This is the first in a three-part series about decisions made by Alexandria Public Schools Superintendent Morton Sherman during his first two years as superintendent. Two months, dozens of interviews and 774 pages of documents acquired via Freedom of Information requests revealed details about upheaval in the central office and Sherman’s long-time use of outside consultants. This series is also being published by the Alexandria Gazette.

By Paige Winfield Cunningham

The Alexandria public school district has nearly tripled the amount of money spent on consultants at a time it faces financial challenges.

But the issue isn’t just dollars and cents. Teachers say they are spending too much time away from their classrooms being lectured by high-price consultants.

Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman is at the center of this fiscal and educational controversy.

The year before Sherman took the reins at the Alexandria City Public Schools, ACPS spent $379,000 on staff development. Spending began to grow after he arrived in 2008, and totaled $940,000 during the last school year. Consultants range from individuals who have known Sherman for decades to larger firms from the northeast.

Ingrid Sanden, parent to a child who recently entered an ACPS elementary school, said she’s concerned that training could be overkill — especially when it takes teachers away from time with students.

“I don’t like it when they’re outside the classroom,” Sanden said. “We feel like teachers need training, but I’m not sure they want all this training to be honest. The teachers I’ve talked to are like, ‘I can’t wait to get back in the classrooms.’”

Sherman has increased spending on consultants as the district has grappled with a stagnating budget and rapidly growing student population. Over the last two years, the district’s budget grew by 1.4 percent, while student enrollment increased by 6.9 percent.

But Superintendent Sherman contends his approach of using outside consultants is crucial to reforming a district that has failed for years to meet state and federal standards.

“What I’ve said is you must have the professional development and here are the outside consultants that can do it,” Sherman said. “My hope is within a year we won’t have any of these consultants. They’ll all be gone because we’ll have trained internal people to do it.”

[For video of Sherman, click here]

But bringing consultants in just temporarily was not what Sherman did at his last two school districts. Two of the highest-paid outside consultants at ACPS were employed through most of Sherman’s eight years at the Cherry Hill district in New Jersey.

Heavy use of outside consultants is one of Sherman’s trademarks, say former school board members who worked with Sherman during his tenure at Cherry Hill and more briefly at Tenafly, another New Jersey school district.

The emphasis Sherman places on professional development illustrates a leadership style that some love, and some hate. Ask 10 different people about Sherman, and you’ll get 10 different answers, say those who knew him at the Cherry Hill and Tenafly school districts.

To supporters, Sherman is a visionary who doesn’t mind ruffling feathers. But to critics, he’s obsessed with celebrity consultants and programs that pull teachers away from their classrooms and load them down with more busy work.

“He’s a controversial person,” says Sharon Giaccio, who served on the Cherry Hill school board at the beginning and at the end of Sherman’s eight and one-half years at the district. “I’m in the huge fan category.”

During Sherman’s time at Cherry Hill, more than half of the schools became certified to offer International Baccalaureate programs. He reduced class sizes in the elementary schools, opened a new middle school, instituted full-day kindergarten at the Title 1 schools and cut down on vocational classes at the high schools.

He also brought in Bena Kallick and Fran Prolman — the two highest-paid individual consultants working for ACPS last year — to help map out curriculum and hold teacher training. Consultants were used in a lot of different ways, says Giaccio. Sometimes, employees would be directed to read a piece or material and the consultant would then moderate a discussion.

“In those types of cases I was very comfortable,” Giaccio said. “[But] in some cases, you would wonder why didn’t this person just get hired as an employee.”

Neither Kallick nor Prolman continued working for Cherry Hill after Sherman left that school district, according to records obtained from the district.

Sherman revamped spending so much that people renamed the popular “Macarena” dance after him, says Donna Cohen, who served as president of the school board during some of Sherman’s time there.

“He would put his hands down and do this chopping movement down,” Cohen said. “The folks in the town called it the ‘Morterena.’”

Cohen is also in the “huge fan” category. She says he’s an “extraordinarily capable man” who seems to work constantly.

No matter what their opinion of Sherman, everyone seems to describe him as possessing an incredible work ethic. He has “limitless energy and appears to work 21 hours a day,” says Susan Bastnagel, who served as Sherman’s executive assistant.

But that energy was often channeled into efforts that stirred up controversy. Sherman left Cherry Hill in December 2005 amid squabbles over I.B. The program is so controversial, in part, because it costs $19,000 to apply and can cost hundreds of thousands more to meet requirements.

Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, I.B. offers standardized college level courses and tests—similar to Advanced Placement. Middle and elementary school courses have been added since a group of teachers began the program in the 1960’s. In the U.S., the I.B. program is found on about 500 campuses, according to the program’s website.

“At the end of his time here, his detractors were calling him slick, or a camera hog, or arrogant,” Bastnagel said.

Sherman then became superintendent in Tenafly, N.J., where he spent two and one-half years before coming to Alexandria. He put Kallick to work there as well, paying her $45,000 to lead staff meetings, review new curriculum and generally advise, according to district records.

His defining work at Tenafly was standardizing curriculum among the elementary, middle and high schools and emphasizing professional development, says Richard Press, vice president of the Tenafly school board.

“He is probably one of the most knowledgeable and cutting-edge educators I’ve ever met, and having worked with him for two years, he left what I would say is an indelible mark on the school district for the better,” Press said.

