Category: Education (Page 3 of 4)

The Myriad Lame Excuses for Jeffco’s Disastrous 2019 Assessment Scores

September 11, 2019 / ijsadmin

The scores were bad, but the variety of excuses for the atrocious results seemed endless. Brad Rupert started the Board discussion by attempting to blame the scores on the 5A/5B vote. I just can’t comprehend how that vote would affect scores. Not only was the vote in early November, but how were the kids involved? If the kids weren’t involved, then what Brad really meant was that the teachers were so involved in the vote that they weren’t properly performing their jobs. Is that what he was saying? JCEA probably wouldn’t agree with that, but wasn’t it really an attempt at shifting blame – from the teachers responsible for the scores to … teachers?

Brad’s next attempt was to blame the scores on the shift to the K-5, 6-8 model. Yet, once again, under scrutiny, this attempt backfires. The Board promised the community that the move to the 6-8 model would be good for kids. Growth drops of 7 points in both ELA and Math and real drops of 3 / 4 points doesn’t seem like it was good for the kids. This excuse once again only highlights the poor operational aspects of the move. And, who should bear ultimate responsibility for these scores? Teachers? Isn’t that their job? But, certainly no one will ever mention them as having responsibility for the drop. And, how did this move affect the 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, 7^th and 8^th grade CMAS scores? What about the PSAT and SAT drops? Lame, lame lame, Brad.

The next attempt at an excuse was Kris Schuh’s “we anticipated an implementation dip” excuse. Really? The District “anticipated” a dip? If a good organization “anticipates” something, don’t they plan for it? Since there was no mitigation, that must make Jeffco schools not a very good organization. In fact, it doesn’t seem like Jeffco did any planning for the “anticipated” dip at all. The “additional planning time” seemed like a knee-jerk, desperation attempt to stave off legitimate Board questions on what the District was doing. In addition, Flores didn’t have an answer for what the District would be doing to help PSAT and SAT scores. ‘Anticipated’? It seems far from it. Flores also stated that scores should be looked at through the lens of the DUIP. Yet, the DUIP showed that scores would increase for the 2018-19 school year. That doesn’t support the “anticipated dip” excuse from Schuh. Someone wasn’t telling the truth – either the person who wrote the DUIP and didn’t include the “anticipated dip” or Schuh in making up the lame “anticipated dip” excuse.

To top the list of excuses, the District attempted to blame a dead teenager, Sol Pais, for the fact that 2 schools didn’t get enough students to school to take the tests. That’s 2, just 2 out of how many? 100+ schools? And Jason Glass really expects people to believe that?

Having bad results is one thing. Good organizations have solid, concrete and measurable plans for improvement. Jason Glass and Jeffco demonstrated their complete and utter incompetence by not having those plans, but instead only producing lame excuses and half-baked and wish-washy plans, with no realistic chance for success to the Board.

Unfortunately, the Board let Glass and his merry band of incompetents off the hook too easily.

It’s time for a change of Board members and Glass. With 5 years now as a Superintendent in Colorado, Glass needs to be put under a critical lens as he has no track record of improving academic performance in either of the two Districts he’s been in.

Jeffco’s 6th Grade Move to Middle School Debacle

September 3, 2019 / ijsadmin

Jeffco’s Board promised that moving 6^th graders to Middle School would be good for the students, despite some studies to the contrary.

It wasn’t!

In fact, measured by test scores it was a debacle and the magnitude of the drops is just mind boggling.

CMAS Math Growth was down a massive 7 points while the number of students meeting state standards was down a comparable 4% points.

It was the same for CMAS ELA. Growth was similarly down 7 points and the number of students meeting state standards was down 3%.

The only people that could call this move a success would be the Jeffco Board of Education who cited the “success” of this move in extending Jason Glass’ contract 5 years.

I think the exact opposite. When you see scores drop like this it demonstrates to me that Glass doesn’t have the leadership or skills necessary to move the District in the right direction and his contract should be terminated. He completely embarrassed the Board, but more importantly he completely let down the kids he’s responsible for educating.

I feel the same way regarding the Board of Education. If they consider this a “success”, their definition doesn’t match mine. I want to see thinking, and results, that are student focused. By extending Glass’ contract the Board clearly demonstrated that they aren’t student focused and they too need to be replaced.

