MY PRINCIPLED VISION OF OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Sheldon Fishman

As a 30-year Silver Spring resident, I know Montgomery County. As a parent of four Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) graduates, I know our public schools—well enough to know how fortunate we all are to have one the best large school systems in the nation. But I also know from my many years as a civic and PTA leader that maintaining the high quality of the public schools today and tomorrow requires extraordinary commitment and leadership. I’m running for the Board of Education (BOE) because I believe I offer the citizens of this county a rare combination of experience and committed leadership. My goal is to exercise this leadership not only to maintain the quality for which our schools are known but also to improve them and prepare them for a changing world.

My promise of leadership as a School Board member centers on five common-sense principles that I have adopted from the Parents’ Alliance, a group of seven county parent and teacher organizations united for education reform. I stress these principles because I want voters, and eventually all county citizens – especially students, parents, and teachers—to understand what will drive my decision making once I’m a member of the School Board. Here is my principled vision of our county public schools.

MCPS shall implement clear, coherent, and content-rich curriculum standards anchored in real knowledge: historical events, geographical facts, important vocabulary and expressions, computational skills, and the intricacies of natural phenomena. The job of the Board of Education is to realize a vision of continuously improving education on behalf of the community. But the recent emphasis on alignment to state tests has made such a vision irrelevant. It has led to the sloppy development and premature roll-out of our current K-8 math curriculum while driving out such promising programs as Singapore Math, and it threatens all our children with the specter of uniform mediocrity. In a recent Washington Post column, Karin Chenoweth said, “I now call the [Algebra High School Assessment] a ‘pretend algebra’ exam and fear that it will undermine mathematics instruction throughout the state.” As a member of the BOE, I will ensure that promising programs have a chance to fulfill their promise and will put parents’ ambitions for their children ahead of rigid alignment.

Example: In 2001, I was one of the core members of a county-level PTA committee that surveyed parents’ attitudes regarding their children’s math instruction and drew up a set of recommendations for math curriculum and instruction. The recommendations called for a streamlined and coherent curriculum that emphasized complete mastery of math facts and computational skills as well as math concepts, reflecting widespread parental dissatisfaction with “hopscotching” from one topic to another (often without a guiding textbook). Unfortunately, these recommendations were completely ignored as the county moved to align its curriculum with state tests that overemphasize writing, data analysis, and the use of calculators at the expense of the skills required for college and rewarding careers. As a School Board member, I will work closely with teachers and parents to rebuild MCPS into a school system with a truly world-class curriculum capable of preparing ALL our children for advanced studies and a competitive, increasingly globalized job market.

MCPS shall enable each child to achieve his or her potential by fostering high expectations for all, offering challenging instruction for students at every level, and providing timely and appropriate remediation and acceleration.

I am particularly concerned that African American and Hispanic students are not reaching their full potential. But how do we change the situation? To begin with, I believe that what’s good for other students is also good for students who arrive at school with disadvantages: coherent curriculum, assessments that guide instruction by well-trained and highly competent teachers, small classes, and flexible grouping to meet student needs. (MCPS success with K-2 students under Superintendent Weast’s elementary school initiatives demonstrates the impact of these types of reforms.) But we need to go further in three areas to increase achievement by our most underperforming students: ensuring that the very best teachers at all levels have incentives to teach in the most difficult environments, and aggressively recruiting young minority students into accelerated instruction (a program aptly named “Star Search” by the elementary school at which it originated), and monitoring and reporting each student’s progress accurately and efficiently.

Star Search is an informal strategy to identify highly able early elementary students. It involves teachers encouraging “next tier” students to try out an accelerated math or reading group, in the same way a parent might check out a more advanced library book for a child. Teachers and parents offer a lot of cheerleading to see that students for whom the trial move makes sense stay the course, but no one is made to feel a failure if it doesn’t.

Most importantly, I’m convinced that the key to having all children reach their full academic potential is better information on the progress they make each and every academic year, whether they start out below, at, or above grade level. Since different cohorts often begin at different levels of achievement, average scores and pass rates on standardized tests tend to fluctuate randomly from year to year, especially when the cohorts are small. Focusing on these fluctuations can confuse teachers, parents, and even administrators. It can also create disincentives to include special needs and ESOL children in assessments, or conversely, to transition such children into the regular program. And finally, the emphasis on pass rates can lead to the neglect of gifted children’s needs. Emphasizing the progress of individuals and the average progress of various groups increases the incentive to challenge all children. For this reason, I will push for a computerized assessment and reporting system – integrated with the instructional system to minimize the burden on teachers – that keeps parents and teachers alike up-to-date on the progress of individual students and various groups of students. Our schools have both the know-how and the technology resources to make such a reporting system a reality.

