So Chris Winters gets the jobs.
That’s a good thing.
Last June I wrote that the school administration should have saved the money on the search firm for a new headmaster. It was obvious that Chris was the guy. The only people who didn’t know that was the school board. They spent $17,600 to find out.
Oh well, at least the dithering Weissler administration is finally history.
But reading between the lines of the Greenwich Time story – click here – you can see the monumental challenges facing GHS.
At least four major issues were mentioned in the article – special ed, weighted AP grades, preparing the non-college bound student and attendance policy. Separately, they all seemed worthwhile. But taken in total, they represented the conflicting constituencies at GHS, which has no apparent strategy and no priorities. The school administration simply caves in to the loudest group – whether it’s special education, science classes or school bus routes.
This is no way to run a school district. You may or may not agree with the Friars of Field Point Road, but at least I know the priorities there: Keep the mill rate low at all costs and don’t borrow long term. Whether you like it, that’s a clear strategy in Greenwich and for many generations, it has served the town well – most of the time.
So what are the schools’ priorities?
Winters said his top priority is moving GHS closer to the “Vision of the Graduate,” a document outlining the ideal skills and traits that Greenwich students should have when they graduate.
Ideal graduate?
Achieving those goals means making GHS more “rigorous, innovative and responsive,” Winters said.
Huh?
Okay, Chris. You got the job. Your don’t have to run for office any more. Now stop with the psycho babble. Who can argue with “rigorous, innovative and responsive?” What are you really saying?
How about going to work to get GHS to rank occasionally in some Top 10 list other than FCIAC standings? Okay, I’ll settle for Top 100. No, I’ll actually settle for Top 1,000.
In the absence of any discernible strategy or measurable goals for the Greenwich school district, here are my recommendations:
1. GHS should be consistently one of the Top 10 high schools in the state as measured by the annual Grade 10 standardized tests. (It now ranks No. 26)
2. GHS’s main priority should be college prep. Too many studies have shown the success gap between college graduates and people with only a high school education. If someone wants a vocational education, fine. But that shouldn’t be GHS’s job. McDonald’s and Burger King have fine training programs for those who don’t want to go to college. I don’t want to spend my tax dollars educating kids to flip burgers. And if you do, we will all be heavily punished in our declining real estate values.
(By the way, someone should tell Peter Tesei that an 89 percent college admission rate from our high school graduates is not something we want to make public – let alone brag about. Most towns like Greenwich should be well north of 90 percent … see Tesei remarks on the town website)
3. Close the performance gap. Implement state-of-the-art remedial learning programs at Ham Ave, New Lebanon and Julian Curtiss elementary schools. Chris Winters cannot do this alone. By the time kids reach GHS, they already have been sliced, diced, tested, sorted and corrugated. Chris Winters is a good headmaster, but he is not a miracle worker. Greenwich needs to ensure that all all kids can read, write and do math with proficiency by Grade 3 (when the Connecticut Mastery tests are first taken). Let’s try and bring the western part of the town up to par with Old Greenwich and Riverside.
4. Support special ed. GHS is actually lucky that only 11 percent of its student population requires special education. Some inner city high schools have special ed populations exceeding 20 percent. This is a highly charged and emotional area. Greenwich has the resources to ensure that our special needs students get the best education. This is the promise and responsibility of a public school system.
5. Sports are secondary. I would pay for the above priorities by de-emphasizing sports. There are days when I wonder whether GHS is actually a giant sports complex instead of a school. As my friend Bob Horton pointed out in his inaugural column in the Greenwich Time, do we really need 14 football coaches? Is water polo really more important than our standing in Advanced Placement?
Let’s build a pedagogical palace and not a Cow Palace.
Speaking of AP, it seems to me any student willing to take an AP course and then score at least a 3 on the AP exam has earned the right to have his or her grade weighted. I think that’s a simple decision.
Those are my recommendations, what are yours?
P.S. To the reader who invited me to move back to the shanty I grew up in, I can only reply that even if I wanted to, they tore down that shanty in Taipei years ago and built a luxury condo complex. I didn’t spend that much time in the shanty anyway because while growing up in Taiwan in the Fifities, I went to school six days a week, 10 hours a day. Since then Taiwan had one of the fastest growing GDPs in the world.
