Accountable value for parents and the community

Education is the backbone of our society’s future, and it is what will lead to continued prosperity here in Maryland.  Citizens of the state should be “life long learners” who participate in expanding their knowledge around academic, cultural, and applied pursuits.  Our citizens should be afforded the best basic education possible, as well as a spectrum of continuing education opportunities.

We need to have strong public and private schools to educate our young people, and we also need to continue to enhance and improve our community colleges and university system.  Public supported education is a benefit which is directly received by the minority of tax payers in the state, however, the results of our education system directly impact everyone.  The academic achievement of our students directly impacts the sort of businesses that can be sustained here, and productive young people are less likely to be a burden on society in other ways (welfare, crime, etc.).  Education should be an accountable value for parents and the community at large. 

For the past ten years I’ve been on all sides of public and private education in Maryland and across the nation. I have been involved in a number of ground breaking efforts in education, including a $5M US Department of Education Technology Challenge Grant, the design and implementation of The Walt Disney Company’s landmark Celebration School, and the development of leading edge technology to manage text, image, video, and audio resources for instructional use.  I have served in advisory capacities to the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research Initiatives (OERI), as well as several school districts across the country.  These activities resulted in me being asked to participate in a special panel on instructional technology by the National Academy of Science and the US Department of Education. In addition, I led the Education Technology subcommittee of County Executive Janet Owen’s Transition Team when she was elected four years ago.

Part of my campaign to become your representative to the Maryland House of Delegates is to work to fix what’s wrong with our public schools.  If elected, I will work to have our schools:

·      Reduce class size and limit building overcrowding

·      Provide safe, adequately sized, modern facilities

·      Eliminate “crowd control”-type discipline

·      Teach character, respect, and tolerance

·      Reward scholastic results and innovation by students, teachers, and administrators

·      Support both knowledge acquisition and critical thinking

·      Require communication between home and school as part of curriculum and teacher evaluation

·      Make the success or failure of a school the “business” of the community

Where are we today?

While the state and local boards of education have worked hard to improve our state’s schools, we must face the fact that our current public school system is no better than average.  While Maryland spends over $7,000 per student per year on public K-12 education, our state scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests were in the middle of the 50 states.  While states such as Connecticut, Kansas, Minnesota, and Massachusetts continued to improve their scores, Maryland has showed little forward progress.  The National Center for Education Statistics has reported that Maryland’s scores in mathematics, science, reading, and writing all fell within the average range of US states for 4^th and 8^th graders.  Similarly, Maryland students’ SAT scores were reported to be in the average range as well, and the percentage of graduating high school seniors that went on to further study  was roughly four out of ten.

Some ideas to make things better

“Community School Districts”

For being such a small state geographically, Maryland has school districts which are among the largest in the nation.  The average school district in the US has less than six schools – Anne Arundel County has over 100 schools.  In fact, there are four other school districts in the state which are among the 25 largest in the nation.  Typically, these large school districts have larger schools, often housing 50% more students than schools in smaller school districts. These school districts have higher ratios of students to teachers (19:1 versus 16:1 for US averages).  Our ratios in Maryland can be even higher than that.

Additionally, it is interesting to note that the rules that govern school construction here in Maryland (known as the “state rated capacity”), stipulate that school buildings should be built to hold approximately 20 to 25 students per instructional space – remember, the US average student teacher ratio is 16 to 1.  It is precisely this “state rated capacity” formula which prevented Anne Arundel County Public Schools from building a 13^th high school last year.

I have three children who have come up through the public schools in our county.  My middle school age daughter had several classes in 7^th grade with more than 35 students in the class.  This is unreasonable.  Numbers like this force teachers and administrators to have to adopt “crowd control”-type tactics; rules and regulations which are meant to maintain safety, not encourage learning.  In addition, the largeness of the school system (e.g., Anne Arundel County’s school system has over 70,000 students and a budget of roughly $500M a year), intimidates most teachers and administrators to the point where much of the innovation, creativity, and energy of teaching is squashed by administrative bureaucracy, policies, and chains of command.