Example: Currently, at the elementary school level, MCPS has in place a fairly sophisticated assessment system associated with its math curriculum. Unfortunately, results from these math assessments, are not shared systematically with parents. This reality is a source of profound dissatisfaction among teachers and parents alike. A school system focused on raising achievement levels for all students cannot reach its goals without detailed road-maps showing where individual students currently stand. And all parties, especially parents, must be informed of how their children are performing at all times. As a School Board member I will take action to correct this critical shortcoming. I realize that a computerized assessment and reporting system cannot be brought online “overnight” – change takes time; however, I believe that reasonable initial goal for this reporting system would be to have the current math assessments online within a calendar year.

MCPS shall work with parents and teachers to make available to all students a broader range of educational options, such as special education placements, charter schools, magnets, and consortium programs. I know that one size does not fit all, and in the vast majority of cases, parents know best which size fits their own child. As a School Board member, I will make it my mission to ensure that all families are empowered to choose among a variety of educational options to find the best fit for their children. These options should include the full range of special education placements, signature programs, International Baccalaureate programs, charter schools, and if possible, varying bell times. The right to choose should not be limited to certain groups or certain areas of the county.

Example: MCPS needs to hold all of its schools to certain standards. Yet without some leeway for individual variation and innovation, continuous improvement is impossible. A highly standardized system tightly controlled by a huge central bureaucracy is a prescription for waste, stagnation, and mediocrity. As a School Board member, I will “push” and encourage our schools to serve as laboratories for promising new programs. To this end, I will advocate that MCPS take full advantage of the charter school option. In theory, the BOE supports charter schools. Our BOE was the first school board in Maryland to pass a policy allowing the creation of charter schools. However, since 1998 – the year the BOE passed its first charter school policy – we have failed completely to take advantage of this option. Currently, there is a good possibility that MCPS will open a KIPP Academy as a charter school at Belt Middle School in 2005. I applaud this new option as a means for raising achievement levels for disadvantaged kids in the Wheaton cluster. But we must not stop with KIPP or with a single school.This county ought to be aggressively encouraging the creation of a variety of responsible charter schools. This means it might even issue an invitation for specific charter school proposals to address specific priorities. One such current need and priority is full-day, year-round Head Start programs. Our current Head Start resources are stretched to their limit – there simply is no space in current MCPS buildings to accommodate this urgently needed Head Start option. However, there are numerous well-organized community-based preschool programs that we could be leveraging as partners in meeting this need. The charter school option addresses this need with wonderful flexibility.

MCPS shall improve transparency and accountability by (a) publishing budgetary information that clarifies appropriations for specific personnel categories and programs in a manner commensurate with program size and importance, and (b) ensuring that new initiatives are systematically piloted and are not implemented district-wide until they demonstrate sustained, significant positive effects on student achievement in multiple sites. A $1.6 billion organization should not innovate on the fly. It is the job of the Board members, as representatives of the voters, to oversee the system’s use of taxpayer dollars. I will take this responsibility to heart by insisting that the only programs implemented system-wide are those that have stood up to rigorous assessment, either in school systems comparable to MCPS or through systematic MCPS pilots. In addition, programs already in effect should be subjected to independent cost-benefit analysis. The history of the public schools is littered with expensive innovations that won enthusiastic reviews until time revealed that they had accomplished little besides using up precious resources and goodwill. Nonetheless, schools and school systems continue to build short-term reputations on the number of innovative (and generally untested) programs they embrace instead of on solid gains in achievement. (Consider the many schools nationwide that won Blue Ribbon status without raising student outcomes.) Unfortunately, MCPS is no exception. It has spent millions on new initiatives over the past four years, receiving glowing reports from its own Office of Shared Accountability and praise from the media and the educational establishment, yet only one of these programs, the early childhood initiative, has actually led to higher outcomes. Moreover, thanks to haphazard implementation, it remains unclear which component of the early childhood initiative (longer school days, more rigorous curriculum, etc.) was responsible for the improvement in scores. And while OSA undertakes studies to assess each initiative, virtually none of these meet the standards that the U.S. Department of Education has established for scientific educational research. As a result, the system has no way of knowing if all or even most of the money spent on the initiative was well spent, and thus it has no way of knowing where to make cutbacks now that it faces a budget crunch.

Example: While lobbying for full funding for our children's education, I

will take my oversight duties seriously to ensure that taxpayers get the

most bang for their buck. My first step to achieving this goal will be a

drive to make the work of the Departments of Shared Accountability and

Reporting and Regulatory Accountability at once more open and more independent.

