You Have To Fold The Meat To Get It On The Bread

Minneapolis education dollars in action:

The Peeblesmobile is history as far as Minneapolis public schools are concerned.

The district turned the Cadillac SUV once leased by former superintendent Thandiwe Peebles over to a dealer earlier this month. The district paid the dealer $9,788 to buy out the remainder of the 48-month lease.

The district assumed responsibility for the vehicle, originally valued at $48,860, as part of the buyout of Peebles' contract that accompanied her Jan. 27 resignation. That decision aroused considerable public comment.

It astounds me; the same people who huff and puff about "CEO pay" are the same ones that seem to want to keep pumping money into school systems...that spend it on things like this.

I'm far from the first to note that urban superintendants are being treated like sports or showbiz stars these days; salaries (by public-employee standards) is are high and booming (PDF file). New Saint Paul superintendant Meria Carstarphen earned $170K in her previous job as "accountability officer" at the DC Public Schools (aside; do the DC schools have a reputation for being "accountable?" Everything I hear says a better word is "crappy"), and given that she's been named to the job before the contract was negotiated, that's gotta put her in a pretty good bargaining position. And then - like Harvey (six years) and Minneapolis' Thandiwe Peebles (less than a year) they're off to their next job (at a hefty raise), work undone.

To enact any meaningful change, a Superintendent would have to break through a lot of inertia; the unions, the school board (with the exception of Tom Conlon, a radical-DFL fiefdom), and so on. Given that none of them spend enough time to even affect the problems that afflict our schools, much less improve things, why the superstar treatment?

I didn't follow the reign of Thandiwe Peebles very closely. But I'll predict the following for Meria Carstarphen:

• She's gone in three years
• She'll add to the bureaucracy
• She'll launch a PR and lobbying campaign to show how short of money her over-half-billion-dollar district is
• When and if she doesn't get a bump as big as she wants, she'll lay off more teachers
• She'll trumpet minuscule increases in test scores as signs she's succeeding
• Those reports will ignore the fact that the scores are rising largely because lower-scoring kids are dropping out, especially low-scoring minority students
• She'll be gone in three years

Let's check back in a few years.

Posted by Mitch at April 3, 2006 08:02 AM | TrackBack