Commissioner's Report to the Regents
February 1996
by State Education Commissioner Richard P. Mills
First Fruits of the Strategic Plan
At the December meeting, the Regents decided to
create a Strategic Plan for the State Education
Department and their own operation. When completed
and brought to life in the way we do business, the
strategic plan will overcome a major weakness identified
in the Rockefeller Institute Report on the State
Education Department. Since the Regent vote, we have
developed a vision statement and a mission in draft form.
The entire Department has examined the findings of the
Rockefeller Institute Report. We have also created four
additional tools to help us reflect on what we are doing
now:
o An analysis of all current work
processes;
o A review of Regent, Commissioner and
Department responsibilities under the
law;
o A scan of the threats and opportunities
in the environment in which we work;
and
o A history of the Department and
Regents.
The first ever Department-wide managers meeting
took place in late January to study the basics of strategic
planning and to reach a shared understanding of
expectations for management in the Department. The
first series of quarterly performance reviews for each
major unit in the Department will take place during the
first two weeks of April. During these reviews, each
management group will be accountable for their team
contribution to Department and unit mission,
management of budget variances, development of the
strategic plan, and results of their efforts to make this a
better place to work. All the major sections of the
Department have developed preliminary performance
measures and in the coming days we will display these in
the public areas of the Department to stress the
importance of results.
In the coming weeks, I will meet again with each
management team to support their participation in
strategic planning. Challenges for the future include how
best to involve more of our stakeholders in strategic
planning and to ensure that the strategic plan meets the
expectations of the Regents at each critical point.
Department members have worked quickly and
effectively together on these tasks and I appreciate the
quality of their work.
District Superintendents: Essential Leadership in the
Field
There are nearly 700 school superintendents in
New York and I have been calling them one by one. It
will take more than two years to reach them all at the
rate of one a day and itūs comforting to have that much
talent in the State. The urgency of the Regents reform
agenda requires continuous outreach to school district
leadership, however, and for that reason I dissent from
the Governorūs proposal to strip the District
Superintendents of their responsibilities to the
Commissioner. In my half dozen meetings with them
since September, we have worked on standards and
assessment to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Their charge is to see to it that a spirited discussion on
the standards takes place in every community. If I can
judge by the high level of understanding of the standards
among superintendents when I met with all of them at
their annual meeting this month, the District
Superintendents have carried out their charge very well.
In objecting to the Governorūs proposals
concerning the District Superintendents, I do not
embrace the status quo. Instead, the District
Superintendents and I are developing a strategy that will
probably include the following:
o Commissioner expectations. The District
Superintendents should meet a set of
Commissioner expectations that flow from the
Regents strategic plan. These would be
developed annually and form the basis of an
annual evaluation.
o Costs. There is ample data available on the
costs of the services provided through the
BOCES. These data need rigorous
examination. Where the costs are too high
we will find ways to lower them.
o Shared Services Aid. My impression is that
District Superintendents can beat the
competition on cost and quality if they are
given a level playing field. We have resolved
to find ways to deregulate shared services aid.
o Scope of Services. In an effort to serve their
customers and stay solvent, some BOCES
have ventured into service areas that are far
afield from their original educational
purposes. It is time to examine the services
they provide and decide what is off limits.
o Professional Development. Once the Regents
adopt the new high standards and a rigorous
testing system to match, it will be obvious that
there is more professional development to be
done than any existing provider can do.
Teacher centers, BOCES, higher education
institutions, professional associations, and the
Department, to name just a few, must join
forces to offer high quality and low cost
professional development. These training
programs must connect to the standards.
This is a demanding agenda and a fitting response
to the challenge in the Executive Budget.
Setting Standards
On the Regents agenda this month is a momentous
item: Adoption of rigorous standards in Math, Science
and Technology and English Language Arts. These
standards are for all students. If the Regents continue on
this course, by July they will have adopted high standards
for all areas of the curriculum. Itūs time to think
carefully about how we will build the capacity to bring
those standards to life. The Regentūs budget proposal
contains many items that are capacity building, but our
commitment must go beyond the budget for any one year.
