The Education Wars: Oh, Those Administrators

This site asks a good question about why Chicago's public school system hired a former superintendent who was embroiled in a testing scandal:

Between August (or September) 2009 and early February 2010, Middleton served as one of the most powerful school officials in Chicago. As a result, she got to be part of the Board of Education's team that presented the "data" arrayed against Gillespie. According to her testimony, she was testifying on behalf of CEO Ron Huberman, who has yet to attend any of the hearings being conducted in his name.





Because the hearings on school turnarounds are one-sided to a shameful degree, nobody got to ask Geraldine Middleton how she could possibly know anything about Gillespie — or any other school in Chicago — since she was only hired by CEO Ron Huberman under a secret but now highly controversial change in decades-old Chicago policies that allowed the CEO to hire "Area Officers" who had no Chicago or Illinois teaching or administrative training or experience.




There is more. When Middleton was hired by Huberman and the Chicago Board of Education in August 2009, Middleton was in the middle of a scandal back in North Caroline involving a common but unsavory response to "data driven management" — cheating to raise scores on standardized tests. One of Middleton's principals had been accused of cheating on the North Caroline PACT tests to provide Middleton with "data" to show how much things were improving. Middleton had been hired to hear the Halifax County school system in order to raise test scores, and she had done so — until the scandal called into question some of the methods used.



Instead of remaining in North Carolina as she had promised to clear the record, Middleton answered the call of Ron Huberman and arrived in Chicago to take one of the higest-paid and most powerful jobs in the Chicago Public Schools.