Math is everywhere you look these days! For instance, yesterday Susan Enfield, interim superintendent of Seattle Public Schools, decided not to dismiss Ingraham H.S. principal Martin Floe but to put him on “probation” for another year. Wrote Enfield: “I have decided to renew Mr. Floe’s contact for the 2011-12 school year, under the condition that he continue on a plan of improvement….”
Let’s see, if we carry the two…the decision about whether to keep Floe on as principal will coincide exactly, then, with the decision about whether to keep Susan Enfield on as superintendent. Enfield is going to have to work fast if she hopes to generate the support that Floe has in his corner.
Questions remain about what, precisely, Floe was to be fired for. When asked for reason, Seattle Public Schools pointed to Ingraham H.S. test scores–saying, “this was not the only factor”–and subsequently backed off the importance of Ingraham’s test scores at all, when it was pointed out that they were by no means the worst in context of the district’s overall slumping performance.
Nina Shapiro writes: “What the Ingraham affair drove home is that we have a big, big problem district-wide with the performance of minority students. As we noted yesterday, throughout SPS, only 12.5 percent of last year’s African American sophomores met standard on the state math test. At Rainier Beach High, only 3.9 percent did.”
Enter University of Washington professor Cliff Mass, who has been outspoken about the poor math skills he’s been seeing in college students:
I can’t help but ask the following question: if Martin Floe deserved to be fired for the supposed lack of performance of his high school, shouldn’t the Chief Academic Officer of the district (Susan Enfield) have been fired for the overall district-wide stagnation of academic performance, particularly of lower-income students? Why does the buck stop at the principals’ door and not to higher (and very high price) administrators like Enfield and her associated Bree Dusseault?
Now, “here is a story that has not been in the newspapers,” Mass adds. While Susan Enfield was chief academic officer of the district, a group of parents met with her about the maligned Discovering Math series the district was considering, specifically bringing up their concern that the series “promotes a widening achievement gap between middle-class and low-income students.”
“She listened and smiled and did nothing,” writes Mass, concluding:
Thus, it is extraordinarily hypocritical that she decided to fire Ingraham HS Principal Floe for poor math scores at his school (which has a large minority population) since she KNOWINGLY allowed a book that preferentially damages such groups to be used district wide.
Of course, as we’ve seen, the district now makes a point of distancing itself from firings based purely on test score performance.
