New Baltimore School Chief Talks About Agenda

New Baltimore Superintendent Andres Alonso is making the rounds and talking some sense. Whether he can implement his common sense agenda is a whole other ball of wax in a city not exactly known for flexibility and innovation.

The Baltimore school system's new chief executive officer told city principals yesterday that one of his top priorities will be giving them more autonomy to run their schools as they see fit.

Andres Alonso also wants budgets centered on individual schools, not a central bureaucracy, and he wants instruction tailored to individual students' needs.

Asked about his plans to reform Baltimore's beleaguered school system, the 50-year-old Cuban immigrant was quick to say he doesn't know yet. Often, new superintendents come in and implement whatever they did in the place they were in last, and the reforms fail because they aren't right for the new place.

This last sentence is the most common sensical thing I have heard from a new leader in any capacity, particularly education. Too often people are brought in with some great ideas and great successes in other ventures, but those ideas don't match the conditions in the current place. I must give credit to Mr. Alonso for recognizing that crucial matter.

Some of the other items that struck me as true but often ignored by school leaders in a rush to appease adult constituencies rather than the students the schools are supposed to serve:

With special education, he said, he wants to focus on the kids "at the margin" -- those who need extra help but are not severely disabled, those who need early intervention and advocacy. "Those kids are the canary in the mine," he said, "the first ones to die of the poisonous gases."

snip

Recruiting excellent principals and then giving them the autonomy to make decisions is at the heart of his agenda.

He said he supports spending money to pay teachers more in hard-to-fill subject areas. But money spent on a more popular reform, class-size reduction, should be spent carefully, he said. Class-size reduction creates job openings in high-performing schools as well as low-performing ones, creating an opportunity for teachers in low-performing schools to flee.

The first item I think is very true. While I have no specific data, my intuition is that unless a special education kid is severly disabled, they are unlikely to get the necessary attention and assistance they need to help them succeed. It is as if the school system has acknowledged a problem, but failed to finish the job in correcting the problem.

The latter item is vitally important and now that I see it explained in this way, I fully understand the appeal of "smaller class sizes" for unions. I always implicitly understood the appeal of smaller class sizes for unions was to increase their membership (read power). But given that teachers with seniority have the ability to transfer and with smaller class sizes, positions open up at higher quality schools allowing them to transfer out, simply spending the money on smaller class sizes means that you have more teacher mobility (read flight) from the lower performing schools, the schools that need the most help.