TRENDS IN EDUCATION
Nebraska Superintendents in September 2010 BY DR. JAMES E. OSSIAN, Wayne State College
A Ossian
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s one who still enjoys the privilege of designing and delivering academic programs for the preparation of school administrators, I spend a good deal of time conversing with practitioners of the art, including attendance at ESU #1 and ESU #8 superintendent meetings in Northeast Nebraska. If nothing else, those sessions are an excellent reminder that I made a good choice in deciding to leave the superintendent ranks 14 years ago. Nebraska ESUs are staffed by talented educators, and they have for many years provided a variety of valuable services to their constituent school districts. More recently, however, it seems that an inordinate amount of their effort is focused on assisting administrators with interpreting test results and the protocol for a host of data-collecting documents, the reporting deadlines for which now fill up another school calendar. One can feel the frustration mounting at area superintendent meetings. School leaders, particularly in smaller communities, are wondering who on their staffs have the time and expertise to take on another chore or will it be added to their own bloated agenda. As an occasional visitor at the ESU meetings, I even find it difficult to learn and digest all the new acronyms. When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) became law in 2001, Nebraska administrators, and those across the nation, regarded it with mixed reactions. Optimists agreed that the purposes of closing the achievement gap and holding all students to acceptable performance on rigorous academic standards were laudable. Skeptics considered the act to be a colossal waste of pulp and the overarching goal of having all students achieving at a high level within a few years time as ridiculously unrealistic. Educators of a more liberal ilk breathed a sigh of relief when the Obama administration moved into the Whitehouse. That sigh became a gasp when the president’s majordomo at the Federal DOE, Arnie Duncan, ratcheted up the testing stakes, promoted competitive grants and charter schools, and endorsed punitive measures for administrators and teachers in “persistently low achieving schools” (PLAS). And another acronym is born. Diane Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education in the Bush Administration and one of the architects of NCLB, has emerged as an articulate critic of the
NCSA TODAY
SEPTEMBER 2010
law and its implementation.* Her main rationale is that the Federal DOE has become infused with the corporate values of competition and choice. In her article “Why Does Everyone Think CEOs Have the Answers?” published in AASA’s June 2010 issue of the School Administrator, she takes business and political leaders to task: “…they insist that schools compete with one another based on reading and math scores; that they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on test preparation and drill students until their scores rise; that schools with lagging scores be closed…that teachers and principals get bonuses if they raise test scores and negative evaluations if they don’t, possibly even terminated.” p. 8 [*Note: Ron Joekel reviewed Ravitch’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” in the June 2010 issue of NCSA Today.] Nebraska school leaders understand that they are government employees and that they are, therefore, subject to the statutes and policies fostered by elected officials at the federal and state level. Whether purposely or unwittingly, those elected officials have effectively usurped most elements of local control, wherein school administrators and school boards used to make the major decisions affecting school children in their local communities. This circumstance will not change until and unless a critical mass of policy makers are elected who are sympathetic to reversing the testing craze and aggressive enough to wrest control from the current lords of sort-and-count. Educators are many and they have many friends, all of whom vote. The New Year At the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year, there will be 42 school districts that have a new executive leader, four more than last fall. The number of school districts has shrunk from 253 to 251 because of Clay Center becoming a part of the South Central Unified system and Prague merging with East Butler. In all, there will 238 individuals in the superintendent role for the 251 districts. Ten head executives will be serving more than one district for a cumulative total of 23. The slight increase in turnover for the new year has had little impact on the 32-year average, which stands at 41.2 years. For (continued on page 17)