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Post date: May 06, 2013 10:56:9 AM
Dear friends of CAAA:
It was a pleasure meeting with your group on Thursday, May 2, 2013. The Croton Alliance for Academic Achievement is clearly a dynamic group of committed and involved parents, who deeply care about the quality of education in the Croton schools, and I am thankful for your interest.
Please see below my written responses to the questions which you posed:
1. Please tell us briefly what has motivated you to run for the Board and what special skills or experience you feel you would bring to it, if elected.
Motivations:
I have been involved in education for all of my life. My parents were both educators - my father a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and my mother an orthopedic surgeon who led the training program for new surgeons. Both served on the board of various schools, and discussion of education was always part of discourse in our household. I am married to a teacher. And, as many of you know, I am deeply involved in the Destination Imagination program at PVC, CHHS, and on the NY state level.
So it is natural for me to be interested in running for the board now. Given my experience with my own kids, and my experience supporting others kids through DI I see the fundamental promise of public education – that providing an appropriate and challenging education for every child is not just critical to that child, but is also a fundamental foundation of our society. By educating our children to the best of their ability we create the next generation of thinkers, innovators and community leaders.
Given all of the changes which are occurring in public education, now is the time to get involved.
Why am I qualified?
At work I manage a team of highly trained software developers and quantitative analysts. This involves, first of all, setting a strong overall vision and set of policies for the department. Goals are set and a plan must be put into place to achieve those goals. Budgets must be written balancing the available funding vs. goals. Staffing plans must be created, and high quality personnel attracted and retained. The plan must be executed - and progress towards goals measured. There are rigorous regulatory and audit requirements which must be satisfied. While the ultimate goal in the schools is different, and some of the constraints vary, the board is similarly responsible for setting vision, budgeting, employing an administration, and tracking progress to implement the education of every student in the district - all in the context of a rigorous regulatory regime.
I served on the education committee at Croton Jewish Center (CJC) for multiple years, setting educational policy for the organization, running the religious school, hiring teachers and setting overall vision for the program.
Now that CJC has merged with another congregation, I serve of the Board of Trustees of Congregation Sons of Israel in Briarcliff (CSI). CSI has a million dollar annual budget, and incorporates not just the synagogue and its physical plant, but also a K-12 religious school, a nursery school, and a summer nursery camp program. As a non-profit organization, CSI depends upon donors and membership fees for a large portion of its annual revenue - and given the recent economic situation, it too has had to come to grips with the difficulty of balancing organizational goals vs. significant funding constraints.
Finally, as I mentioned, I am heavily involved in the Destination Imagination organization which provides creative problem solving programs for students in our schools. As a trustee of the New York DI affiliate I work extensively in outreach to help bring DI’s creative problem solving, leadership and teamwork programs to new schools. I manage online public relations, IT and communications for the organization. Here in Croton, I have managed DI teams in the elementary, middle and secondary level - including bringing 3 teams to Global Finals. I teach creative problem solving skills, train other team managers, and I am the treasury adviser for the program, managing our approximately $20,000 annual cash flow.
2. Please explain your opinion of the Common Core curriculum, including your perception of its impact on the Croton schools. If elected to the Board, would you advocate for curriculum changes at any level? Please explain.
My understanding is that Common Core is not a curriculum; the common core standards documentation specifically state that it should not be treated as one. It is intended to be a set of standards which students are expected to master - an end-point for curriculum. It should inform curriculum - not be curriculum.
On its face, Common Core can serve some good, in setting higher standards for our schools. It is important to have challenging goals, no matter what the endeavour, and evidence based approaches do have some merit. For instance, it is clear that they are forcing some much needed rigor upon the program in the lower grades here in Croton.
That said, there are significant problems with Common Core, many of which go back to its creation by a consortium of business funded foundations, and textbook / testing companies – who took almost no input from teachers with experience in the classroom. It is tailored largely to drive improvement in schools elsewhere with far greater problems than those we see in relatively successful schools like Croton. It is untested - and we won't know for at least 4 years what its true impact will be. And now the Next Gen Science Standards appear to have similar problems. Our children are the experimental subjects. And of course, its prescriptive nature means that there are high stakes involved in meeting those standards - allowing it to become a major profit source for the same testing companies (like Pearson) who were involved in its creation.
