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APS is one of the higher paid Metro areas districts, I'm pretty sure. Their salary information is down right now, so I can't check.
You guys doing the North Fulton/ South Fulton comparison are looking at a whole different district, but it's an interesting comparison with APS at the South Fulton level.
The demographics are comparable, but there's no systemic South Fulton cheating scandal. South Fulton schools aren't necessarily known for their great administration and some are really hard to staff, and yet, nothing like an APS response to testing pressure.
It's one thing to talk about supporting a struggling district, but if the district has repeated demonstrated that it mismanaged money and already has a surplus of county level administrators and non-classroom positions, what are you really going to do? What form does the support take?
And something else to consider, especially as data analysis seems to show a lot of the seemingly good urban results failing apart in terms of suspicious test gains, is that it's really hard to find people who have demonstrated success in schools like APS and South Fulton. Someone who can be a great principal with the situation at Chattahoochee doesn't necessarily have the skill set necessarily to make it happen at Tri-Cities. Just because a teacher can teach the heck out of kids at Walton doesn't mean he or she can motivate the kids at Crim. Even if you raised salaries to the point that people applied, a lot of suburban folks who look good on paper because they've been at schools with a lot of academic parental involvement, are simply not going to be able to get the job done without it.
I'm certainly not saying that we quit trying, but saying districts shouldn't be left to struggle and actually figuring out what to do are wildly different things. Most of the things people think will work have been tried in various forms.
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