Does anyone with an office in the Taj Mahal EVER admit a mistake?
If the results of CCSD's hiring of Community Education Partners (CEP) also portend the results of Superintendent McGinley's newer plans, we're in real trouble here. The P & C 's article Tuesday regarding Murray Hill Academy was as polite as it could possibly have been, given the circumstances of this major fiasco. Probably CCSD school board members at Monday's meeting also veiled their comments.
It's time for a reality check here.
- Would CCSD have hired CEP if then-Chief Academic Officer McGinley had not recommended they do so (probably at the urging of her Broad Foundation helpers)? NO
- Did McGinley assume that Charleston's problems were analogous to Philadelphia's? YES
- Did CCSD spend $5 million to "warehouse" perhaps a total of 600 students over a period of 2 and 1/2 years? WOW
- For this princely sum, did CEP ever provide an effective principal and enough certified teachers for students to get credits? NO
- Did McGinley negotiate a contract with CEP that required students to attend for 180 days but now claim that is too long to be effective for CCSD's students? YES
- Did the building never reach capacity because CCSD didn't assign enough students? YES
- Was the $9 million building built specifically for CEP according to its specifications? WHAT FORESIGHT
- Did CCSD assign fewer than 70 students to that new $9 million building this fall? YES
- Is McGinley suggesting rooms in this specially-built school be used for office space? YES
- That would be because the Taj Mahal has grown too small for all its bureaucrats or because it is falling apart? WHO KNOWS?
More importantly, how can we hold CCSD more responsible for spending in the future? Just think of all those lovely building and renovation projects Bill Lewis has on the table and his escalating estimates for the renovation of the old Rivers High School building. Is anyone watching the store?
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6 comments:
I want to vomit. Who else is disgusted as I am?
Let's do the math and really make ourselves sick. What have we been paying per student over there? We know the "counseling" is a joke. Hell, they can't even get IEPs and 504s in place at Buist - so we know they're not doing it for the kids at Murray Hill.
Actually, Murray Hill would make a very nice neighborhood PK-5 school. But that would also require CCSD administrators to believe that small neighborhood schools with roots in the community are better than mega schools with 2 hour bus rides each way on a Durham contracted bus. Too logical and, besides, it might go against Broad Foundation models. So that leaves us with more office space. And they want to put 800 seats in a new Memminger...say what?
CCSD is constantly throwing new plans on top of last year's "new" plans without bothering to assess any of them. I thought CCSD administrators were all about being data driven. They are either not paying any attention to the data that the rest of us are seeing or the data they are using isn't any good.
Hey West Ashley,
This is from Seattle.
Data Driven decision making means.
1. First ignore any relevant data
2. Decide whatever you want.
3. Then go searching and cherry-pick data to support whatever you decided.
Be sure to move on to a new program so that you never assess if what was devised actually works. This is particularly important as this process seldom produces anything that works.
I am sure that you now realize that Charleston is data driven just like Seattle.
To Dan Dempsey: It's not much consolation but I guess misery loves company. If we have both found the most disingenuous phrase used by education administrators today is "but it's for the children!", then it looks like "all of our decisions are data driven" is a close second.
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