Consider the recent scandal related to this spring's ELA common core test, in which students whose schools purchased Pearson test prep materials had an advantage on the test because identical reading passages were used in the prep materials and on the mandated test. It is clear that these tests are an expensive giveaway to companies like Pearson. In order to do well on Pearson’s test you will need to buy Pearson textbooks and Pearson's prep materials. Never mind whether those materials are effective teaching tools - it is private enterprise extracting profit from public schools.
But Common Core is a fact of life - having been mandated by New York State. The question is: How do we, as a district, react to it?
I assert that in large part our curriculum already met most of the Common Core standards when they were adopted by New York state in 2010. We would not have been seeing the educational outcomes which we were seeing in the Croton schools otherwise. Our kids got into great colleges (Yale, Cornell, Harvard, MIT); our hall of distinguished graduates is replete with individuals who have excelled in their fields of endeavour. And as was recently noted in the press, our high school – where most students had minimal exposure to Common Core driven curriculum – is already in the top 260 (99th percentile) in the US, and 40th (97th percentile) in the State.
The key is to use the common core mandates together with teaching techniques which we already know work - ones which master teachers in our district have been using for years. We should be using the expertise of those master teachers to support and train their junior colleagues on the faculty. They can instruct their peers in the use of tools which work; tools which provide their students with challenging learning opportunities. We do not need to tack left and right following the latest educational fad du-jour – we need to take the strategies which are already working, those which are supported by strong research, and make them available to every teacher; to every student.
Unfortunately the way NYSED is implementing these standards, combined with the mandated APPR for teachers, works against that. School and teacher ratings are informed by student success on the state tests – so while these tests are officially not "high-stakes" for the students, they are "high-stakes" for the teachers and for the school district. If we don't want our teachers to "teach to the test" – if we want them to teach students as opposed to teaching standards, we must work to reduce the linkage between student standardized test scores and teacher or school rating and instead focus more heavily upon mastery - both in our teachers and for our students.
3. In your opinion, what strategy or strategies should the school district use to meet the needs of students who perform above grade level in some or all academic subjects?
I want to state unequivocally that we should have accelerated programs in our schools to serve children who are exceptional. I know that in a small district such as ours this can be challenging – as there are often not enough kids needing acceleration to make up an entire section – but we must not abandon the exceptional kids to mediocrity. For years we have been mandated to address the learning impairment end of the special education scale – but we must also attend to the other kind of "special education" – the special programs which exceptional kids need to succeed according to their potential. To do this we will need to be clever – combining and splitting classes and scheduling in innovative ways to utlilize our best teachers most effectively.
But let's back up a moment: One of the common characteristics of truly gifted children is that they have high ability, but often have performance which does not match their ability. The goal should be to attend to the needs not just of students who show higher performance than their peers, but also to serve those who have higher ability than their peers – to ensure that they are enabled to perform in concert with their ability. But our schools do almost no ability testing. We only have the state-mandated performance tests, and teacher recommendation, with which to determine which students are "above grade level". This deficiency must be remedied. While teachers should, in theory, be able to identify kids needing a greater challenge, that is not enough – kids can fall through the cracks (and I have personal experience with this). We really need to implement tools to accurately assess ability – and I intend to advocate for changes in this regard.
We seem also to have a misunderstanding of the word “accelerated” in this district, for instance, with our middle school to saying "all of our students are accelerated in science". What does "accelerated" mean if it applies to the entire student body? Yes – they are accelerated vs. the NYS expected coursework for 8th grade – but are they being challenged according to their varying abilities? And what about the fact that gifted kids often have exceptional ability in one area, but struggle in others? A brilliant math kid might be an average reader – or vice versa. We must ensure that these kids are given advanced opportunities where appropriate, and support where appropriate.
So what do we need? We need programs for exceptional kids that are rigorous. There must be well defined entrance criteria - based upon ability testing - to define who should be in the program. It should be possible to enter the program at any grade – so that we ensure that students are not inappropriately locked into an upper or lower track. This is important because some students’ performance changes significantly as they mature. Related to this, there must be well defined rules on what it takes to remain in the program. And of course all of these standards should be documented and published – so that parents know what programs are available for their kids.