Here is only some of what it will take.
The Regentūs examination system must be
strengthened and we need to decide a schedule in the
spring - probably in April - for the elimination of the
Regentūs Competency Tests and the introduction of an
all-Regents approach. In addition, the existing tests for
the elementary and middle grades have to be
strengthened. Throughout the remainder of 1996, we will
examine tasks for the new tests and data on reliability.
We must prepare to trade regulations for
performance on a scale not previously contemplated. If
the standards are clear we donūt need to specify so much
about how to achieve them. Schools will need to re-
evaluate how they use their time and resources and the
Department can lead best by example. Department
managers have established performance targets and have
begun the difficult work of deciding how what we do
contributes to our goals. In the process, some of the
work that we do now will have to be abandoned with the
approval of the Regents.
Partnership with human services will become a
necessity. Fortunately, relationships among the human
services community and education, at least at the State
level, have become much stronger in recent months as a
result of the work of the Council on Children and
Families, the Legislature Task Force on Children and
Families, and the Regents Workgroup on the same topic.
The tasks are the same in all three arenas. Just as the
Regents are adopting expectations of academic
performance in the standards, we are expecting an
agreement with our human services partners on a
common statement of expected results. Such an
agreement will help us select the most appropriate
strategies for joint venture.
Finally, we must use the knowledge gained from the
Regents work on time and learning to support major
changes in school calendars. We can hardly expect
performance to change significantly if we continue to use
time so inefficiently and to keep school for only 180 days.
Building a Budget to Reach the Standards
One of the problems with the Executive Budget is
that it contains so many good ideas. School report cards,
pressure for cost control, pressure for higher
performance, a strong push for inclusive education for
children with disabilities -- all of this is to the good, so
we canūt respond with old tactics.
There is also a long list of very concrete problems
with this budget: There are $242 million in special
education costs shifted to the local communities, a
missing $96 million in growth aid, $16 million in cuts in
various programs included in the block grant, the lack of
recognition of inflationary costs of $269 million and the
$55 million in BOCES aid to cover costs already incurred.
These are only a few of the problems. We could
spend our energies for the next four months and more
just clawing our way back to level funding. That
wouldnūt be enough. In all of our discussions on the
budget, -- and I have testified four times, in addition to
meeting with individual members of the legislature -- we
must show that we are bent on meeting those high
standards and that we are talking about a budget to do
that particular job. This will be good preparation for the
multi-year budget thinking that must follow if we are
serious about our strategic plan.
Time to Get Specific About the School Report Card
New Yorkers want a School Report Card. When
the Regents met in Syracuse, the local press was running
a series of editorials and opinion pieces on the contents
of the school report card and gave extensive coverage to
what local citizens expected to read in such a report of
school results. In Rochester, Superintendent Janey has a
four page report card that spells out results as well as his
firm conviction that existing State standards are too low.
Bravo for his forthright comments on both issues. In
Buffalo, Regent Bennett and I talked to the Editorial
Board of the Buffalo News which then devoted the top
third of the Sunday paper to school report cards. A
great many superintendents have offered to help and
have sent examples of local efforts to describe
performance.
With so much interest and so many good examples
at hand, itūs time for us to get concrete about our ideas.
The EMSC draft is a place to start. District
Superintendents said that it was not enough to compare
school performance to the State average; we need to say
how high performance ought to be. Superintendents and
teachers have said that we should stop reporting the
percentage of students above the State Reference Point
as if that represented a high level of achievement.
Human services colleagues on the Council on Children
and Families have offered to help with social indicators
to give a context to the school performance measures.
The school report card will give visibility and
credence to the long efforts to raise standards and to
engage the public in actions needed to reach those
standards. I appreciate the hard work of all engaged in
this.