Cobb school board Dems: Where's the accountability?

Feb. 10—MABLETON — Cobb's three Democratic school board members voiced concerns that the school district's proposed strategic plan does not have enough measurable goals at a town hall meeting Thursday night.

The forum, held at South Cobb High School, attracted roughly 30 people. Board members Leroy Tre' Hutchins, Nichelle Davis and Becky Sayler presented the district's proposed 2023-2028 strategic plan to the audience. The board is set to vote on the plan at its meeting next Thursday.

"I don't see the measurable goals in this," said Sayler, who, along with Davis, joined the board last month. "So I think it will be hard to make adjustments without having that already identified."

Hutchins agreed, saying at one point that it's imperative for the board to have "expectations identified, and measurable goals for accountability as well. And so that is going to be my request."

Davis followed up on concerns she voiced when the board discussed the plan at its January meeting.

"But what is the broader benchmarks? How are we going to make progress in these areas? ... That's, I think, the broader conversation and the way that we should even be thinking about accountability, which is not happening, even at a very broad level," she said.

Republican board member Randy Scamihorn told the MDJ Friday that he disagreed with the Democrats' premise.

"A strategic plan is a starting document, in my training and my experience, where it sets the direction of where you want to go, not necessarily how you want to get there," he said.

Scamihorn said he had spoken with the Democrats about their concerns, but respectfully disagreed.

"If you try to put everything into one document ... it would become a cumbersome document. ... It's supposed to be a 100,000-foot kind of plan, and then you work down from there," he said.

'Road map'

At the January meeting, Superintendent Chris Ragsdale and top aide John Floresta stressed that the strategic plan is supposed to be a road map. The document includes high-level language that reads like a mission statement.

"It is not an accountability tool," Floresta said. "... You're not going to find data points inside of this plan. You're going to find goals and alignment to those goals as I just referenced, and it should be done in a way that the public can easily understand."

The plan includes nine skills that students should have after graduating from Cobb schools. Floresta said those skills were produced after teachers and thousands of parents weighed in during public engagement.

"It's based on continuous improvement, so you're not going to see a, 'OK, by this year, we want this percentage goal met,'" Ragsdale said.

The skills, or "competencies," are critical thinking skills, collaboration skills, community awareness, communication skills, entrepreneurial skills, self-direction/personal responsibility, math and science content knowledge, language arts and social studies knowledge, and personal finance knowledge.

"Strategic plans, and the success of strategic plans and the quality of strategic plans, are definitely not measured in how many pages there are to the plan," Ragsdale said.

Ragsdale and Floresta said measurable data comes from accountability systems at the state level.

"We have so many measures of progress that we are required to do," Ragsdale said.

Specter of over-accountability

Ragsdale at the January meeting invoked the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which was criticized and later replaced for placing a large emphasis on standardized testing to hold schools and teachers accountable.

"By some date certain, every student was going to be reading on grade level," Ragsdale said of No Child Left Behind. "Well it doesn't matter what the date certain was, because it didn't happen. That is an unattainable goal.

"And a lot of schools and school districts have fallen into that same kind of trap that, 'Oh we want to have a 100% graduation rate. Well absolutely, we want to have a 100% graduation rate. But there's always gonna be parameters and factors that weigh into that."

Ragsdale went on to say that districts have sometimes set goals that were unattainable, and in other cases set goals too low.

Former Democratic board member Dr. Jaha Howard, Sayler's predecessor, said at the town hall that Cobb had moved too far in the opposite direction.

"In fairness, too much of an overcorrection can lead to an obsession with measurable goals, and then we are chasing numbers," Howard said.

But, he added, "because in this metro area, we have seen that in the past, our county has been able to run to the other side of the spectrum and say, 'no measurable goals.'"

No Child Left Behind was criticized especially in the wake of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, when teachers said they were under intense pressure to produce higher test scores.

Sayler, a former Cobb teacher herself, said No Child Left Behind punished educators for not meeting certain goals. Many programs take a long time to yield results, she said, and the tools for measuring success are often imperfect.

"So there are a lot of pitfalls to measuring. It's hard to figure out what to measure," she said. "But I think that as a county, we could be measuring, if we can't measure outputs, we can measure our inputs — how many teachers are retraining in the science of reading, how many town halls are we having ..."

Hutchins noted that each school has its own individual strategic plan, which is supposed to line up with the district and board's priorities.

Responding to an audience question, Hutchins said schools are evaluated by the state's CCRPI metric.

Parent input

Other topics briefly discussed at the town hall were school safety, social-emotional learning, principal advisory councils and the physical condition of schools.

Despite the modest turnout, attendees were glad to get face time with the board members.

"I wish there was more people here," said newly elected state Rep. Terry Cummings, D-Mableton. "I thought it was really good. ... I really think it's critical to have parent input. It's really critical. I think maybe the rain kept some people away."

Said Timothy Brown, a South Cobb High parent, "I think it was great. It gave us as parents an opportunity to voice our concerns to our board members."

Leresa James, a parent of a 2021 Cobb schools graduate who also has a ninth grade student at Pebblebrook High, said she was glad the event was held, and that not many such town halls took place in the past.

James said she wished the strategic plan included SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

"The fact that we're here and it's not something that's SMART is concerning," she said.