Strong Leaders Surround Themselves with Even Stronger Subordinates

July 27, 2019 / ijsadmin

I was a bit surprised when Jason Glass took over as Superintendent of Jeffco schools and he didn’t replace ANY of the top leadership. In many instances a change in top leadership is accompanied by the new leader bringing in some of his “own” people. I always wondered why no changes were made, with the exception of bringing in the all important Chief Communication Officer he previously worked with in Eagle, a year after he took the Jeffco position.

Did Glass consider the people who were already there to be superstars? It’s hard to imagine that given the weak academic results of the District.
Did Glass not have a network of people he trusted and believed in from past jobs? That’s a possibility given he came from Eagle.
Does Glass have the arrogance to believe that he could make the incumbents better in their jobs? That’s certainly a possibility.
Was Glass so weak that he didn’t want to get rid of the incumbents? Again, that’s a possibility.
Does Glass not trust himself to be able to hire better people? Again, another possibility.

The bottom line is that for nearly 2 years all of the incumbents remained in place. Eventually, the Chief Human Resource Officer left, Kevin Carroll retired and the Chief of Schools – Elementary was hired away.

The jury is still out regarding Kevin Carroll’s replacement (good riddance, by the way). However, the replacement for Chief of Schools – Elementary is a head scratcher.

Strong leaders surround themselves with strong subordinates. Glass’s appointment of Renee Nicothodes, who spent many, many years at Adams 14, is not confidence inspiring. With the state essentially taking over Adams 14, Renee has NO track record of making improvements. Could Glass not get someone with a better track record, or is he afraid of bringing in someone who might be stronger than he is? Either way, it is an indictment of his leadership and a blow to the kids and improvement in Jeffco.

Why Did Jason Glass Get a Sudden 5-year Contract Extension?

June 10, 2019 / ijsadmin

Why did Jason Glass receive a sudden 5-year contract extension? We don’t know the answer to that. We only know that it was discussed in Executive Session, put on the public Board meeting agenda and quickly and unanimously agreed upon.

During the Board discussion multiple Board members had reservations about the suddenness of the vote, in favor of more transparency. In fact, the District’s counsel, Craig Hess, recommended against taking a vote without providing more time for public comment.

However, Ron Mitchell was adamant on jamming through the extension that night, using the fact that the minimal public comment was sufficient.

In the end, using the passage of 5A/5B and the 6^th grade move to Middle School (Edit: maybe the 6^th grade move wasn’t as good as the Board wanted it to seem) as examples of the “good” work Glass has done the vote was taken and ALL Board members voted for the extension – transparency by damned. And just like that, without waiting to see the performance results from Glass’ 2^nd year Jeffco is locked into a still unproven Superintendent for the next 6 years. Not a good strategy, if you ask me.

And finally, once again, Glass’s contract contained no performance incentives. The kids in Jeffco can only hope the unproven “transforming the task” and “Deeper Learning” will actually have a positive impact on education. Without studies and proven results in any other school district I remain skeptical.

Jason Glass’s Lack of Leadership

March 24, 2019 / ijsadmin

Everyone knew it was coming. There’s no excuse for not knowing the answers to Board members’ questions. Yet, Glass and District staff miserably failed to plan for the recommendation to change school start times.

Changing high school start times has been a topic in Jeffco for a long time now. My daughter sent a letter to the Board about this topic in the spring prior to Glass getting hired, so the discussion is not new. Many people talk about it and there are valid studies that show that it immediately improves the academic performance and health of teenagers. Multiple Colorado Districts have already shifted, and even more are considering it.

Jeffco, under Glass, even started talking about it in February 2018. A Committee was formed in July 2018 to develop recommendations by January 2019, with one of their stated objectives being: “The group as a whole will also consider how schedule changes could affect transportation, sports and other after school activities, student employment, and district budget”.

Yet, it seems that when the committee made their recommendations in February, Glass, and the committee, didn’t have answers to some Board members’ legitimate concerns, particularly as to what the actual costs, logistics and implementation would be. Also, Glass stated that “numerous” principals had concerns about the disruptive effects of the proposed time changes.

Are you kidding me?

