The CMS spokeswoman notorious for being near to impossible for anyone in Charlotte to reach evidently is available to take calls from The Washington Post.
And so begins an odd little tale involving the Mayor of DC and the DC public schools copying verbatim some of CMS’ boilerplate vision statement stuff. The WaPo:
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s administration copied significant portions of its education strategy verbatim from a plan developed by a North Carolina school system, even as the mayor seeks to show he has the vision and expertise to restructure governance of the District’s troubled public schools.
Fenty’s 31-page document is a blueprint of his plans to improve students’ academic performance. It contains passages that are virtually identical to some in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools’ strategic plan — including the opening statement describing the administration’s vision. Fenty’s document was submitted to the D.C. Council in late February in support of his proposal to take control of the public schools.
Plus DC even copped Peter Gorman’s infamous “data dashboard” idea. The folks at CMS evidently take all this, ahem, borrowing, as a badge of honor — hence Nora Carr provides a quote to the Post.
“We’re glad they found things they could use in our program. The only caution I have is that it is critically important that plans are tailored to meet the individual needs of communities and students,” Carr says.
This brings us to the hysterical part. DC evidently nicked the CMS approach under the mistaken assumption that CMS is an urban school district similar to DC. DC consultants went looking for top-ranked urban districts and landed on CMS. Joke is on them.
As we have been over and over, CMS is not an urban district, it is a suburban-urban blend. CMS likes to compare itself to urban districts because that makes CMS look good. If DC wants to mimic CMS, the first thing that needs to happen is a merger, say, with Montgomery County schools. (Ha!) Then, DC continues to call itself an urban system. Profit.
Bonus Observation: CATS has now also taken a page of CMS’ playbook, with defenders of its performance comparing CATS to much different transit operations in places like Dallas, Atlanta, and DC. More on that flawed study shortly.
