As part of this week’s print extravaganza, I interviewed controversial Memphis City Schools (MCS) consultant Jeffrey Hernandez. His $1,500-a-day consulting fee, coupled with an intense animosity for him from some parents in Palm Beach County and his ties to superintendent Kriner Cash and deputy superintendent Irving Hamer, have caused questions about his employment at MCS.
As the chief academic officer for the Palm Beach County School system, Hernandez installed centralized lesson plans for teachers, frequent student assessments, and Saturday classes for struggling students. The resulting controversy included a Facebook page, Testing is Not Teaching, and after only a few months, Hernandez was reassigned to work only with low-performing schools and the district went back to a decentralized system.
During the last few months of his contract there, however, Hernandez was concurrently working for MCS as a consultant.
And In June, when his contract was officially up in Palm Beach, one of the blogs for the Palm Beach Post reported that the schools that used Hernandez’s methods showed gains on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test while those that didn’t, didn’t.
You can read the print Q&A here. Other portions of the interview are excerpted below:
Flyer: How did you begin your career in education?
Hernandez: I started as an office secretary in an elementary school. I started from the perspective of the bottom up. I worked with a phenomenal principal and he mentored me.
How old were you at the time?
I was 16. I had just graduated from high school … I was one of several students across the district selected to do high school in two years. I then became a teacher in the inner city.
After spending 7 years as an assistant principal, former Miami-Dade County superintendent Rudy Crew then appointed you as principal. How was that?
Crew came and opened the School Improvement Zone. I was one of the principals he appointed the day before school started. It was an inner-city high school populated mostly by Haitian Creole students. We had 100 percent free/reduced lunch. The day before school started, we had 16 teacher openings, no books, a negative budget by about $50,000, and graffiti all over the school.
Crew is like superintendent Cash. By Monday, the school had to look like I’d been there all summer. I took that school from a D to an A and we maintained an A for three years.
You have a history of turning around failing schools. How do you do it?
