6/15/2011 12:00:00 PMCleveland Schools CEO Offers Final Thougths on Improving Failing Schools

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Two weeks before his time as interim CEO for Cleveland schools is up, Peter Raskind offered some thoughts about what can be done to spur progress in student achievement and improve teacher evaluations. But Ida Lieszkovsky reports, Raskind was short on specifics.

Raskind says he doesn’t think it’s reasonable to base teacher evaluations on just standardized testing, nor is it a good idea to just accept the fact that students from poorer neighborhoods tend to perform worse than their better-off peers. But he doesn’t have a specific prescription,

more a suggestion that teacher performance should meet one overarching standard… “Adequate growth for every child, every year.”

One thing he was adamant about is the relationship between administrators and teachers unions.  “I think labor and management have entered into very complex, quite restrictive, quite rigid agreements that I would suggest are not consistent with today’s dynamic world.”

Raskind says if that doesn’t change, the union and administration will both fail.  At the same time, he emphasized that he does not support Senate Bill 5 - the newly passed law that limits the collective bargaining rights of most state employees.

Meryl Johnson with the Cleveland Teachers Union says she too thinks the relationship between labor and management needs to improve. 

“Just like in a home, if the parents are fighting all the time, that child is not going to have The best experience of childhood.”

Raskind and Johnson were part of a forum at Cleveland State University about how to improve underperforming schools.