Is the CMS Ed Center deadwood finally being stirred to action? Moving teaching “mentors” out of the Ed Center and into actual classrooms devoid of teachers is, believe it or not, a radical move for CMS. Not surprisingly, there are howls coming from the mentoring program managers.
But Chief Academic Officer Ruth Perez notes that the first priority has to be to put what teachers CMS has in front of students. If those teachers really do not what to be there, well we need to find that out too. In fact, former Superintendent James Pughsley’s Instructional Excellence Department always seemed to have more to do with Ed Center politics than actual teaching and learning.
Moreover, the department was part and parcel of Pughsey’s notion that CMS teachers had to be “re-trained” to teach in order for test scores to improve. This “re-training” was given a higher priority than improving classroom discipline or doing away with educational fads and sticking to proven basics of instruction.
Recall that when Pughsley and his core of insiders went to Raleigh in March 2005 to explain to Judge Howard Manning how it was that CMS spent so much money yet got such poor results, the idea that teachers were not conforming to Instructional Excellence Department dictums figured prominently. CMS lacked “a critical mass of quality teachers,” according to Pughsley. IED would fix that.
Good-bye IED.
