. Granted, it is just a couple of sentences from a multi-page document but it does represent a willingness to bring this discussion into the open and an awareness that the superintendent is the CEO of the school district.

Superintendent performance questions in other states

An excellent South Carolina based transparency site has been asking some great questions about whether school superintendents are "earning their keep". The premise of the post is that the highest paid superintendents' districts are performing mediocre at best.

The Bluegrass Institute has been monitoring this very issue in Kentucky for a while now. You can read about our efforts here. It is great to see accountability and transparency on superintendent evaluations spreading in other states!

Open Records: Jefferson County Schools, Berman performance evaluation

An open records request was sent today to obtain the most recent performance evaluation for outgoing Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) superintendent Sheldon Berman.

JCPS and Berman were part of the investigative report "Rewarding Failure" which shed light on the broken process of evaluating the performance of school district leaders. With this records request, the Bluegrass Institute is following up to see if there has been any progress!

You can track the request progress here!

Cheating our kids: poor performance = pay increase?

If your child's school district had only 11.6% of 11th grade students meeting the benchmark ACT score for math in 2008 and an embarrassing 9.2% in 2009, would say say there is work to do? With scores not much more impressive in other subjects would you say the superintendent deserved a perfect score on their performance evaluation?

Well, this is the case in Carter County Public Schools. Below are graphs indicating the percentage of 11th grade students meeting the ACT benchmark score in various subjects. The numbers are not flattering.

Despite these numbers, superintendent Darlene Gee was given rave reviews on her evaluations with ZERO mention of student performance. These evaluations were accompanied by salary increases. Significant increases...

Take a look at the evaluation for yourself...

2009 evaluation

2010 evaluation

This amounts to rewarding failure. Student performance is poor while the leader of the district continues to receive significant pay increases? How does that work?

View the SPARSE Knox Co. superintendent evaluation

Knox County Schools has been exemplary in its efforts to fill our open records requests. This week, they maintained that form and filled a request to obtain the most recent superintendent performance evaluation.

You may remember that superintendent Walter Hulett received a PERFECT score this year.

We wanted to see for ourselves what the evaluation looked like and now, you can too.

View the evaluation.

Honestly, it seems odd that the superintendent received a perfect score and that there were not any comments left about his performance. Is this really the type of accountability we want in our education system?


Knox County Public Schools were one of four schools profiled in "Rewarding Failure"

View Carter County's 2010 superintendent evaluation

We recently submitted an open records request to obtain the 2009-2010 evaluation for Carter County Public Schools superintendent Darlene Gee.

You can view/download this evaluation here.

Just as with last year, there is virtually no mention of individual school performance, specific metrics, or goals. Gee "meets" expectations in all categories. The only comment from the evaluator is in the image below:

Does this evaluation reflect the type of accountability we want to see from those responsible for our children's education?

Caverna Independent’s school board owes an explanation

The latest round of inflation in superintendent evaluations continues with the Caverna Independent School Board providing “high marks” to their superintendent.

According to the Glasgow Daily Times:

“The school board evaluated him (the superintendent) in 10 areas: leadership and district culture, policy and governance, communications/community relations, organizational management, curriculum planning development, instructional leadership, human resource management, value and ethics of leadership, student achievement/learning and labor relations.”

The article says the superintendent got a “good” mark for the student achievement/learning area.

Really?

The latest available 11th Grade ACT Composite Score for Caverna is from 2010. It was a dismal 16.1, WAY below the statewide average of 18.5.

With that score, Caverna ranks WAY DOWN at 164 out of the 169 school districts in Kentucky that have high schools.

Now, how is that again about “good” student achievement/learning?

This board must be looking at something, but it clearly isn’t whether Caverna is getting its students ready for college and careers.

By the way, Caverna pays its superintendent $107,188.00 according to the latest, 2010-2011 data from the Kentucky Department of Education. That ranks 108 out of the 171 districts in the state that had salary reports in the department’s Excel file. However, tiny Caverna only enrolled 761 students in that school year. That should be well below what I calculate to be the state average of around 3,700 students per district.

Double-checking 'perfect'

We wrote yesterday about how the Campbellsville Independent School Board turned in a perfect score evaluation for their superintendent.

Today, we submitted an open records request to obtain a copy of the performance evaluation along with the criteria the board uses for evaluation.  You can monitor the progress of the request here.

Knox, Carter County schools records requests

Today, records requests were submitted to Knox and Carter County Schools to obtain the most recent performance evaluations for their superintendents. Both of these school districts were featured in our investigative report "Rewarding Failure: The rubber-stamping of Kentucky's superintendent performance evaluations."

We will be following up the the four districts we profiled to see how this year's evaluations compare with last.

