Heroic Principals and Failing Grades
[Setting aside, for a moment, whether we should take this all at face value,
the article demonstrates the fallacy of applying the same standard to every
school, regardless of the population served. This guy appears to have walked
into a terrible situation and done an amazing job of turning the
relationship between the school, community and students around (probably
with a lot of help from other people uncredited in this article).
The article is inspiring to a parent like myself, yes. But - should this be
the standard by which we judge all our administrators and other staff?
Should we expect the people running our schools to literally kill themselves
so that the kids they serve have a decent chance of obtaining an education?
And what does this tell us we need to do as a community? Yes, quality
leadership is essential… but what can we do, in the absence of being able
to recruit someone like Santiago Corrada? -Thomas]
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/5242625.htm
Posted on Sun, Feb. 23, 2003
A school worth saving — and a man who believes in it
BY DANIEL A. GRECH
dgrech@herald.com
[…]
Last spring, when Edison became one of two high schools in Florida to
receive a second failing grade from the state, Corrada took it personally.
Corrada, the overachieving son of poor Cuban immigrants, had battled
for every perfect report card he brought home from school. He had never
gotten an F in his life.
Now he had two.
The state doesn’t take into account that three out of every four
Edison students speak Creole at home, the highest concentration of Haitian
students in the nation. It doesn’t handicap for each drive-by shooting on
Martin Luther King Drive or adjust for poverty so severe that students faint
from hunger or the burn of a rotten tooth.
A single standardized test has branded this school — its teachers,
its students, its principal — a failure.
But the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which students take
again next month, doesn’t measure pride or resolve. It doesn’t measure the
hope in students’ eyes as they rock the bleachers of their double-F school.
[…]
