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Above: Former Kambala Girls principal Debra Kelliher thanked her supporters
One of the nation's most prestigious girls' schools has "unreservedly" apologised to its former principal after settling a high-profile case defamation case out of court.
Kambala girls' school former principal Debra Kelliher was suing her former employer in the NSW Supreme Court and two of its teachers over emails sent in April 2017 she claimed had defamed her.
The emails were circulated in the days after Ms Kelliher resigned from the exclusive day and boarding school in Sydney's leafy Rose Bay after staff took a vote of no-confidence against her.The emails, penned by head music teacher Mark Grandison and head social science teacher June Peake, were sent to various parents, staff and former staff in the days following her resignation.
The matter was listed for a jury trial, however the two parties were keen to settle the dispute out of court to avoid media coverage and have since been negotiating out of court.The settlement amount was not disclosed.
However, when the defamation case was first launched, Ms Kelliher, who lost her $650,000 annual salary at the school, claimed losses of up to $2 million.
In an apology released this morning which was part of the settlement the school and the teachers involved said they "deeply regret, and unequivocally withdraw" the comments.
"Kambala, the school council, Mr Grandison and Ms Peake, all apologise unreservedly to Ms Kelliher for the publication of those emails and for the harm and hurt they have caused to her," the statement said.
Ms Kelliher said she was pleased this matter has been resolved and that the school had apologised for "the damaging comments made against me".
"I'm proud of my record as an educator," she said. "The work I undertook at Kambala [was] to build an inclusive school, which focused on the needs of the students.
"I'd like to thank the staff, parents, students and wider school community who have supported me during this time."
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Those who were part of Korero 2017 will recall that we were joined for the entirety of the gathering by Bishop Charles [above at Korero 2017], who is the Pastoral Leader of the Diocese of Palmerston North in New Zealand. He offered the following insightful reflection recently on the Diocesan website. His words resonate with many in the CaSPA community as we seek new understandings in areas such as the Governance of Catholic Education in Australia
Once every five years the priests in New Zealand meet nationally for a professional development week. This time it was in Christchurch. And the experience was seismic.
No priest or Bishop could have left that week unshaken. The two input speakers each very different from the other shook us to the core. Take your pick of the Titanic sinking or the Bismarck rudder-less going round in circles, the images of the Church (the barque of Peter) presented to us were brutally raw.
A central thesis of one of the speakers was that the festering wound of sexual abuse of minors, points to a wider and deeper fault-line running through the Church (something which historically has been seen as a mighty force and now is experienced as a pathetic weakness): clericalism.Clericalism is the appropriation by a clerical caste of what is proper to all the baptized. More simply put, it's a club mentality which renders the baptised subservient to preening priests.
I loathe clericalism. It makes me shudder. It's a hangover from tribal forms of priesthood where castes were set aside for temple service found in the Old testament, and which morphed into a culture of 'superiority' or entitlement, or as Jesus himself put it: "Lording it over others" see Mathew 20:25 and 1 Peter 5:3).Clericalism isn't an isolated phenomenon; it has close cousins. Misogyny, sexism, bullying, racism, paternalism, are also pathetic attempts to Lord it over others. Misogyny parading as theological orthodoxy is a particularly toxic example.
Of course this does not mean to say that organisations, including the Church, don't need strong leaders. Indeed, in times of crisis good leadership or governance is essential.That's where we are stuck though, going around in circles. So much ordinary leadership as well as formal governance in the Church has been tied to ordination and thus to priests and Bishops.
So where to next? Fresh theological study of baptism as a source of or, better put, call to leadership is already underway. We do not need to wait for its conclusions before we bring about change.Pope Francis's reform of the Church started with a bow; his is not primarily a theological reform. It is an attitudinal reform. He bowed to the world from the balcony of St Peter's on the night of his election and instead of 'telling us' he 'asked us' please bless me, bless pray for me. He spoke not 'at' but 'with' us, the baptised the universal Church indeed all humanity. This is a reform of the heart. Let us not underestimate its power for good. After all, clericalism is not a theology. It's a pathology. A pathology of arrogance and ignorance that has been a tumour in the Church for too long.
But back to governance or leadership. I like to use the metaphor of the table. Who sits at the table? This shifts discussion from laws and protocols to people and vision, from power and authority to gifts and talents, from in-groups and sycophancy to diversity and creative thinking.In Aotearoa we can point to some good examples within the Church. For example the Finance and Management Council of the Palmy Diocese, to which I am accountable, is chaired by a woman farmer and has diverse membership. Diversity is of course not about simply ticking "difference boxes"; it is about taking seriously the recognition that any governance structure needs a range of insights and experiences and intuitions at the table.
What about our Bishops table? It too needs to be broad. Diversity at a table does not mean that any one stops being who they are. When I sit at our Bishops' table, or any other table including kitchen tables, I sit there 100% as myself and therefore 100% as one who serves as a Bishop. Someone else's presence doesn't undermine me, doesn't dampen my voice as a Bishop or belittle my contribution. The presence of others in fact enhances me and saves us (Bishops) from the high risk of group monologue.How could it be threatening or undermining if we Bishops actually had at our table prolonged korero or discussion inching towards shared insight (Dei Verbum 8) and policy and planning with Mori, with women, with young leaders, with representatives of the tens of thousands of Catholics who in this land and Church we love, no longer sit at the table of the Lord on a Sunday?
May I conclude by recommending to you an opinion piece written by a key worker in the Palmerston North Diocesan office, Dave Mullin. It's entitled Six Men in a Leaky Boat (Split Enz fans will be smiling!) and while entirely his own article is also the fruit of chats we have had. Read it here.With humility, may our conversations and listening across the Diocese grow, as we seek to include ourselves in Pope Francis' reform of the heart of the Church.
