At the New Rochelle Board of Education meeting last night, Barnard Principal Patricia Lambert presented her goals and objectives for the 2012-12 school year. The only problem is that it is April and the school year is about three-quarters over. Last week the board heard a similar presentation at Albert Leonard Middle School from Principal Velma Whiteside. Again, the year is almost over so why are we hearing about this year’s goals and objectives?
The system in place now is flawed to the point of being worse than useless and needs to be replaced.
Like Wimpy, the old Popeye character, most New Rochelle administrators come before the board with vague assurances of good things to come as if asking the board for a hamburger today in exchange for the promise of a hamburger on Tuesday.
Once a year, administrators come before the New Rochelle Board of Education and present their “goals and objectives”. By tradition, building leaders (i.e., principals) present their goals and objectives to the board on the day the board holds a meeting at their school. Another tradition is that the school board holds one of its meetings at each school over the source of the school year. The problem is that with 10 schools and more than half the meetings held at City Hall, it can be quite a ways into the school year before the board gets around to a particular school. That is why Barnard is presenting in April for a school year that ends in June.
To their credit, some board members — Jeffrey Hastie, Naomi Brickell, and Rachel Relkin — have expressed concern over the past year that there be increased accountability for announced goals and objectives from the administration and building leaders. There has been some progress over the past few years in that “goals and objectives” documents are now being published on the school district web site. It is progress but not enough. There is very little in the way of administrators articulating measurable goals. There is virtually no attempt to evaluate progress against those goals. There is little or no presentation of hard data in the context of commonly understood metrics. That principals are still presenting their goals and objectives for the first time when we are three-quarters of the way into the school year suggest there is still a long way to go.
Things have got to change.
Talk of the Sound is recommending several ways to improve Goals and Objectives reporting by administrators and building leaders.
1. Create a standardized form.
As it stands now, the reports filed by administrators are each unique to their author making comparisons across the district and from one year to the next close to impossible. There should be a basic standardized form for filing “Goals and Objectives” reports. There can be an extra section for building leaders, department heads and superintendent level employees. There can be a free form section at the end to add any additional remarks but not for use in presenting goals or objectives.
2. Publish “Goals and Objectives” reports for every administrator on September 1st of each year.
All administrators should be required to submit their goals and objectives for a particular school year over the summer, before the school year begins. Those reports should then be published so they can be distributed to parents and staff on the first day of school and discussed as part of “back to school” night at each school. Every parent should be offered a copy of the report for their child’s school plus all of the district-wide departments and superintendents whether via the web site, email or hard copy. They should be presented to parents as a contract between the administrators and the entire New Rochelle community.
3. Administrators present “Goals and Objectives” Spot Check report.
The school board should continue to include administrators on the agenda over the course of the year as has traditionally been done but change the nature of the assignment. Administrators should present a summary of their supervisor’s evaluation of their previous year’s “Goals and Objectives” reports (see item #4), how they improved their current year’s “Goals and Objectives” reports based on recommendations from their supervisor and the board, what their current year’s “Goals and Objectives” report indicates and provide a “spot check” update on progress against the current year’s “Goals and Objectives” report.
4. Report Progress Evaluations against the “Goals and Objectives” reports at the board’s annual reorganization meeting in July.
Each “Goals and Objectives” report should be evaluated by the administrator’s supervisor with the board doing their own evaluation of the Superintendent’s “Goals and Objectives” report. That evaluation should be presented by the supervisor to the board in the presence of the administrator.
For those not familiar with Wimpy, the name refers to J. Wellington Wimpy or “Wimpy”, a character in the Popeye cartoons who is described as “a pleasant, friendly man, fond of tall tales and hamburgers”.
Wimpy is soft-spoken, very intelligent, and well educated, but also cowardly, very lazy, overly parsimonious and utterly gluttonous. He is also something of a scam artist and, especially in the newspaper strip, can be notoriously underhanded at times.