Fresh from her triumph acting indignant and obtuse on the topic of teen drinking, CMS board member Rhonda Lennon deployed a faulty reductio ad absurdum in defense of Peter Gorman’s upper management. As Pundit House details, Lennon led the charge to defend the Learning Communities from board member Kaye McGarry’s motion to eliminate them:
CMS officials have in the past roundly conceded that the learning communities, formed three years ago at a cost of about $10 million, do little to bolster academic achievement. But in voting against McGarry’s motion to ditch the administrative outposts, Merchant and Lennon both argued that it wasn’t the school board’s place to dictate operational management to Superintendent Peter Gorman.
“We hire Dr. Gorman to determine how he thinks he can best manage his staff, to have the layers of management between him and 170 schools,” Lennon rationalized. “To think he could possibly supervise those – we have 180 days during the school year. I guess, Dr. Gorman, that means you and [Chief Academic Officer] Ann Clark could visit each school one time. That’s how much supervision those schools would have.”
Why, yes. That was exactly the situation which obtained before the creation of the LCs. The Ed Shed was empty and cold, save for four or five top administrators running around like maniacs, burning rubber out of the parking lot, trying to get to the next far off school so that they might “manage” it. Give me a break.
Such mendacity explains why CMS just pink slipped 600 classroom positions, but still spends $2m. a year on PR and untold millions to park six-figure administrators and their secretaries in strip malls across Charlotte.
