Who's minding the store?

As Scott O'Connell said yesterday, he did indeed have a number of questions that he asked administration.
The answers are concerning.

Principal turnover in a 44 school district is normal, and I would imagine this isn't all we'll see this year. It's still only March.
Do note, however, that North High still does not have a principal, either. Also, several of those are going to be tricky to fill: a Worcester comprehensive high school like South isn't an easy thing to lead and the superintendent has expressed less than confidence in what should be the rising leadership. Ricci Hall leaving Claremont first is a huge loss to the district--Hall could lead a district himself--and Claremont was a pretty substantially changed school under current leadership. Quinsigamond is Worcester's largest elementary school, and it's been shaky on MCAS results in past years. It will again be interesting to see if the School Committee's past interest in having a public input process appears during this round of searches.

The central admin holes are scary, frankly. As I've said before, take a look at our student body: Worcester is a majority first-language-not-English school system. In this school year, more than a third of Worcester's student body are English learners. There is NO WAY this district should be without an ELL director from January to the end of March. We've gotten almost 300 students from Puerto Rico (most of whom, you can bet, are English learners). ACCESS testing for ELL students was during January. The district literally just a year ago was almost (and finally) in compliance with the terms of a Department of Justice (yes, the federal department) agreement on English learners. The district has been under federal oversight since 2009. And note, by the way, the person who was largely interviewed in that article, Marco Rodrigues, is also no longer with the district. And those who are "covering" per the article from today's paper have no experience with this management; they're new to the district office, as well.

As for accountability and research, "getting ready for MCAS" is in no way the biggest part of that office (if it had been, my vote against creating the position would have been correct; I'll happily admit I had this one wrong). For the third largest district in Massachusetts, Worcester has done an amazing job staying out of the attention of DESE's takeovers. Compare our numbers to Springfield (poorer, but not that much bigger), for example; we've not had nearly the number of turnarounds and (knock wood) the bright idea of an empowerment zone hasn't flown here. There are plenty of things to credit on that, but one of them has been number crunching: what are we doing well? what aren't we doing well? And no, that isn't just MCAS; it's things like when our kids start kindergarten, what the information we have can and can't tell us, and how we can use what we know to do better. It may sound like a luxury--it did to me back in 2010--but it's kept us out of hot water in the time since.

Here's the thing: there's a learning curve for every superintendent, and this one has been steep. There's also turnover in every administration; in this case, that has also been steep. Some things that we ought to be asking here, thus, are:

• who is leaving and why?
• who is covering those responsibilities and what experience do they have doing so?
• why is it taking so long to fill some positions?

One can't just keep saying things are being covered by the (new) deputy superintendent and have that be okay. It's not.