Recently, Council of the Great City Schools auditors wrote;
There is a culture of fear of retribution and retaliation
by administrators,
against anyone who stands up against them.
My own personal experience bears witness to the absolute
accuracy of the perception and the reality.
The question then;
Are there teachers at Jimmy Carter Middle School,
who fear retribution and retaliation,
if they stand up and tell the truth
about student discipline problems at JCMS?
Despite the fact that there are more than 70,000 years of
teaching experience in the APS,
the leadership of the APS has never surveyed those teachers
and asked them;
What do you need to be successful?
Not only about discipline, but about any thing.
The leadership of the APS cannot point to a single time
that they have documented the truth about student discipline
in the APS.
The same CotGCS auditors wrote;
APS principals routinely falsified statistics about problems at their schools.
Former APS Deputy Superintendent Tom Savage once said;
If I told the truth about what is going on at my school(AHS),
the realtors in my neighborhood would have my neck.
Former APS Superintendent Peter Horoscak said;
You can't just tell the truth,
you never know how someone might want to use it.
What if "someone" wanted to use it to solve problems,
instead of hiding them?
There is a meeting coming up including staff (I suppose),
administration and the union.
What about the other stakeholders?
Is anyone going to ask them
what they know and feel about the problems?
My guess would be, no.
Are they going to try to keep the free press out?
My guess would be, yes.
Now, when and where is this meeting?
1 comment:
I asked my fellow teachers about the JCMS discipline problem because Iw anted to know what others were thinking. In a nutshell, the senior teachers that have tenior are taking the lead and advising new teachers not to be in the forefront because they can easily lose their positions at the end of the year if they do so. I was also told that this is a problem going on for about 2-3 years (at least), and teachers are using the union and coming out as a last resort.
I think Rita sees it as a personal and professional attack. However, to my knowledge, she hasn't polled the staff on how they think the situation could be made better... everyone feels she is just being defensive and prioritizing other things above this behavior issues.
In my experience,in general, Rita is not a bad principal, but her priorities need adjustment, and she needs to be more welcoming to her instructors for them to make suggestions, and be heard.
The JCMS Instructional council would be a good place for this, but it is strong-armed and the agenda is heavily controlled by admin, which is the opposite of what it was intended for.
If Rita fixed these things, I think she would be a wonderful principal, but until then, there's going to be this "civil war" brewing.
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