Updated 2:36 p.m. Tuesday, June 16, to include additional information from Hartford Board of Education member Robert Cotto regarding claims of test score improvements under Steven Adamowski’s leadership.
NORWALK, Conn. – When Steven Adamowski took over a foundering Hartford school system, one of his first tasks was to rebuild the central office.
The approach was not unlike that employed by former Norwalk superintendent Manny Rivera, and both men apparently learned some lessons from the manner in which they went about it.
Someone close to the situation said recently Rivera believes he should have been more aggressive about dealing with uncooperative and insubordinate central office and building administrators.
Adamowski said if he had it to do over again, he, too, would focus on school building leadership.
“While I may frame this differently, I certainly learned this the same way that Dr. Rivera did, to focus particularly on the quality of school building leadership early on,” Adamowski said in a Monday interview. That not only involves dealing with the folks who are not providing teachers and their constituents with good leadership, but it also involves developing this country’s new leaders who can manage the school in a reform situation. So, yes, I am aware of that from my own experience and his experience, and again, based upon the feedback I have had so far from individuals in Norwalk, this building leadership issue appears to come up again and again.
“It’s very much related to, what you might frame as, resistance from the old guard, the back-stabbing and the unprofessional behavior, and so on.”
The situation is one that was addressed in the job description handed to search firm PROACT, which had marching orders to find candidates unafraid to confront the situation head-on. The new superintendent would need to deal with entrenched forces resistant to change, it said.
“We are all a product of learning from our own experiences,” Adamowski said, referring to Rivera’s struggles with that resistance. “I had a different but analogous situation in Hartford. I reorganized the central office three times, went from almost 300 people down to 99. The first phase of that was to simply get rid of the fat and the redundancy, duplication. Second phase was to create, or to re-purpose into new functions – like school intervention, new school design, choice office and so on. Third phase, we established our talent office.
“I established, a different and more aggressive approach than the traditional (Human Resources) function that deals with improving teacher quality and school leader quality. If I had to do it again I would have started with the talent function because, toward the end, we were just running out of the quality of people we needed to lead the new schools and do the new things and perform the new functions.”
The Norwalk Board of Education is scheduled to vote tonight – Tuesday, June 16 – on whether to hire Adamowski as its next superintendent. The vote will come during the regular BoE meeting agenda and after the public comment period. Five members of the nine-member board have indicated to NoN that they intend to vote in favor. If they do, the Board will continue final negotiations on a contract with the intent for Adamowski to begin July 15. Interim Superintendent James Connelly is expected to stay on at least until July 15 and could stay longer to help in the transition.
Adamowski said he has “multiple priorities” on his agenda should he be confirmed to begin July 15. One would be “the collection of data out of the district and triangulation of it.”
“I would look for analysis of all the student achievement data, school data, and interview the stakeholders,” he said. “By the time you get to 50 (stakeholders) you can triangulate what you have observed and have an idea of the district’s need and pulse of it.
He also knows he will have several top-level positions right away and hopes to tap into his array of contacts build in Hartford and through being a special master.
“There is very pressing need now to … get the right people on the bus. Some of these are key positions,” he said. “The operations position supervises the principals; chief academic officer, the chief financial officer… I already have started thinking about that. I have had the good fortune to create a network in Connecticut through my work in Hartford and teaching in the UConn executive leadership program. There are a lot of good people I would be reaching out to and attempting to recruit. My experience has been it’s not a question of just posting and waiting for applicants. You really have to go after the best people.”
Working with the Board of Education to get everyone on board with a plan of action is another thing he wants to do ASAP.
“I also hope that I will have an opportunity this summer to sit down with the board to do two things relative to the strategic plan,” Adamowski said. “One would be to create a measurable vision for the future that embodies the strategies in the current plan. Every member of the staff should know and be able to say to anybody the vision of the district and how they fit into it and how they are contributing to it. Second would be to make some refinements in the strategic operating plan, based on district data from the last school year. In particular, implementation steps that are scheduled for the next school year.
“Those are some of the things that would be in my entry plan. It would be very comprehensive, probably involve my activities in the first 30 days at least.”
Leadership was a major topic of the conversation, and Adamowski said that does not just mean the people in the central office and building administration.
