right direction? Definitely yes!"" title="Valerie Forti: "Are we moving in theright direction? Definitely yes!""/>right direction? Definitely yes!"
Name: Valerie Forti
Age: 45
Position: Executive Director, Business Education Roundtable, a nonprofit
organization made up of the state’s top CEOs, devoted to improving the state’s
public education system
Education: Master’s in Public Administration, Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University
Background: Served seven years as assistant director of the Office of Education
Accountability for the Kentucky legislature, on the executive staff of Kentucky’s
attorney general and in 1983 created a program for children in-crisis called Project
Safe Place, which now operate in 185 cities nationwide
Family: Two children
Residence: Providence
PBN: Who belongs to BER?
FORTI: They’re pretty much the top companies in Rhode Island. We have about 35 [CEOs] right now and it’s the right mix. We’re very pleased with our members. They’re very diligent. For the most part, they have been very involved in education. They support school systems, they’ve all individually done education projects. But the purpose of the BER is to bring their collective knowledge and understanding of education and collective desire to see something happen, to say, ‘How can we, as businesses in Rhode Island, actually come together and make a difference?’
Why did the BER start?
About 11 years ago, President Bush convened the National Business Roundtable and invited companies to be part of the National Business Roundtable Education Initiative. [He] kind of implored them to go back and support public education in their home headquarters, in their state. Rhode Island was not part of that mix. So about three years ago a couple of things lined up. Stan Goldstein was coming back to Rhode Island at the helm of CVS before he retired it to Tom Ryan and Gary Sasse of RIPEC [The Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council] and Dick Hoag at Providence Washington and a few other leaders sat down and said, ‘the business community has got to get focused – to come together as one voice to represent the perspective of business and bring some clout to the whole process.’
I understand BER’s CEOs had a sort of educational baptism by fire.
After I’d been here about nine months, in the spring of 1999, I sent all the CEOs out to interview principals all over Rhode Island. I just [said] this is what you need to do. And the CEOs were a little bit stunned. We’d given them a list of questions [for] urban, rural and suburban and middle, high school and elementary schools, all over the state. And the principals were stunned, because they’d never had a CEO [interviewing them]. You know, Stan Goldstein was interviewing a principal of an elementary school. And the results were interesting. The CEOs kind of went into it thinking, they’re the principal of a school, how hard can this be? Sort of like being a manager of one of our branch manufacturing companies or facilities.
I guess it didn’t work that way?
Well, it was the week of Columbine High School. And the CEOs were astounded.
The number one thing [they] said is we just can’t believe what they have on their
plate. The most amazing thing was that principals would be principals at all,
because of what they’re confronted with, not on a day-by-day but a minute-by-minute
basis.
What else did these CEOs learn?
That there are obstacles within the system that prevent good principals from being the best principals they can be – and that there are no new principals coming into the system. We are not recruiting well and we are having a harder time finding a wider pool of applicants. We’re down to a puddle. It’s hard to recruit principals from other states. This is a national problem, not just a Rhode Island deal. So we decided to begin to grow our own.
What’s so hard about recruiting principals?
It’s kind of like it’s not worth it. We have many step 10 teachers and even lower than that that would be marvelous principals, but they look at the job and think, well, why would I do that? Sometimes the differential, literally, if you have a step 10 teacher who has a coaching job [maybe] as little as $1,000 a year, and they work 180 days, where an administrator, a principal, work[s] 240 days a year. And they make $1,000 a year more. It does not take a Rhodes Scholar to say this does not make sense.
What has BER done about it?
In July we started Aspiring Principals, a collaborative project between the BER, the Big Picture Company, the Center for School Leadership and the R.I. Association of School Principals. We have six principals now working under what we call Distinguished Principals, who are mentor principals in districts around Rhode Island. They’re completely taken out of their [teaching] job and completely focused on working as a principal for the school year.
Do they get course credit?