This isn’t some “out-of-the-blue” unexpected recommendation. EVERYONE should have been preparing for this recommendation as the evidence is so strong for it. EVERYONE on the District staff, including Glass, should have been preparing for an implementation. Glass should have known, from his staff, EXACTLY what this would cost and should have already been budgeting for it in the 2019-20 budget. Yet, it seems, in a clear absence of leadership, Glass didn’t anticipate these legitimate questions and consequently didn’t direct his staff to perform the necessary planning that would have ensured a successful implementation in 2019-20. This is particularly disconcerting since other Districts have been able to make these changes in a similar amount of time. Real leaders, especially those who claim to have a “Vision”, anticipate and plan for changes. Glass didn’t! And the concerns of Principals? Don’t these Principals understand the benefits of these changes? Wasn’t Glass and his band of merry Community Superintendents talking to Principals about what could potentially happen to start times and start addressing those concerns in the plans they should have been making? Obviously not. Shouldn’t Glass, as the District leader, have just told the Principals that the evidence out weighs their concerns and that they have an obligation, a duty really, to do whatever was necessary to implement the changes? Again, obviously not!

And to add insult to injury, while Glass could find unbudgeted money in the 2018-19 budget to hire a second a SECOND Communications Director, a Bond Construction Communications Specialist and $400,000 for renovation of the 3^rd floor of the Admin building he COULDN’T find enough money ($70,000 most likely spread out over 2 budget years) for a consultant to begin this year to help the inept District staff work through some of the issues raised by the Board!

All of this adds up to a clear and utter lack of leadership on the part of Glass on something that has a well documented direct and immediate impact on education performance, health and safety, which is now, most likely, years down the road.

What a joke! Glass’s actions, when it really counts, clearly demonstrate what type of leader he really is – weak and ineffective!

Why won’t Jason Glass show 5B Charter calculations?

March 16, 2019 / ijsadmin

As the discussion surrounding the allocation of 5B monies to Charters has continued over the past few weeks, it has been easy to see why there has been confusion. First, EVERY piece of literature put out by the District stated that Charters would receive 10%, or $56M from the bond proceeds. Not one piece that I saw contained an asterik clarifying that the share was dependent upon Full Time Enrollment (FTE) such as “* FTE dependent”. Personally, it makes sense to proportionally distribute the funding based on FTE, but it certainly appears that there are people who strongly believe that they were told that Charters would get a flat 10%, and I can see their point. I wasn’t in those meetings, but the anecdotal evidence is that there was certainly a high degree of confusion in this regards, and not just from EVERY piece of written literature and media.

Because of what I consider to be this justified confusion, I would have thought I would have seen a somewhat different tone in the Facebook responses surrounding this topic. I would have expected to have seen some potentially empathetic or conciliatory responses such as: “Now that you bring this up, we see how there might have been some confusion.” or “Maybe we should have included something to clarify this in our literature.” or “We’re sorry we created this confusion, we’ll learn from this and strive to do better the next time.” or even “At the (add a date here) meeting of the Charter school consortium, we very clearly discussed that Charters would be receiving a prorated share of the Bond proceeds.” Unfortunately, I didn’t see those responses in the Facebook discussion on this topic. At https://www.facebook.com/groups/1236337263132884/permalink/1758767880889817/ you can go back and see if you agree or disagree with my opinion on this.

By the time the Board meeting was held this past Thursday questions regarding Bond proceed allocation appeared to shift to understanding how the FTE numbers were arrived at and the calculation of the prorated share. Those questions seem legitimate to me since using CDE numbers at https://www.cde.state.co.us/cdereval/pupilcurrent it appears that Charter students make up 10.7% of the District’s student counts. These numbers appear to match up with the student count numbers contained on page 20 of the District’s Office Statement to Bond investors that can be seen in this letter to the Board https://www.boarddocs.com/co/jeffco/Board.nsf/files/B9T4N972FC2D/$file/c19119O.pdf, which I would think would be the official, audited numbers. Those numbers show 9,052 Charter school students out of a total of 84,631 total students in the District, or 10.7% by my calculations. I will state that the District may do some additional calculations on these numbers to convert to FTE since some students only attend ½ time, but I think that is what, in the interest of full transparency, people want to see – how exactly the Charter proration was calculated. And, I think it should be simple enough to provide this detail.

Yet, at Thursday’s Board meeting, when the District had an opportunity to put all of these questions to rest, they didn’t.

At the 5:17 point of the Board meeting Livestream Kathleen went into a discussion of the history of past Bond proceed sharing with Charters and then went on to discuss that there are a variety of ways to count students, that the audited student numbers are what the District uses and that Golden View’s numbers are subtracted. Yet, she failed in the most important part of any explanation – showing the actual numbers and formula that the District uses and the source of those numbers. That means that questions remain.

