As if there was ever any doubt, CMS super Pete Gorman has made clear that his primary allegiance lies with other six-figure public school administrators. Not teachers, not students.
The incredibly arrogant and tone-deaf move to end-run to the petty bureaucrat’s best friend — Ruth Samuelson — with legislative language to change state law so that CMS teachers would not have to approve pay-for-performance guidelines signals not only contempt for CMS teachers but the steadfast belief that administrators are more important to educational success than classroom teachers.
Hence the opposition to actually empowering school principals to find, hire, and retain good teachers — or hold them responsible for failing to do so. But that would mean compensating principals accordingly while cutting out waves of do-nothing middle-managers. Any wonder which direction the manager-in-chief is heading?
Same deal with CMS’ sudden testing mania — which will generate “metrics” which the managers will then use to set teacher pay. Any obvious screw-ups will be the fault of the tests — which will then have to be “adjusted” — by the managers. Everywhere you turn Gorman has turned CMS into a full-employment shop for bureaucrats.
The model is to pay as little as possible for a endless supply of Teach For America guileless saps, hoarding all the cash for the EdShed and the occasional high-dollar fad to keep the magnet mommies happy. Gorman really does not even have to much care about CMS’ chronic “equity” police as the $55m. pot-o-gold for the West Charlotte feeder system has tamped that down.
No wonder Gorman’s name keeps coming up for plum jobs in the educrat stratosphere. By their warped standards, he is a frickin’ genius.