4. As you know, one of the largest responsibilities of the Board is dealing with the budget and approving large contracts. What do you feel are the largest drivers of cost in the budget? What, if anything, can the Board do to influence costs and save money for programming for the kids? If programs have to be cut, how would you think about where to make cuts? If, on the other hand, programs could be added, where do you feel there is the greatest need or possible impact?
First of all, I would like to point out that according to this year's budget documents – salaries, pensions and fringe benefits for collective bargaining employees make up over 70% of the budget. Note that there is no flexibility in payments made to pension plans – these are dictated by law. Together with mandated expenditures e.g. for special ed, that leaves a "discretionary" budget which is well less than 20% of the budget. I use discretionary in quotes as many of the items covered in the discretionary budget are not truly discretionary for us – they can include items like funding for vital programs for students, professional development, and the such.
So we need to find additional funding - or cut elsewhere...
On the funding side:
We cannot just raise taxes more. There is a big political cost in exceeding the tax cap - and we must not make living in Croton unaffordable, especially for our seniors.
I do think that we should be looking for grant money where possible and appropriate. This can be difficult for a small district like ours. We are a relatively affluent community, and are unlikely to get much in the way of assistance based merely upon financial need. Another concern: If we depend too much upon grants to keep programs going, what will happen if that grant money ceases to be available? And will the requirements of the granting organization prove to be a burden? Grants with too many strings attached could be a problem.
On the expense side:
CTA (our teachers union) has already given up significant concessions in the last two contract negotiations; the last contract had a zero salary increase and a freeze on step (seniority). Croton teachers pay the highest percentage of their healthcare costs of any district in Westchester. Cutting here would be a poor tactic if the goal is to attract and retain excellent teachers for our kids.
I think we need to take a close look at administrative costs: I dispute the oft-quoted statistic that Croton has a low administrative load compared to other districts. First of all, the data behind this analysis is over two years old. Secondly, only the 6 administrators making over $126,000 per year are included in the analysis, while by my count there are another 9 administrators beyond that, and the cost which they represent to the district is not insignificant. We now have 2 highly paid assistant superintendents where we used to have less expensive clerical staff performing those roles; we have separate directors of finance, of technology, of continuing education, of athletics, and for special ed. According to my analysis, using data from SeeThroughNY and gleaned from Board Meeting minutes, salary and benefits expenditure for administrators making more than $126,000 per year is approximately $1.7 million. But the total for the remaining 9 administrators is another $1.1 million - a significant sum! There is no question that this is greater than the administrative load in other comparable school districts, and it is disturbing that while teachers are taking cuts, academic programs are being limited, and athletic programs are being reduced, the administration continues to grow.
I strongly suspect that there is excess in administrative costs, and in other parts of the budget. I just wish that the budget documents which were published by the district gave us enough information to ascertain exactly how much. As a board member I would pledge to explore this carefully, and I will insist upon the publication of detailed budget documents similar to those published by other nearby districts.
On cutting or adding programs:
I would hope that we would not need to cut programs. But if budgets get so difficult that we must, I think we need to be extremely careful. We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize our kids prospects for the future. Any cuts would need to be judicious and balanced, and target programs which affect the smallest number of students possible. We will need to make sure that we still offer a set of programs which meet our student’s needs. That said – I strongly believe that academic programs are a school system’s raison d’etre – and would certainly come at this topic from that point of view.
If we do manage to find funds to add programs, I would want to focus on creating programs which improve our academic success:
One particular area in which I would like to see additions is in science education for grades K-6, which currently is totally inadequate. There is no effective science instruction at CET; and at PVC, grades 5 and 6 suffer equally. There should be dedicated resources in each of these schools for science education.
Similarly, we should consider adding a K-12 engineering program. Our kids are not getting into the top engineering schools in sufficient numbers - and it is because most have never been exposed to the topic.
Another area is enrichment programs for academically exceptional students. With just a few more teachers we could really create a program which would take our schools and our kids to a higher level of achievement.
Again, it was a pleasure meeting with you. I hope for your support on May 21st.
Thank you,
Joshua Diamond
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