We can only wonder why there is such an unwillingness to show the numbers and calculations.

Is Jason Glass and the District trying to hide something? It seems that it would just be so simple to show the numbers, explain them and let everyone go away satisfied. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened and the questions remain and people are left to wonder why.

To me, it seems that this entire issue has been extremely poorly handled by Glass and the District staff.

Therefore, in the interest of full transparency, let’s see the full accounting of the formula for and source of the student count numbers used to calculate the Charters’ share of Bond proceeds!

Taxpayers deserve an open and fact-filled discussion on teacher pay

May 2, 2018 / ijsadmin

Over the past few weeks we’ve heard many things regarding school funding and teacher salaries.

We’ve heard that:

Colorado teacher salaries are 46^th in the nation.
Colorado teachers have an average annual salary of $46,506.
Teachers leave the teaching profession because of low pay.
Teacher pay has not kept up with inflation since the Great Recession.

And while all of these statements may be true in some context, in Colorado teacher pay is set at the school district level.

That effectively means that what is happening at the national, or state levels, may or may not be true in Jeffco.

Therefore, Jeffco taxpayers deserve to hear specific data in relation to their teachers so that they can make informed, and local, decisions regarding school funding and teacher pay.

For example:

What is the change in Jeffco per pupil funding since the Great Recession?
What is the average teacher salary in Jeffco? Can total compensation be quantified?
How many teachers in Jeffco have salaries which have not kept up with inflation since the Great Recession?
Why, with 2 JCEA negotiated contracts, increased state funding, budget cuts and a school closing, are there still teachers with salaries that have not kept up with inflation?
How many teachers in Jeffco have salaries that have increased by more than 125% of the rate of inflation since the Great Recession?
What would be the total cost of salary increases, or one-time payments, to ensure all teachers have salaries, or compensation, ensuring cost-of-inflation equivalency since the Great Recession?
How would these numbers change if the 2010 mandated 3.5% increase in SAED is factored in, since SAED is to be funded by moneys otherwise available for employee wage increases?
What is the exact number of teachers who leave teaching in Jeffco because of low pay?

It’s easy to throw around numbers that may, or may not be in context.

However, in the interest of full transparency I believe that it is important for both Jeffco schools and the JCEA to have an open and fact-filled discussion with Jeffco specific numbers so that taxpayers can fully and completely understand the issues as they pertain to our teachers. This includes an opportunity for taxpayers to ask pertinent and relevant questions.

What do you think John Ford and Jason Glass?

Can you provide full transparency and make this happen?

An Extraordinary Lack of Leadership from Jason Glass

April 21, 2018 / ijsadmin

Can anyone give me an example of any organization that would ALLOW its employees to force it to shut down its core functions merely because its employees WANTED to take a day off?

Don’t almost all organizations require supervisor approval if an employee requests a day off?

Don’t (competent) supervisors subsequently ensure that the organization has adequate staffing during the employee’s requested off time prior to granting approval?

What does that say about Jeffco schools then when District and School Leadership essentially ALLOWED sufficient numbers of teachers and staff to take “personal” days on April 26^th “forcing” Jason Glass to shut down the District for “safety” reasons?

In my mind, it means 3 things:

That Jason Glass is an extraordinarily weak leader. He clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t have the will or courage to stand up for students and perform his PRIMARY job responsibility.
It clearly demonstrates that students are NOT the Number 1 priority of Jason Glass or the District. The District has one job, and that is to provide a quality education to the District’s students. How does that happen when teachers, and students, are not in class? And what about the 31% of the District’s Free and Reduced Lunch students? Where are they getting their meals that day? It certainly seems that from the actions of teachers taking a “personal” day and Glass shutting down the District, that students are NOT the Number 1 priority.
Jason Glass and teachers don’t care about working parents. What are working parents supposed to do if their kids aren’t in school? Jason Glass and the teachers essentially told these parents that they want them to take their own day off work, take their own “personal” day, or a day without pay so that teachers could “protest”. Selfish, selfish, selfish!

Who is running the school District? Certainly not Jason Glass. And after not standing up for the students and parents, and by extension the taxpayers who pay his salary to ensure kids get an education, JCEA knows that they run the District and can do whatever they want in the future.

