Even as CPS opens more new schools, children with special needs have a tougher time finding options. Placements in private therapeutic schools are scarce, and some charters are reluctant to enroll them.
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Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, school improvement will follow
By: Rebecca Harris / February 05, 2010
In his address today to CPS principals, CEO Ron Huberman released a
“School Performance Management Toolkit,” a booklet with details about
how administrators should implement the process at their own schools.
He also reassured them that central office will not demand that they
produce specific test-score gains. In his address today to CPS principals, CEO Ron Huberman released a “School Performance Management Toolkit,” a booklet with details about how administrators should implement the process at their own schools. He also reassured them that central office will not demand that they produce specific test-score gains.
“There is no principal who is going to do poorly... who is committed to the performance management process,” Huberman said. “Where we don’t believe (performance management) is happening, we are going to be very tough. But if it’s occurring, we are much less interested in the outcome.”
Even so, the process he outlined will require teachers to assess students more often, and for schools to shift away from using standardized testing data to gauge performance.
Huberman spent much of the speech showing principals how performance management could help them in their daily work. He also announced a hotline for principals to report problems with central office services such as transportation or tech support.
Clarice Berry, head of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, said she was grateful Huberman provided more clarity about his plans.
“I think that my principals left that meeting a little relieved about what’s expected of them,” Berry said. “There is going to be no quota. The only thing I’m still skeptical about is that there is fidelity in the implementation of this toolkit.”
She said that having specifics will allow her to address any issues that come up for principals. “We can have conversations about how the CAO’s (chief area officer’s) vision is matching with what Ron says.”
Mark Jordan, an assistant principal at Gompers Fine Arts School in West Pullman, was pleased with Huberman’s pledge to provide resources, support, and autonomy for principals.
“It’s not so much about what the test score says, but about whether you are starting to get beyond excuses,” Jordan said. “He’s not going to tell you how to get there... he just wants you to get there.”
Once the process is in place, Huberman said, results will follow, though he acknowledged that his strategy is unproven.
“Performance management, with the structure we are trying to give it, has never been attempted in a large urban school district,” Huberman said.
Still, he made it clear to principals that current results are not good enough. Even at a growth rate of 3 percent a year, he said, it would take several generations for CPS students to catch up academically with students elsewhere in the world.
And, Huberman said, chief area officers must set specific performance goals for the schools in their areas.
“Those meetings are never meant to be antagonistic, but they are at times tough,” Huberman said. “If a CAO is knocking on your door saying, ‘Why has this performance management session not occurred?’ it could be because when they meet with me, if there aren’t good answers to those questions, they are going to possibly have a bad day.”
His toolkit outlines ten steps for a process he described as “the creation of professional learning communities” in schools:
- Assess the school’s existing performance management practices
- Build instructional leadership teams and teacher teams that meet every week or two. This is the centerpiece of his strategy, Huberman said. “If this happens, we are going to move kids.”
- Choose priorities by comparing the school improvement plan to current performance data.
- Create a calendar outlining which data should be reviewed each week, month, and quarter.
- Develop a strategy for sharing the new calendar and the process with teachers, parents, a school’s LSC and community members, who all have a stake in school improvement.
- Assemble timely data that is relevant to a school’s goals
- Craft questions and agendas for performance management meetings – for instance, “How are concepts being reviewed on a regular basis to ensure students both master and retain skills?”
- Determine the “root causes” of problems by repeatedly asking why a desired result is not occurring, while avoiding excuses. “‘Johnny comes from a broken family, Johnny comes from a poor neighborhood.’ That is not a good root cause,” Huberman said.
- Create meaningful action items
- Implement and monitor changes
Once performance management processes are in place, Huberman said, data can help schools target specific students and teachers for extra support. The district sought principal feedback on draft versions of the toolkit, Huberman said.
For the toolkit to work, Huberman said, principals will need to shift away from using ISAT and PSAE data – and teachers will need to assess students on a day-to-day basis.
“By the time you get that information, and teachers get those results, kids are gone,” he said. Rather, the Scantron Interim Assessment will provide information on student growth four times a year, Huberman said. The district has already spent $20 million increasing the computer-to-student ratio so schools can implement the test.
