The Anchorage School District is big. Really big. I taught in a K-8 private school, unaffiliated with any district. My first administrative job was in a five school district and my first principalship was in a six school district. The largest district I’d worked in previously had twelve schools. So here I am in one of the 100 largest school districts in the country. I’ve written previously about the perils of bureaucracy, but today I write in praise of it.
Anchorage has been transitioning to the Danielson Framework over the last two years. There have been innumerable PD opportunities, trainings, and work sessions in order to prepare evaluators to use the Framework for teacher evaluation (and pass the big test). Two years ago in Illinois we were told, “Ok, you all have to go through these online modules, it’ll take about 50 hours, and if you don’t pass the test when you’re done, you can’t evaluate teachers in the fall. Oh yeah, the system won’t be ready until June. Good luck!” At the risk of sounding like a sycophant, I publicly praise the Professional Learning Department every chance I get.
Testing. You’ve got PARCC, we’ve got AMP (Alaska Measures of Progress). In Illinois, you can poke around the website, fumble with the practice tests, and hopefully you have enough bandwidth for PARCC. Here they check every school’s bandwidth and tech capabilities, double and triple check them. Building Test Coordinators have hours of training, online resources, and human supports in order to prepare buildings for testing. It’s amazing.
Finally, as a building principal I always felt I was making educated guesses at budget priorities. In this system, there’s accounting, budgeting, risk management, and a fleet of support personnel helping you get it right. So while the big machine often feels overwhelming, it can also be comforting and supportive. I’ve yet to have a negative interaction with someone at the district level. Keep it up, ASD.
CULTURAL OBSERVATION: Everyone goes to Hawaii! Seriously, back home I can’t think of many people I know that have been to Hawaii, but here, virtually my entire staff has been or is planning on going next Winter Break. If you step back and think about it, it makes sense. It costs a lot of money to travel to the Lower 48 so for a few bucks more, why not the islands? Ohio or Oahu? Yeah, that’s a tough one…