I am proposing that legislation be developed to study the effect of allowing local communities to choose whether or not to assert more control over local schools.  While some features of the centralized system would remain (e.g., centralized administrative functions, etc.), much of the decisions on how instructional funds would be spent would be put in the hands of local area directors (controlling a feeder system) and a partially elected, partially appointed community school board (perhaps put in place by the local PTA and CAC).  Instructional funds would be allocated based on enrollment in each feeder system with capital funds allocated based on the age of school facilities and enrollment in the feeder. 

Additionally, state rated capacity formulas would be changed to reflect a more realistic number of students per instructional space – numbers which are supportive of instruction. This would make more state money available for new school construction and additions.  Systematically we need to bring down our student teacher ratio, since a majority of studies conducted by the US Department of Education have concluded that smaller classes lead to higher student achievement, fewer discipline problems, and greater student participation.

I am proposing legislation which would study the feasibility of decentralizing Maryland schools from its current county-centric model.

My legislation would investigate the feasibility of having one feeder system for each high school in a county, and an area director who would be responsible for instruction, administrative, and fiscal aspects of the feeder system (responsible to the community school board and the county superintendent).  The area director and the community board would have much more say about what happens to over crowded schools, or sometimes more importantly – schools which are well under capacity.

In addition, if elected I would also support actively piloting of Charter Schools.  This would afford Maryland parents and teachers the same abilities to create publicly funded charter schools as other states that have successfully implemented charter programs.

“Better administration”

Our county’s school board is responsible for nearly $500M in budget per year, and we expect them to use sound judgment on how to best prepare our more than 70,000 students for life in society.  We need people who are both qualified and accountable to the tax payers.

In my campaign for District 33A of the Maryland House of Delegates, I am proposing to develop a bill which would create a partially elected and partially appointed Board of Education. 

Under this bill, future Boards of Education would be comprised of four elected, three appointed, and one student member. The four elected members of the Board of Education would represent legislative districts in the county, and they would be fully accountable to the voters.  The three appointed members would be required to meet specific qualifications that are appropriate for managing a large enterprise such as our Board of Education.  One might think of these members as the CEO, COO, and CFO of the Board of Education.  These members would be appointed by the County Executive, and they would serve terms equal in length to the elected members (I’d propose four years instead of the current five).  The final member would continue to be a student member with a one year term.

Crafting the specifics of this proposal will require discussions with local Anne Arundel County officials, the state Department of Education, as well as other knowledgeable parties – such as the National School Boards Association (NSBA), however, I believe that my experience advising the U.S. Department of Education and  the Anne Arundel County Public Schools gives me a firm base from which to work.

Perhaps having a process such as this in place will help to ensure that the voters have something to say about how roughly one-half of our county’s budget is spent, while at the same time helping to reassure us that there are people involved in making these decisions that are qualified to do so.

“Better teachers”

Having volunteered with teachers and administrators in Anne Arundel County for nearly ten years, as well as being involved in education professionally for more than five, my experience tells me that the highest quality academic results come from the best prepared students being challenged by well trained and motivated teachers.  Teachers and students need to be better prepared to teach and learn. 

Reaching that goal means that we need to move toward universally available pre-K instructional programs which prepare our children to be ready to start to read in kindergarten.  Reports from the National Academy of Science and the US Department of Education have confirmed unusually high adaptation and language skills in the young brain – potentials which today go vastly under exercised as children sit in pre-school day care centers.  If elected, I would support legislation to move forward with a staged deployment of universally available pre-K instruction starting at age four.

Teachers need more comprehensive professional development, and a higher percentage of Maryland teachers should be certified in the content area that they are teaching.  Last year, more than 2,000 teachers were hired in the state on provisional teaching certificates (nearly 75% of those teachers had no prior teaching experience).  Maryland, like much of the nation, faces a significant shortfall in certified teachers.  In particular, recent reporting from the Maryland State Board of Education projected significant shortfalls in certified teachers in mathematics, science, and special education.  These shortfalls could significantly impair the larger school districts in the state (such as Anne Arundel County) which hire 70% of the teachers in the state.