In addition, it is critically important to make the work of OSA's Audit

Office much more visible to the general public. If an MCPS internal audit

uncovers waste or inefficiencies with serious budget implications—and, unlike my opponent, I do believe that addressing inefficiencies can lead to further budget savings—then the public should be informed as soon as the BOE is informed. More often than not, public scrutiny leads to positive change. However, MCPS's existing accountability efforts—be they program evaluations or internal audits—are neither open nor independent. I am determined to change this because any public entity spending $1.6 billion must be accountable to the public. One simple way to make the work of Departments of Shared Accountability and Reporting and Regulatory Accountability more visible to the public is to require all department reports, including internal audits, to be released to the public complete with the original data. The federal government does this as a matter of routine now (e.g., releasing actual survey data or follow-along data for studies of specific cohorts of students being examined). MCPS is capable of doing the same, and taking these steps can be done without compromising the privacy of MCPS staff, parents or students. If the federal government can make available to the public the datasets for its early childhood cohort studies, then MCPS can make available to the public the datasets on its all-day kindergarten initiative. Such actions facilitate public scrutiny of how public dollars are invested, as well as enabling scholarly checks and balances when outside independent researchers re-analyze student performance.

MCPS shall deal fairly with the community by acknowledging community input, giving community opinions due consideration, and explaining how community input influenced their decisions. Sentiments often run strong and deep on educational issues. After all, education is the central public institution in our communities. The vast majority of us are publicly educated, and half of our county revenues are spent on our schools. We understand that education is the key to economic well-being in a knowledge-based economy. And, of course, those of us who are parents care deeply about education because we know it can have a profound impact on our children’s lives. As a result, the members of the Board of Education are often in the difficult position of making decisions about which a significant number of vociferous parents disagree. Unfortunately, the overwhelming tendency over the past four years has been to regard these voices as little more than noise. As an experienced manager, I understand that the leaders of a school system comprising over 140,000 students in over 190 schools with a budget of $1.6 billion, cannot allow operations to be micromanaged by concerned citizens or well-considered policies to be derailed by every dissenting voice. However, I also understand that respect for stakeholders—not activities and PR materials designed to create the appearance of respect but genuine respect—-is crucial to maintaining a healthy, vital, and continuously improving organization. For this reason, I believe that the Board must do a better job tapping community wisdom and responding to community sentiment.

Example: Two recent public controversies highlight my concerns. The first arose recently when PTA leaders discovered that the Board of Education was transferring control of surplus land and property in their part of the county to the County Council without following established procedures for public notification. Whatever the merits of the transfers, there is not question that they need to proceed under the most transparent process possible. When asked about this lapse, the Board did not appear at all apologetic or anxious to make amends. In fact, the PTA leaders who challenged the Board felt themselves subjected to scrutiny and criticism for raising legitimate if inconvenient issues.

The second controversy arose when a senior MCPS attorney attending a professional conference performed a skit that included a number of tasteless and insensitive jokes regarding special education students and their parents. (You may have seen portions of the skit on local TV stations, and if you did, you'll agree with my description.) The Board was barraged by letters from parents of special education students complaining about the pain this skit caused them and in many cases suggesting a variety of remedies. Yet only one member of the Board showed any sign of sensitivity to the special education community on this issue, in public or in private .

The truth is that there is no rule or policy that can compel the members of the Board to respect the community they have been elected to represent, and because a large percentage of voters are disengaged from BOE and MCPS issues, the democratic process does not always guarantee true accountability. What is required, quite simply, is a change in culture. It would be disingenuous for me to claim that I can change the culture of the Board of Education and MCPS single-handedly. But I can guarantee that if I am elected, there will be at least one Board member who will genuinely respect, listen to, and respond to the community and its diverse members.

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Week by week, members of the Board of Education—although presumably working a part-time job—are confronted with a mountain of complex issues requiring decisions by the community’s elected representatives. A Board member needs considerable knowledge of and experience in the system to deal with these issues responsibly. But more than experience and knowledge is needed. Without a critical and philosophical framework for action, the Board has a tendency either to drift or to relinquish leadership to the superintendent and the vast MCPS bureaucracy. Beyond my educational background, my managerial skills, and my two decades of experience in MCPS, I bring to the Board table the necessary framework for decision making, in the form of five principles developed jointly by the diverse community organizations that make up the Parents' Alliance. County students, teachers, parents, and taxpayers will be well-served if the Board adheres to these important standards.

August 12, 2004