Different Day, Same Shit.

A number of my fellow bloggers have been on the case of a certain school system superintendent by the name of Casey Wardynski. I already covered him on two separate occasions, highlighting how he hails from an organization that exemplifies the term "controlled chaos" when it comes to public education and how he wowed the administration of Huntsville City Schools with his military background and no-nonsense posturing. Except that most of his actions have been a bunch of nonsense. Dangerous nonsense that would have had people screaming for previous superintendent Ann Roy Moore's head on a commemorative platter.

Not only has he made sure that the Broad Foundation got a return on its investment, he's also called on several of his closest friends to get in on the fun. He's "cleaned house" by playing musical chairs with teachers and principals, shut down a number of schools and closed the city's only alternative school in favor of a far-flung private "treatment program" with little to no accountability. He's also managed to be incredibly hostile to anyone who asks him exactly what the flying hell is going on. All the while, he receives praise and pats on the back from a largely cowed and sycophantic school board and an equally cowed and sycophantic press.

Meanwhile, he's looking for ways for the school system to get out from under its "unitary status," including putting the kibosh on majority-minority transfers that help many of the kids from the poorer northern half of the city into schools in the wealthier southern half. I suspect that by loading up the schools on the north side of town with "failing" students, there will be an impetus to "do something" about the low test scores they're producing. Instead of actually addressing the underlying issues of poor performance, there may be a drive towards converting said public schools into "experimental" charter schools. But at least you get free laptops out of the deal.


Conservatives are interested in proving their point about public schools by doing all they can to make them fail. Once that's done, the wreckage can be dismantled and swept away in favor of charter schools and privately-owned academies. I sincerely doubt that Casey Wardynski is actually doing anything to make the school system he's in charge of any better. However, I have complete confidence that he's reshaping the school system as a showpiece for why converting the "dysfunctional" public schools into a privatized charter system is much better.
The endgame is directing billions of education dollars away from federal educational institutions (most of which aren't likely to exist anymore) and into the hands of private companies charged with the administration of charter and private schools. Paraphrasing Major General Smedley Butler, "It's a racket."

And it's a racket that most likely won't involve many of the poor inner-city urban youths (a.k.a. blacks and browns). Public education will hang on as a dumping ground for the so-called "scraps" that no private or charter school wants. These schools want to look good and having kids who are considered "hard to teach" and perpetual "low achievers" brings down the test score averages and makes the place look bad. Those with disciplinary problems are likely to end up in a "wilderness behavior modification" program with no contact with family or legal representation.

"It's a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher's pay scale, you'll attract people who aren't called to teach.

"To go in and raise someone's child for eight hours a day, or many people's children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn't want to do it, OK?

"And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It's just in them to do. It's the ability that God give 'em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn't matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity.

"If you don't keep that in balance, you're going to attract people who are not called, who don't need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance."

The above comes from Alabama state Senator Shadrack McGill (R). It's not every day you're confronted with a statement that is so irretrievably stupid that it takes the rest of the day just to wrap your mind around the sheer stupidity of it all.

For starters, I have yet to run into a passage in the Holy Bible that holds keeping teacher salaries at well below the national average as a "biblical principle." That's just something you won't see in the Old or New Testaments any time soon. McGill must have one of those custom-made Holy Bibles filled with "scripture" specially designed to justify the entire conservative philosophy.

Second, those who have a calling for teaching might initially go in without regard to how much they're being paid, but eventually their thoughts will turn towards keeping the lights on and the fridge stocked up. As this whole "calling" thing, sounds like McGill is mixing up teaching with preaching. The classroom is not a pulpit, the students are not church folk and there's no deacon walking around the room with a collection plate in hand.

Last but not least, sounding off a desire to keep teacher salaries as low as possible should be a red flag to just about anyone who is teaching or thinking of teaching in the state of Alabama. One of the things that brings the cream of the crop to the surface is a decent salary. Although the state has one of the highest starting salaries in the nation, the average salary is well below the national median. Depressing those salaries won't bring in the best and brightest, because the best and brightest want to be paid a decent salary that is commensurate to what they're worth and if they have to go outside the state to be paid well, then that's exactly what will happen. The idea that great teachers have to sacrifice their salaries and livelihoods just to do the job they love is quite nonsensical and patently stupid.

