Kansas Education Commissioner Bob Corkins had an upbeat assessment of his first year on the job when he met recently with The Eagle editorial board, pointing with special pride to his efforts to streamline databases, reorganize the department staff and reach out to school districts. But some superintendents, including Wichita’s Winston Brooks, gave mixed reviews of the controversial Corkins, a lawyer who came into the job without either education or management experience.
“Bob’s in way over his head,” Brooks told the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Part of the problem was the quality of a technical assistance team that the Education Department deployed to help Wichita meet its testing mandates under the federal No Child Left Behind law. “God only knows we need help,” Brooks said. “But we aren’t going to get it from people who first and foremost didn’t prepare for the visit, they didn’t have a clue where Wichita has been and where Wichita is going. And they weren’t experts in the area. This is far too important to be dealing with rookies.”
Meanwhile, board chairman Steve Abrams had only praise for Corkins in a story in the Kansas City Star: “I will certainly argue that we have been moving forward very, very well under his leadership.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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24 Comments
So Winston how many of the superintendents in Kansas have more college than you do?
How many superintendents in Kansas are elitist and put their children in private school?
How many superintendents in Kansas got passed over as a superintendent of private schools because they did not have the qualifications for the job?
How many superintendents in Kansas large school districts had no experience as a superintendent before they were hired?
Technically Winston you are not qualified for the job!
Perhaps that is your problem with Corkins. You look in the mirror each day realize that you are not qualified either.
Posted by: sotheysaid | October 30, 2006 at 02:32 AM
“So Winston how many of the superintendents in Kansas have more college than you do…”
ouch, heh
Apophis is probably going to rake me over the coals for this one, after he concurred strongly with a post I left a few days ago, but as someone who hasn’t joined an anti-tax group, and thinks public education here is worth supporting–if it is done well– I have to express an opinion that Winston Brooks, the go-along-get-along guy, is not a wise choice for Wichita’s public education system leader.
1) He trained in elementary ed. Elementary ed is a pretty easy job. The going gets tough in middle and high school. These levels are precisely where Wichita students, as in many communities, are losing ground. Elementary-ed teachers are the least educated of teachers. So to have one in charge of the entire school system, unless you want to develop independent primary and secondary districts, is extremely ill-advised.
2) Among doctoral degrees, the Ed.D and Ph.D. in education are among the weakest in quarternary education (Gourman Report) but they nevertheless do require relatively strong study skills, substantial analytical abilities, and the ability to write and defend a research-based thesis . Several dozen Kansas communities’ superintendents have doctoral degrees. Mr. Brooks, superintendent of Kansas’s largest district, doesn’t have one.
3) Even more troubling, if one watches him speak at BOE meetings, he hasn’t mastered the English language. He often starts sentences, and then doesn’t finish them in a coherent manner. You can get his drift by “gestalt”, but he has a language-processing impediment. This is important, because if an Education leader can’t speak articulate English, what kind of example is he setting?
4) He’s partly a private-sector employee, thanks to his disingenuous threat to relocate to Portland (he would have crashed there within a year or two, and it is reasonable to infer that he read that writing on the wall–all outside candidates said “no thanks” after they interviewed), as a pretext to get BOE approval for an anonymous-payor-group private pay and benefits supplement worth more than principals make as their entire income.
The Eagle lamely failed Journalism 102. It should have said, “Okay, there may be justification for private interests to want to help you, so the public needs to know their names, in order to determine whether or not these are people who sell goods and services to the district, because if they do, that would raise a serious question of your supplement representing kickbacks, and that potential problem would merit full public examination, since you are a public employee.”
5) A couple years ago it was said he was very proficient in PowerPoint presentations, which impressed locals, but it was a skill possessed by 4th graders in some schools elsewhere, according to the Wall Street Journal.
6) His panning a gifted math and science academy flies in the face of what smart 21st-century-focused cities and states are doing.
He can’t be a STRATEGIC leader, because he is ill-informed about the national economy, really the global economy, that Wichita graduates, and the city, will have to compete in. He is arguably setting up a predictable-failure scenario, because his understanding is of a past economy and social ecology, not the future’s. But schools’ only legitimate justification is to prepare kids for the future, and to thereby create future prosperity for their communities.
It’s not enough to be an “expert”. The question is, is a person’s expertise USEFUL in current and future circumstances. I mean I used encounter doctors who were EXPERT, albeit in OUTDATED medicine. You wouldn’t want to be treated by them, unless you wanted ineffective “traditional” results.
Mr. Heartlander,
I thought it was pretty clear from news reports that Les Eck of Rusty Eck Ford was the one responsible for providing Mr. Brooks’s salary subsidy. His contribution is no secret. Are you aware of any other monies he’s receiveing besides 259 and Mr. Eck?
Give the pinheads hell Bob.
