Mike Mathieson
December 7, 2022
I. The School Board vs the Superintendent
Look, I’m not saying we as a community let our DPS61 district leadership team completely off the hook, but we put way too much focus on the school board in our town and not near enough focus on the people in the trenches doing the real difficult work of running our district. Heck, Duane and I are guilty of this too. While most of our articles focus on large “district vision” type issues, it’s really the Superintendent and her district leadership team that should address our concerns.
I did a Google search of news items since June 1, 2022, of “school board” and “Superintendent” for Decatur vs Chicago, and the results were not surprising. For Chicago the number of results for “Chicago superintendent” or Chicago public schools CEO” (Chicago’s Superintendent is called the CEO) had twice as many results as a search for “Chicago school board” – 15,090 to 7,650! The people of Chicago and the news media rightly don’t care as much what the school board thinks as they do about the person who’s making the real decisions for the district every day. Yet, my corresponding Google search results for Decatur show a nearly one to one ratio of hits for “school board” to “superintendent” – 655 to 748. For some reason we’ve become fixated on our school board here. I’ve talked to people from Mt. Zion, Warrensburg, Taylorville and Maroa and my anecdotal data shows people in the surrounding communities know who their Superintendent and school Principals are but they don’t usually know or care about their school board. It’s time we stopped putting so much emphasis on the school board in Decatur and start addressing our issues to the Decatur Public Schools Superintendent and her team.
Duane had an article nearly a year ago, The Role of the School Board, that lists the six functions of the school board, and the main focus is really only these three:
The board clarifies the district purpose.
The board employs a superintendent.
The board monitors performance.
That’s it. I don’t want to deemphasize the importance of school board members – those three items listed above are huge. But, to provide real examples of what I’m talking about, we’ve had two major issues in our district in the last year:
Our drastically low test scores (and the national news surrounding the issue).
Spending 70 million dollars in CARES money.
I don’t mind school board members weighing in on either of these issues – at least weighing in from a broad philosophical point of view – to “clarify the district purpose” and more importantly to “monitor the performance” of the Superintendent and her leadership team in dealing with these issues, but that’s where their role stops. The real solutions should come, just as they would in Chicago, from the education professionals. The Superintendent, the Director of Student Learning, and certainly the Chief Financial Officer when it comes to CARES money. They should be able to start and stop any conversation we’d care to have on those issues, but it seems we as a community are for the most part, looking in the wrong direction for our solutions. Should board members - a group of random community members, lawyers, community activists, retired teachers, etc. - propose solutions to solve our low test scores? Well… maybe in individual meetings with the Superintendent, I guess if they have an idea to share? Or, perhaps in a very broad philosophical way, like:
Are we doing enough to retain high performing students?
Should we micromanage teachers – telling them what to teach in every given week of the school year?
That’s a qualified – go for it. Board members should discuss their broad vision or purpose of the district with each other and in tete-a-tetes with the Superintendent. But, because of our misplaced focus, these two issues were not, or are seemingly not, going to be resolved by the people most qualified to provide solutions. And then if we continue to focus on the school board, when problems arise later, both groups can point at the other and say, “well, you wanted this…”. It’s like a magician doing a card trick where they bring your attention to one hand while they slip the card into a pocket with the other hand. Correct me if you think I’m wrong but wasn’t the decision to build a new school in a district with rapidly declining enrollment made in large part by the school board with very little (or possibly no) input from the guy that understands the enrollment and funding numbers the best – the CFO of district.
And from the other side – has our focus on the School Board allowed the Leadership Team a free pass on the low test scores issue? I realize this is the most complex issue we’ve had for years in Decatur – generations (literally!) of students are affected by this – and have we heard enough from the Superintendent? I’m guessing that in 90% of the districts in the nation the Sup would be grilled on this issue ad nauseum. So, let there be no mistake, the buck should stop, not with the School Board Members, but with the Superintendent. And here we are as a community, radio, newspapers, and even our Substack (sometimes – but we are taking a step in the right direction), putting most of the focus in the wrong place! The board’s role here should be to monitor the performance of the district leadership – are they taking steps to solve this problem? Don’t try to solve the problem – observe, check progress, what steps are being taken - monitor!
II. License
So, who should start this refocusing effort? Well… Duane and I are proud of the fact that the next big milestone in our Substack feed is to have over 200 subscribers – hopefully by early in 2023. Many of our articles get over 500 “reads” – our Cell Phone article is our most read article so far (apparently this struck a chord with a lot of people) with over 700 unique reads, and (of course) I think we hit the right tone in our articles – walking a line between statistical analysis and how things will play in our community. In our research we’ve met with top level district leadership team members, district Foundation leadership, and yes – even board members. Does this give us a license to ask difficult questions to our district Superintendent? We obviously think it does - so, HERE WE GO! We came up with five questions we’d like Dr. Clark to address, and we’ve tried to phrase them so she doesn’t have to take too much time out of here schedule to respond. We’re also going to give her the option to respond to only the first question, perhaps more in-depth if she chooses, and we’ll come back to the rest later. We’ll publish her answer(s) in our next article and I’m going to leave out our introduction of who we are, because you’re reading this Subtack article, so already know that.
III. An Open Letter – Five Questions
Starting with the most important issue in our district… We feel one of the main reasons for our low test scores is that it’s easy for families to leave our district (easy because the distance and social hurdles are relatively small to move out of DPS). Regardless of if you agree with this assessment, certainly a possible solution to the test score issue is to retain, and possibly even attract, more upper quartile students. Do you have any plans with this intention, and if so, can you briefly describe them? We are particularly interested (among anything else you want to mention) in:
Do you think more homogeneous reading and math grouping would help both the top and bottom quartiles in elementary schools?
Are we are going to continue our district policy of ensuring same-grade classrooms rigidly follow the same syllabus all year, ignoring individual and class-wide learning differences?
Duane and I like the idea of a Khan World School like academy to attract and keep upper level students within one of the high schools. Do you think this idea has any merit, or do you have other ideas to help retain more top students that tend to move elsewhere as they go into high school?
What are we doing to alleviate the teacher shortage problem? Who is heading up the hiring team and are you making any budget changes for things like travel and advertising to help?
We’ve had a large enrollment drop in the last few years, which will continue to reduce state funding. Are you considering and planning for budget cuts, and can you give us some ideas of where you feel money can be saved? And on a related but smaller issue: we’ve made the case in the past that we don’t like the idea of a “Public Relations” department in a district our size and would like to see more of the people making the decisions (like you!) talking to the media and community. You inherited most of the current corporate structure, so now that you have over a year under your belt, do you see any changes in the future?
Also, on the topic of declining enrollment: if we were to get to 1,500 students in the two combined high schools, I’m sure no one should complain (but of course, some will!) about a merger into one Decatur High School. If we were to merge the two schools as soon as possible we would save money and probably be able to provide more opportunities for students. Put simply, do you agree that there is some level of students where we will need to merge, and do you have anyone on your team looking at this issue?
One of the big hot-button issues nationwide is student cell phone use in schools, and many teachers agree that this is a huge detriment to learning. Do you have any district-wide plan in the works, or would you consider a plan, to stop the use of cell phones by students in the classroom?