Welcome back, MNPS students and teachers. Hope everybody had a fantastic reprise last week. As my son has informed me throughout spring break, we now have 34 more days until summertime. While things might have quieted inside district school buildings, outside storms continued to rage over district initiatives, spending, and the 2018-2019 budget.

I must also confess that I started this post before the events at Monday’s Budget/Finance Committee transpired. In fact, I almost scrapped this piece, but I believe there are some points that are extremely relevant to the ongoing conversation, and so, I’m getting this out. Look for a follow-up tomorrow.

On Thursday and Friday of last week, Channel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams began a series of reports showing MNPS was not following its own purchasing protocols and was continuing to utilize friends from the Northeast as primary resources for educational support. These reports come on the heels of an already heated debate over enrollment projections and next year’s proposed budget. In response to the heat, and I’m assuming anticipation of the upcoming news stories, the normally media-shy Director of Schools Dr. Shawn Joseph grabbed his microphone and hit the airwaves, making stops at Channel 2 and Channel 4, and even doing the podcast Nashville Sounding Board. All told, the Nashville community was given a whole lot to digest last week.

It would take hours to dissect and put into context all of the information made available last week, but there are a couple of things I would like to point out. I’ve heard the argument raised that the majority of Dr. Joseph’s problems spring from a subpar communications platform. The argument being that policies and implementation just aren’t communicated well and so the perceptions become ones of incompetence and mismanagement.

While I don’t fully buy into that argument, I’m willing to give it some credence. The district continually seems to communicate in a reactionary matter and is seldom proactive. Instead of telling parents about water issues, they wait for the story to break on the local news. Instead of alerting people to changes in free lunch programs, they wait for the story to break on the news. Instead of explaining enrollment shortfalls and the subsequent loss of funding, proactively they wait for the local news to break the story ahead of time. Once the story breaks, they cry fake news and inaccurate information and rush to defend themselves. In other words, they consistently allow somebody else to shape the narrative before they tell their story and then play the victim when the story doesn’t suit them.

You would think that after two years of wash, rinse, repeat, that somebody would hold a meeting where an actual communications strategy was discussed and implemented. By now, somebody has surely realized that the actions of district leaders are being closely scrutinized, there are no secrets, and just hoping nobody notices is not a communications policy.

Take this year’s budget process, for example. It’s been a dumpster fire when it didn’t have to be. Before administrators even discussed the upcoming budget and the revised Title I distribution with principals, they should have had all the exact figures in hand and those figures should have been fully vetted for accuracy. There should have been a sit down with a core group of senior principals where the plan was shared and those senior principals provided with an opportunity to stress test the plan. Then, accurate figures, with an accompanying narrative supporting the figures, could have been presented in a timely manner. If people took exception to the changes, the discussion could be based on verifiable numbers, instead of the plethora of changes that have left nobody sure of what figures were accurate. To this day, I have no faith in the numbers being tossed around.

Secondly, you have to provide information that is accurate and easily verifiable. Look at the district’s response to Channel 5’s report on the rise of unauthorized purchase requests. According to the Channel 5 report, “Unauthorized purchase requests (UPRs) went from $304,289 in the year before Dr. Joseph took control — skyrocketing to $2,279,647 in Joseph’s first year on the job. Already, this year, those UPR requests have topped a million dollars.” MNPS’s response goes into detail about what a UPR is and how they are used. And then makes the claim that “In 2018, UPRs are trending to be flat—we expect UPRs to fall as education continues in the district and we ensure all employees adhere to proper expense reporting.”

What?!? How is from $304,289 compared to over a million dollars trending flat? Furthermore, if you just started tracking UPRs in 2015, where was the money accounted for previously? Did it just turn up somewhere in the budget? When you say that 2018 is trending flat, are you talking about the fiscal year, which begins in July, or the calendar year, which began in January? Where does the money for UPRs come from? What’s the whole story here, and if there is nothing in William’s story for me to be concerned about, why are you not explaining it in more detail to me? And by the way, several of those UPRs are for 5-figures and above, so to utilize the examples of a teacher applying late for a conference or a maintenance worker picking up a part is a little bit disingenuous.

A proper narrative requires telling the same story every time you repeat it. Dr. Joseph has pointed to the growth of advanced academics as a success this year, and to some extent, rightfully so. But in touting that success at various media outlets, he’s changed the story with each telling. On the radio, he stated that we’ve doubled the number of kids taking advanced classes throughout the district. At the State of Schools speech, it became “We have doubled the number of students with plans to take Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Cambridge exams, and we have expanded our advanced programming in middle schools.” On Channel 2 it was, “We doubled the number of kids taking advanced placement at the high school level.” All three claims are very different, and I’m not sure any of them can bear up to being fact checked.

The one that probably comes the closest to being factual is that we’ve nearly doubled the number of kids taking Advanced Placement tests. The reason being that the district paid for those tests this year. So, if last year you had 100 people taking AP classes and 50 weren’t taking the test because they couldn’t afford it, it’s not a big stretch to imagine that if the financial barrier is removed, everybody will take the test. The district deserves accolades for removing that barrier.

However, just like with testing the water for lead, it’s not enough to just take the test. What were the results? What are we doing with the results? We all purportedly hate participation trophies, yet’s here’s Dr. Joseph asking us to give him one. You have to do more than just test.

Dr. Joseph is shouting MAP testing results from the roof tops. But again, we are not telling the whole story. First of all, we’ve chosen to completely disregard a whole testing session. Kids took the MAP test in November and scores were down 2%. Those results are no longer part of the conversation as we focus only on September and February testing results. That 2% drop in November was ruled insignificant. February scores are up 3% and being touted as the “highest they’ve ever been in MNPS,” which is not a true statement. 

However, I can’t close out this portion of the conversation without sharing the thoughts of Thespian Bruce Taylor. Taylor is a compatriot from Prince George’s County who, despite having no formal training in education, has managed to secure a $100k contract to work with 2 schools on ACT improvement. Two middle schools, I might add. Taylor admits that he has no formal training in education, but provides this argument in defending his qualifications: “If my approach doesn’t succeed, then all the ‘credentials’ in the world wouldn’t work.” Conversely, if it does work, and there is some evidence that it does, then “credentials” wouldn’t matter either.

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