Meanwhile, McGill believes that such sacrifices should not extend to the legislature:

McGill, R-Woodville, said a 62 percent pay raise in 2007 - passed first by a controversial voice vote and later in an override of a veto by then-Gov. Bob Riley - better rewards lawmakers and makes them less susceptible to being swayed by lobbyists.
Lawmakers entered the 2007 legislative session making $30,710 a year, a rate that had not been changed in 16 years. The raise increased it to $49,500 annually.

McGill said that by paying legislators more, they're less susceptible to taking bribes.

I doubt that. No politician who's getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and perks is going to suddenly give that up over a nearly $20k annual pay raise. That's just extra change dug out from underneath the couch for those guys, on top of the kickbacks and gifts they'll continue to receive. It's interesting how McGill is willing to give legislators such as himself a larger paycheck, yet he's adamant about keeping teacher salaries as low as possible.

I suppose the end game of all this is to keep teacher salaries depressed to the point at which no one in their right mind would want to take up the job (at least in that state) for a living. This will be one of the many sources of justification for pushing ahead with the idea of charter schools as a replacement for the "failed" public education system, a system that is currently being driven into failure thanks to a number of factors, with underfunding being one of them. If you take a close look at most school systems in Alabama, you'll notice how inflated the salaries of the administration are in comparison to the faculty and staff within the schools themselves. That might not bother someone who approaches the issue of public education with a business mindset - after all, the CEO and other execs have to be "well-compensated" in order to perform a good job.

Looking at education from a business perspective also demands that the guys on the ground floor - the teachers and support staff - be paid as little as possible to preserve the bottom line. That's something that Casey Wardynski is introducing to Huntsville City Schools with "Teach For America." Instead of having qualified teachers with hundreds of hours in traditional training and years of experience in connecting with and motivating students, HCS students will be taught by fresh-faced college graduates who have relatively little experience. While the strong push for "Teach For America" is just Wardynski's way of making sure the Broad Foundation gets a return on their investment, a cunning politician can seize on TFA as being a backdoor for dumping qualified and experienced teachers in favor of what will eventually amount to as "temp workers." There is a certain allure towards paying teachers fry-cook wages, on the mistaken believe that they don't do much of anything aside from sit on their asses and babysit kids all day.

Perhaps McGill should borrow a proper copy of the Holy Bible and spend the next few days going over it from cover to cover, preferably with a good minister who'll guide him through the text. That should help him separate genuine biblical principles from the principles he's conjured up in his head.

Plenty has gone down surrounding Dr. Casey Wardynski, newly minted superintendent of Huntsville City Schools. If it isn't the parade of new $100k+ hires during a time of proration and teacher layoffs, the drop-kicking of several school principals and a $500k push to higher educators funneled through the Broad Institute network, it's the sudden proposal to change the name of the newly built Lee High School and the controversial move of the New Century Technology School magnet. Yeah, the man seems to be shaking things up, for better or worse.

Okay, folks. You need some background.

• Ever since Wardynski got on board, there's been the sense of unilateral decision-making on part of the superintendent on a variety of issues. Case in point, the firing of Fillis McGhee, Jo Ann Thompson and Keith Henderson. Each case has their merits, and they all reek of an underlying motive somewhere. These moves are being hailed as a shakedown in corruption within HCS, except any genuine shakedown would have to involve sawing off dead wood off the White Street tree.
• Meanwhile, Wardynski's made a few of his friends welcome at their new home by throwing a total of $641,000 their way. And now he's chasing around a $550,000 $850,000 $1,700,000 four-year contract with Teach for America.* Gee, Casey, I thought we didn't have all that money to throw around. The schools are broke, teachers are getting let go right and left, and parents are tired of sending their kids off with their own rolls of toilet paper.
• Then there's the ham-handed way Wardynski's handling the renaming of the new Lee High School. Pulling down the Lee name without consulting anyone about it is a bit of a dick move that suggests unilateral action, Casey.**
• Even more ham-handed is the proposed move of New Century Technology from its current location within the crowded Columbia High School, located smack dab in Research Park, to the new Lee High School several miles east. Keep in mind Lee had its own magnet program already in place. Also keep in mind that New Century wanted its own campus for years. Butler or Westlawn would fit the bill for a new campus, as both are a lot closer to Redstone Arsenal and Research Park than Lee is.