Down the line, Huberman said, the district will try more performance management strategies, including:
- New quarterly elementary and high school progress reports. Beginning in March, they will provide principals with faster indicators to gauge their progress. But the district’s yearly school performance ratings, used to determine probation status, as well as a school’s eligibility for closure or turnaround, will not change.
- Moving performance management conversations to the student and parent level, “where the students articulate their own growth, know their own level of achievement, (and) we get the parent involved.”
- Developing an on-track metric, similar to the freshman on-track indicator, for every grade.
- Providing additional training on performance management this summer.
- Giving teachers access to the district’s data system, known as the “dashboard.” “We should have started with (the dashboard) being a teacher tool,” Huberman said. “We’re now going to fix that.”
- Implementing per-pupil budgeting and give schools more purchasing autonomy, including the ability to buy professional development by the unit. “No principal should have to spend a dime on professional development they don’t want,” Huberman said.
- Rating curricula, including the district’s own, on its results, so that principals can more easily analyze benefits and cost.
- Giving schools more autonomy to choose their own reading and math coaches.
Huberman also gave a taste of what his weekly performance management sessions look like at central office:
- Technology support companies were rated on their response time and their cost per support ticket.
- The student expulsion process was put under a microscope, and administrators found that facilitating an expulsion takes an average of 129 days; on average, area offices were sitting on expulsion cases for 18 to 46 days before passing them along to the law office, which spent another 45 days preparing cases for hearing.
- Emergency school placement data “didn’t look great,” Huberman said. “You’re almost better off staying in the traditional (transfer) system.”
- The Office of Specialized Services “is up a lot” for performance management meetings, he said. “It’s an area that we know needs to be more responsive,” Huberman said.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Here are a few tips that could help:
1. Get rid of IDS. AgileMind is only making the situation worse. Ask 90% of teachers and they will agree. These children are walking away knowing how to solve specific types of problems. They are not walking away from high school with math skills. It is a travesty that this program is being used in Chicago.
2. If you want students to use computers, they need to be available. Our labs are locked. I spent 2 periods today trying to get the door open to our lab.
3. Laptops? Ha. The level of theft is so bad in our school that teachers don't want to even bring them into the classrooms.
4. Security. Or should I say What Security? With the exception of 2 or 3 in our high school, security guards sit on the phone, talk to the kids, go get lunch...nice, huh? There are days I we can't function in our classroom because the security guard is out in the hall playing with a group of kids and the noise level makes learning impossible.
Huberman needs to get into the schools. And his visits need to be surprise visits where he can really see what's going on. Someone at the Board always alerts our VP when the CAO is on her way over. Things get cleaned up beautifully when they know she's coming. It's become a hope that she will visit because it's the only times that there aren't a hundred kids roaming the halls during classes. What a mess.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
That is real deal. Huberman, PM group and CAO's have never been involved in developing a framework for whole school reform. They are making it up as they move along. They have not experienced real school reform. No experience and leadership means no wisdom. I compare this to the worksheets that they give kids to fill out by the numbers. This has no soul and no wisdom. This is a Frankenstein monster by them stitching catch phrases and some management voodoo. It sounds nice for sound bites on the radio, on npr, or tv. When you show this to real professionals in the field... if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck.. you get it. Interesting that Huberman and PM group talk a "nice" game and tell you that they have your back... just make sure you have a kevlar suit. Not joking!
There are BENCHMARKS established on what school districts.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Let's talk about CPS, I have a problem when my child has to fight and go to school in fear in order to receive an education. Yes CPS my son is afraid to go to school, but what was your suggestion to send my son to another school with the same problems just a bigger school and with bigger problems. If you treat them like animal in the jungle that how they will act. CPS needs to be reconstruct the whole system to access the children needs , not just to get funding that CPS dont use to help our children. We have sat down too long on getting our children the proper education, CPS it must stop. What can you offer a child who wants to learn when all of the public in the neighbor are the same and the rest are charters who dont want to admit your child. What can I do let him stay home because he cant be safe at school or send him to school to try learn in fear of been dump on, tell me CPS..