Scores on the New Jersey statewide High School Proficiency Assessments (HSPA) fell slightly during Sherman’s time at Tenafly. The year he joined the district, 97 percent of students met or exceeded proficiency in reading and writing and 94 percent did the same for math. The year he left, 95 percent met those benchmarks in reading and writing and 93 percent in math.

It’s more difficult to measure results in Cherry Hill, because the HSPA was not created until 2001 — four years after Sherman joined the district. But from 2001 until he left in 2005, scores rose considerably.

Now in Alexandria, Sherman has brought his emphasis on I.B. and professional development to the district. Two middle schools are pursing the I.B. program: Jefferson-Houston is a candidate school, while Mount Vernon has filed an application.

Sherman has also brought in Prolman, Kallick and a number of other consultants to hold teacher trainings in the ACPS schools last year and again this year. District officials say the development trainings will translate into results in the classroom. But to recently retired teacher Mike Penn, they just added to the “to-do” list for already exhausted teachers.

“I stopped going to the rah-rah sessions because I was tired of hearing them reinvent the wheel,” Penn said.

Mike Penn worked at T.C. Williams for 36 years, holding vocational classes and working with students to place them in jobs around the community. Although he’d hoped to work for another few years, he decided to retire in July after taking a 14-day pay cut, losing his office and a dedicated phone line and dealing with a schedule turned inside-out.

He credits many of the changes to an ongoing push for students to excel in Virginia’s Standard of Learning tests, thus reducing focus on vocational learning. But he says the stress he felt during his last year was shared by his colleagues as well, as they were put under more pressure to attend after-school trainings.

“I think it actually got to the point where the teachers were saying, ‘we gotta go to one more session but I’d rather go home and get some rest so I can be fresh for tomorrow,’” Penn said. “I think it got to the point where it was overkill.”

Delbert Wilson, president of the Alexandria Retired Teachers’ Association, said he’s been hearing similar complaints from retirees this year — that more work than usual was added to their plates. Teachers tend to think of professional development as money that could be better spent, he said.

“Typically the conclusion is that the money isn’t well spent,” Wilson said. “In general, when you bring in all the consultants and all that kind of thing, the feeling is, ‘oh, here we go again.’”

Ever since T.C. Williams was designated a “Persistently Low-Achieving” school in March, officials have chosen to meet federal requirements by undergoing a “transformation” over the next three years. That means students and teachers must create individualized achievement and learning plans, there will be monthly assessments and external consultants will be brought in.

“It was truly a requirement to go outside the school,” said Sherman. “By having an external set of eyes, you’re going to do things differently, so Marty and Bena were hired as outside consultants.”

But Kallick and Marty Brooks, along with dozens of other new consultants, were already being paid by ACPS before the persistently low achieving school designation. Of those contracted to work with the high school during its transformation, most were already working for the district.

Along with Kallick and Brooks, Jon Saphier, the Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project, Ron Ferguson and Lucy West’s organization, Metamorphosis TLC, had already performed services for ACPS.

The Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project, operating out of Columbia University, signed its first contract with ACPS in December 2008 — at the close of Sherman’s first semester with the district. Since then, ACPS has paid the firm $325,000 to provide on-site teacher training at each of the schools as well as district- wide conferences for $1,750 per day. The firm was also paid $121,734 during Sherman’s time at Cherry Hill.

Sherman is also bringing in Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond for “oversight of implementation,” according to a memo he sent to the school board in May.

That Sherman delights in mingling with those on the education A-list is no secret. Although he is a member of the Hawn Foundation’s board of directors, he used tax dollars to pay the foundation for a day of training with Jefferson-Houston teachers last year.

Sherman also brought actress Goldie Hawn, the founder of the Hawn Foundation, in to speak at the T.C. Williams convocation in 2008. He spent $2,379 in school district money on a dinner at Landini Brothers in Old Town Alexandria for Hawn, school board members and area officials — in lieu of paying Hawn any kind of honorarium, he said. The Hawn foundation is a 5-year-old old non-profit foundation that promotes childhood development.

He’s also hired Betsi Shays, wife of former Connecticut U.S. Rep. Chris Shays (R), to earn $146,000 directing a new office combining curriculum and professional development efforts called the “Alliance for Learning and Leading.” Shays worked at the Peace Corps from 1998 to 2007, and then served as a director in the International Affairs Office at the U.S. Department of Education before joining ACPS.

Harvard professor Ron Ferguson, who’s involved in the T.C. Williams transformation, was paid $10,701 last year after lecturing at a district-sponsored community forum.

The influx of nationally recognized experts is a positive for ACPS because the system used to be “insular,” says school board chairman Yvonne Folkerts. The complaints she’s been hearing about too many teacher trainings are typical criticisms — even before Sherman came to Alexandria, she said.

“I found it was terrific we had someone from Harvard, we had someone from Stanford, we had national experts come in,” Folkerts said.

Despite the controversy, the former Cherry Hill and Tenafly board members say he’s gifted at connecting with school boards and persuading them to support his initiatives. Robert Watling, who worked as a budget supervisor for the district during Sherman’s first year there, remembers Sherman once expressing that confidence to him.

“I think one of the comments he made to me was that basically he knows the outcome of a meeting before he goes to it,” Watling said.

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