I agree with your views on Greenwich’s school system for the most part. Where we part company is in your second recommendation the part about not wasting your taxes and lowering your real estate values by providing a HS education for students not college bound. What would you have us do load up a school bus with the graduating 8th graders that don’t look like they are college bound and dump them off on McDonalds door step? It may come as a revelation to you but not all kids have the same IQ. We owe all of our young an education to the limits of their abillities. Just like a ship it takes the people way down in the engine room as well as the captain strutting around on the bridge to keep things operating. Sorry about your real estate values but maybe you should look to the folks in the financial district (your highly educated neighbors) for a place to put the blame!
Comment by Idaho — January 15th, 2010 @ 12:48 am
Just a slight correction, Mr. Millstein. Though GHS has an 89% rate of sending its graduates to “college”, that includes junior college. It’s rate of getting students into four-year colleges is only in the mid-70% range. By contrast, many other area public schools put somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% or more of their graduates into four-year colleges. So GHS’s record in getting kids into the crucial four-year institutions is very poor, indeed. And in this community, which is the wealthiest of its size in the entire country, none of our graduates should be shooting for junior college.
I wonder just how good a decision it was to make the interim headmaster the permanent headmaster. How much differently will Mr. Winters’ term in office be if he was there while academic performance was sliding? Is he committed to excellence in education? From his suggestion that we should de-emphasize honors and AP classes by putting grade points back to the level of non-honors courses, it seems that he just doesn’t “get it”. His misguided emphasis on education for those not going to college, when he should be working with those students and supporting those students and pushing those students to take harder courses and make sure they go to college, is very troubling.
You are absolutely right to point out that Asian students, and, for that matter, most students in the rest of the world go to school for more days and longer school days than do we. It’s no big secret that if you study more and harder, you will get better results. Funny that we apply that work ethic to scholastic sports, but we consider kids who work hard at their studies to be some sort of freaks, whom we refer to as “overachievers”. Not only is the performance of Greenwich public schools mediocre in the context of our region, but even worse in an international context.
Perhaps if our local newspapers began writing as many articles highlighting the achievements of our outstanding students as it does outstanding athletes, our educational achievement level would increase.
Comment by Sean Goldrick — January 15th, 2010 @ 10:31 am
Dear Mr. Lincoln Log: You might re-read your arrogant and short-sighted statements that follows: “GHS’s main priority should be college prep. Too many studies have shown the success gap between college graduates and people with only a high school education. If someone wants a vocational education, fine. But that shouldn’t be GHS’s job. McDonald’s and Burger King have fine training programs for those who don’t want to go to college. I don’t want to spend my tax dollars educating kids to flip burgers. And if you do, we will all be heavily punished in our declining real estate values.
Mr. Log Head- You owe an apology to those parents and students you identify as “less than college material.” My dear man, Greenwich would fail to pieces, like Rome did, without these “vocational types” operating those very services you ridicule. You might have been somewhat successful in college, but you are not a very sensitive or kind human being.. Deb.
Comment by deb Meyers — January 15th, 2010 @ 3:44 pm
Having spent the last four years as a “GHS parent,” I’d like to add a couple of observations.
First, any serious discussion of GHS college admissions statistics needs to take into account the fact that Greenwich has one of the highest percentage of high-school age students attending private schools in the nation. While these students may or may not be academically exceptional, nearly all come from families that prize academic accomplishment–and nearly all of them go on to college. Just image what the college admissions rate would be if these students attended GHS instead of Brunswick, Greenwich Academy, Sacred Heart, Choate-Rosemary Hall, Deerfield, Taft, Andover, Exeter, etc.
My own child a local attended private school from age 1 to 13, and was accepted by one of the above mention private schools, but decided on GHS instead. The education she received at GHS far surpassed anything she could possibly attained elsewhere and she is now in one of the most competitive college programs–with an admissions rate of less than 7 percent–in the world. She somehow managed this without playing on a single sports team — or even attending a single sporting event, as far as I know. What she did receive was excellent Honors and AP instruction in Science, English, Math, Social Studies, French, and Theater Arts — as well as incredible extracurricular opportunities in Student Government, service organizations, theatrical productions and numerous other areas.