What happened here demonstrates an extraordinary lack of leadership. It sets an extremely bad precedent. What will JCEA do next if they now know there are no repercussions for coordinated job related actions? While Jason Glass might agree with some of the funding related issues, it is his JOB to look out for the students, and their education, FIRST.

Finally, why haven’t we heard from the School Board? Actually, that’s not a hard question to answer as we already know the Board is owned by the union.

It is just shocking that there is so much lack of leadership, particularly from Jason Glass. This would just NOT happen in any other organization that is truly serious about its core mission.

Innovation Fund – Another poorly thought out idea by Glass

January 14, 2018 / ijsadmin

The difference between a Visionary and Operational organizational leader became painfully evident at this week’s Board meeting.

I agree that an Innovation Fund, managed well, has its place and could derive benefits for the District.

However, once again, as is becoming a common theme with Glass, the implementation details were poorly thought out and demonstrate the operational inexperience and incompetence of Glass and his District staff.

First, even though this may be a good idea, you don’t raid District reserves that have already been depleted by adding seats for the District’s controversial move to a K-5, 6-8 configuration. This puts reserves at the very low end of the recommended level. It also seems extremely dangerous to me, given the length, and now velocity of the economic upturn. As someone who has experienced multiple downturns, that scares me every day. Therefore, instead of planning for the inevitable, as prudent and experienced leaders would do, Glass, and the Board, have put the District into a position of financial weakness if the economy collapses in the short term. All of this for an idea that is not an absolute necessity.

Second, I don’t understand why this needed to happen so quickly, or even how there is any chance that fund uses will show results by the end of this school and fiscal year. Grant recipients won’t be announced until the week of March 5th. This means that awardees will only have approximately 2 months to use the funds and show results before the end of the year. I don’t see how anything meaningful can come about in that short of time. The proposed timeline for 2018-19 is even more puzzling. For that school year recipients won’t be announced until November. While this provides roughly a semester for awardees to implement and obtain results, it completely ignores full-year, or first semester innovation opportunities. When added together, wouldn’t it be better to slow this process down and award grants in the April time frame for the 2018-19 school year? Wouldn’t this give grant awardees planning time that would better ensure the success of their ideas? To account for the District’s budget cycle, grants could be awarded contingent upon the Board approving 2018-19 Operating Funds, removing the necessity of depleting Reserves. If during the upcoming Budget cycle the Board prioritizes other District needs higher than the Innovation Fund, then the awardees do not receive their grants. They would know by June, still have time for planning and eliminating the need to pull from reserves.

All of this raises the question: “What’s more important in Jeffco, a Visionary or Operational leader?” Clearly, Glass wants to be a Visionary, and with this recommendation he wanted a quick “win”. However, he has demonstrated time and time again with his poorly thought out ideas (e.g. no clue regarding implications of and the difficulty of starting an Arts Academy, a HS GT RIE committee that utterly failed in its stated purpose of finding program sustainability and now a poorly thought out Innovation fund created from District reserves) that he and his District staff have no clue, are incompetent and are out of their league operationally.

A Vision is nice, but Glass and his staff have proven that they won’t have the ability to implement it, merely reinforcing DeliverEd’s findings. I guess we shouldn’t expect anything less as the Board hired someone from a District 12 times smaller than Jeffco and without the operational experience necessary to manage a district the size of ours.

District Staff Hides Fact MAP data shows decrease in Growth Rates

January 13, 2018 / ijsadmin

At the January 11^th Board meeting, Matt Flores and his staff of PhD’s went way out of their way to hide the true facts regarding Winter MAP data.

Starting out by saying they were extremely happy with the data, on several occasions they highlighted that the Growth data was better than the growth data in 2015-16, except for 4^th Grade Math.

Yet, the true facts are that Reading growth rates stayed the same or decreased in 4 out of 8 grades in comparison to 2016-2017 and decreased in 6 out of 8 grades for Math.

That’s not a trend we should be seeing!

In addition, Matt destroyed any credibility he had by trying to snow the Board into believing that 4^th grade growth rates in Jeffco were worse in comparison to 2015-16 because 4^th grade math concepts were harder. He completely ignored the fact that 4^th grade math concepts were harder for EVERYONE taking the MAP. Nice try Matt, but after that, why should we ever believe anything he ever says?

The Board, and Matt and his team, should have focused on the disturbing downward growth rate trend. Instead, Matt had his PhDs work overtime to perpetuate the “everything is going great in Jeffco” myth. As a result, no action gets taken and our kids continue to suffer.