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| - Palm Beach County educator embellishes record, gets top Pittsburgh job LOCAL EDUCATION By Andrew Marra - Palm Beach Post Staff Writer 9 Posted: 10:08 a.m. Friday, June 3, 2016 After 18 years as a Palm Beach County school administrator, Anthony Hamlet won the top job in Pittsburgh’s public school system last month with a resume boasting a series of successes at turning around struggling campuses. Among the achievements he touted in winning the superintendent position: lifting the grades of two struggling Palm Beach County schools from F to C, raising the graduation rate at Palm Beach Lakes High School by 13 percentage points, and two years of “direct supervision” of 20 of the county’s most challenged schools. But those and some other of Hamlet’s claims about his track record in the county’s schools appear to be misstatements or exaggerations, The Palm Beach Post has found. As principal of John F. Kennedy Middle in Riviera Beach, Hamlet did not lift the school’s state grade from an F to a C as he claimed on a resume he submitted to Pittsburgh’s public school system. When he became principal in May 2009, it had moved from a D to a C under his predecessor and remained at a C when he left in 2011. He also did not raise Palm Beach Lakes High’s graduation rate by 13 points to 72 percent as claimed. During his three years as principal, the official graduation rate rose by less than 5 points, from 63.4 to 67.7 percent, state records show. +Palm Beach County educator embellishes record, gets top Pittsburgh job photo Anthony Hamlet (right) has been selected as the head of Pittsburgh’s public school system. His claim that Palm Beach Lakes High’s grade rose from an F to a C under his stewardship was also inaccurate. It had a C grade from the state when he became its principal in 2011 and remained at a C during his three years at the helm. Indeed, the school has never been listed as an F school since Florida began assigning school grades in 1999. The extent to which Hamlet said he cut suspensions at Palm Beach Lakes High is also at odds with state records, The Post found. +Palm Beach County educator embellishes record, gets top Pittsburgh job photo Anthony Hamlet, a longtime Palm Beach County educator, has been chosen as Pittsburgh’s new schools superintendent While he claimed that the number of suspensions per year dropped by 2,689 during his tenure, the decrease recorded by the state was 1,035 — from 1,312 to down to 277. That’s a significant drop but less than half of what Hamlet claimed. At the time, Palm Beach Lakes High had about 1,900 students. Positive effect on children’s lives Hamlet dismissed the questions about his resume as “a few percentage-point discrepancies.” They were of little consequence, he said, in the full context of his experiences as an educator. “With the drastic reduction in (suspensions), with the transformation of the climates and cultures of schools I have led, the dropouts who I have retrieved and gotten them to graduate, and many children’s lives I have positively impacted, I am sure you can find something positive to write about,” he wrote in an email to The Post. Hamlet’s characterization of his most recent role at the school district, as a school transformation director, also appears at odds with the nature of his responsibilities. On his resume, Hamlet told Pittsburgh educators that as the school district’s director of school accountability, he had “direct supervision” of 20 schools and their principals, as well as “supervision of school budgets totaling $128,944,159.” “In Palm Beach County, I’ve been given all the most difficult schools to deal with, and I’ve transformed those schools from terrible to great,” Mr. Hamlet said at a news conference in Pittsburgh last month. In his final role at the school district, Hamlet operated one of the district’s two “school transformation” offices, a five-person department that monitors compliance issues at county schools but has no direct operational role. His position entailed helping to assess schools’ “culture, systems and instruction” and to verify that each school’s “improvement plan” was aimed at addressing the school’s main challenges, Hamlet told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week. Both transformation offices are being shut down this summer as part of Superintendent Robert Avossa’s overhaul of the school district bureaucracy, and Hamlet was scheduled to be transferred to a human resources post as the district’s director of recruitment and retention. Applications not fact-checked Brian Perkins, a consultant who ran the Pittsburgh public school system’s superintendent search, said he did not fact-check the finalists’ applications. But he said he interviewed two Palm Beach County school officials who, he said, corroborated Hamlet’s track record of turning around struggling schools. He did not name the officials. “I can’t speak to whether statistics were accurate or not, and certainly the people that I spoke to didn’t talk about that,” he said. “From their perspective, Dr. Hamlet had been the kind of leader who, when necessary, had focused first and foremost on school climate and building school culture.” The head of the Pittsburgh schools’ board of directors downplayed the discrepancies, saying in a statement that Hamlet “set himself far apart from the pool” in several ways. “Beyond the information on his resume, his interview, references, and rise and proven success within his district all contributed to our selection of him as superintendent,” said Regina Holley, president of the board of directors of Pittsburgh Public Schools. Palm Beach County school district officials declined to comment on Hamlet’s characterizations of his schools’ performances. In emails to The Post, Hamlet offered various explanations for his resume’s claims. Regarding JFK Middle, Hamlet insisted that it had been an F school when he took over, even though state records show that it had never earned a F grade from the state before or during his tenure. He added that it was on the federal government’s list of schools that would require intervention if test scores did not improve. He said that when he took over the school in May 2009, he was the fourth principal to be assigned to it in that school year. He acknowledged that Palm Beach Lakes High had never been rated an F school. He said, though, that under his direction the “accountability side” of its school grade rose from an F to a C. But Florida’s school-grading system gives schools just one grade. There is no separate “accountability” grade, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education said. “The whole thing is the accountability system,” spokeswoman Cheryl Etters said. “I’m not sure quite what he means by that.” Hamlet acknowledged, too, that Palm Beach Lakes High’s official graduation rate did not increase by the amount he claimed. Explaining the discrepancy, he argued that state guidelines allowed high schools to count students who graduated months after graduation day. High schools “usually have up until Aug. 1 to work with struggling students in order for them to graduate at the end of summer of their senior year,” Hamlet wrote. He did not provide any corroborating figures. Etters disputed his characterization, saying that students who graduate after the school year are not counted in the official graduation rate used by Florida schools. A school district spokeswoman said Palm Beach County schools use the official graduation rate to measure school performance. Florida does keep track of the five-year graduation rate for the state’s high schools, which includes students who graduate late. During Hamlet’s tenure at Palm Beach Lakes, the school’s five-year graduation rate fell slightly, from 73.2 to 72.8 percent, records show. Hamlet did not directly address the discrepancy between the suspension data he submitted to Pittsburgh Public Schools and the data recorded by the state, but he said that the data changes frequently as students come and go from a school. “When students enroll and withdraw from schools, their discipline data follows them,” he wrote. “When the students enroll into a new school, the students’ discipline history and data is automatically calculated into the schools’ data.” Hamlet was scheduled to begin working this week as a consultant in Pittsburgh’s school district, which educates about 25,000 students, and is slated to take over officially as superintendent in July.
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