ED at TR

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Aurora Steinle is the interim ED. She has a history of affiliation with the school, although I can’t remember how - maybe the Board?

We (a longtime TR family) were honestly thrilled when we heard the previous ED was leaving. Things are fine under the interim ED - at least at a minimum we don’t feel like we are being misled by this one.

She was the chief of staff. She's an ed policy person, not a teacher/educator. (not that it's necessarily a bad thing, just an FYI)

To add some context, she's a bureaucrat. She's not a leader of anything.

I think TR will not exist in 8 years.

Many of the HoS, principals, and EDs are stuffed shirts with two years of teaching and a masters in "educational leadership." TR isn't unique in that respect.

TR was unique. The ED was a young AA woman who was "supervised" by a largely white Board. She wielded phrases like "equity" as a weapon to control them. To have asserted themselves would have exposed them to accusations of racism, and this Board suffers from the worst kind of liberal guilt; they'd rather have the ship go down than be accused of racism. In a field filed with stuffed shirts, she was unique. Years from now they will use her school facing comms as examples of how to say nothing in 5000 words.

Pedagogy matters in ECE. When you get to 3rd grade and up it is time to learn and manage classrooms. Hip phrases and philosophies don't really matter at that point.

NP here/former TR parent. Thank you for this honest assessment. This perfectly captures the entire mess.

[Anonymous]

Same. We were at TR for many years and left after the COVID completely virtual year. We realized that any advocacy for reason and attempts to support the students was totally ignored. We did not trust that our child was getting an adequate education anymore. It felt like there were no checks and balances. If we were still in DC, we would have transferred to our in bound DCPS. We moved out of DC

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Same. We were at TR for many years and left after the COVID completely virtual year. We realized that any advocacy for reason and attempts to support the students was totally ignored. We did not trust that our child was getting an adequate education anymore. It felt like there were no checks and balances. If we were still in DC, we would have transferred to our in bound DCPS. We moved out of DC

This rings true! Which campus were you at?

[Anonymous]

4th street, we were generally fine with the school pre-covid

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:4th street, we were generally fine with the school pre-covid

Were you ECE pre-covid? TR does that well. When real education and hormones start is where it crashes on its face.

[Anonymous]

No TR personal relationship, but I will say as someone who tracks charter transparency, their Board agendas minutes etc are always published, public and updated at way more regularity than any other charter I've seen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:4th street, we were generally fine with the school pre-covid

Were you ECE pre-covid? TR does that well. When real education and hormones start is where it crashes on its face.

This was our experience also. And pre-COVID, the relentless focus on “community” (constant reading of mission statement as someone else mentioned) really started to grate on me. The parent group of my DS friends also seemed to be strangely brainwashed by it all. But that’s my personal rub, my DS was happy there. But by 4th grade, he was soooo far behind in math and his teacher didn’t seem to care.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No TR personal relationship, but I will say as someone who tracks charter transparency, their Board agendas minutes etc are always published, public and updated at way more regularity than any other charter I've seen.

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I do not think the word "transparency" means what you think it means. Nor do I think that's the relevant concept here. Publishing summaries of board meetings at which the board utterly fails to meet its fiduciary obligations is not evidence of transparency. It is white washing failure and whistling past the graveyard. That the board continues to have meetings at which they explore none of the persistent failures, provide only cursory discussions of issues and praise failed leaders has nothing to do with transparency.

By your logic Bernie Madoff was transparent because he never missed an SEC filing deadline.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No TR personal relationship, but I will say as someone who tracks charter transparency, their Board agendas minutes etc are always published, public and updated at way more regularity than any other charter I've seen.

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I do not think the word "transparency" means what you think it means. Nor do I think that's the relevant concept here. Publishing summaries of board meetings at which the board utterly fails to meet its fiduciary obligations is not evidence of transparency. It is white washing failure and whistling past the graveyard. That the board continues to have meetings at which they explore none of the persistent failures, provide only cursory discussions of issues and praise failed leaders has nothing to do with transparency.

By your logic Bernie Madoff was transparent because he never missed an SEC filing deadline.

+100. LOL. Plus, who do you think approves the minutes and related governance documents before they are posted? The Board.

The TR Board is a complete joke.