Questions for School Board Candidates

It’s school board election season again.   As usual, I find myself a bit frustrated as I read candidate websites and statements— 99.9% fluff, “I’m a nice guy who loves children”, etc, with barely a hint at any actual issues.   It’s even harder during this election season:  since I’m stepping down, I’m anticipating that several new candidates will be asking for my endorsement.  Thus, I’m supplying a set of questions which I believe should be asked of every board candidate.  

I know some candidates will try to resist making direct statements on any of these issues, trying to please everyone.   Or some will say “Many of these are political questions, and I’m above politics, I just do what’s best for the children.”   Saying “I don’t know” is OK— but in that case I expect some info on how you would go about deciding.  These questions are all based on real issues that have been faced by HSD or other school boards— and when your choice of candidate really matters is when these controversial issues come up, not when everyone agrees.  It doesn’t matter if someone claims to be non-political; when these issues come before the board, members must vote one way or the other.   

Thus, I will be asking that any newcomer seeking my endorsement answers each of the questions below.  And I believe you should too.   They don’t have to agree with me or you on every answer, but they do need to demonstrate a drive to seek reasoned, intelligent opinions on these issues, rather than simply evading them or voting with the crowd.    (Though of course you will be able to infer my opinions pretty easily by reviewing past entries in this blog.)   If any candidate refuses to answer these questions on the basis of being “above politics”, they are actually the worst kind of politician— an evasive weasel who can’t be honest about their beliefs.  Keep that in mind when deciding your vote!

1. How do you believe we should judge overall district performance?   What kind of actions should we take if particular schools are found to be low-performing?
2. Should the property taxes be raised for the citizens of HSD in order to provide more money for schools?   If so, by how much?
3. What should we do about the fact that the state is showing complete incompetence in the school funding area, continuing to increase unfunded mandates (full day kindergarten, expanded PhysEd, etc) while failing to reform a thoroughly bloated PERS?
4. If we find during some year that the district is lucky enough to have more money than we projected, should we spend the remainder on new programs and improvements, or save some for leaner years?  
5. Are there any general changes or improvements you would suggest to HSD’s  budgeting process?
6. If a local housing complex that contains many low-income tenants petitioned the district for a specific hardship-based tax break for their residents, would you support or oppose it?  Why?
7. Should our college and career pathways program encourage each student to “follow their passion”, or try to guide students into likely career paths using other criteria?   What criteria would you suggest?
8. How do you feel about School Based Health Centers, and their overall role in the district?
9. Should a 13-year old girl be able to get birth control prescribed at school, during the school day, with no form of parental notification?
10. What accommodations do you believe the schools should make for the proliferation of new gender identities?
11. When choosing members for appointed boards or subcommittees, what kind of process do you believe the board should follow?
12. Do you think we should focus on providing advanced and honors classes for high achievers, or push more towards mixed-level classes that bring all students together? 
13. If we are directing resources according to “need”, does this mean we should spend more on at-risk students than currently successful ones?  What kind of spending differences between students are acceptable?
14. How do you feel about charter schools and other educational alternatives?   Should our district aim for more charter schools?
15. Do you believe it’s fair that City View Charter receives several thousand fewer dollars per student than the rest of HSD spends, even after subtracting services (like busing and special ed) that City View is exempt from?   Why?
16. Should HSD be able to use taxpayer money to launch a marketing campaign, in hope of getting more taxpayer money allocated?
17. Should HSD staff be allowed to form student “leadership clubs”, whose activities include traveling to Salem and lobbying state officials to take positions favored by our district?
18. If a district boundary change is identified that will save the region several million dollars in costs overall, but cause a few dozen students (and their tax money) to be moved from Hillsboro to Beaverton, would you support or oppose it?  Why?
19. What should our schools be teaching our children about the merits of the American system of government, in comparison to the rest of the world?
20. Should our schools be teaching that we live in a fundamentally racist society, permeated with White Privilege, which is inherently unfair to anyone who is not a white male?

Graduation Rates and Credit Recovery

You probably read the recent newspaper articles reporting graduation rates in Oregon high schools, including in our district.   Hillsboro once again did very well, with small increases in grad rates in 3 of the 4 main high schools, leading to a 1.26% increase overall.   This is excellent news, and reflective of multiple HSD programs providing active outreach and assistance to struggling students who might otherwise be on track for failure.   However, we need to be a bit cautious here:  if you think about it, you can increase graduation rates by lowering standards as well as by educating students.   You may recall that last year a departing teacher made a number of critical comments about the district, which I summarized in my blog .   One of his major concerns was a lack of standards in the credit recovery system, based on an online tool called “Plato”.   In the last few months, I followed up and took a closer look at our credit recovery program.

To start with, if you just look at the Plato system in isolation, I can indeed see why there was a serious concern.   This system is much more bare-bones than the “real” online classes largely used by our Online Academy (which you may have seen me praise in the past ), sometimes amounting to little more than an extended outline plus a 20-question multiple-choice test for each major unit.   So I followed up by meeting with Assistant Superintendent Travis Reiman, along with teacher Jeff Gower, who runs the credit recovery at one of our schools.   I was very impressed after speaking with Jeff.   He explained that Plato is just one tool, and that the real goal of credit recovery is to work with the subject-area teachers and find appropriate ways for a student to demonstrate mastery after they have been failing under the standard instructional methods.   Some of these students just need some individualized attention and coaching, and are not truly incapable of absorbing the material— it is just hard for a subject-area teacher with hundreds of students to properly identify and address their unique issues.   He shared some success stories of students who were able to return to the regular classroom after catching up in the credit recovery program.   As to the question fo whether this involves lowering standards to rubber-stamp students through to graduation, Jeff pointed out that each year a number of students in his program fail to achieve mastery and are not granted credit.   After speaking to Jeff, I am much more confident that our credit recovery program has solid goals and processes, and is doing the right thing for our students.

Now, we need to remain vigilant for several reasons.   I only had a limited amount to time to look into the credit recovery program, so if you are a student or teacher who has been involved in this area, I would love to hear more about your experiences, positive or negative.   Also, of course, issues like credit recovery and graduation rates only show that our district is doing well at keeping the students near the bottom from dropping out, and do not really say anything about how well we educate the rest of our students.   To truly claim that HSD is a high-achieving district, we also need evidence that academic achievement is rising, both for average and top students.   (As I have mentioned before in my blog, this has been made harder by the redesign of curriculum and standardized tests in the past few years under Common Core.)   I would really like to see our district start to appear at the top of academic rankings, providing solid evidence that all our students are well-served, including the ones at the top, middle, and bottom.  But for now, I’m joining the rest of the HSD community in congratulating our staff for its exceptional achievement in once again increasing our graduation rates.