Wake County Schools Superintendent Tony Tata will need to find a new mentor.
As noted in this Charlotte Observer online article, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Peter Gorman announced his resignation this afternoon. He's leaving to become a senior vice president for the newly formed education division at News Corp., run by conservative businessman Rupert Murdoch.
Gorman had been tapped by the Broad Superintendents Academy to be Tata's mentor during his first year on the job in Wake.
You should probably get to know the name of Eli Broad because he could have a major impact on the Wake County school system in the next few years.
As noted in today's article, one obvious factor is that Wake Superintendent Tony Tata graduated from the Broad Superintendents Academy. Another factor is that Tata hopes to use his contacts from the academy to draw in millions of dollars from philanthropists like Broad, Bill Gates and the Walton family.
One of the things Tata said he was surprised to learn when he started in Wake was that the school system wasn't heavily involved in raising money from the private sector.
It's no April Fool's joke that Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata will meet with members of the news media on Friday.
The 9 a.m. media availability is the start of a weekly event that Tata will hold on Fridays. Don't be surprised if you start hearing about news announcements coming out on Fridays.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Peter Gorman has taken a similar approach in holding a weekly meeting with the news media.
Tata will hold the session before moving over to the Virtual Town Hall meeting that starts at 10 a.m.
Look for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Peter Gorman to be providing advice to Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata.
The Wake school system announced today that the Broad Superintendents Academy has assigned Gorman to be Tata's executive coach for one year. Along with the audits, it's one of the services that Broad provides to its alumni.
“The executive coach is much like a teacher mentor,” Tata said in a news release. “The focus of the relationship is on the mechanics of the role of the superintendent and providing support.”
The Wake County school board's superintendent search committee is now in closed session looking at candidates and discussing salary and benefits packages.
The search firm of Heidrick & Struggles has been charged with bringing the top five to 10 applicants to the search committee. The committee will whittle down the list to three to five finalists for the full school board to review.
In addition, committee chairwoman Debra Goldman said they'd discuss today in closed session what the salary and benefits would be for the new superintendent.
UPDATE
School board member Chris Malone, a member of the board’s search committee, said they’ve narrowed down the list of top candidates but haven’t yet gotten down to naming finalists yet.
"It was an embarrassment of riches," Malone said of the top candidates identified by the committee. "We'd be lucky to have any of them."
School board chairman Ron Margiotta, who attended today's meeting, said he’s optimistic that they can hire a new superintendent by January.
Malone and Margiotta said all the applicants now being given strong consideration have both education and management experience but aren’t all superintendents. The board had eliminated the requirement that the superintendent be an educator.
No decision has been made yet on the compensation package.
A Sunday Los Angeles Times article is challenging some popular conceptions about which teachers are effective and where they work.
The newspaper analyzed student records in the Los Angeles Unified School System to perform a value-added analysis of teacher effectiveness. The newspaper's plan to post online a database of the results of 6,000 elementary school teachers has produced an uproar, including a mass boycott from the teacher's union.
Findings included:
Is the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system now better academically than the Wake County school system?
As noted in today's article, Charlotte-Mecklenburg's black, Hispanic and low-income students are outperforming their peers in Wake on state tests. Plus, Charlotte's white kids are doing as well as their Wake peers.
Overall, Wake has higher scores. But that's attributable to Charlotte having more black, Hispanic and low-income kids, whose scores are still lower than their white counterparts.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg school leaders are favorably comparing the school district to Wake County schools.
As noted in today's Charlotte Observer, CMS Superintendent Peter Gorman presented several charts on Thursday showing that black, Hispanic and low-income students in his district are now more likely to pass exams than students in those same groups in Wake and Guilford counties and statewide.
Gorman says high-poverty schools aren't ideal for students and teachers. But he said the test-score trend of CMS catching up to Wake shows it’s more important to improve teaching in those schools than to shuffle students.
The hype is already beginning in school districts across the state about how students did so much better this year on the state's testing program.
The improved performance shouldn't be much of a surprise considering how for the first time elementary and middle schools were allowed to count passing scores on retests. That fact got only a brief mention in some school district press releases.
(To be fair, you could get the info from Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools if you dug past the press release to click on the attachments.)
The school board accepted Supt. Del Burns' request today to not accept an automatic three-percent raise.
Under Burns' contract, he's guranteed a raise of three percent each year. His request means that he won't get an $8,190 raise on his $273,000 base salary for the coming fiscal year.
The board can still choose to give Burns a raise later this year when it reviews his performance. Last year, the board gave him a 1-percent raise on top of his automatic one.
Some other superintendents, such as Paul Gorman in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Maurice Green in Guilford County, have also asked their boards to not give them automatic raises this year because of the economic conditions.