Keep Brooks. He has a good head on his shoulders. Anyone who can afford it should send their kid to private school. I don’t give a shit who you are.Brooks has done a good job with Wichita. We are improving. He is critical of the lack of leadership and expertise coming from the top guy. There is no way that christian whacko republican leaders have a clue about public education.
JimG.
Get up on the wrong side of the swimming pool today?
Garth McGinn is best suited to serve the interests of the constituents of Kansas 4th Congressional District. He will not be beholding to special interests that have dominated our current representative for the last 12 years. Garth’s positions are moderate. He would help lead the effort in sincere campaign funding and ethics reform. Garth believes energy independence can benefit Kansas farmers immensely and reduce our reliance on foreign oil by doubling fuel efficiencies in 5 years and have half of vehicles on alternative fuel by 10 years. He knows it is a key growth area for Kansans and the nation, requiring both public investment and tax incentives. He will work to simplify the tax code and end loopholes enjoyed by just the wealthiest Americans. The incumbent has little to nothing to show for his 12 years as your representative in Washington, and has no plan for the needed changes. It is time for a change in Washington and the Republican parties unparalleled corruption, crony capitalism and scandal. .
Garth McGinn will be an advocate for the change and improvement sorely needed. Garth McGinn will best represent you.
hee hee
Ksfarmgrrl wept.
I guess we are just not getting the GOOD NEWS about education under corkins.
Is that, um, kinda like the good news we are not getting about iraq?
Where is ckd to give us the good news spin?
hehehehehehheheheh
If Abrams thinks corkey has been so successful, he should provide proof.
That statment reminds me SO much of all the success the preznit says we are having in iraq.
Kinda depends on the meaning of is?
I LOVE the smell of wingnut desperation in the morning….
On the Corker matter, he may or may not be qualified to be education commissioner, but smarter places than Wichita, with strong economies are going outside the education community to recruit new-idea school leaders.
New York City’s superintendent is a former U.S. attorney, as is San Diego’s. Seattle USD made excellent gains under a retired Army general in the 90s (who unfortunately died in office). Los Angeles’s superintendent for the past four years has been former Colorado governor and DNC chairman Roy Romer, and his successor is a retired vice-admiral. In Chicago, the mayor has complete authority over that city’s schools.
Obviously these men have high-level public managerial experience. They’ve been recruited to transform the outdated public education culture. The process will take time, but some very smart people think it can eventually work.
Wow, what a great example of classic conservative strategy.
Dont like what Brooks says? Well then, just attack the messenger and ignore the message. Attack him personally, and maybe the message will go away?
Jesus wept.
We are on to you guys. Give it up.
Mr. Cropp, it was reported at the time that Les Eck was the publicly-self-announced spokesperson/leader on the private pay packaged, for a group whose other members declined to reveal their identities to the public.
There was a similar event at KU at about that time in which a group of mostly-anonymous private citizens proposed supplementing chancellor Hemenway’s pay. The KC Star criticized this secrecy, and argued that transparency was in order, given that KU was a public educational institution.
Mr. Brooks worked his way up in diocesan schools here for many years before being tapped to head the public system. In parochial sector, or any other private education sector, it is common to solicit private donations for many purposes, including raising money to pay fair-market to well-above-market salaries for top-level administrators–quality people aren’t cheap–and in private education it’s not the public’s business who the private benefactors are.
It’s also common in public universities for endowed chairs to be established by private parties to enable the universities to recruit better reseachers and teachers than normal institutional salary scales allow. But the endowers don’t conceal their identities, because they feel it is good PR to have their names known, and they typically hope that their acts of publicly stepping up to the plate will motivate others who have substantial capital to do similarly.
To be frank, Mr. Brooks received a total public/private package reported by WE to be worth over $220k, which was about equivalent to the Portland USD public-funded salary. But a $300k house here was $500k there, and property tax rates were substantially higher as well.
A lower salary here was not inappropriate because of our lower cost of living. The local BOE got along very well with Mr. Brooks, but they reasonably concluded that his pay-raise desire was not something they could support through public funding, or, to put it straight, convince the public was justifiable.
Finally, the national superintendent tenure-average was at that point under 3 years: superintendency is typically a high-turnover occupation. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for Mr. Brooks to gain long-term tenure in Portland, which was a high-turnover district, the prior sup having lasted only 2 years. If I recall correctly, that superintendent’s predecessor had also left after a short stint.
Mr. Brooks, an outsider, would have had none of the politico-social connections he had cultivated here. He would have been given very little time to develop them. PUSD, being urban, was disadvantaged per se. In Portland, the urban-core-surrounding suburban communities had their own school districts, and they weren’t concerned about PUSD’s plight.
So why would any rational person give up a long-term-secure job to go into completely unfamiliar territory, take a job that on a cost-of-living-adjusted basis didn’t pay much more than he was already making, and that had a demonstrated history of chewing up superintendents and spitting them out?
