Madison’s New Superintendent

I’ve found the Madison public schools’ new superintendent.

Her name is Katharine Birbalsingh. The British educator, 49, has developed an international reputation for a no-nonsense approach. She was the subject of a lengthy interview in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. Here are some inspiring excerpts.

Ms. Birbalsingh herself is of mixed heritage, with an Indian-Guyanese father and an Afro-Jamaican mother. 

The British media never tires of calling her “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress”—the title of a friendly ITV documentary—sometimes with the peculiar affection that the British reserve for women who wield a firm hand, but usually as a way of marking her out as a prickly anachronism of whom you should be wary. She started Michaela (the equivalent of an American charter school) four years after she was run out of a state school for making a brief speech at the annual Conservative Party Conference, in which she said that Britain’s school system “is broken, because it keeps poor children poor.” As she sums up her argument in our interview, it is that “black children fail because of what white liberals do and think.” (My emphasis added.)

Children, she says, “need lots of discipline. And when I say discipline, I don’t just mean they need to be able to sit on a chair.” They need to be able “to work hard both in the classroom and outside, to engage with the learning and really want to listen to the teacher, to be interested in the subject matter, to be able to strategize for their lives and have goals.” They need to understand “how their behavior now will affect their futures, and the kinds of people they will be.”

When people recoil from the word, Ms. Birbalsingh tells them that she means “a discipline of mind, of attitude. Ignoring this is one of the ways we let our children down—all children, but it especially hurts the disadvantaged.” Her small-c conservatism is equally plain-spoken, with its emphasis on “personal responsibility, and a sense of duty towards others. People don’t like it when I talk about that.”

I’m already dancing on the edge of fair usage, so I’ll stop here, but I wish I could just cut and paste the whole article. I encourage you to read all of it. Read it and weep.

That’s because there is zero chance that the Madison School Board would hire anyone like Birbalsingh. In the last hiring process a few years ago, a board with some of the same members and the same profile hired an educator out of Texas who took the job, then took a look around, and decided to stay in Texas. Then they hired Carlton Jenkins, who spent three years avoiding the press, the public and, as far as I can tell, doing much of anything.

Their choice for interim superintendent is Lisa Kvistad, who, based on one interview in the Wisconsin State Journal, shows some promise. We’ll see. But given the past actions of this board I’m not optimistic that they will attract top-notch candidates or that they would hire one given the opportunity. After all, this is a board whose newest member said during her campaign that “schools are the product of white supremacy.” Oh, for cryin’ out loud…

Madison schools are losing students in the fastest growing city in the state. Teachers feel dispirited and powerless. Test scores are down. The racial achievement gap is stuck where it is. The board just passed a preliminary budget that probably can’t be sustained after the COVID money is gone.

It’s a mess. And yet all but one or two of the seven board members are focussed on abstract notions of “equity” which, as Birbalsingh points out, end up moving us ever further away from anything like what’s needed to help struggling kids succeed.

What Madison needs is a dramatic departure from the direction of this board. We need the common sense of a woman like Katharine Birbalsingh. But until the voters come around to that view — and I’m not at all sure that they ever will — we’re stuck on this downward trajectory.

And on another matter... let’s hear it for Randall Stephenson. Stephenson resigned from board of the PGA over its pending deal to be purchased by the Saudi government. “I have serious concerns with how this framework agreement came to fruition without board oversight,” Stephenson wrote in his resignation letter, adding he cannot “objectively evaluate or, in good conscience support” it “particularly in light of the U.S. intelligence report concerning Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.” Khashoggi, a journalist who had been critical of the Saudi government, was murdered on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It’s only one example of murders and torture used to silence anyone who dares take on MBS.