We are going to be doing an alternative certification project for these principals, so it’s beginning to seep into higher education that the way that we’re training administrators isn’t working. And when a district takes someone out of a classroom for a year they have to hire a substitute. So we’re giving them a substantial portion for that personnel to help offset that cost. We’re getting ready to institutionalize our application process and we’ll be asking for applications for next year’s class, probably in January.
How are you funded?
Through the BER member companies. We have an annual operating budget of just under $200,000 and our program budget fluctuates. We have received a big grant from the Human Resource Investment Council this year, $173,000, which we are using as 100 percent pass-through to school districts that are participating in the Aspiring Principals Program and we have received a very generous gift of $50,000 from TACO to help underwrite administrative costs. And then we have a $15,000 grant from Fleet and we have received money from the Rhode Island Foundation.
Why should business get involved in education?
For businesses to stay in business, yes you have to have good employees. You have to have employees that have the basic skills. They have to be able to read and write, have some kind of mathematical skills, whether it’s just to analyze or enter data, they have to have some computer skills. But that isn’t the sole focus. Business leaders are also community leaders. Business people recognize that when you have an educated citizenry you have citizens that participate in elections and they understand why it’s important. They read the newspaper; they participate in the arts. They raise their children in a more educated and thoughtful manner. They make better decisions. So it’s not just because we want good workers, it’s because it’s a better place to live when you have people that are making educated decisions.
What else is BER doing?
Working with the leadership of both teachers unions, the Superintendents Association,
the Principals Association and the School Committees Association, we have selected
three districts and given them an executive to help them implement or develop
their district five-year plan. It’s very exciting. Melinda Ailes from Bank Rhode
Island has been fabulous in Johnston. Bob Maddock from Bank of Newport has been
working with Newport and Bristol/Warren [is] working with Raytheon.
What do you think about education in Rhode Island?
You know, 10 years ago in Rhode Island, as in many places, people didn’t talk about education. So whether everything is the way we want it to be or not is not the question. The question is, are we getting together, are we moving in the right direction? And the answer is definitely yes.
Do you think too much time is being spent in schools on crowd control and social
service and not enough actually teaching kids to read, write and think?
That’s a huge question. One of the things the BER is really beginning to focus on, carefully, is that Rhode Island is one of the states that has a very low administrator ratio. Maybe we are truly hurting our schools by having the ratio of administrators to teachers and students so low, [maybe] we are burdening the leadership in schools to the point where the enormity of the role of an administrator in a school is overwhelming.
Is BER about applying business expertise to creating a profitable school system that produces sound products?
Well, we would never call students products. But if you have the president
of a company so overwhelmed by the minutia of fixing a conveyor belt, or the delivery
trucks aren’t coming in on time, or the rail yard’s got a hitch and we’re not
getting the raw materials delivered – if you have the president of your company
involved in that kind of minutia, chances are good that person isn’t able to carry
on with the vision. What we’re saying is principals really should be working with
the lead teachers in schools to carry on the vision. Everything in the schools
is important. It’s just a matter of does it all have to be important to the principal.
Someone used the example that we need to have the principal looking out over the
whole forest. We don’t need to have them picking up individual leaves.
BER members include CVS Corporation, Verizon Rhode Island, Editorial Projects in Education, Providence Washington Insurance Company, The Providence Journal Company, AMICA Mutual Insurance, Bank of Newport, Bank Rhode Island, FleetBoston, Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing, Bryant College, CBSI, Collette Tours, Coordinated Health Partners, Duffy & Shanley, Econotel Business Systems, Inc., Ernst & Young LLP, Fidelity Investments, Gilbane Building Company, GTECH Corporation, Hasbro, Inc., McAdams Foundation, Narragansett Electric, Pilgrim Screw, Raytheon Electronic Systems, Robbins Properties, Sovereign Bank, Starkweather & Shepley, Taco, Inc., Textron, Inc. and The Washington Trust.
