Superintendent Very Selective in Highlighting Articles to Staff: Union is Fair Game; School District is Off Limits

What’s fair is fair, and if the superintendent is going to push articles she feels are critical of the BTU, then in fairness, our members ought to get a look at articles  that are critical of the superintendent’s performance. So here are the two pieces we haven’t linked to before, but we feel in the interest of fairness, we feel ought to be part of the discussion.

From the Globe on May 25: 

“The Boston School Committee gave Superintendent Carol R. Johnson low marks in many areas on her most recent evaluation, revealing rare discontent among some members over her leadership less than a year after her contract was renewed with much fanfare.The evaluation, conducted Jan. 31 at a School Committee retreat and obtained by the Globe this week under a public records request, highlighted Johnson’s difficulties in addressing several highly charged issues.
“Chief among the concerns: her slowness in fixing chronically late buses, causing a frustrated Mayor Thomas M. Menino to directly intervene; and her ill-fated proposal to relocate Boston Latin Academy last summer and a subsequent replacement plan that expands and changes the location of several popular schools, which has generated mixed reactions among parents and students…”

Read More.

Follow-up in the Globe on May 26

“These are down days for Boston School Superintendent Carol Johnson and her top staffers at school headquarters on Court Street. Many of the superintendent’s initiatives are met with outright skepticism on the part of parents and the public. And she received an unimpressive grade – the equivalent of a C – on her latest job performance evaluation from the School Committee.
“The operations function of the school department has grown progressively weaker during Johnson’s five-year watch. She understands urban education and knows what needs to be done to improve the schools. But she and her team stumble during the implementation stage…”

Read More.

We’d rather not get into a back and forth with the superintendent in this manner, and we have asked the school department to work with us in trying to finish the mediation process without exciting any more bad feelings. That said, it takes two sides to cooperate and to date, cooperation on their end has been lacking.