Albatross to Superintendent: “Time for a reality check” – Part I

Dear Superintendent Highsmith,

It is time for a reality check.

Crises and chaos ebb and flow. The world unfolds amid them. Let us stop making excuses and laying the inadequacies of our students at the feet of an illness. The Golden Age of the Pandemic has ended. There will be more disasters, perhaps even a black swan event. We all must carry on.

That’s quite a dramatic budget you’ve got there. It will quickly eat the Hamden taxpayers alive.

You must have a voracious appetite. Eight million dollar increase. According to the New Haven Independent, New Haven Public Schools asked for only three million more than what their mayor proposed. It would be a pleasure to look at your budget, line by line, to see all the goodies packed in there, despite unctuous claims to act only on behalf of students. The New Haven Register reported that Mayor Lauren Garrett did some closed-door haggling with you and made cuts. Post the entire budget on the website so that citizens can haggle, too. Anyone who pays taxes rightly cares about how their money is spent, and citizens should have some oversight over what they fund.

Every line on that budget, every expenditure, should have to pass a test. Nothing superfluous, please. Like someone cleaning a house, we can decide what to throw out and what to keep. We will need clarification on the unfamiliar items, or the items labeled “miscellaneous.”

“Miscellaneous” is a secret weapon superintendents use to hide their spending; however, nothing should be opaque in government spending.

Public education’s unspoken social contract means that in return for citizen money, a job gets done. Students have to do their jobs.

Hamden Public Schools has more money than ever, and it comes with no expectations. In fact, the less these students do, the more you want.

We cannot keep, as you call it, “supporting” students when so many of them do nothing. When so many students come to school and do nothing, or complete assignments by cribbing from the internet, or cheat by having exams airdropped, you cannot lay a claim to more cash. The biggest boost that you could give the students who genuinely deserve that boost is a boost out of Hamden Public Schools. We must salvage the pearls. That is the tragedy of Hamden Public Schools: the human cost of ignoring those pearls.

Every year, history repeats itself as school superintendents across the country piggishly eye a district’s taxpayers and then go to their boards to demand more money. Taxpayers have good reason for gloom whenever a superintendent’s budget proposal to the board is delivered in their annual state-of-the-schools address, but eight million dollars is immensely funny. I am reminded of Verdi’s fugue: Everything in the world is a joke. You must have been at your comedic best that night. You were always highly entertaining to hear and to watch.

You did not tell us what progress will look like and how we will know that we have achieved it.

You need to make promises and deliver on them. You cited declining standardized test scores as the reason for a tax hike, but scores tell us what superintendents want us to believe about them, and those beliefs always point to a demand for more cash. No analysis is objective, neutral, and value-free. Interpretations either oversimplify , at best, or at worst, misrepresent. The line between interpretation and fact is always blurred. Superintendents love to overgeneralize, attributing every decline to a lack of money. They want us to believe that money makes test scores go up. That is a reductive way of thinking. A more nuanced approach is needed. Study makes test scores go up. Will and effort makes scores go up.

A lot of things can make scores go up. Eight million dollars guarantees nothing, and you offered no guarantees.

Since Hamden schools cannot be sold on their excellence, you are selling your budget on their decline. It should be pointed out that scores were on the decline when you were at the high school. When you were principal and Erin Bailey, now an assistant superintendent, was a “data facilitator,” only a quarter of the students were on grade level, yet 97% of the school graduated. Classes were buckling under bad behavior. You made such a hash of the stewardship of that high school that Jodi Goeler, your predecessor, did what bosses do: booted you to Central Office.

There was not one accomplishment that you could congratulate yourself upon, and yet you were anointed head of human resources, where you kept a poster on your door that said “The Grand Inquisitor,” an allusion to your frequent investigations of the faculty; however, you evidently did not understand that the purpose of the Inquisition in 17th century Spain and Portugal was to root out and punish heresy, just as you and your friends in Spring Glen want to punish The Albatross for heretical views.

Incidentally, the Grand Inquisitor was also a character in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This character defended the devil as mankind’s unifier, who gave them bread and controlled their minds. You may want to take down your poster.

The state of Hamden schools has not been strong for years. Covid simply laid bare all the weaknesses that you were so successful in hiding. In fact, the public school problems around this country are the inevitable result of the way that they are run, not the result of an illness or the lack of money. We can chart the blunders made by administrators across the United States: the November 2021 Oxford High School shooting where administrators, despite knowing that he was a danger, let Ethan Crumbley in the building so that he could kill four students; May 2022, Uvalde where the principal, Mandy Gutierrez, couldn’t be bothered to get the locks fixed and 19 children were killed – that principal was also booted to her district’s Central Office, where she was made a “director;” January of this year, a six-year-old in Virginia shot his teacher, who has since had four surgeries, after faculty repeatedly warned administrators about him; and just last week, Austin Lyle, in Colorado, shot two faculty members, after administrators made “a plan” for him to be searched daily.

We are in a nationwide public education crisis. If the investor service Moody’s had to rate us, we would get a negative. Although school systems are plagued by a fatal combination of mismanagement and corruption, education leaders across this country decline any responsibility for what can only be described as madness. They have only one narrative: Covid, and one request: MONEY. You superintendents never quit. You can’t. You have a hopeless addiction to other people’s money.

Part II: http://thectltribune.com/2023/04/25/albatross-to-superintendent-time-for-a-reality-check-part-ii/