CSAP Failure Results in Bruce Randolph (Middle Grades) Show that Unsuccessful DPS bureaucrat for Reform and Innovation Kristin Waters Must Resign

2009 CSAP Results are here and provide interesting info about one of the members of DPS' new Administration.

Her name is Kristin Waters, the recently appointed bureaucrat in the well-paid and bombastic position of Assistant to the Superintendent for "Reform and Innovation".

Waters was the highly promotioned principal of Bruce Randolph School between 2005 and April 2009.

However, at the Middle School level, Bruce Randolph is going south. Results from 2009 CSAP testing show that at least 80% of the students are not proficient in the core subjects. Only 5% of the students are at or above proficiency in Science, 16% in Writing, 17% in Math, and 20% in Reading.

During the 2008-2009 school year, the last for Waters as Bruce Randolph's principal, the decay was visible. Middle School Science proficient students went down by 7%. Reading and Math proficient students went down by 5%. Only writing showed a meager increase of proficient students by 3%.

CSAP figures prove false the public relations effort to present Waters as a successful administrator.

Because her experiment at Bruce Randolph Middle Grades failed, despite the financial and PR support received from DPS and other sources, Waters must go.There is no point in keeping as a 6-figure DPS bureaucrat a principal showing managerial failure at the middle school level.

Teach for America teachers: an open letter to you

Jesse Alred

Houston Education Reform Examiner

http://www.examiner.com/x-16144-Houston-Education-Reform-Examiner~y2009m7d18-Teach-for-America-teachers-an-open-letter-to-you

July 18, 9:29 PM

I am a veteran teacher from Houston seeking a dialogue with current and past Teach for America teachers regarding what appears to be a pattern of TFA leaders and alumni in school district leadership positions espousing status quo ideas and profiting from close relationships with plutocratic corporations while self-righteously proclaiming they are the new civil rights movement.

I first became aware of this when a former local TFA director, now a school board member, recently proposed to fire teachers based on test scores and opposed allowing us to vote to have a single union.

The conservative-TFA nexus began at the beginning, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp's initial efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide's negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India.

The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize taking responsibility for the event. Not only did Union Carbide provide financial support for Ms. Kopp, it provided her with other corporate contacts and office space for her and her staff.

Ms. Kopp has never expressed the least bit of odd feeling Teach for America's birth in the polluted womb of Union Carbide.

A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project and was all but saved by their managerial assistance.

The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools run by elected school boards with for-profit, corporate-run schools.

In 2000, two TFA alumni, Michael Feinberg and David Levin, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bushes at the Republican National Convention in 2000.

This was vital to Bush, since as Texas governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican.

Feinberg and Levin placed the African-American and Hispanic kids in their charge on that 2000 Republican stage with them. Was it worth it for KIPP? Did any of their graduates fight or die in Iraq? Or the fathers, uncles or cousins of their students?

In Washington D.C., TFA alum and Chancellor Michelle Rhee has fired 1000 teachers and has only minor improvements to show for it in terms of student improvements. She says we need "a different breed of teachers."

Rhee falls into the trap of other TFA alums, underestimating the power of inequality and behavior in student outcomes and therefore laying all the blame at the feet of teachers who are not from her socioeconomic background. Her misconceptions must have caused some significant portion of the 1000 people she put out of work.

Wendy Kopp's idea for Teach for America was a good one. TFA teachers do great work. But its leaders often seem to blame teachers, public schools and teachers' organizations for the achievement gap. By blaming teachers for some deep-seated social problems this nation has, they are not only providing an inaccurate critique; they also feed conservatives more ammunition to use in their 28-year campaign against employing government as a problem solver.

Our achievement gap mirrors our country's level of economic inequality, the greatest among affluent nations. Better schools are only part of the solution. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed our schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It's not the other way around.

The obstacle in schools serving low-income kids is not teacher or principal quality, but student buy in. Too many kids do not see schools as relevant to their lives and act accordingly when forced to be there.

As more people are starting to recognize, we need national health care, a stronger union movement, higher wages, redistributive tax policy, generous college funding, immigration reform, trade policy, and dimunition of military spending to defend and expand the middle class. In public education, we need to experiment with new models making schools more appealing to kids not planning for college. Magnet schools and charters like Kipp works for a select group of kids whose families envision college in their futures, but we need models relevant to the others.

Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor People's March—even when it alienated corporate funders. His final speech, the night of his assassination, was on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. In his last book, Where do we go from here, he argued for modifying American capitalism to include some measure of wealth distribution.

I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. You as an individual TFA teacher have a responsibility here because your work alone gives TFA leaders credibility It's not the other way around. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.

Racial discrimination in Denver Public Schools: African-American and Hispanic teachers affected by DPS non-written policies

Educators to file U.S. complaint about DPS

The district says it'll strive to hire more African-Americans.

By Claire Trageser

303-954-1638

ctrageser@denverpost.com

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12604579

The Denver Post

A group of 12 educators worried about the decline in the number of African-American teachers in Denver Public Schools decided Tuesday to file an official complaint about "systemic discrimination" with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Larry Borom, chairman of the Black Education Advisory Council, said discrimination has caused the number of African-American teachers in Denver to drop to 200 in 2008 from 324 in 2000. But according to the Colorado Department of Education, the number has dropped to 265, not 200, while a count by DPS shows 256 black teachers.

Borom said that whatever numbers are cited, there is still a decline.

"Whether it's 200 or 265, it's still a downward trend, and that's not what we want to see," he said.

"This is plain old discrimination based on race. They are not hiring enough new African-American teachers, not making new positions available, not providing support to new teachers and not renewing contracts."

