Posted on 06/26/2003 6:28:23 AM PDT by madprof98
Superintendent Beverly L. Hall wants to give Deloitte & Touche three months and almost a half-million dollars to tell her what's wrong with Atlanta Public Schools. I can tell her based on five hours in sham interviews for a new school principal. And my report won't cost her a dime.
As an eight-year parent at one of the system's best-performing elementary schools and an eight-year volunteer at one of its poorest, I already knew Atlanta Public Schools was no threat to win a Baldridge Award for management excellence. But until my recent experience on a school-principal interview panel, I regarded the institutional befuddlement with amused resignation.
My grievance concerns John Hope Elementary, the school serving the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District downtown and with which our newspaper, the Daily Report, has had a close relationship for eight years. Pick any statistic you want -- test scores, meal assistance, attendance, enrollment, English speakers -- John Hope usually competes for a low rung in any ranking.
Many of John Hope's ills result from circumstances beyond school system control -- poverty, the breakdown of the family and even the legacy of addiction. But the school's most recent disadvantage derived from something utterly controllable: the overly controlling way APS management went about finding a replacement for John Hope's retiring principal.
My five hours in administrative lockdown in an interview room provided a rare glimpse inside the mind of one of local government's most dysfunctional bureaucracies. This story does, however, have a happy ending. The woman I considered the best candidate for the job won out. That she did, however, attests to her abilities, not the methods used to select her.
Unfortunately, the trouble doesn't end with John Hope. As I was to be reminded any time I questioned the principal-selection process, the procedures used for that talent search are used throughout the school system. The village idiocy, I was assured, is systemic.
I had a seat at the principal-search table because I serve on John Hope's Local School Council. Beforehand, I requested the candidates' résumés. No, I was told, that violates privacy. It violates the rights of job applicants to let the people interviewing them see their résumés?
Later, I was asked whether I had any interview questions to submit. "Well, it's a little hard to know what to ask without seeing the résumés," I said. "I'll just ask my questions when I get there."
No, that's also against policy. The questions must be approved and must be the same for all the candidates.
Try using these methods to pick a top manager for your business.
A staff committee came up with the questions days or weeks in advance. Most read like a speech, fusing together two or three unrelated ideas and then tacking a question mark on the end. Question No. 4, for example, started out by making a global statement about the importance of hiring qualified staff, but ended by asking what the candidate would do to develop school pride.
To give the interviewers the illusion of participation, each of us was assigned a question we had to read to every candidate verbatim, no variations, no improvisations. And no follow-ups. Every candidate had to have the same opportunity to answer the exact same question.
Our interview minders gave us a memo listing 44 buzzwords to listen for as an indicator of a candidate's "depth of knowledge." The list included "Bloom's Taxonomy," which apparently had nothing to do with rising school millage, and "Higher Order Thinking Skills," which apparently had nothing to do with how I was spending my day.
The whole process is garbage in, garbage out: We spoon-feed the candidates questions in the form of inane doublespeak, and they upchuck it back in buzzword projectiles from the APS list.
Each of us on the panel received in our packets a stack of blank score sheets, one for each of the eight contestants. The form listed the nine questions and provided spaces to grade each answer from one to five, with five being the highest. The top three cumulative point-getters then go on to meet with Hall, where they presumably undergo a real interview.
First, however, they have to beat the clock. Each contender had exactly 30 minutes to answer the nine questions. This is done in the name of fairness. And it's entirely fair, unless you're foolish enough to provide a thoughtful answer. That can cost you. Give a particularly considered response to No. 6 -- a big, fat, slow-pitch softball having to do with setting high expectations and making students successful -- and you could find yourself out of time to answer No. 9. No answer, no points, no job.
In scoring, I gave up trying to assess the quality of answers to questions that held little relevance and even less of my interest. Instead, I gave out 4s and 5s to the candidates who seemed capable of independent thought. I doled out 1s and 2s to those who had no business operating a pencil sharpener, let alone running a school. (Ask me how I scored the candidate who told us it takes a village to raise a child.)
Superintendent Hall, you say you want advice. Here's mine:
• First, end the charade. Either you want parents and local business people to inform the selection of school principals in their communities or you don't. I hope you do. But, if you don't, please don't squander our time and your credibility by casting us in these badly scripted school plays.
• Second, if your lawyers say you have to run an interview this way, find yourself better lawyers. No self-respecting organization hires the way you do. Your Human Resources department's self-parody bore all the markings of bad advice greatly indulged.
• Third, aim higher. Your hiring procedures need to focus on finding the best and brightest. Yours are singularly concerned with avoiding claims of unfairness. There's a way to accomplish both goals.
It starts with an unbiased, unapologetic quest for quality. Equal treatment does not mean equal time and equal questions. Not all candidates have equal credentials. Some deserve more time, closer questioning and a higher level of engagement. Others, well, deserve greater respect of their time, ready validation of their parking and an earnest and early valediction.
We did see some good candidates, including the woman ultimately tapped for the position. I only would have liked to interview her.
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S. Richard Gard Jr. is editor and publisher of the Fulton County Daily Report, the statewide daily legal newspaper in which the full version of this commentary originally appeared.
School administrators seem fixated on the buzz words and PC pap, but are afraid to ask questions like how successful are your teaching methods, what was the graduation rate at your school and what special advantages are there in hiring you..questions that would be fundamental in a business environment.
Not so. The Federal Government "interviews" the same way, and Lord knows they respect themselves. It is actually even worse: In addition to only being able to ask applicants the exact same question (with no variation in wording, mind you), WE PROVIDED THEM THE QUESTIONS IN ADVANCE. IN WRITING.
Then we graded them on a point scale. Applicants were permitted to bring in the questions with their pre-written responses. Many just read the responses right off the paper.
Even more maddening is the process of pre-screening applicants by reviewing their resumes. We're given "look for this" lists to bounce against the resumes in search of the proper buzz words. Anticipating this, the applicants' resumes often ran to ten or more pages, completely filled with management-happy buzzwords. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to weed through all that to discover what experience and other qualifications the applicants actually had.
People in government gripe about how the hiring/promotion process is an "old boys' network" where people are hired because of who they know. Actually, the "old boys' network" is the only way to actually get any usable information on job candidates in the government.
As I have long feared.
It's for the children".
LOL....the schools really are screwed! Garbage in, garbage out.....but, at least they've got garbage!
Hey, that sounds like school!
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