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Talk to teachers Ron. Iif a CAO makes a school do a program that the teachers and principal prove it does not work and the school can prove that their program is working--CAO gets her way! Because of our CAO, our teachers HATE coming to school now--there is no time for teaching now. The students are hating it too. This is your fault Ron and you are doing nothing about it.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Sorry, don't believe it. Our coaches were chosen by the CAO because they were the CAOs' friends. Not for their work (they do little at our school except order take-out food and eat it,) not for their knowledge, (they are always asking us teachers: 'what does this mean?',) and not for their teaching, (they use worksheets when they 'demonstrate' how it should be done.) Our principal wants to placate the CAO,since she is well aware of the connection. What a mess.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Ron's idea of accountability is to pre- select data to use to beat the schools over. Bean counters are used instead of wise managers who know their "stuff" in their discipline and are open to listening and being of service to the school and teachers. Performance Managment is a bean counter's dream. It is a school's nightmare. Any tool in the wrong hands can be dangerous. In this case, using the wrong tools by amateurs in school reform will bring public education down. Is that not what Ren 2010 is all about!!!
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
If you want to do a story and have the documents to prove what we will put down on paper, I will do two things for you: put it under my name and see what agencies can be contacted for proper adjudication of the matters in question.
John Kugler
kuglerjohn@comcast.net
www.substancenews.net
PS watch the video from last night
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caZAgGHBZvE
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
huberman wants teachers to cheat, not teach. Like they do in Texas. Think about 2-3% annually is not enough, many students do not come to school, we have to test nonEnglish speakers and they test in English only same for special ed. We are testing so much, there is no instruction--the students are at the laptops...sounds like this is what he wants....
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Calling all Parents, Teachers and Students, Get Ready for the Fight of your Life!
Ron Huberman's experiment is causing nothing but confusion, discord and disharmony and mayhem in the system. The only problem is that it is by design. They want to make people's lives so hectic that they will run away to another state or even to the suburbs. Then they can create the man made Katrina like hurricane that will wash away all the minority children and people. Remember, Arne Duncan finally admitted that he just loves hurricanes like the one that killed thousands of poor people in New Orleans, This was the best thing that happened for education he said.
This is the model of school reform that is sweeping the nation. To make it so bad, Huberman, Duncan and Daley don't even mind if a few kids get beat to death, shot or killed in the process. In fact the more the merrier. It will be easier to start things over without so many of these little " at risk" ( a better way of using the n word) problems running around.
People, read between the lines. No one is getting an education here in Chicago. Educating children won't happen again until Mayor Daley rids the city of all these Black people that he so despises. What bothers me he actually finds a few black people who are in denial about being black, to do his dirty work. He wouldn't want to get his lillly white hands dirty so he hires one of these uncle tom bozos do do his dirty dealing.
To sum it all up, we the people need to take back ours schools our lives and our city from these incompetent _ _ _ holes! Fill in the blanks please!
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Zeta, you are an idiot. Blaming the man for all the ills in our society. Parents must step up and do their part in educating their children. Additionally, we must do our part to educate.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Brian a fifth grader can figure that out.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Rebecca Harris is a good journalist. Her February 3 article “Helping principals, teachers the next wave of performance management,†and her February 5 article “Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, school improvement will follow†provide a treasure trove of information to readers of Catalyst. Ms. Harris’ job is not to provide a critique of an application of performance management approaches to CPS school management, but rather to provide the nuts and bolts of what it is. She did that job well, and I thank both her and Catalyst for providing this information. But I want to go beyond the descriptive to what drives performance management.
What Ms. Harris does not discuss is how the CPS performance management package including what is called the “dashboard†came to be. Sarah Kremsner the CPS Chief Performance Officer and Mr. Huberman did not invent this approach, in fact they acquired it from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, yes the primary owners of Dell computers. In November 2009 the Dell foundation gave to CPS via the Chicago Public Schools Foundation $1.6 million to “support CPS in finalization, planning, and implementation of the following strategies: top to bottom performance management; revised area and school support model; and high impact human capital initiatives†(from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation website).
Virtually all the components described by Ms. Harris can be found in the strategy for urban schools on the Dell Foundation website. Just before the Dell Foundation provided funding to CPS they provided $4.5 million to the Denver School for almost exactly the same performance management package. You can see this in the Dell Foundation press release on the Denver Grant. Go to
http://www.msdf.org/newsroom/press_releases/09-09-21/4_6M_Grant_Funds_De...
