The School Administrator

January 2005Saving Black BoysRosa Smith and Gerry House on fighting underachievement

Features

Reclaiming Children Left Behind
by N. Gerry House
Causes and cures for low minority achievement in the eyes of the president of the Institute for Student Achievement and a former superintendent.
Similar Reading: The Institute’s Story and Lessons Learned About the Achievement Gap
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Saving Black Boys
by Rosa A. Smith
Unimaginable outcomes for the most vulnerable students require imaginable leadership, says the president of The Schott Foundation for Public Education and a former superintendent.
Similar Reading: A Foundation’s Plan for Black Boys and Black Boys: The Sad Facts and A Latino Perspective: Better Teachers and Administrators
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Against All Odds
by William H. Parrett
How a public school in Idaho serving mostly Native American students reversed a tradition of low achievement. A professor who studied the school tells the story.
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An Excuse-Free, Multicultural Educator
by Tania Z. Chance
Move beyond blaming uninvolved parents for deficient student learning, argues a Minnesota school district’s director of multicultural education. A multicultural approach can lead to practices and policies for closing the achievement gap.
Similar Reading: Transition Into Multicultural Education and Additional Resources
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Ramping Up Schoolwide Reform
by Thomas Toch
Three urban districts — Rochester, N.Y., East Orange, N.J., and Duval County, Fla. — are using an outside catalyst, the America’s Choice School Design, for standards-based school-improvement. They are starting to see promising returns.
Similar Reading: America's Choice School Design
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Profile

Ray Daniels: Connecting Personally Through His Personnel Work by Jay P. Goldman

With 40 years of service in the same school system, it’s no wonder that Superintendent Ray Daniels feels a personal connection to the staff in Kansas City, Kan., where he’s used those abiding relationships to pull off some measureable outcomes.

Departments

Board-Savvy Superintendent

The Cornerstone Relationship Between CEO and Board President by Dale Kimball

Perhaps more than any other single factor, the relationship you have with your school board president may dictate the quality of the overall board-superintendent relationship, in the view of a Michigan-based superintendent.read more

Focus

Personnel Evaluation: Assessing Principals Through Self-Led Conferences by Gary S. Mathews

The author, a 13-year superintendent, describes how he supervises and evaluates his building administrators in a manner that empowers them as instructional leaders — with something he calls “principal-led evaluation conferences.”read more

Guest Column

Testing To Improve or To Punish? by William L. Bainbridge and Steven M. Sundre

With high-stakes tests now showing their teeth in the form of consequences, significant questions are being raised at a higher volume about the value of such tests.read more

Federal Dateline

Did Education Play a Role? by Nicholas J. Penning, senior policy analyst, AASA

With the 2004 presidential election now history, we can look back at the campaigns of the principal contenders to gauge whether education maintained its recent status as one of the highest-ranking issues on the national agenda.read more

People

People

News of AASA members’ appointments, retirements, honors and deaths.read more

Tech Leadership

Read Any Good Technology Policies Lately? by Lane B. Mills

You probably read an existing policy only at the point you need it most — when wrestling with a problem. In the technology area, the review, updating and development of policies in a school district should be a regular activity.read more

President’s Corner

The Leaders of the Future by Donald L. Kussmaul

During the past year, Bill Strauss, co-author of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, has provided AASA with programs, information and data about American generations past, present and future. Knowing and understanding the effects one generation has on the next is significant when determining the role future generations will have in the ongoing development of our nation.read more

Executive Perspective

A Letter to the President by Paul D. Houston

Dear Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry: I write this letter in October, long before the votes have been cast and tallied so I don’t know which of you will be inaugurated this month. But whoever it might be, I would ask you to step back and reflect on the perils and possibilities of your job and in particular how they will affect the future of our country by the children’s policies that you choose to pursue.read more

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