The fight against the governor’s Opportunity School District is missing some notable warriors: local school superintendents.
Some school boards are taking a stand, but there’s not a stampede of outraged superintendents to Nathan Deal’s door. Rather than rail against the inevitable, superintendents may feel their time is better spent fortifying their own struggling schools to prevent takeover.
DeKalb and Atlanta Public Schools, the districts most susceptible to losing schools to the OSD, have chosen fortification. Steve Green of DeKalb and Atlanta's Meria Carstarphen are rolling out reforms to bolster the case they're better positioned to repair schools than an appointed OSD czar. Fast-tracking improvement plans in targeted schools has become the priority, rather than barnstorming against OSD.
Meeting with the AJC editorial board recently, Georgia Federation of Teachers President Verdaillia Turner faulted school chiefs for failing to use their bully pulpits to castigate the OSD. She did not hesitate to ascend her own pulpit to chastise the two superintendents.
In turning over some struggling APS schools over to charter school groups, Carstarphen is doing what she was hired to do, said Turner: "Privatize the schools." Carstarphen disagreed, saying Friday, "I was hired to put APS back on track and to help turn around our lowest-performing schools, with no preconceived ideas for what it would take to do so. There is absolutely no plan to privatize APS; my focus is on ensuring that our kids receive the quality education they deserve so that they are positioned to have choice-filled lives."
Turner said Green sees DeKalb as another rung on his career ladder, adding, “Superintendent Green came from Kansas. He is going to leave DeKalb County. We are here to stay.”
In response, Green said, “I have been and will continue to be adamantly opposed to any form of state takeover of local education, no matter what it is called. The battle that I fought, lead, and won to prevent state takeover of the Kansas City Public Schools speaks for itself.”
Even if the odds favor OSD approval, Turner said more Georgia superintendents ought to stand with Clarke County Superintendent Philip D. Lanoue in speaking out against it. “They should do what’s right,” she said.
Lanoue has laid out the basics of the appeal to voters to reject the state-takeover plan, stating, ”We need to help you build your community around your school and we can do that outside the Opportunity School District. But if you vote this in, what you’ve said is that you’re giving the responsibility to educate your children to someone else.”
The 2015 National Superintendent of the Year, Lanoue has been more willing than many of his colleagues to criticize the governor and Legislature. Last week, Cherokee Superintendent Brian Hightower also took a public stand against the OSD and its reliance on test data to label schools as failing, saying, "How can the state seriously consider overriding local control of a community school based upon a metric that changes each year. They're using a metric that's seriously flawed, and this is as high-stakes as it gets."
Turner described the OSD as a tsunami that will devastate communities by seizing schools. “It won’t stop with a 100 schools,” she said. “People do not understand this will take away our local control. If you don’t like your board of education, vote them out.”
Turner said she understands some people are frustrated with the pace of reform in Georgia, but she blamed the chronic underfunding of education, the historical top-down nature of state reforms, the marginalization of teachers in reform discussions and a refusal to acknowledge the impact of poverty on student achievement.
With the political clout behind the OSD, Turner said she knows she’s facing “a Goliath and all I have is a slingshot.”
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