At the behest of the board superintendent Vitti did a self-evaluation where he rated himself highly effective in 47 out of 48 categories. The only place Vitti gave himself less than an 8 is under parents, staff and students school safety.
Okay, that’s a big one but then again he has only been on the job 7 months.
Where I do like some of the things the super had done I don’t think I would be all that generous.
There was his gaff with the teacher’s academy, which was mandatory before it wasn’t mandatory.
There has been an apparent disconnect with what the administration is saying and what librarians are hearing. He says everything is fine where the librarians are hearing the sky is falling.
Quite frankly he has spent too much time promoting corporate reforms. He has doubled down on Teach for America, which does the exact opposite of what we know to be best practices, preferring to go with them instead of trying to put life long educators in our classrooms. And then he has sped up the march of charters in the county including attending a conference about how to attract more charter schools. I sometimes wonder does he work for the people of Jacksonville or does he work for Gary Chartrand
His reorganization is a risky one. Yes we had to many administrators and yes a lot of them had risen above their ability but he now runs the risk of putting a lot of pissed off people in our schools, bumping quality school based administrators and having the whole thing blow up in our faces. There is a lot of risk reward here.
Then there are his promotions. The creation of area chiefs is a brilliant idea but many of us in the trenches wish he would have hired leaders not bullies masquerading as administrators to fill the positions. I have heard varying degrees of “oh my God, what has he done” about three of them.
If I were rating him, I would put him at the low end of effective, which is probably the best we should expect from somebody who has never run anything nearly as big as DCPS over his first seven months. He has had some nice ideas but he is not walking on water.
