Poor District Evaluation...Now What?

A team from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education visited the school district where I work last January, and recently published the report of their review. The report was an incredibly accurate account of the state of education in my building. Like, my "Struggle is Real" post, in many ways I feel validated. When I have challenged our practices, or lack of appropriate practices, I have made to feel like chicken little at best, and was actually called out in a meeting for being "the most divisive person in our department" for suggesting a change in practices.

Some quotes that jump out at me:

The town of Weymouth is not providing necessary and required resources to meet the needs of 
students, schools, and facilities throughout the school district (page 22).

In observed classrooms, the use of technology to support and enhance instruction was limited. 
Students did not have frequent opportunities to access technology as a tool for their own 
learning...In 75 percent of observed classes at the high school level, students did not interact with 
technology in the classroom. Student use of technology was limited to using calculators and 
observing content displayed by an LCD projector...When technology is 
not used consistently to support and enhance classroom instruction, students are not benefiting from a critical 21st century tool that will be required for future success both at school and in the workplace (pages 16-17). It has long bothered me that teacher evaluations have praised teachers for using technology in instruction, when really they are only using calculators and PowerPoint.

The district does not have content specialists at the middle and high schools (page 20).

Teachers said that, while they had access to multiple forms of data, they were unsure of 
how to use it to improve their instruction...Some teachers said that they could access data results from MCAS, DORA and DOMA, but they reported they did not have sufficient time to meet and lacked a data support structure to help them effectively interpret and use the information they had...Teachers’ association officers [at the time I was the union president] cited “professional development in data analysis” as the first of three key issues they wanted to bring to the attention of the district review team (page 19).

After the 5 minutes of "I told you so" gloating has worn off. Now what? I have been advocating for years in personal conversations with 4 of 5 central office administrators, that they need to publicly communicate the problems before the town will understand why they need to pay more. The administrators ask for huge budget increases, but also continuously say everything is going great, and our poor graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and MCAS scores are simply the result of a bad economy. If you have fallen down, and someone asks you if you need help getting back up, and you say that you are fine...do you expect the person to help you anyway?

This document has the potential to be game changing for my district---or swept under the carpet like all bad news. What is the next step?