I find that it is not surprising that many of the performance management reforms will require CPS to purchase computer hardware; no doubt Dell will get more than their fair share of these purchases. Assembly of desktop computers for the North American market took place at Dell plants in Texas and in North Carolina for many years. So the company is seen as an American manufacturer. But Dell's desktop plants in Texas were all shut down in 2009. The last major U.S. plant in North Carolina is scheduled to close in April, 2010. It marks the end for most of Dell's personal computer manufacturing in the United States. It's expected that most of the work carried out in North Carolina will be transferred to contract manufacturers in Asia, though some of the work will move to its own factories overseas. For many years Dell produced computers in Limerick Ireland, they closed that plant last month and moved all production to the lower cost Lodz Poland facility.
The reality of performance management for Dell is of course cost cutting and going off shore as it is for many companies. If donating $1.6 million to CPS to establish a management system nets Dell computers millions in sales over the next ten or so years then from a performance management perspective one would have to say it had a positive outcome. Now all of the discussion of the interrelation of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation does not mean performance management at CPS will net no productive outcomes for CPS students. That I think can only be determined with time.
Rod Estvan
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
we citizens are so fortunate to have you Ron. Thank you. Did you hear the sue gamm is back on the 8th floor at CPS? Ron should have the guts to hire you. He really needs your espertise with PM, but his ego is oo big to do it. Too bad. He could be walking the talk with you as a hire.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
The lie is that Huberman pretends that there are are no established ways of doing school reform other than Ren 2010. Remember that this is a top down mandate with no resources given to the schools other than a cheap PM guide. That is disrespectful! The staff development offered through CPS and CAO's is bad to wanting and pulls staff from working with their fellow teachers on professional development days. For authentic school reform to occur all members of the professional community of a school must be on board on improving the the specific areas of improvement. There are actually better guides by folks that actually do school reform for a living and have noted successes. Their guides are better since it is a product of many years of schools going through full cycles of praxis. Huberman is clowning the schools and the professionals in the classrooms. Since groupthink runs rampant in the penthouse on Clark St., there is no consultation nor feedback asked for in a MEANINGFUL way from the most important folks, the teachers, the professionals in the classroom. With more mandates on top of the ones already given, Huberman gives the professionals in the field his concept of PM. For meaningful PM to happen, PM has to mean something to the teachers who are given more than a cheap toolkit. Money needs to be channeled away from the gimmicks and into the schools. Ren 2010 needs to be stopped. They are floundering as it is and cost money better spent on giving school the resources needed for authentic reform to happen.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
The work and grants of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation are not associated with Dell Inc., the computer company’s products or business. Some of the above commentary about the association is false. The two entities are completely separate and unrelated. Further, the foundation does not provide grants for technology, nor do they provide technology to entities such as CPS.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
how did the Dells get their $$ to spend and who is the CPS major/exclusive vendor for school computers with CPS. Is it Dell? Yes, it is.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Despite the spin and pleasant announcements at different venues by different spokespeople about PM, it is a punitive, non constructive, non formative venture by Huberman. It lacks vision, context and soul.
PM is being integrated in all departments. It isn't pretty. Administrators/Managers are pretty clueless and don't know what to look for, which makes the meetings a waste of time. Great for morale! Looks like Huberman will bring down public education from within with his lame excuse for accountability.
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
would someone please tell huberman we are testing students..not breaks on a train...it is so insane!! these are kids....when you have 28 to 34 kids in your room..you just cant get test results and create some magic lesson plan for each....and I agree reading specialists and math coaches are often picked from a principals freinds...they are no help ......Mr. Huberman I implore you...do some REASEARCH not just numbers...do some real interviews with teachers...see what they feel...they cant all be as bad as you think,,,do you really think that charters schools are filled with angels from above????
Huberman to Chicago principals: Do performance management, schoo
Benchmark, Dibbels, Access, ISAT ... Huberman and his PM team have no clue like Duncan didn't as to all the mandated testing that occurs in the classroom during the year. As Catalyst has noted, the instructional day for our students is way to short. One can only integrate disciplines so much. Chicagoans should know how all this mandated testing takes away from instruction. No wonder there is no trust or faith in the CEO's of Chicago Public Schools. They are so far from the reality of the classroom that they make decisions that hurt more than help the teachers and students. I would love to see Huberman teach in a 3rd grade room in a neighborhood school for one quarter and handle all the mandated assessments and try to teach all the subjects with excellence!!! For all the business acumen these executives say they bring with them to CPS, it doesn't show! Somebody is getting conned! It is the students and taxpayers.
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