LA SCHOOLS … AND OTHER MUSINGS-When I read the paper, I do not immediately turn to the sports page.
I like sports, but I’m not obsessed like I am about public education policy. Sports writing generally offers the best storytelling in the daily media. Sports is a (and the) metaphor for everything else and good sportswriting turns the dataset of the box score into elegiac prose and the mundane into matters of life+death; good v. evil.
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.
“A cyclone can't be snared. It may be surrounded, but somewhere it breaks through to keep on going. When the cyclone starts from South Bend, where the candle lights still gleam through the Indiana sycamores, those in the way must take to storm cellars at top speed.
“Yesterday the cyclone struck again as Notre Dame beat the Army, 13 to 7, with a set of backfield stars that ripped and crashed through a strong Army defense with more speed and power than the warring cadets could meet." - by Grantland Rice, NY Herald Tribune, 18 October 1924
Nobody ever wrote about a school board meeting – or a session on congress - with prose like that!
You want poetry?
“These are the saddest of possible words:
‘Tinker to Evers to Chance.’
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double-
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
‘Tinker to Evers to Chance.’”
- By Franklin Pierce Adams, NY Evening Mail, July 10, 1910
Sure it’s over the top, but that’s what a zenith is. There’s no half way: It’s Henry V at the dawn of St Crispin’s; it’s a sonnet by the bard or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
LAST WEEK a sports reporter reported on the findings of an ivory-tower economist and his theory. It becomes at first-read the most assessable (and most practical) instance of game theory: "The study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.” They give Nobel Prizes for game theory; Russell Crowe plays game theorists in the movies.
Except this one’s isn’t really about intelligent rational decisions. It’s about firing football coaches.
Cue the cheerleaders! Block that metaphor! How can any of this have anything possibly to do with the subject matter of this blog? Read on:
THE HYPOTHESIS: Systematic elimination of losing coaches by NFL teams generally leads to weaker performance among those teams in the following few years.
THE FINDING: Michael Roach, PhD, professor of Economics at Middle Tennessee State University analyzed all pro football teams between 1995 and 2012, and he measured the effect of a change in head coach. And he finds, on average, that teams do worse after changing their head coach. They don’t do as well as they did the year before. Or the next couple of years.
Every team (school board) believes it has the unique power to spot+hire the head coach/superintendent who can turn things around. But very often head coaching/superintendent changes are really based on not liking the guy that you have rather than a rational decision about whether there's somebody better to come in and take his place.
Regardless of whether you do well or poorly after firing a head coach, Roach's analysis finds you would probably have done even better if you had not changed coaches.
Dr. Roach’s theory is based on bunch of factors: Human Nature/The grass is greener / Next year HAS to be the Cubs’ Year! / “This clown is so bad, the next guy should be Vince Lombardii!”
But, Statistical Analysis fans, the truth is that this whole wretched mess is governed the phenomenon called Reversion (or Regression) to the Mean: The probability density function P(x) of any random variable x, by definition, is nonnegative over every interval and integrates to one over the interval.Thus, as you move away from the mean, the proportion of the distribution that lies closer to the mean than you do increases continuously. For English Speakers: Performance-over-time, whether in the classroom, the gridiron or the superintendent’s office tends to get drawn toward the average. If you are lousy one year, it's just statistically likely that you're going to be better the next year. This is something that fans/observers/bloggers often miss. When you change a head coach and you go from being a 2-14 team to an 8 and 8 team, what you don't know is if the same thing would have happened under the old coach as well.
“Wait a minute Scott!” you are saying. “You are stretching the sports metaphor too far! The animals in Orwell’s farm were just animals! Melville’s whale was just a fish!”
“…And the last superintendent was so bad it’s impossible to do worse!”
Exactly.
(And no offense is intended to any current superintendent.)
For a guy who doesn’t get out much I hang with a strange group of folks – educators and administrators and policy makers and the odd politician …folks I think are movers-and-shakers. And they ask me what I think about The Next Superintendent. This is aggravating because I want to know what they think …but the truth is that it is good we are thinking and asking.
This is not Saudi Arabia where the next oldest half-brother gets the job.
IMHO, Ray Cortines is leading this District well.
“Compared to what?” I ask myself, “his predecessor …or his predecessor’s predecessor?”
Wait … he is that guy! And even then it was his second time around. Scott Fitzgerald did not have the superintendent in mind when he said there are no second acts in American life.
Supt. Cortines will certainly lead his district though this budget cycle/school year and probably into and maybe through the next.
Kevin Gordon of California education consultants Capitol Advisors advised the Board on Tuesday that this district needs to be making long term financial plans beyond the current budget cycle and legislative term. The budget cycle and the lege term are, despite lofty claims of “local control” and pretense at subsidiarity - not curiously/coincidentally aligned. They are one and the same.
The same can and must be said about planning for District Leadership moving forward.
LAUSD can do a national recruitment and still hire one of our own. That search begins with a conversation – even before the board posts the job listing or issues an RFP for a search firm it needs to set (and I say share) the criteria of what they are looking for – with requirements and expectations and all the rest.
This is the moment, carpe deum.
¡Onward/Adelante!
(Scott Folsom is a parent and parent leader in LAUSD. He is the former President of Los Angeles 10th District PTSA and represents PTA as Vice-chair the LAUSD Construction Bond Citizen's Oversight Committee. Scott is a member of the California State PTA Board on Managers. He blogs at the excellent 4 LA Kids … where this perspective was originally posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 8
Pub: Jan 27, 2015
