This comment page as I see it is a place for some people to just vent. Read them for what they are worth and move on. I assume some of these people you are writing about are teachers and it obvious if they express their opinion at work they will be dealt with the same way as Mr. Hardy.
I firmly believe that the superintendent definitely has an agenda that she is not sharing with us. I have not seen or heard her comment and what she sees as long-term goals for this district. If you do not believe the Broad Academy training she received or working under Paul Vallas has not directly influenced what is happening in this school system you have not done your homework. As I stated above Im not sure whether this is the correct method for the most efficient education of inner city students but I believe the public has a right to be part of the decision making.
My comments are based on looking at the Broad Academy which has been implemented in 40 school systems at a cost of four hundred million dollars in training costs for administrators. There are 13,506 school systems in United States according to the last census.
My research into Paul Vallas sounded very positive at first. There was great fanfare and hope when the programs he initiated in Chicago and Philadelphia were first announced and implemented. Further research and what I needed to see was a long-term effects. Here is what is discovered regarding the Philadelphia school system as of August 2010 after Mr Vallas and Dr Sheffield left .
In spite of the numerous problems uncovered at individual schools, the biggest problem lay clearly with the School District’s Charter School Office,’ said Butkovitz. ‘The Office demanded little in the way of accountability from any charter school we investigated.

‘There was a complete and total failure on the part of the Philadelphia Charter School Office to monitor charter schools and hold these schools accountable for how they spend taxpayers’ dollars.’

By reviewing the Charter School Office, the Controller’s investigation looked at 13 charter schools and found financial mismanagement and questionable practices at all 13 schools. Some of these findings include:
-nine schools had leasing agreements with related organizations, six of which listed their only source of income as rental revenue from the charter school.
-eight schools had related party transactions involving construction, maintenance and/or management contracts: one school’s management company’s owner also owned the construction company that did work on some of the schools under its management purview.
-Joseph Caruso, who was paid $80,000 as legal counsel to the Preparatory Charter School, was listed as a full-time teacher at the charter school and received retirement benefits under the Public School Employees Retirement System (PSERS).
-Imani Education Circle Charter School was located on a property owned by the school and leased to the Imani Foundation, which housed six for-profit entities but was receiving a 100 percent property tax exemption by the Board of Revision of Taxes
Here is an article related to large number of Charter schools in New Orleans , Paul Vallas new stop and Dr Sheffields last stop.
The back-channel scrambling for personnel, a departure from the more orderly hiring methods of traditional school systems, bothers some. Dingerson faults Louisiana authorities for allowing charters to pour into New Orleans after the hurricane with ‘no coordinated vision or plan for how the system they were building would serve children well and equitably.’
Charters snapped up rent-free school buildings, she wrote, recruited students they wanted and shut their doors to other applicants. Regular public schools had to admit any student who showed up during the school year, despite disruption to classes. ‘The city’s regular schools now struggle to serve a disproportionate number of students with special needs,’ she wrote in an e-mail.
Vallas said he is pushing regular schools to innovate, giving them more autonomy and longer hours. He said he doubted that other cities will have as high a proportion of children in charters as New Orleans. Resistance to charters elsewhere, he said, is too strong.
Now closer at home in Chicago, here our quotes from the Chicago papers regarding her mentor after he left Chicago in 2001 and test scores dropped to their lowest level in 13 years following the use of an approved Standard test tool.
The data suffer from the same problems that have plagued Chicagos accountability system since 1996, when former schools CEO Paul Vallas first established the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills as Chicagos accountability test. The ITBS was never meant to be used for such activities. Prior to the lucrative explosion of standardized testing in the late 1990s, the developers and publishers of the ITBS even warned purchasers of the test that the tests were not to be used to evaluate individual students, the success of schools, or any particular curriculum.
I know she was not there at this time, but we do know one the first things she did was to purchased an integrated testing tracking tool as part of her multimillion dollar administrative computer upgrade. Yes 2+2 sometimes equals 4 but not behind closed doors. Financial report that needs an external audit, Woooo scary conspiracy rant.
What Im saying is give us the big picture. Is it a school system that is streamlined with fewer buildings and 20% charter schools, supported with high end teaching technology not tracking technology. A component for high school students to receive technical training for jobs not requiring a college education. A special education programs that support students special needs. Students that are not seen is a drain on the system and more importantly not to be considered a negative component because they historically drag down TEST SCORES.
Please Dr. Sheffield be open and honest with your goals and objectives and you may be pleasantly surprised at the support you may receive from Rockford.