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As you may be aware CaSPA is very interested in proposing new models of Governance for Catholic Education at the Plenary Council 2020. Meanwhile it would appear that some believe the default option is the highly centralised model where the CEO Director sits at the top of a hierarchical model of governance. This is not the model that saw Catholic Secondary education grow and develop in Australia.
Experience with government school systems also show that while the top down model might be "bureaucratically appealing", it does NOT necessarily result in improved educational outcomes as the following article points out:
For two decades, the prevailing wisdom among education philanthropists and policymakers has been that the U.S. school system needs the guiding hand of centralized standard-setting to discipline ineffective teachers and bureaucrats. Much of that direction was guided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent billions since 2000 to influence both schools and education policy.
But as schools open this year, top-down national initiatives based on standardized testing and curricular uniformity are in retreat.
Last fall, the Gates Foundation ended its support for a $575 million, six-year teacher-effectiveness project; the initiative had failed to meet the foundation's goals to "dramatically improve student outcomes," according to a recent study commissioned by the foundation.
Two dozen states started backing away from the Gates-backed Common Core State Standards not long after they were first embraced in 2010 (though many of these states retained "key elements" of the standards, according to a 2017 report by an education organization the foundation helps fund.) Earlier, the foundation acknowledged that "many of the small schools" that it invested in the foundation's first major education initiative "did not improve students' achievement in any significant way."
Now, the foundation seems to be stepping back from sweeping national initiatives in its bid to remake education. In the coming years, its K-12 philanthropy will concentrate on supporting what it calls "locally driven solutions" that originate among networks of 20 to 40 schools, according to Allan Golston, who leads the foundation's U.S. operations, because they have "the power to improve outcomes for black, Latino, and low-income students and drive social and economic mobility."
If Gates hews to its new plan, it will mark a significant change from the top-down approach that characterized not only the recent work of the foundation and the continuing focus of other education-minded philanthropies, but also government policy. Think of "No Child Left Behind," the 2001 federal program dictating that all children achieve "grade level" by 2014; schools that failed to reach that mandate risked being closed, though, in practice, the U.S. education department granted states waivers from the most onerous requirements.
Or "Race to the Top," the initiative of President Barack Obama's administration that offered cash to states that adopted the common-core curriculum and tied teacher evaluations to standardized test scores.
The Gates Foundation's pivot represents an acknowledgment that when it comes to education reform, local experiments "done with, not to schools," as Golston puts it, appear to be more promising than grand initiatives.
The foundation's new strategy bears a striking resemblance to an undertaking that took root in New York City nearly 50 years ago, during the financial crisis of the 1970s. At the time, the legendary teacher Deborah Meier, who would later become the first educator to win a MacArthur Foundation genius award, helped spark a small-school renaissance that came to encompass well over 100 schools throughout the city.
In the early 1990s, the Annenberg Foundation offered Meier $25 million to develop four independent school-network organizations. The idea was that small schools work best if they are supported by links to like-minded schools and can share knowledge and funding. Although political changes curtailed the impact of the Annenberg-funded networks, most survive to this day.
One mini-network that emerged during the Annenberg years caught the Gates foundation's attention: the Julia Richman Complex, a largely self-governing group of small public schools on the east side of Manhattan that share a building previously occupied by a defunct high school of that name. The foundation declared the complex a success and started to put up small schools across the country like so many tract houses in the midst of a real estate bubble. While some did well, many went bust. Eventually, the small-school strategy was written off as a failure and Gates abandoned it.
One reason: The foundation failed to heed the warning of Ann Cook, the founder of the Julia Richman Complex: "Small is necessary, but insufficient" for success, she said at the time.
What she meant was that the Julia Richman schools, like other networks of successful schools, had developed a unique culture, including essential training and pedagogical practices, that wasn't obvious to would-be imitators.
One of the longest-lived networks from the Meier era was the New York State Performance Standards Consortium, a network of about 30 high schools to which some of the Julia Richman schools belong. The consortium schools won state exemptions from standardized testing and require students instead to produce ambitious final projects, which demand a distinctive teaching approach focused on guiding students to pursue their own research and learning. Many of these schools also give teachers unusual influence in administration and curriculum decisions a system that works because new teachers typically undergo rigorous training and because turnover is low.
During Mayor Michael Bloomberg's final term ending in 2013, New York City's education department launched its own networking experiment, allowing schools to select teams of expert consultants in areas such as budgeting and special-education regulations and pay for them with their own funds (Bloomberg also had given principals control over their budgets). In the most successful cases, principals banded together with like-minded colleagues and schools, learning from each other. If they were dissatisfied, they could change networks. (Bloomberg is the owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Opinion.)
Although they were championed by some of New York City's best principals, the networks were dismantled by Bloomberg's successor, Mayor Bill DeBlasio.
Today, the Gates Foundation's K-12 strategy is run by Robert Hughes, the former president of New Visions for Public Schools, one of the four network organizations that had shared in Meier's Annenberg-financed project.
The biggest challenge for the foundation, which is accustomed to funding megaprojects and rigorously measuring them, will be to see beyond the data to the organizational culture that makes the best schools and networks work.
Nor has the foundation completely relinquished grand, top-down reforms. It just joined The City Fund, an ambitious new plan by a group of education-focused philanthropies to introduce a sweeping new initiative across "every city" in America that would, among other things, give them an expanded role in developing and running charter schools in arrangements that often limit local governance. So far the group has amassed $200 million $10 million from the Gates foundation.
From: Bloomberg, Andrea Gabor 4 September 2018