Call me a skeptic, but I suspect that Mr. Brooks may have been playing political “poker” and been bluffing on this hand. I just can’t envision that he really would have left Wichita, had the BOE rejected the private-pay proposal that raised his income by some 35%.
Unfortunately, Mr. Brooks initiated the negative campaigning, with political, turf-protection-motivated negative-attack-statements:
“Bob’s in way over his head,” Brooks told the Topeka Capital-Journal. “…This is far too important to be dealing with rookies.”
Which is harder, earning a WSU master’s in education, or KU law degree? What Mr. Brooks may fail to understand is that Mr. Corkins has attempted, and succeeded, in harder self-initiated education pursuits than Mr. Brooks has. Smart people, who have really applied themselves and succeeded in difficult academic challenges, have faster knowledge-acquisition skills than people who have not done this can comprehend.
Mr. Brooks considers the East High IB programme to represent a pinacle of college-preparatory education. It is not, which is why the nation’s top public college prep schools such as Stuyvesant and Hunter High Schools in New York and Evanston Township High School in Illinois, aren’t IB schools. IB was originally developed as a private school model in Geneva, then expanded to major embassy cities to enable students who spoke many different languages, to qualify for university admission. The programme, taught in either English or French, could not be top-flight, relative to American and European schools that taught subjects in students’ native languages. (To understand this, consider Wichita students trying to learn biology, chemistry and mathematics in French.)
This idea of a slower-pacedcollege-prep curriculum (slow relative to top-grade college prep programs) was deemed to be a good way to help public minority students in America get into college.
That’s a good idea. But when you transmogrify it and primarily use it as a magnet to attract high-performing students, because you don’t offer a high-grade AP option (BTW, Collegiate, Independent, Kapaun and Carroll use AP), is a mal-exploitation of high academic talent.
A couple years ago, Mr. Brooks said, “It is my understanding that IB is more rigorous than AP.”That’s why you don’t want an elementary educator in charge of high school college-preparatory education programs. Because his “understanding” was precisely opposite to reality. (BTW, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were proven that Mr. Brooks is a Republican.)
Mr. Brooks may be “over his head” and a “rookie” when it comes to 21st century secondary preparation for tertiary education.
Yeah, Ksfrmgrrl.
Corkins and the CPA in Iraq are two pieces of the same puzzle.
These far-right wingnuts in power today place far more emphasis on ideology than on little things like, you know, actually knowing how to do the job you’re hired for.
Corkins sends people to Wichita who obviously unfit for their work, are in over their heads — but by god they believe that charter schools are the tool for every problem!
If you don’t believe in government — and today’s Republican party sure as hell doesn’t — what in the name of everything holy makes voters think that Republicans can govern?
Just another note. Wichita schools are doing pretty well in elementary ed, Mr. Brooks field of expertise.
It isn’t going to happen, but if Wichitans were smart, they’d create a separate High School District run by college-preparatory experts. Let Mr. Brooks do what he knows. Don’t force him to try to do things in which he is not knowledgeable. Many cities have bifurcated elementary/secondary districts, particularly in California, which developed bifurcated districts decades ago, and contemporaneously developed the world’s leading public tertiary education system.
On Corkins’ charter school championing, don’t igore the fact that this is a quintessential small-d democratic concept. Publicly employed principals and teachers, working in close collaboration with parents. No capitalist industrial-model hierarchy.
Did you ever hear of “Power to the People”? That’s democratic to a t. I think John Lennon even adopted the slogan and turned it into a song.
“All politics is local,” said House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D Mass).
Make your public schools truly local. Charter public schools represent a really good idea. Some will work, others will not. But little people will figure things out.
The National Press Club last week hosted Shell Oil President John Hofmiester. Mr. Hofmeister is a K-State political science alum (bachelor’s and master’s). He denigrated the idea of American energy independence from the Middle East, calling the idea “naive” and “infeasible”. Of course it’s “infeasible”, which is to say, “I don’t even want to THINK about this possibility,” to the CEO of a company that relies on cheap fossil-fuel extraction from impoverished Third World countries, to eat major losses if its operating model becomes obsolete, and become a dinosaur. But, unbeknownst to this poly sci guy from Kansas, it’s not scientifically or technologically infeasible for America to achieve energy independence.
It’s a matter of counting up tera-watt-hours of energy represented by Third World-supplied petroleum burning in the U.S., and figuring out what combinations of nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric, domestic (including Canada as “domestic”) coal, shale and sand oil, and biofuels would be necessary to generate the same numbers of tera-watt-hours–or less with better energy conservation. Some really smart scientists and engineers–people who are a lot smarter than Mr. Hofmiester–think it’s doable.