There's also a not-so-subtle push for the school system to gain "unitary status." In short, that means HCS can finally throw off that decades-old desegregation order and start building and zoning schools the way they want without asking the U.S. Justice Department for permission. That doesn't sound so bad until you find out how the school system and the city in general is effectively segregated via north and south sides. I'll explain.

Thanks to the desegregation order, HCS can't build any new schools in the heavily white southeastern portions of the city. That means the city can't build another school to relieve the rampant overcrowding of Grissom High School, the only public high school in that particular area. That means the Tigers will have to put up with those portable classrooms out front.

Meanwhile, you have the heavily black northwestern and north-central portions of the city. The houses are cheaper, the people are working class and the schools are majority black, and therefore assumed to be complete shit by the Weatherly/Whiteburg crowd. Schools like J.O. Johnson and S.R. Butler High are operating at way under capacity, for a number of reasons. In Butler's case, all of the Redstone Arsenal students were rezoned for Columbia High when it first opened, drop-kicking Butler's enrollment numbers. Majority-to-minority school transfers rule the roost (guess in which direction), thereby placing further strain on the already over-capacity southeastern schools.

Given the property values north of University Drive, east of Sparkman & Jordan Drive and west of the Parkway are a bit paltry, to say the least, the schools there don't get as much funding as the schools in the more affluent Whitesburg/Weatherly/Jones Farm/Lilly Flagg areas. Unfortunately, there seems to be an inclination to blame a lack of proper school funding and the education opportunities that are thereby stifled on the somehow natural inferiority of black minds and their criminal, trouble-making tendencies. And I speak as a survivor of a school system where the administration and teaching faculty have already assigned stereotypical notions of who you are supposed to be and thereby act accordingly.

The only way to get out from under the order is to find a way to bring the ethnic composition of the schools across the city to a desirable enough level for the Justice Department to give an okay. So far, that has not happened. And thanks to the screwed-up ethnic demographics of the city in general, it never will, at least not for the next decade or two.

And that's why I ask about the way Fillis McGhee was fired. Yes, it's generally not a good idea to try to use your position to get favors for your kid, no matter how well it would benefit them in the end. However, keep in mind this was a black principal of a majority-white school in a majority-white part of town. I hate to lace up  the "Air Rs," but if Wardynski's shakedown is actually the first salvo of many signifying a movement to...ah..."put things back to where they were" or "bring back neighborhood schools" or some such thing...

Better bloggers than I have covered the ongoing HCS saga in greater detail. I present to you links to Geek Palaver, Merts Center Monitor and Redeye. Go read them.

* EDIT: Per Geek Palaver, the four-year Teach for America contract actually totals to approximately $1,700,000. I keep that in mind next time I hear about yet another round of teacher layoffs.


** EDIT: Wardynski had the "Lee High School" motif put back up after student and community outcry.

Over the past year or so, Huntsville City Schools was busy sawing an anchor off the rickety S.S. School System. That anchor turned out to be former superintendent Dr. Ann Roy Moore, who just so happens to be on the wrong side of America's preferred color aisle, not that it seems to matter much. And the school board didn't let Moore's contract deter them from working over that anchor with a blow torch and an angle grinder -- they paid her an extra $100k to stay on as an advisor of sorts, so they wouldn't get smacked in the face with a lawyer's most favorite words: BREACH OF CONTRACT.

And after a lengthy search, the school board found a guy by the name of Dr. Casey Wardynski. At first I wasn't too interested in blogging something like this because it seemed so...small potatoes. But then I kept hearing some interesting stories about where he came from, and more importantly, what he was doing and who he brought along with him.

