APS leadership off to Boston

If you go looking for it, link, on APS' award winning website, you can find enough information to conclude the Supt Winston Brooks will be in Boston this week speaking at the Council of the Great City Schools 55th Annual Fall Conference. Unclear, from their website; which, if any, board members will be accompanying him.

Which begs a question;

Are community and students' interests better served
by sending these people to Boston, or by having them
stay in town to do what they're supposed to be doing
here?

What do they gain by going?

Brooks is a speaker at the conference.

This indicates, the selection process for speakers does not include a record of actual, meaningful success in leading a large urban school district, link.

It seems fair to extrapolate;
the conference will be of the blind
leading the blind.

If you examine the agenda, link, you will find they will be become learned in essentially the same topics they became learned in, in the 54 preceding Annual Fall Conferences. And, they're all "leading" districts where half of students leave high school with inadequate skill sets to succeed.

The fundamental premises;

• there is only a handful of people who are capable of making important decisions in public education, and
• their expertise and experience so far out weigh the expertise and experience of thousands of teachers in their districts, that
• they can ignore those hundreds of thousands of years of teaching experience, and
• instead of asking teachers what they need to succeed, can go to Annual Conferences to share the secrets of success.

don't stand up to reason.

Perhaps most importantly of all; no where on their agenda will you find the discussion of: what do we do with chronically disruptive students?




photo Mark Bralley