“Everywhere I have been I have developed ways for ‘pass forward’ for teachers’ leadership,” he said. He spoke of a “leadership academy” to help teachers become assistant principals and principals.
“When I was in the Clayton school district in St. Louis we created a ladder program that was actually similar to that, where accomplished teachers could do something for a year or two or permanent, or go back to teaching… That addresses a lot in our totally flat teaching system because right now all the increases are based upon seniority.”
Helping teachers grow and become better teachers and more relevant to the students is not an overnight process, he said. It takes years.
We know from research that it takes seven years for a teacher to become outstanding, he said. We also know that the period of time from 10 to 15 years is very critical.
“They either expand their repertoire… or they become stuck, or they leave teaching. Or they figure out the only thing they can do to have a higher income … is to become an administrator.”
Adamowski said his hope would be that, at mid-career level, “We could create opportunities for the most advanced teachers to mentor others, to develop curriculum, to supervise other programs. … I am a very big advocate of that.”
An example of that would be the Literacy 4 Parents 4 Their Children program managed by Norwalk Federation of Teachers President Bruce Mellion and developed and implemented this year by Francine Hakim and Pamela Serlin, twin sisters and Norwalk teachers who have been serving as teacher leaders-in-residence for the State Department of Education.
Adamowski said another development in the area has been a state teacher evaluation and seed system.
“That’s an evaluation and professional development system that categorizes teacher behaviors around a set of standards. It’s four categories,” he said. “So, for example, the very lowest category is novice … The highest category is advanced teachers.”
He said he would like to get Norwalk to a point where that evaluation system is being implemented “with integrity, so that the ratings … circle us back to the school leadership issue.
“Once you have a valid indication of the advanced teachers, that is really the group that the district should be working with in terms of providing leadership opportunities,” he said. “They should be able to qualify for these opportunities based on attaining an advanced level, and you should be able to model those behaviors for those teachers.”
Adamowski also spoke about closing the achievement gap, claiming credit for successes in two of his prior superintendencies – Cincinnati and Hartford.
Cincinnati, he said, was an 80 percent black district when he was there. The racial/ethnic makeup in Hartford was 30 percent black and 60 percent Latino; half the black population was West Indian, he said.
You cannot simply point to race or ethnicity as the driver of the achievement gap, he said.
“We have this situation in many cases where … a problem is masquerading as race. There is basically a gap that is born out of the income level of the students that are involved.”
Rivera was making progress, he agreed.
“The early literacy program is excellent as a strategy,” he said.
But more is needed, and his strategic plan, when implemented, would address that, he said.
“I think this kind of explains the board’s desire to have somebody as a superintendent who is an implementor.”
He said Rivera’s approach was good, but “It needs some refinement and vision that can drive it. But basically it is a number of very sound strategies in closing the achievement gap. … This is a question now of system implementations and alignment of those new approaches and new things with each other.
“If there is one area of the plan that I think could be bolstered and be sure to improve the achievement gap it’s the amount of time in instruction,” he said. “We have a lot of research on this that suggests if you can add 300 hours a year in a student’s schedule you will get a return in student achievement.”
He then pointed a finger at a time-honored tradition of the American school experience – summer vacation – as a leading culprit in the problem.
“Part of the problem for low income students … is regression in the summer. You and I would start to regress after four weeks without instruction,” he said. “The lower income children regress in three weeks. They are not in an environment where parents are maybe ensuring that they are reading or proving summer enrichment activities. So having a school, or at least a choice of a school on a year-round schedule that limits the breaks to two weeks at a time is a very effective way” of being ready to move on in fall.
“We have the overall issues of blocks of time,” Adamowski said. “European countries we compete with, they are simply spending more time with people studying things. We are studying this. That is something I would like to look at.”
Any strategies for closing the gap will need tweaking based on results, he said. The strategic operating plan “should be a living document so every summer we get the data from the district for the previous year, we look at it and we make adjustments to the plan based on our findings,” he said.
Hartford was the lowest-performing district in the state when he took over, he said. “We were a poster child for achievement gap.”
He said 30 to 40 percent was closed on his watch based on the area measure, a fact that appears in a report issued by CRPE: The Evidence Project.