Success, however, did not always come easily. There were many tears shed and hundreds of nights spent working to midnight and beyond. I often found school assignment files on our computer that were closed well after 1 AM. I would suspect that many of students in the top 10 percent of the GHS graduating class matched or exceeded Mr. Millstein’s 10 hours a day, six days a week of academic commitment. I know mine did.
The reality is that wherever there is a top 10 percent, there is also going to be a bottom 10 percent. Intelligence may play a factor. But so does motivation and, especially, a family background that values and encourages education. The suggestion that “McDonald’s and Burger King have fine training programs” is, indeed, flippant and insulting.
GHS has a responsibility the 70 or so students each year who do not go on to college to provide vocational training that insures that they won’t need to resort to flipping burgers. Here Mr. Millstein has it completely backwards: If someone wants a vocational education, that IS GHS’s job.
Finally, although I’m no fan of athletics at the cost of academics, let’s be realistic, Mr. Millstein. Have you ever heard of student being courted by a top-ranked university for their academic ability? Sorry, Charlie, but it’s the kids who excel at football, soccer, lacrosse, fencing, crew, tennis, and, yes, even water polo, who get the free passes to college–often in the form of a letter of intent signed even before the Senior year begins. So if increasing college acceptance rates is really the goal, you probably want MORE athletic coaches, not less.
Comment by GHS Parent — March 23rd, 2010 @ 12:33 am
Having spent the last four years as a “GHS parent,” I’d like to add a couple of observations.
First, any serious discussion of GHS college admissions statistics needs to take into account the fact that Greenwich has one of the highest percentage of high-school age students attending private schools in the nation. While these students may or may not be academically exceptional, nearly all come from families that prize academic accomplishment–and nearly all of them go on to college. Just image what the college admissions rate would be if these students attended GHS instead of Brunswick, Greenwich Academy, Sacred Heart, Choate-Rosemary Hall, Deerfield, Taft, Andover, Exeter, etc.
My child attended a local private school from age 1 to 13, and was accepted by one of the above mention private schools, but decided on GHS instead. The education she received at GHS far surpassed anything she could possibly attained elsewhere and she is now in one of the most competitive college programs–with an admissions rate of less than 7 percent–in the world. She somehow managed this without playing on a single sports team — or even attending a single sporting event, as far as I know. What she did receive was excellent Honors and AP instruction in Science, English, Math, Social Studies, French, and Theater Arts — as well as incredible extracurricular opportunities in Student Government, service organizations, theatrical productions and numerous other areas.
Success, however, did not always come easily. There were many tears shed and hundreds of nights spent working to midnight and beyond. I often found school assignment files on our computer that were closed well after 1 AM. I would suspect that many of students in the top 10 percent of the GHS graduating class matched or exceeded Mr. Millstein’s 10 hours a day, six days a week of academic commitment. I know mine did.
The reality is that wherever there is a top 10 percent, there is also going to be a bottom 10 percent. Intelligence may play a factor. But so does motivation and, especially, a family background that values and encourages education. The suggestion that “McDonald’s and Burger King have fine training programs” is, indeed, flippant and insulting.
GHS has a responsibility the 70 or so students each year who do not go on to college to provide vocational training that insures that they won’t need to resort to flipping burgers. Here Mr. Millstein has it completely backwards: If someone wants a vocational education, that IS GHS’s job.
Finally, although I’m no fan of athletics at the cost of academics, let’s be realistic, Mr. Millstein. Have you ever heard of student being courted by a top-ranked university for their academic ability? Sorry, Charlie, but it’s the kids who excel at football, soccer, lacrosse, fencing, crew, tennis, and, yes, even water polo, who get the free passes to college–often in the form of a letter of intent signed even before the Senior year begins. So if increasing college acceptance rates is really the goal, you probably want MORE athletic coaches, not less.
Comment by GHS Parent — March 23rd, 2010 @ 12:35 am