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Manny Caulk, FCPS superintendent
A month after Manny Caulk started his job as the new superintendent for Fayette County Public Schools, he was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his sinus cavity. Four months later, after undergoing an 18-hour surgery to remove the tumor, Caulk is back on the job and using his medical experiences as a learning opportunity for himself and the school district.
“I went to Markey Cancer Center as a patient, but over time there, I became more of a researcher,” Caulk said.
Caulk, who served as the superintendent of schools in Portland, Maine, before joining FCPS in August, holds that teachers and school administrators looking to improve educational outcomes can learn a lot from today’s health care system.
During his recuperation, Caulk spent time observing hospital processes and procedures, he said, and asking about the skills required for employees in today’s health care industry. Soft skills, such as the ability to work collaboratively, problem-solve and communicate well, were key — not just for doctors and nurses, but for every employee in the organization, all the way to the hospital’s custodial staff .
But that wasn’t all that Caulk noticed. On-the-job training and practice, through techniques such as the regular medical rounds conducted with resident students, was experiential and collaborative. At the same time, technology is transforming the field, bringing new procedures and techniques online that weren’t possible a decade ago. And perhaps most importantly, it all revolves around creating a positive outcome and a better experience for the patient.
“You look at education and health care, and we are both at the crossroads,” Caulk said. “If you look at health care, it’s moving to be more patient-centered. Education, in my opinion, should be moving more toward being student-centered.”
That is part of the vision that Caulk hopes to bring to Fayette County during his tenure.
For Caulk, student-centered education means learning experiences that are customized to individual needs, that embrace the passions and interests of each child and that leverage technology to extend learning beyond the average school day. For most individuals who have graduated from high school today, their K-12 educational experience revolved around classrooms filled with students, all sitting in rows of identical desks, reading the same page of the same lesson in identical textbooks.
“That shouldn’t be the future of education,” Caulk said.
At the same time, Caulk is taking the helm at a time when FCPS is being pressed to address longstanding achievement gaps in reading and math for its African-American students, special-needs students, students with limited English proficiency and students living in or near poverty levels.
In a letter sent to FCPS board chair John Price in May 2015, Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday warned that swift improvements were needed from the district to close the gaps and improve low-performing schools. Among other district deficiencies, Holliday’s letter noted a persistent lack of processes to ensure continuous improvement, problems with isolated departments that do not collaborate effectively, the lack of a comprehensive data system to inform decision-making at all levels and the need for comprehensive professional development plans to support the district’s teachers.
Caulk said the district is moving to address those concerns, starting with the recently completed Comprehensive District Improvement Plan, which serves as a working roadmap focused on novice reduction.
In Caulk’s view, the goal of student-centered education and the district’s imperative of novice reduction are not mutually exclusive.
“The challenge is how to create more opportunities for more students,” he said, noting as an example the success of the district’s Carter G. Woodson Academy, which was modeled on the Black Males Working enrichment program that began at First Baptist Church Bracktown to raise the academic bar for African-American boys in the community. “You can still offer choice and get at closing that opportunity gap and what I call educational equity,” Caulk said.
Creating those opportunities requires a community of cooperative support, Caulk added, noting that the local business community has shown strong support of the district’s efforts.
“That’s one of the things that attracted me to Fayette County,” Caulk said. “When you look at the focus of the business community, it’s on education, and rightfully so. … For any community, it’s investment in its children is its greatest economic development strategy.”
Caulk also sees the need for FCPS to support more collaboration at all levels within its own organization. For starters, the district established principal learning networks in October, in which school principals meet with their peers once a month to share practices and gain insight from each other. Previously, Caulk said, most principals operated their schools more or less independently, without an established system to gain peer input or mutual feedback.
Caulk equated the new networks to the medical rounds he witnessed at Markey.
“We have our principals as that frontline physician, if you will, in the school setting, along with our teachers,” Caulk said. “We are looking at leadership excellence across the district ... The expectation is that our leaders work together and help each other and build that capacity.”
Caulk hopes to take the concept a step further, he said, by implementing similar instructional rounds at the classroom level, with some pilots to be launched as early as this school year.
Caulk has also initiated several audits to collect data on different programs and operations, including a recent audit of the district’s career technical education (CTE) program, conducted in partnership with the Kentucky Department of Education. A districtwide audit of the FCPS central office operations is expected to wrap up near the end of the current school year, and additional examinations are in the works for the district’s special education, English as a Second Language (ESL), and gifted and talented programs. After the data is collected, Caulk’s intent is to synthesize that information into a strategic plan for the district that he hopes to start implementing next year. And similar to what he observed within the health care system, the spotlight will be centered on the key player in the process.
“We are looking to build a world-class system of great schools,” Caulk said. “We are not focused on adult issues. We can’t be. It gets in the way. We have to be focused on what’s best for students.”