Imposter Syndrome

If you feel like a fraud, it might be true

The most important thing I want you to take away from this post is that Dr. Warren Morgan would not be the current CEO of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District if Mayor Justin Bibb had not shouted down a respected school board full of experts in their fields and forced them to choose a vacuous empty suit to replace Eric Gordon. Nothing else matters beyond that. Dr. Warren Morgan wouldn’t have been on the short list for any other big city school district in the country. His cv is unimpressive. His personal story, which I’ve heard dozens of times, is unremarkable. When he is asked to talk about his vision, it does not extend past his mirror. When asked to make decisions for the most radically innovative school district in the country (Denver was a close 2nd), he tries to make it smaller to fit in the tiny box that brings him comfort. Dr. Morgan was not ready for this job and after a year in the expensive office with the lake view, he still didn’t know that we are an open enrollment school district. That Mayor Bibb wrapped his arms around Dr. Morgan and chose him to lead the school district my children attend, is absolutely disqualifying.

Look around and ask yourself, where have all the board members gone? Ask yourself where has all the money gone? Ask yourself where the Cleveland Plan’s principal autonomy has gone? Ask yourself where the philanthropists have gone? Ask yourself if anyone, Mayor Bibb or CEO Morgan or Education Chief Michelle Pomerantz has any understanding of the Cleveland Plan and what is actually required to change it, not just ruin it? Ask yourself if any CMSD school is better off at the start of this school year than they were at the start of the 2022-2023 school year?

I also ask you to read the full text of Eric Gordon’s final State of the Schools address (for which he did not purchase $11,000 worth of tickets or rent a $2,500 teleprompter, like Dr. Morgan did) and compare it to anything Dr. Morgan has said or done during his first year at the helm. I ask you to look at the sections dealing with the financial health of CMSD. Yet two years later there is a levy on the ballot, and I hear teachers saying that they will lose their jobs, and art classes, and music classes if this levy fails.

“With the days of looming financial bankruptcy far behind us, the best sign of CMSD’s vastly-improved organizational health is our five-year financial forecast. Last passed by the Board of Education in May 2022, the current forecast shows that CMSD is forecasted to be financially healthy through at least 2026, if not longer. What does that mean? It means the district won’t need to consider a new levy for at least four more years. While this is possible, in part, due to significant federal investments in pandemic relief, it is also due to successful advocacy at the state-level for a more fair school funding formula and our own prudent financial management. That same sound financial management has also positioned the district for a potential “no new tax” bond issue or property maintenance levy at some point in the future to protect the community’s significant investment in dozens of new buildings built or renovated over the last 25 years.”

Prudent financial management. I miss that. Eric Gordon did not spend public money on tickets to his own speeches. He did not spend public money on glorifying himself with a Crain’s award. He did not even take the car allowance that Dr. Sanders and now Dr. Morgan luxuriate in. He visited all the schools because he was genuinely interested in being in the schools and not because he had a contract rider for a huge bonus if he visited 100 schools per year. There are fair criticisms from the Gordon years, but he took care of public money. He made promises and tried to keep them. He was understated and approachable. This job was a vocation and not, as Dr. Morgan told students on The Dish, a pathway to making money.

“Today, instead of cutting art, music, and physical education, we are able through innovative contract language with the Cleveland Teachers Union to ensure that every PreK-8 school not only has a full-time art, music, and physical education teacher, but is able to expand the K-8 day to provide even more art, music, and physical education opportunities.”

Last September when the state report card information came out, the communications team at 1111 Superior started the process of putting the information together with the intention of sending it out to CMSD families, like they always did. They kept us informed of the promises kept. But they were told by the new leadership that there was a change and CMSD wouldn’t be sending out the good news. And there was a lot of good news. If I’m guessing why, it’s that Dr. Morgan and Mayor Bibb didn’t want to spread the good news then and they were invested in a strategy of suppressing the achievements from the Gordon era so that they could claim further improvements for themselves.

“And with the release of Ohio’s new report cards we now have data affirming the remarkable progress we’ve made in recovering from the pandemic, and a baseline for measuring continued progress in the years ahead. While CMSD’s new state report card shows that Cleveland and other districts struggled significantly during the pandemic, I am pleased to report that the data also shows our scores are improving. In fact, in a number of areas on this year’s report card, CMSD has already returned to pre-pandemic levels.”

This was all part of the playbook, according to an article in Scene Magazine from November of 2022, right after Eric Gordon stepped down from his position.

“As mayor, these sources said, Bibb saw himself as the leader and change-agent of Cleveland’s schools, and that this hubris led to a series of miscalculations that resulted in Gordon’s forthcoming departure and – for the first time in his young tenure – open skepticism among institutional stakeholders about Bibb’s leadership.”

Ask yourself, as you unenroll your children from CMSD schools and start paying tuition at private schools, how is Justin’s leadership over the schools going for you and your family?

