Business and community leaders of Jacksonville: Last year’s Iowa Test fiasco (see below) is simply one of many reasons why your support of Superintendent Vitti is misguided.

Many problems in Education arise from well-meaning leaders who are not experts in Education. I consider the business leaders, pastors and community leaders supporting Dr. Vitti to fall into this category.

If our leaders truly want to make Education in Jacksonville better (I’m certain they do), they would do so by insisting on Dr. Vitti’s removal.

Pastors serving high-risk communities: I have spoken to a number of DCPS officials regarding the District’s increased African-American graduation rate.

The conclusion? DCPS has become more thorough in purging ineligible dropouts from the system. Doing so is completely ethical. Claiming that clerical adjustment as a victory against inequality, not as much.

Additionally, Vitti delivered a mandate (detailed below) forcing most high school program coordinators to teach full loads of classes. This directly harmed teachers’ ability to coordinate after-school programs for all teenagers, disadvantaged or otherwise.

Business and community leaders: The ultimate job of DCPS leadership is to facilitate the education of children in classrooms. It does not matter how many initiatives Dr. Vitti begins, how much money he raises, etc., if these programs and funds do not facilitate the delivery of education in Jacksonville’s classrooms. Some concrete examples of how Nikolai Vitti has failed to facilitate — and has actually harmed — the education of Jacksonville’s children:

Vitti’s regime is disorganized and does not treat the first day of school as a hard deadline. Student head-count estimates often do not reflect reality, and it is likely intentional. For example, Sandalwood has always had 3000-3300 students. Last year, DCPS budgeted for just 2200 even though there was no rational basis to do so. Our final head-count was ~3000 students, just like previous years. As a result, First Coast News responded to parent complaints on our 70-100 student math classes that had to be moved to the auditorium. The District hired extra teachers about two months into the year, leading to students’ education being interrupted by involuntary schedule changes. This saved the District two months of teachers’ salary for nearly 1,000 students at Sandalwood alone (not counting other schools) — at the expense of actually educating those students.

Vitti places incompetent cronies into instructional support positions. You can find my first-hand experience here.

Vitti has brought with him a culture of fear and hierarchy where teachers are forced to delay resolution of instructional issues by filtering issues through their principals rather than contacting resources directly. Teachers who contact district personnel directly with pertinent issues risk bringing sharp rebuke upon themselves and their principals (to my knowledge, this was unheard of before Vitti).

Vitti makes changes blindly without regard to proper transition, or to consequences, such as the following:



Vitti spent $1.2 million on the Iowa test (PDF Warning) without realizing the money was only for the first half of the exam. The Iowa Test requires two administrations to be valid (“The Reading Comprehension test at Levels 9 through 14 is administered in two separate testing periods of 25 and 30 minutes. By reducing fatigue, this two-session format increases motivation, helps maintain test takers’ focus, and results in dependable scores.“) Call your local middle/high school reading teacher and ask if they ever gave their students the second administration of the Iowa test last year. When DCPS learned the $1.2 million they spent did not include the second administration, they quietly abandoned the exam, discarding its results. $1.2 million and thousands of student-days were lit on fire by Vitti’s incompetence.

Vitti tried to replace relevant, employable Career Education programs with what I, along with managers from the IT departments of CSX, Florida Blue, Bank of America, and others considered to be unemployable garbage.

Vitti shuffled a number of principals mid-year last year. Why not wait until the end of the year to avoid disruption? The obvious answer may unfortunately be the correct one: that Vitti doesn’t care enough about disrupting children’s education.

Vitti increased the high school “day” from 7 periods to 8 without hiring more teachers. Business leaders of Jacksonville: please explain the resource management Vitti used to add 14% more classes without adding 14% more teachers. Much of the burden fell upon athletic directors, program coordinators, librarians, etc., who taught a full load of classes without extra pay in addition to other responsibilities. Corners are cut somewhere, meaning students suffer. Elective classes, and even many core classes (including all Math above Algebra II and all Science above Biology) being subject to having unbelievable numbers — again, math classes of 70-100 kids were reported by First Coast News.

Vitti’s unfunded mandate forced school librarians to teach classes, closing libraries at 32 Jacksonville middle and high schools (PDF Warning). You know who this hurts? Low-income children who have neither a computer nor a parent/car available to take them to the local library to do research. For those children, the school library is their only place to conduct research, because the school bus provides the transportation needed.

A quote from Joey Frencl, Duval County Teacher of the Year: “[I] plead with the School Board and Dr. Vitti to fully fund library/media services in Duval County. Is the public aware that the libraries at these high schools lack a certified library/media specialist and are basically closed to students: N.B. Forrest, Robert E. Lee, William Raines, Jean Ribault, Atlantic Coast, Englewood, First Coast, Fletcher and six other high schools. Libraries are closed at 18 middle schools including Baldwin, Darnell Cookman, Ft. Caroline, Landon, LaVilla, Mayport, Stilwell and JEB Stuart. This information was gathered by my calling each school in November and asking who was staffing the library/media center.”

Vitti has replaced American Government paper-based curriculum with computer-based curriculum without providing computers to access it, and also implemented iPad-based reading curriculum without providing sufficient iPads in a timely fashion (“timely fashion” is crucial), sufficient Macintosh computers for teachers to present the curriculum, or Wi-Fi access points capable of supporting a classroom’s worth of devices at once. This means hundreds (certainly) or thousands (likely) of struggling readers went days, even weeks in some cases, not receiving mandated reading instruction.

Business leaders of Jacksonville: please understand that if even one of the above is true, it would be devastating to the education of those students affected. Now understand, that all of them are true, and all are attributable to Nikolai Vitti.

Business leaders, if you had a project manager with the above track record, they would likely be fired. I am confident that the reason you support Vitti is because you are unaware of the issues above. I am imploring Jacksonville’s business, community and religious leaders, along with the Duval County School Board, to withdraw their support of Dr. Vitti, so that they can instead support Jacksonville’s children. Whether you realize it or not, supporting both is mutually exclusive.

Change can be good, even great. Stagnation is always bad. But change is destructive when going in the wrong direction, or implemented improperly. Change must be balanced with some semblance of reason and stability.

Instead, Vitti has implemented numerous disjointed initiatives and abandoned nearly as many, giving few (if any) of his plans sufficient time to work. This is not a problem of needing more time, this is an incurable problem of Vitti being an objectively bad leader. There are more examples out there. Anyone defending Vitti, in my humble opinion, isn’t looking at what he’s doing closely enough.

In closing: please understand, I’m not a politician or bureaucrat. I’m a former teacher whose goal is to improve Jacksonville’s Public Schools. Vitti has never done anything to me personally. I simply believe he has been and will continue to be bad for Jacksonville. I also believe I have presented ample evidence to support this opinion.

School Board, it’s not too late to buy out Vitti’s extended contract. In fact, you could do so for less than the cost of half an Iowa Test.

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