How many of you know about or remember Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s current “five-year plan” – “A Journey of Excellence” – to accelerate the use of technology from 2010 to 2015? If you don’t, there’s no need to get your undies in a bunch, because it is expiring this year.

We’ve written about “A Journey of Excellence” and what appears to be its lack of meaningful academic achievement in the past, including in our 05.15.09, 09.16.09, 06.06.11, 09.08.14 and 09.18.14 posts.  We’ve noted how D-64 keeps getting away with spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars doing what legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden always discouraged with the warning “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.”

But if you have a perverse fascination for trying to figure out how D-64 keeps getting away with it, you might actually enjoy D-64’s website history of the expiring “Journey” – starting with the “4-page PDF list including Action Plans” (with its page 2 commitment that “Student performance on the…(ISATs) will always compare favorably with other high-achieving districts”) and the colorful “Strategic Plan Implementation Schedule 2012-13”.

Not surprisingly, we couldn’t find any reports, presentations, news releases, or any other form of communication on that “Strategic Plan” webpage – the latest of which is dated April 22, 2013 – that actually shows, or even talks about, how D-64’s ISATs “compare favorably with other high-achieving districts.” In fact, we Googled for a solid 20 minutes and could not come up with one instance of D-64’s Board or administration providing any objective and/or numerical comparisons of D-64 ISATs that demonstrate favorable comparisons with other “high-achieving districts.”

That’s because D-64 has learned that dangling the carrot of increased achievement is a great marketing tool for convincing wishful parents and gullible taxpayers that there really are silver bullets for achieving academic excellence; and that D-64 has come up with them through its latest five-year plan. And once that convincing has occurred, making sure those parents and taxpayers don’t realize they’ve been snookered is the key to D-64’s ability to dangle another carrot in front of them five years later.

Which is what it’s doing with the announcement that it is forming a 30-35 member “Strategic Planning Steering Committee” to help the District create a new five-year plan that will “identify the most important challenges District 64 will need to address in the next five years, and how the District might go about planning for those challenges,” according to Supt. Laurie Heinz.

For those of you who have been through these goat rodeos before, you won’t be surprised to read such cliches as “community-driven strategic planning process” that will involve “a wide range of community stakeholders” and allow “all stakeholders…to contribute their ideas and vision” by…wait for it…”completing a survey or participating in a focus group.”

What would one of these rodeos be without stakeholders, surveys and focus groups?

And just for good measure, the committee “will be guided by a highly experienced, outside facilitator” who will be paid a sizable chunk of our tax dollars to make sure all the goats get herded in exactly the direction the D-64 administration and the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA,” a/k/a the teachers union) want them to go.

It won’t be as impressive as John Wayne surveying a herd of steers and saying “Take ’em to Missouri, Matt,” but it’s likely to be as close as you’re going to get with goats and government.

At the risk (albeit a minute one) of taking away all the fun, expense and faux suspense of this strategic planning goat rodeo, however, we offer the following “challenges” D-64 will need to address within the next five years:

1.  Improving the quality of D-64 education so that student performance and other measurable values actually provide a formidable incentive to our higher-achieving and more demanding current residents to stay here rather than to emigrate to Glenview, Northbrook, Northfield, Wilmette, etc. for their better-scoring school districts; and a formidable incentive for such achieving/demanding non-residents to relocate to Park Ridge instead of to Glenview, Northbrook, et al.

2.  Negotiating a taxpayer-focused collective bargaining agreement with the PREA in 2016 that ends automatic annual raises to teachers for no improved student performance. During the five years of “A Journey of Excellence,” base teacher salaries have increased a total of 11% (not counting “step” and “lane” increases, or any “spikes” for soon-to-retire teachers in order to juice-up pensions) while student achievement based on ISATs appears to have been flat or declined in comparison to “high-achieving districts.”

3.  Convincing folks whose kids have finished using D-64 (and D-207) education that such education will continue to improve and provide an increasing cost-benefit value that will ensure continued appreciation of their home value, thereby discouraging the economic death spiral of current/imminent net-payers selling their homes to current/imminent net-users – the former of whom pay roughly $4,000 of RE taxes to D-64 while the latter of whom pay that same $4,000 but take out $14,000 per kid of “free” education.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for D-64’s Board, administration, or any “highly experienced outside facilitator” to focus on these kinds of “challenges.” They’ll be too busy trying to herd the goats into the pen they’ve already chosen for the next five years.

Just as soon as they declare the most recent five-year plan a shining success simply because it put an iPad or Chromebook in every kid’s hands.

To read or post comments, click on title.