In the above picture, I’m pretty sure they are laughing at you and thinking about the cooling, massaging ass chairs. Anyhoo, I am not a Cleveland land developer, nor am I a city planner, so I had zero interest in Justin Bibb as a candidate for mayor. I am a mom. My only concern is education. It’s the only reason I live in Cleveland. When candidate Bibb spoke of education, he would say we need “bold action” for “faster results” and that’s how you knew that he had no idea how education worked. He had no idea how public education in an inner city worked. He also didn’t seem to care enough to get educated about the topic. Justin Bibb did not seriously address my main election concern, so I did not vote for him. Seeing what he has done in office, I will never vote for him for any office.

We moved from our not great house in the Union-Miles section of town in 2022. I wanted to look outside of the city because I didn’t like the way the new Mayor was handling our schools. My wife wanted to stay in Cleveland for the lower (comparatively) taxes and for the schools. We ended up in Collinwood with the perfect house right near the lake that I love. But every morning since last February when Dr. Morgan announced the reduction of instructional minutes for CMSD (now on pause until after we vote for the levy, like the Cudell Park fiasco) I have resented my perfect little house and wished that we had rented a one-bedroom apartment in Beachwood, where the leadership is steady and if my children have to attend a Big Box school, I could trust the leadership.

This is a photo of Dr. Morgan ticking off a box on his way to a salary bonus. His salary is already obscene. The spending for the Alma Group to find his Executive Leadership Team was obscene. The salaries he is paying to those members of the ELT, people who should have been booted out of CMSD long ago, like Mosley and Farmer, and then paying Candice Grose $159,500 to destroy the communications and market teams to replace them with her free-lancing friends and a bunch of clip art, that’s obscene. Paying to send Candice to Seattle to speak about PR to a room full of people who have likely surmised that she cannot keep her head above water is obscene. Allowing Dr. Florence to choose a new ELA curriculum and then imposing it with a first on every school and every grade is obscene.

Justin Bibb plucked Warren Morgan from a smaller role in the Indianapolis City Schools. There were just eight high schools there and they were those big box schools full of thousands of students. That’s not what Cleveland had with the Cleveland Plan. We have lots of schools where the staff knows the students and inner-city kids have an opportunity to choose and create a bespoke education. But that makes Warren Morgan uncomfortable, because like Justin Bibb, once you get past the platitudes, there isn’t much there in the way of experience and innovation.

Under Eric Gordon, when the district asked the very poor residents of Cleveland to vote in favor of a levy, they would detail exactly what the levy would be used for and then keep track of how they were spending the money and the promises they were keeping, building up a trust with people who really don’t have any money to spare.

Issue 107 passed with 57% of the vote because the taxpayers trusted Eric Gordon.

Issue 4 passed with 63% of the vote because the taxpayers trusted Eric Gordon.

Issue 108 passed with 68% of the vote because taxpayers trusted Eric Gordon.

Issue 68 (during Covid) passed with 61% of the vote because the taxpayers trusted Eric Gordon.

I requested the meetings calendar for Eric Gordon and Justin Bibb and they did not meet, alone together, as many times in one year as Bibb has been featured in these photos from Warren Morgan’s Instagram page. Justin Bibb never even tried to understand Eric Gordon or the Cleveland Plan. I can’t trust the decision making of a man who is unwilling to even talk to the person who lifted CMSD from the bottom of the eight big city schools in Ohio, to a position tied with Toledo for first.

All I have heard or read is that Mayor Bibb was “shocked” by the financial state of the schools. Warren Mogan used taxpayer money extravagantly for himself and the ELT. Board Chair Sara Elaqad says the levy is an investment in the future. Uninspiring, to say the least. There has been no trust built up with Mayor Bibb and Dr. Morgan. I don’t even think they have tried. The school board does what it is told. Nobody is looking out for the students, the teachers, or the taxpayers.

I have availed myself of the fraud reporting mechanism for the State Auditor. So far, I have filed four separate frivolous spending reports but then my wrists got tired from the typing. I’ll resume sending reports tomorrow. With each report, I attach the relevant public records and invoices. If anyone else would like to file fraud reports, email me at pollykarr@gmail.com and I will send you the public record attachments.

I’ve also sent more public records requests, this time about the large number of grievances being filed over non-payment of overages from the last school year and some shenanigans going on with pre-school enrollment and IEPs. I have zero trust that I am getting the full range of responsive documents, but I continue to ask and push back.

The Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook now has over 400 members, many of whom are participating in discussions and bringing up lots of concerns. There was a bombshell anonymous post about the creation of the External Affairs department that should be read by everyone. Please join us over there. Also remember that this blog is FREE and always will be, even if you get asked to pledge money from Substack. I do not want your money. Just your word of mouth and tips, if you have them