Aliyya Swaby File Photo
The Board of Education formally rated Superintendent Garth Harries a notch above “effective” — giving him an average score of 3.375 out of 5 in this year’s performance evaluation.
The score dipped slightly from the superintendent’s last evaluation, in February 2014, just before the board unanimously voted to renew his contract for another three years.
At that point board members had only about six months worth of results on which to judge Harries’ performance after he took the job the previous July. They gave him an average of 3.5.
A year and a half later, after an extended executive session Monday at John Martinez School, the Board of Ed briefly presented to the public Harries’ latest evaluation, which spans the period from March 2014 to February 2015. This is the first time Harries (at left in above photo) has been evaluated for the period of a full year.
Board members employed the same rating system used to evaluate the district’s administrators and teachers, with a scale of 1 to 5 for each performance area. Those areas are: student impact; collaboration and engagement; transparency, access and equity; and vision and leadership.
Harries received a score of either 3 or 3.5 for all four areas, with a 3 meaning “effective,” a 4 meaning “strong” and a 5 meaning “exemplary.”
Click here to see the full report.
Board member Alex Johnston said the board used the 12-point profile developed during the process of hiring a new superintendent in 2013 as a rubric for evaluation. The final report is a results of months-long conversations among the board and with members of the community.
It focuses on the district’s progress in achieving its school reform goals in the last year, including Harries’ own self-assessment of his successes and challenges along with the board’s commentary. The board noted the district’s “noteworthy gains,” including a graduation rate at around 75 percent for the class of 2014 and a dropout rate essentially halved.
It praised Harries for reorganizing the board’s committee structure, forming a new governance committee and a teaching and learning committee for discussions on “instructional practice and policy.”
The report noted room for improvement in developing the school enrollment process, communicating with the board “on a timely basis when emergencies arise,” and striving for continued improvement of turnaround schools after state or local interventions.
The superintendent’s controversial proposal for a partnership with charter network Achievement First (AF) was mentioned only briefly in the report, despite the intense public debate it sparked this winter. The board canned the proposal in late February.
Under the “vision and leadership” category of the report, board members noted that “leadership challenges remain,” with only 54 percent of those recently surveyed reporting they feel the district has been clear and effective in all areas of its work. “It is also evident that alignment and morale issues surfaced around the Achievement First partnership proposal you have championed,” the report then reads.
Harries told the Independent that although the issue of whether or not the district should financially partner with AF on a new charter school “attracted a lot of attention and energy,” the board decided to focus its attention “far beyond that issue” in the evaluation. “It was part of the picture, but the board looked at the full range” of his actions, he said.
“That issue got out of hand and I ended up needing to pull it back …The board as you know were individually in different places about that issue,” Harries said. But members agreed that he should continue to promote “provocative ideas,” he said, and “were unanimous on needing me to push for improvements in the district.”
The charter proposal “wasn’t really discussed” in executive session, Mayor Toni Harp said. “It wasn’t anything I brought up.”
Teachers union President Dave Cicarella congratulated Harries on his “high marks.” Often teachers think the evaluation scores align perfectly to letter grades, with a “3” correlating to a “C.” But that is “not true,” Cicarella said. “To be effective, you have to be a very good teacher. There’s nothing average about an effective teacher.”
He said the superintendent’s evaluation scale mirrored the scale for teachers and administrators “deliberately” to ensure “top to bottom accountability.”
Johnston said the board will “gather in executive session every couple of months to discuss the superintendent’s performance and evaluation.”