▲ Helms: Of all those things you said, is OCE last on the list? ■ Morton: Well, it’s a keen issue for board members and superintendents. There is
no question about it. But, you can begin to see how it loses a little traction in the body of the Legislature because of all the competing interests. There’s not a lot of glitz to it. It’s the oil that keeps the engine moving. ▲ Helms: Let’s talk a little about No Child Left Behind. Do you think we’re on track? ■ Morton: Last August we were at 88 percent (Editor’s Note: After the interview,
the SDE announced this August that 82 percent of schools made adequate yearly progress under NCLB). When we get up to the high 80s and 90 percent making AYP, we’re in rare air. But, it also means we’re down to that last 10 percent, and that really gets tough. Some of these schools are meeting the challenge and are making it and getting off the “needs improvement” list and getting on the “made AYP” list. Every school that does that is happy, and we’re all happy. It’s just hard to show double-digit growth in schools making AYP forever. But that’s okay. That’s why the reading initiative and math, science and technology initiative are going to help us get there. Without those initiatives we would be floundering, because they have made so much difference in schools making AYP. ▲ Helms: What are we doing to make sure our new teachers are going to be ready
to face academic, behavioral, cultural and technological challenges? ■ Morton: We just adopted some new standards for teacher education programs in order to certify their graduates. A pet peeve of people in education is that the colleges of education at the universities are usually underfunded. If we want to attract people into the teaching profession, then at some point somebody’s got to make a stand — and put enough money into these training programs to get the right people to teach them and have the right lab experiences and the right mentoring and the right supervision in internships — so we get the best teachers possible coming out of these colleges of education. That’s bigger than either the state board or me. The only leverage we have on colleges of education is we can do what we’ve done — go back and redo standards they have to meet in order to get their graduates a license to teach. We have also reinstituted onsite reviews of colleges of education to help them understand the value of our standards. We’re going to give colleges of education a report card. We now have subject matter testing for teachers, which is going to be a real asset for us. And another one of those little pearls in the budget this year is $2.7 million for “teacher recruitment scholarships.” Ten percent of the scholarship money, about $270,000, will go to high school future teacher programs. ▲ Helms: How can the state school board and AASB work better together? ■ Morton: Well, we have a state board member on AASB’s board of directors
who is a liaison (Sandra Ray). That’s important to just the natural reaction and interaction that should occur. I have an advisory council, and I’m open and welcome to any kind of interaction. ▲ Helms: Is there a message that you would want us to convey to board members? ■ Morton: All I would say is that education is better in Alabama than it’s given
credit for being, and what we know today is just the tip of the iceberg of what it can be. I believe if we can all hold hands together long enough as a state, we can stay together and complete this course we’re on. We’ve got to hold on to the game plan long enough for it to mature and bring about results. It just takes longer than people want to give. There’s a balance of pushing people to do better quicker but knowing that we’re dealing with human beings. We’re not fine-tuning an engine. We have a game plan to do as much as is humanly possible to fix things, but we can’t fix it alone. I’m 100 percent convinced that we’ve got to have the community partnership become stronger in every school district. ▲
September 2007 District Academy Programs 17
District 2 Meeting
20
District 3 Meeting
24
District 8 Meeting
25
District 9 Meeting
27
District 7 Meeting
October 2007 District Academy Programs 1
District 5 Meeting
4
District 6 Meeting
9
District 1 Meeting
11
District 4 Meeting
21- AASB Board 22 of Directors' Meeting Wynfrey Hotel, Hoover 21- Academy Core 22 Conference Wynfrey Hotel, Hoover
December 2007 6
AASB Board of Directors' Meeting Wynfrey Hotel, Hoover
6
AASB Leadership II Core Wynfrey Hotel, Hoover
6-8 AASB Annual Convention Wynfrey Hotel, Hoover
January 2008 7-29 District Meetings
March 2008 29- National School Boards 4/1 Association's 68th Annual Conference and Exposition Orlando
Alabama School Boards • August/September 2007 15