We already know that the Knox County Schools superintendent has received a perfect score this years evaluation...details to come.

Knox County superintendent's perfect score?

It is that time of year again when school boards begin to evaluate their districts' superintendents.

Knox County Public Schools has already been at work and turned in an evaluation that boasts a perfect score (72 out of 72 possible points) for superintendent Walter Hulett. That's a pretty good score. You can only score higher if your teacher offers extra credit.

Earlier in the year we profiled Hulett's performance evaluation in "Rewarding Failure". In our assessment, the evaluation was a bunch of fluff that praised the CEO of the district despite the horrid performance of the schools in Knox County.

Stay posted for more information. In the coming days we will obtain this recent performance evaluation and uncover recent performance data for Knox County.

Superintendent reviews changing?

This year's round of superintendent reviews is starting to appear and some districts seem to be providing a bit more scrutiny than they have in the past.

Last year, Franklin County Schools' superintendent Harrie Buecker received a fairly glowing review from the local school board. You can view that evaluation here. That evaluation did not give much attention to student, school, or district performance.

This year, while still a positive review, superintendent Buecker received some feedback that was a bit more stern than last year. One board member commented:

“I think the code of ethics and the personal integrity leaves a lot to be desired"

This type of feedback for a superintendent was almost non-existent when the Bluegrass Institute reviewed the superintendent evaluation process last year in "Rewarding Failure". While it is desirable to have more discussion on student achievement and progress toward specific and measurable goals, could this be a step in the direction of applying more accountability the CEO's of our school districts?

Education commissioner says more about BIPPS interest area: Weak school superintendent evaluations

Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday adds more ideas about the rating of superintendents – and other education staff – in his latest blog.

The commissioner says:

“As I travel the state, most administrators tell me that we need to address this broken process.”

The commissioner also admits:

“In Kentucky, we have 174 different versions of principal, teacher and superintendent evaluations.”

The commissioner’s blog additionally contains links to several interesting resources that can help local school boards improve their rating systems.

Without doubt, the system now in use for superintendent evaluations is badly broken, as the Bluegrass Institute’s recent report, “Rewarding Failure,” clearly shows. Many current evaluations lack any sort of meaningful metrics of performance. Most are just ‘rubber stamps’ to ratify whatever the superintendent is currently doing while totally ignoring student performance all together.

Few evaluations, if any, contain enough material to justify pay increases and continued employment.

Click here to read the Bluegrass Institute’s superintendent eval expose, “Rewarding Failure.”

Check here for the latest updates on all the other Open Records issues!

Berman opens up on what went wrong in Louisville

Here’s surprisingly candid commentary on fox41.com.

I wonder if people in Eugene will get to see this.

Tuesday thoughts and links: State of the Commonwealth, Fayette schools, and more...

• Gov. Steve Beshear will give his State of the Commonwealth address tonight.  Let's hope he calls for charter schools, increased transparency and accountability, spending cuts in state government, and making Kentucky a Right to Work state...I won't hold my breath.
• Fayette County Schools superintendent Stu Silberman has announced his retirement. You can view a recent performance evaluation here. Some how that evaluation seems to lack any metrics or details.
• An Ohio woman was recently jailed for trying to send her children to a better school...wow.

Knox County superintendent is "Too Trusting"

Recently, the Bluegrass Institute released a commentary on the performance evaluation process of superintendents in Kentucky.  Knox County was one of four districts profiled in the commentary.  Below is an image of part of the the actual evaluation...

 

I'm going to look past the fact that the "strengths" portion of this evaluation is incredibly vague and focus rather on the "weakness" listed: "Too Trusting".

What does that even mean? 

Here are some weaknesses in Knox County.  At the point this evaluation was conducted, Knox County Schools failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress for 8 consecutive years and had dismal ACT benchmark scores (see chart).

Shouldn't the superintendent, the highest paid and most knowledgeable education professional in a school district, be held accountable for this? 8 years without improvement is a long time - and a lot of students.

Read the full commentary here.

Come on KDE, catch up with BIPPS!

The Kentucky Department of Education is under federal mandate to post the tools used by schools and school districts to evaluate teachers and superintendents.  Federal funds await them if they are able to have these tools posted before October 29, 2010.

Of course these federal funds have nothing to do with them making information available to citizens...yeah right.

Fortunately over the summer we took it upon ourselves to find out how superintendents were evaluated.  You can find the evaluations for superintendents in districts that aren't meeting adequate yearly progress here.

Maybe the KDE could save some time and just pull the evaluations from FreedomKentucky.org.

Courier-Journal: Superintendent evaluation secrecy should end

Add the editors at the Louisville Courier-Journal to the growing group of people who are upset with the recently passed legislation that allows local school boards to conduct evaluations of public school superintendents largely in secret.