Well, the first post I did on the LCSD School Board and Robinson now has 10+ comments. That is by far the most of any post of mine. Interesting.
I want to highlight one comment that just came in:Anonymous said...
This mess is going to set education in Lebanon back by years. It is highly unlikely that Dr. Robinson will be able to return to effective leadership and what talented administrator will want to walk into this disaster? The district will get an ineffectual trainee at best and this is a very big, very serious job. My only hope it that principals and teachers, in a leadership vacuum, will pull together at some level and produce some good education.
Rick Alexander, of course, is just a destructive force. He put his own kids through private parochial school. He does not believe in public education and is making it his personal mission to use politics to impede success of Lebanon's regular schools so that even more students will be driven out. This guy is bent on destroying the school system so he manages to get himself elected to a local school board. It is just bizarre.
I'm not so sure the first point holds - the district might still be able to find someone with some amount of talent, but that person will be a tool as far as the school board is concerned. Unless, of course, Alexander disappears. I will agree with one thing: The board and the teacher's union have done such a good job conflating hatred of the small schools initiative with their hatred of Jim Robinson's management style that they've all but guaranteed that a) any innovation will be from the bottom up, which could be a good thing, except b) any innovation will be easily crushed with a reference to the recent history of the district. No one is going to want to propose anything remotely forward-thinking in that environment unless they get the blessing of Alexander and the Lebanon Education Association. Which brings me to point #2...
The suggestion that Alexander got himself elected to the school board for the purpose of destroying the public school system is not at all bizarre. In fact, it has been a pretty common M.O. for conservative operatives of all kinds for years. The Republican Party, and by extension the people they appoint - and I am deadly serious about this - do not believe that government can be a force for good, and they are intent on proving it through a combination of mismanagement and a predisposition towards lining the pockets of their supporters at a huge cost to the general public. They the proceed to point to the programs they've just destroyed and use it as evidence for their claim that government needs to go. What Alexander is doing seems very much the same thing to me; it's slash-and-burn politics that, if successful, leaves the instigator as the only person left standing in a large pile of wreckage. In this case it will be Alexander and maybe the LEA, and since Alexander is an idiot, I don't consider that a particularly good thing.
What gets me is everyone else is apparently so blinded by their anger at Robinson's authoritarian style they don't see the possibility that Alexander could be worse.
However, I will say that I think essentially removing the top level of day-to-day administrative oversight may or may not be a good thing. The School Board cannot effectively replace Robinson in that capacity, as much as they may try (and it will be a disaster if they do). Micromanagement by one person is nothing compared to micromanagement by the likes of an entire board, especially one that contains Alexander (and especially given that micromanagement is very explicitly not what the board is there to do). On the other hand, it could actually serve to leave people with more freedom to innovate at the school or classroom level - under the radar, so to speak. Unfortunately, that could go either way, and in any case getting support for innovation in the future is a dicey proposition.
I would not want to be a parent with a kid in that district right now.
Does anyone know for sure if Alexander's kids went to a private school? If so, which one? Was it in Lebanon?
Friday, August 10, 2007
Hometown Insanity, Comment Edition
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,38430,00.html?iid=chix-sphere
Try this link.
From Education World
9/4/2001
John C. Fryer Jr., superintendent of Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, began his career in public education in 1998, after serving more than 30 years in the U.S. Air Force. His Air Force assignments included combat, teaching, and serving at the Pentagon. In his current role, as leader of the 16th largest school district in the country, Fryer is charged with educating more than 127,000 students.
EW: What was the biggest challenge in making the transition from the military to public school life?
Fryer: A senior officer in the armed forces lives in a political environment, but the political interactions are well defined, reasonably civilized, and rarely personal. A superintendent of a large school district is a political figure, regardless of whether he or she is appointed or elected. The political crosscurrents are strong and continuous and when opponents attack, they often make it personal. To say that a superintendent must have a thick skin to succeed is probably a gross understatement. One must learn through suffering to survive in this environment. It is a skill that is difficult to teach.
Albany Democrat-Herald
May 5, 2005
Zone 2
Rick Alexander, who describes his age as "50-something," is running for his second term on the board. The retired contractor and current contracting consultant has lived in Lebanon for more than 40 years. His children, now grown, went through private schools
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