But those results have been disputed. In a letter sent Wednesday to the Norwalk Board of Education, Hartford BoE member Robert Cotto claims the numbers to have been artificially inflated:
“As I wrote in The Hartford Courant in 2011, there was a mixed result from these policies – at best. Most importantly, the apparent ‘increases’ only began when testing and graduation policies changed to artificially inflate this data.
“Hartford’s ‘historic’ test result increases only began when low-income, Black, and Latino students with disabilities were removed from regular tests and allowed to participate in a separate modified assessment in 2009. By 2011, 10% or more of all Hartford students, all with disabilities, were selected for a separate test. While this was happening, the HPS superintendent and administrators took credit. They also took bonus money for the subsequent increases, caused in large part by removing these kids.”
When it comes to minority hiring, he said, “I believe in diversity because I feel that you have stronger organization when it’s diverse.”
From 1996 through 1998, Adamowski was associate secretary of education in Delaware, developing state standards.
“I’ll never forget working with DuPont scientists on the science standards,” he said. “They were absolutely emphasizing in the standards, the standards around diversity. I asked why. They pointed out the most diverse species are the most successful in avoiding extinction. This is true for any organization and it’s true for school systems. The more diverse system that you have – not diversity in terms of commitment to goals, diversity in terms of your perspective and how you think about things and how you address various issues – it makes you more change adaptable. Diversity is important in that respect.”
He also said that, while having teachers who reflect the student body has its pluses, it is not necessarily always the way to go.
“We have some evidence that there are certain students who do better when they see someone like them as a role model in their school. Then there’s a whole bunch of evidence that suggests there are so many intervening variables in teaching that it’s very hard to pin down if the teacher is of the same race or ethnicity, the student … will do better.
“That brings us to the point where we need diversity, and we need quality simultaneously. The only way I know how to get that is by increasing the pool of candidates.”
In Connecticut, he said, there are only about 10 percent of graduates of state teachers preparatory institutions who are minority, and the majority of those, 7 percent, are African American females. There are only 10 percent of graduates of state teacher institutions who are minoty, and the majority of those are female.
“The greatest area of shortage in our state and in Norwalk are Latino” teachers, he said.
In terms of gender, both black and Latino male teachers are in short supply, he said.
“The reality of increasing that takes us back to that talent model. You’ve got to have a recruitment plan,” he said. “You cannot simply wait for people to apply and make a decision on hiring.”
When he was in Hartford, Adamowski said, the system had a relationship with Puerto Rico, and an exchange program with India.
“There are ways to do this,” he suggested. “We have certain states, like Florida and Texas, where Connecticut can be very competitive for high quality and minority teachers because we pay more.”
He pointed out that Norwalk’s greatest need, diversity-wise, is teachers. “There are a good number of minority school building leaders currently,” he said.
“The teacher level, in my view, should be the priority for this type of recruiting. Then I think it behooves us at the district level to have a diverse staff of senior managers,” he said. In Hartford I was able to bring into senior management more minorities than ever before. The COO there is now COO in New Haven. Two deputies became superintendents. One is now Superintendent of Bloomfield, Dr. James Thompson.”
The bottom line, though, remains quality, he said. The trick is to be sure to recruit quality minority candidates, not just minorities for their own sake.
“I think that it behooves us to look at, as we recruit people and we make decisions, that this is not a myopic push to get minorities into the school system, it’s a push to get quality people into the school system, who also will contribute to the organization’s diversity,” he said. “Again, my focus on that would certainly involve some of those top management positions that are open, so it would be good to have a diverse set of senior managers in the district and then a focus on classroom teachers.”
See our other stories on Steven Adamowski:
- https://nancyonnorwalk.com/2015/06/adamowski-mellion-agree-norwalks-next-superintendent-wont-perform-as-special-master
- https://nancyonnorwalk.com/2015/06/two-sides-to-the-story-adamowskis-pick-to-lead-norwalk-schools-draws-strong-reactions
- https://nancyonnorwalk.com/2015/06/adamowski-wrong-choice-for-norwalk
- https://nancyonnorwalk.com/2015/06/boe-release-of-super-choices-name-greeted-with-mixed-reaction
- https://nancyonnorwalk.com/2015/06/board-of-education-to-vote-on-dr-steven-adamowski-as-next-superintendent
- https://nancyonnorwalk.com/2015/06/new-superintendent-chosen-identity-to-be-announced-vote-expected-june-16-after-union-vetting
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