Maryland has made great efforts to entice certified teachers to live and teach in the state.  The Quality Teacher Incentive Act of 1999 provided numerous fiscal incentives for qualified teachers (stipends, tuition expenses, bonuses, etc.) to accept jobs in the state and maintain their credentials.  However, it would seem that the most significant factor in attracting these teachers is salary.  Maryland ranks 14^th in the country in average teacher salaries, however, when one considers the higher cost of living in parts of the state, this discrepancy becomes even more significant. 

Efforts by the state to encourage raising of teacher salaries has had limited effect.  The Maryland Teacher Salary Challenge Program put in place a mechanism by which counties could access state funds set aside for teacher salary increases if they were able to raise their teacher salaries by 8% by FY2002.  Placing this burden on the counties, particularly counties with tax caps like Anne Arundel was somewhat unrealistic.  School systems such as Anne Arundel have increasing costs of education across the board (including increasing enrollment) and teacher pay increases become more and more unattainable as other expenses mount.

The recently passed “Thornton Education Bill” will help, however it still doesn’t do enough.  The “Thornton Task Force Report” called for a single formula to allocate state funds to education, as well as a dramatic increase in the proportion of the burden of public education paid for by the state.  However, the politics in Annapolis prevented this plan from being enacted as written.  Many underserved areas of the state continued to receive less funds than the Thornton Commission recommended.  This program needs to be changed so that funds are allocated as intended in the original Thornton report.

“Better tools”

Deployment of instructional technology has been a strongly sounded note over the past ten years in K-12 schools across the nation.  This push has resulted in billions of dollars being spent on hardware, software, and networking.  Much of this was done without significant amounts of professional development for teachers.  In addition, for the most part the most capable computing equipment has been placed in computer labs, outside of the instructional setting – away from where teaching and learning take place.  The result has been a widely discussed problem in the educational research community. 

While students clearly need access to technology and to the instruction necessary to effectively use it, our state’s number one instructional technology priority must be pushing our teachers to achieve the necessary level of mastery in the technology themselves.  This can only happen through “hands on” daily interaction with computers and the software which will make teachers more efficient and effective. 

As such, I will put forward legislation to create a “Laptop for Teachers” program.  Under this program, the state would provide a computer stipend, and Internet service subsidy for certified teachers so that every teacher can have a computer with Internet access.

“Better access”

We also need to make better use of the investment that the state has made in network infrastructure.  Over the past several years, Maryland has spent millions of dollars putting in place hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable to link our counties together.  Network.Maryland is that state-owned capacity.  When I served on the Governor’s High Speed Network Development Task Force, I pushed hard for education to be a major user of the state network.  Working with educators across the state, my subcommittee worked to define a governance model for the network which would assure that educational users would never become disenfranchised.  Additionally, we worked with state and local government agencies to focus attention on greater exploitation of the Federal E-Rate program which discounts telecommunications costs for library and educational institutions.

Taking this one step further, this year, I supported (and worked to amend) House Bill 1197 which called for the establishment of a network-based curriculum delivery system which would allow teachers across the state to receive professional development training over the Internet.  This system would also allow teachers to obtain greater access to instructional materials for classroom use.  This bill was passed by the General Assembly in the last session, and it represents a new way for the state to help support professional development of teachers, as well as delivery of a wider variety of instructional materials for students.  Network delivery of instructional materials to teachers and students is an important way to save money and enhance the learning experience; I will support further expansion of the system authorized  under HB 1197.

“Parents need choice”

Our parents need choice when it comes to educating our state’s children.  Our children are our lasting legacy, and it is the responsibility of each parent to provide the best possible education that they can to each child.   Since every child is different and every situation is different, choice is critical in order to ensure that parents are able to provide their children with the appropriate sort of educational experience.  Choice means that our public school systems in the state need to be of the highest caliber possible, and is indeed a choice – not something to be avoided.

This does not mean “school vouchers,” but instead it means that we need strong, community accountable public schools, charter schools that leverage unique opportunities in communities, and private schools which emphasize needs not met by public schools.  In addition, state and county resources need to be available for parents who choose to home school their children.