Yes, Bob is doing a wonderful job. It is great to have someone with his character in place to keep an eye on the career education people.
Say “bye bye” Bob.
Hope you got the resume ready to send around . . . lazy days feeding at the public trough are over, loser.
Abrams to Corkins:You’re doin’ a heck of a job, Bobby
It is my understanding that Mr. Brooks has a “specialist” degree in education; my understanding of such a degree is limited. I have been told by an educator who also holds one that it is a “poor man’s doctorate”, whatever that means. I surmise from the description provided, that one who obtains a specialist degree has done the class work, but not the research needed for a doctorate. Anyone know?
Vaughn, that’s a good point too. I think most if not all master’s involve specialization. Typically in schools with doctoral programs, the master’s and doctoral students take classes together. Master’s programs may or may not require “junior” theses, depending on the program.
KU and other flagship public universities have doctoral programs in education-system administration, which is what I think most Kansas doctoral-degreed superintendents have. It is my understanding, which is limited, that people who do doctoral programs generally do thesis work in education research, system administration, or state/federal education policy-making.
Mr. Brooks didn’t do the high-level track. He’s a local. People think he’s a good match for Wichita, as he’s not a change agent as his predecessor was, whose aggressiveness riled up and stressed out people. Without NCLB Brooks would have arguably just let the system go on as it had been with only glacial-pace ed-standard changes.
I used to watch the BOE meetings frequently.Before NCLB there were no announcements of any major education initiatives, other than the school bond issue, which has turned out well in its own right, but, ultimately buildings don’t teach kids, people do. (According to the WSJ, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is utterly dilapidated, with falling ceiling tiles that have injured people, but the kids won a Cray supercomputer, and they’re going to the Ivies, MIT, et al. in droves. Booker T. Washington High in Tulsa is an old building, but it’s the best public high school in Oklahoma, and perhaps the best hs in Oklahoma, period.)
It appears to me that NCLB has forced Brooks “out of the pocket” and scrambling isn’t his forte. He doesn’t seem to have the can-do attitude of the Ark City superintendent and board, who looked at NCLB mandates and said, “We can do this.” Now their kids are beating Johnson County students on the assessment tests, and their black students are three years ahead of the NCLB annual-progress benchmarks, with 70% proficiency ratings already having been achieved. They’re establishing a model for other small-community districts to study and learn from. Who visits Wichita to learn how to make their own urban schools better? That’s a night vs. day difference: energetic leadership vs. slow-to-change followership.
The discussion above reminds me that qualifications for leadership positions can be quite elusive. Save for instance a committee had met in 1944 to interview Harry S Truman for the job of vice president of the United States, a position that everyone in the world except Mr. Truman realized would lead to the Presidency sooner rather than later.
First committee member: Well, ah Mr. Truman, did you attend an eastern ivy league college?
Harry S Truman: No I didn’t. I attended night school for a while at the old Kansas City business college while working during the day.
2nd committee member: Uh ah, Mr. Truman: Give this committee an idea of what you were doing at age 33?
Harry S Truman: I was plowing our family farm in Grandview, Missouri, behind my favorite mule.
3rd committee member: Well, Mr. Truman, who can you name as a reference for this job of future President of the United States, preferably a top member of the corporate elite of America?
Harry S Truman: My mentor is a fellow named Tom Pendergast, political boss of Kansas City during the Great Depression, warts and all.
Exasperated committee member: Why would you give the name of a former political boss, a gambler on race horses in North Kansas City, head of a nefarious political faction that votes dead people and had a political muscle man named Johnny Lazia who was gunned down by the Chicago mob in 1932 — yeah, tell us that Mr. Truman.
Harry S Truman: During the depression, Tom Pendergast fed the poor, gave coal to the cold, covered Brush Creek with his company’s thick concrete to make jobs for the unemployed. Yes, even though it was a love-hate relationship politically, HE WAS MY FRIEND AND I WAS HIS.
Committee members in unison: Mr. Truman, we the committee members don’t think you are qualified but the fellow in the next room has the final say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Nice post JW.
Let’s get back to education. Elite prep schools, law schools and med schools have used multi-student study groups for decades. In a non-elite parochial school I remember being in a four-student math homework group. I came from a public school. I’d never heard of group study.
But if you think about it, it makes total sense. Different members bring different skills and insights to the table. Through collaboration they learn from each other, in essence exercising social intelligence or superintelligence. In the classroom, several good question answerers represent this idea to a degree, but study-groups represent students’ own initiative to develop cooperative learning groups.
In the past 15 years, public schools have moved to group problem solving, at least in the classroom. Which is good, because the higher your aim in academics, the more critical cooperative problem-solving becomes. But this being said, public schools are still several decades behind the curve. Muti-student problem solving is not a new invention of the public schools, rather it is an extremely behind-the-curve late-adoption.