I still can't quite grasp why the school board and others love the guy. Maybe it was his military credentials -- after all, he is a retired Army colonel, and this city loves itself some military folk. Perhaps HCS figured they'd get a hard-nosed, no-nonsense leader who'd apply some of that military leadership magic on a school system that seems to be unable to get its collective shit together.

Wardynski's previous job was being the superintendent of Aurora Public Schools. More importantly, he's the alumnus of the Broad Foundation's Superintendents Academy, a program that, to quote Balloon Juice's E.D. Kain, "shapes new corporate reformers to go out and bring school choice and privatization to the masses." Nice, bland buzzwords. The "masses" is a nice touch, too -- gotta patronize the lesser peoples when getting your message across.

I checked up on the batting record of the "star players" that were churned out by this outfit, and it's not looking good:

• Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington D.C. schools and Broad alumnus.
• Marla Goodloe-Johnson, former superintendent of Seattle, WA. public schools and Broad alumnus.
• Brad Bernatek, Director of Research, Evaluation and Assessment for Seattle Public Schools and Broad alumnus.
• Beverly Hall, former superintendent of Atlanta, GA. public schools. Although not a Broad alumnus, several members of the school board were reportedly trained by the Broad Foundation sometime in 2006.
• Robert Bobb, current emergency financial manager of Detroit, MI and recent BFSA graduate. The Broad Foundation, along with the Kellogg Foundation, paid Bobb $145,000 a year on top of his $280,000 government salary. Fair bit of change there.
• Kimberly Olson, former finalist for superintendent of the Dallas, TX. independent school district and Broad alumnus.
• Arne Duncan, former superintendent of Chicago, IL. public schools, current U.S. Secretary of Education and Broad alumnus.

When you've got shit stacked this high, no amount of window opening or air freshener is gonna make the stench go away. And what of Dr. Wardynski? Well, he did leave Aurora Public Schools with a $25 million deficit.

In other words, it appears to be an outfit that trains present and future administrative staff in how to aggressively run a school system in the corporate sense, with the ultimate long-term goal of discrediting public schools as they are now in favor of charter schools largely run by corporate interests.

And now that he's settled into his new job, he's brought a few friends along:

Wardynski recruited his second-in-command, Dr. Barbara Cooper, from the school system in Aurora, Colo., just as he did with the new CFO, Frank Spinelli. Wardynski joked at last week's school board meeting that John Barry, the Aurora superintendent, is "pretty unhappy" with him.
Wardynski worked alongside both during his own nine-month stint as chief financial officer of the Aurora system.

And in Huntsville, he is paying both better than their predecessors. Cooper will make $141,600 a year as deputy superintendent - about $7,000 more than the maximum salary advertised for the job. The salary range on the posting, which ended Aug. 29, was $84,217 to $134,545.

And while the administrative staff get thousands over the maximum for their jobs, teachers, principals and faculty are being forced to abide by the absolute minimum. Keep in mind this the same school system that doubled up on bus routes and consolidated schools to save money. And also keep in mind this is in the same state where a teacher coming out of her own pockets for things like tissue and pencils is considered a perfectly normal event.

Methinks the fact that the school system is throwing extra money at hiring and keeping administrative staff around while at the same time turning teachers into minimum-wage slaves pisses a lot of folks off. Showering upper management and executives with money while drawing blood from entry-level turnips is an epidemic that's swept the entire nation. I understand you want to attract and keep your best and brightest, just not at the expense of the folks at the ground floor. You know, the people who actually run most of this shit.

Personally speaking, the jury's still out on this guy, although I'm not liking what I'm seeing this early in the game. And now for some commentary from the peanut gallery over at AL.com:

These salaries are not excessive. Good leadership comes at a cost. If you want cheap leadership, I understand that members of the previous school administration are available.

Don't you just hate it when people attempt to justify waste and cronyism when it works in their favor?

BTW, Geek Palaver, Redeye's Front Page and Merts Center Monitor has much, much more on this and other crap involving HCS.