The council, one of five groups that advises DPS on diversity issues, plans to file its complaint Thursday. It hopes the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs will investigate and give DPS a set of directions, which could include hiring someone with expertise in diversity and making job announcements to minority groups.

DPS already has taken those steps, said Happy Haynes, assistant to the superintendent for community partnerships.

The decline in minority teachers "is exactly the opposite direction from where we wanted to go," she said. "If we're trying to be a more diverse workforce, we have to . . . reach out and go that extra mile. We haven't necessarily done that effectively in the past."

DPS will hire a diversity coordinator, who Haynes hopes will fix many of the concerns.

Haynes also said DPS will recruit teachers of color by working with organizations such as the Black Education Advisory Council and by using diversity hiring programs.

Over the past eight years, the number of American Indian, Asian and Latino teachers in the district has increased slightly, and a new trial program, The Denver Residency Program, recently hired 27 teachers, including five African- Americans, eight Latinos and one American Indian.

These new teachers will slightly improve a significant gap between the number of minority students and teachers.

According to the state Education Department, almost 78 percent of the 4,349 DPS teachers are white, 6.1 percent are black and 14.3 percent are Hispanic. By contrast, 17.2 percent of its students are African-American and 55.5 percent are Hispanic.

Borom said he is as worried about retaining black teachers as he is about hiring them.

"African-American teachers have had a very bad experience in Denver," he said. "There are all kinds of stories in our community about teachers not having the opportunity to have positive career experiences in DPS."

Haynes said that without specific examples of discrimination, she could not comment on that issue. She said the decline in numbers alone is not evidence of discrimination.

Borom said the trend has a negative impact on students.

"There need to be role models for the kids in our community," Borom said.

"Our kids need teachers that come from the same places as them, represent them, look like them and know something about them."

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Henry Roman and Jennifer Portillo, new President and Vice-President of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA)

Mr. Henry Roman and Ms. Jennifer Portillo, voted President and Vice-President of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, will be installed as new Executive Officers of DCTA on Thursday May 21, at the Rep Council meeting in the Denver Center for International Studies.

Our congratulations to DCTA's new leadership team!

Bruce Randolph's Principal appointed Assistant to the Superintendent for Reform and Innovation in DPS

Ms. Kristin Waters has been appointed Assistant to the Superintendent for Reform and Innovation in Denver Public Schools. Before accepting this appointment, Ms. Waters was the Principal of Bruce Randolph School between 2005 and April 2009.

According to the Colorado Department of Education’s School Accountability Report, the Overall Academic Performance on State Assessments during 2007-2008 for Grades 6-8, and 9-10, in Bruce Randolph, was low in both cases (*).

In 2006-2007 Bruce Randolph’s performance was also qualified by CDE's Report as low

Independent observers noted that Ms. Waters is leaving her old post of more than three years at Bruce Randolph School without showing a clear and substantial improvement in student achievement, as measured by the School Overall Academic Performance on State Assessments issued by the Colorado Department of Education.

The same observers are inclined to suggest that Ms. Waters should not accept the appointment in the newly created post of Assistant to the Superintendent for Reform and Innovation. They think that Ms. Waters should continue serving as Principal at Bruce Randolph enough years as to determine the success or failure of the experiment that she helped launch in that School.

However, Denver Public Schools is already looking for a new Principal for Bruce Randolph School. DPS is offering a yearly salary of $96,454, "negotiable, and commensurate with qualification and experience", for a work year of 233 days.

(*) http://reportcard.cde.state.co.us/reportcard/CommandHandler.jsp?cmdSelect=getReportCard&schoolID=39447&searchYear=2008, http://reportcard.cde.state.co.us/reportcard/CommandHandler.jsp?cmdSelect=getReportCard&schoolID=39448&searchYear=2008).

(**) http://reportcard.cde.state.co.us/reportcard/pdf/2007_0880_6350_M.pdf

New DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg comes to the District from a private corporation showing serious decline in its stock value

Mr. Tom Boasberg, Superintendent of Denver Public Schools since January 2009, and Chief Operating Officer between April 2007 and January 2009, comes from a private corporation featuring serious decline in its stock value.

According to the biography of Mr. Boasberg published in DPS' web site, "Before DPS, Boasberg worked for eight years at Level 3 Communications, where he was Group Vice President for Corporate Development, responsible for the company's mergers and acquisitions and strategic partnerships. At Level 3, he led negotiations for dozens of transactions, including nine transactions worth over $100 million each and three valued at over $1 billion each. Boasberg spent his first three years at Level 3 in Hong Kong as Senior Vice President for Asia Corporate Development and Head of the Asian Lines of Business, establishing and running operations in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong." (*)

The same website reports that Mr. Boasberg worked in Level 3 Communications for eight years, between 1999 and April 2007.

The week of April 5, 1999, the share of Level 3 Communications Inc. (LVLT) traded at $84.75. Eight years later, the week of April 2, 2007 the same share quoted at $6.13.

Not a very good performance for the corporation in which Mr. Boasberg was Group Vice President for Corporate Development, don't you think?

It seems that Level 3's growth between 1998 and 2007 was not precisely development. At least, this is what the markets thought. Looking at the stock performance, two words may be more appropriate – decline and decay. Or, if you want, it may be accepted that it was development. Negative development.

After labeling Mr. Boasberg as "a bargain for the District", the Denver Post reported that the former Level 3 excutive will earn "a base salary of $170,000 a year, with the chance of a $50,000 bonus if certain goals are met." (**)

(*) http://communications.dpsk12.org/newsroom/biography/superintendent/

(**) http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_11606655