We don’t know who the candidates are for HISD Superintendent, but at least we know how many of them there are. There’s a Heisenberg joke in there somewhere, I’m just not certain how to find it.
The Houston school board president said Thursday that trustees could possibly hire a new superintendent in the new few weeks.
The board interviewed three candidates for the job Thursday, bringing the total number to eight.
Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra plans to step down Aug. 31.
“Our goal would be to have someone in place on or before Aug. 31,” school board President Larry Marshall said.
Asked if that was likely, he said, “It seems achievable.”
The board plans to conduct more closed-door interviews next week, perhaps as early as Monday, said Les Csorba, one of the board’s search consultants. Csorba and Marshall would not say whether the upcoming interviews will be with new candidates or follow-ups with ones interviewed already.
“I can’t tell you whether it’s round two, three, four, five or six,” Marshall said. “We’re still in the ring.”
Csorba, a partner with Heidrick & Struggles, said the search still is open for last-minute applicants who wanted to lead the Houston Independent School District.
“It’s starting to get late,” he said. “The window’s closing.”
Well, whoever it is will have to deal with this.
Nearly 90 percent of Houston ISD schools meet federal accountability standards, state officials announced today, but the school district itself faces possible sanctions for failing to meet the mark, as do a handful of chronically under-performing campuses.
The preliminary federal ratings come one week after HISD celebrated a record number of schools — 77 percent — achieved top ratings under the state system.
Although both rating systems are based largely on students’ scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, they often produce conflicting results.
Twenty-nine HISD campuses — including Challenge Early College High School and T.H. Rogers Elementary School, both rated exemplary by the state last week — failed to meet the federal mark.
HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra lamented the conflicting accountability measures.
“The results are extremely confusing,” he said. “It does not make sense when schools that receive the state’s highest rating receive the federal government’s lowest rating and schools that receive the state’s lowest rating receive the federal government’s highest rating. We have long maintained that these two systems need to be aligned so that there is just one, clearly understood method for determining accountability.”
Good luck with that, whoever you are. And please note, the problem here may be with the state standards, or at least the way they’re computed, not the federal standards.