Questionnaire answer by the candidate

As a candidate for California Superintendent of Education how do you feel about the following:

The new movie “Race to Nowhere” http://www.racetonowhere.com/ which makes a case for a more humane method of educating our children?

Dear Ms. D., Thanks for your questions. I haven’t seen the movie but in looking only at the one page that came on my screen I see one point suggested: the whole public education process of enforced confinement, academic engorgement at the hands/minds of the various state-credentialed teachers over a period of years, followed/interspersed with what seems like a no-end-in-sight amount of tests—all this is not the best education we can provide for our children. I agree that the present public education morass is a mess, that we as a society, as a people had better put far more mind and muscle power into designing, devising and backing with cold hard cash the kinds of education that will enable each and every child to become all that (s)he is capable of being.

President Obama’s “Race to the Top” program?

As for Race to the Top, well, it’s another attempted government-induced reform dangled in front of money-needy state and local education agencies, which is tied still to the extensive data-gathering and test-administering duties imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act, and so what are students, parents and teachers left with after all of the above is said and done? Zip, zilch, nada, zero, just more government-mandated and employee union-cowtowed-to crap for public schools to deal/cope with. May all of the above be gone one fine day, and may I live long enough to see that day. Thanks for asking, Ms. D., and I hope you can make a better- informed decision for having read this.

Should the U.S. Department of Education be abolished?

I don’t think we should be that quick to abolish the Department of Education, although if they had been the ones who came up with the No Child Left Act of 2001 I would give more serious consideration to abolishing the DOE. I think NCLB was a product of the Bush Administration primarily, but I am not well-enough informed to be 100% certain of that. I sometimes call the No Child Left Behind Act the “Whole Child Left Behind Act,” because it is responsible for placing tests, testing, and test score comparisons front and center in American public education today, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of in my 41 years of classroom teaching. Why, in the 1960’s the only test anybody really cared about or even heard of in high school was the SAT, which was and is still used widely by colleges and universities to assess a student’s aptitude for and/or chance of success in higher education. That’s all we need, with the possible exception of the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), which is the only nationwide test currently in existence, but participation in it is voluntary (and maybe that’s the way it should stay). Graduates of American high schools in the 1960’s went on to successful, productive careers in many different fields of endeavor, including rocket science (How about all those men flying around in outer space!), cancer research, nuclear physics, astronomy, music, art, creative writing, you name it. So no, it’s not about the testing, per se, it’s about how deeply a person goes into a subject/field and how much he/she cares, wants to know and is able to create, originate, improvise within that subject that counts in the long run. These are just a few thoughts that come to mind. Mr. L., I thank you for asking and I bid you good day!

Dear Candidate, before I cast my ballot for Supt. of Public Instruction, I would like to hear your views on school libraries and school library staffing and funding.

Dear Ms. G., I’m a long-time supporter (and user) of public libraries, in schools and outside of schools), but I don’t like what I see as the gradual stripping away of not only the contents but of the importance of school (and of public) libraries. Some of this has to do with the emergence of technology and the switch to on-line access, to elimination and/or paring down of physical books and magazines, etc. that has been going on, which is just the way of our society now, so there’s no sense I guess in “howling at the moon” about it very much, which I have done believe me in years gone by. These days I just bemoan the serious, widespread and growing decimation of public funds that were intended for schools but have instead stopped/stayed in the coffers of school districts and other levels/elements within the public school system. These bureaucrats of course are short-changing schools and blaming it all on the perennial “budget cuts,” some of which is/are true and really occurring, but others of which are excuses and dare I say it—lies to the people in schools and to the public to cover for the way they are strangling, starving the public schools they are responsible for.

How do you feel about families that homeschool privately?

Dear Ms. H., I support and encourage families who privately homeschool their children. As long as the parent(s) have sufficient education, they should be left alone by government to teach their own children. If anything, government could and should do more to support homeschooling parents in their efforts, by providing teaching materials and other educational support requested by parents in order to be the best homeschoolers they can be! If elected I will educate myself to learn as much as I can about the homeschooling movement and the laws pertaining to it in California.

Do you favor or oppose new taxes, fees, or bonds for schools?

Before I favor any new taxes, fees or bonds to raise money for school districts, school districts have to show me (and the public) why they need the money. They have to present simple, transparent budgets that high school students and their parents (among other citizens) can understand. School districts must give the public a clear picture of how, where, when, why and by whom the taxpayers’ dollars have been spent, are being spent, and will be spent, before any citizen or elected official should vote for a tax or fee increase or a bond measure.

With the state budget deficit, how would you handle the decrease in state funding?

I would seek down-to-the-dollar accounting of school district and school site costs/expenses to determine what the actual, traceable, verifiable costs are to run a school district and a school. Much of this information is currently kept secret and/or indecipherable in school districts, and that practice has got to stop. All budgets should be 100% transparent and posted on the school district and school front doors every month for all to see. Once exact costs are known and identified/itemized, it should become apparent how much money a school district and or school truly needs to operate. Again, public education institutions’ 100% budgetary transparency is of the utmost importance at this time in California

Mr. Nusbaum do you support making it possible for parents to select the best school for their kids, and to let parents move their kids to charter schools with some public money?

Sure I support making it possible for parents to select the best school for their kids. The tough part of that of course is how do you know the best school(s)? I guess you can look at API scores for an academic score-based rating, but otherwise it gets down to word of mouth, verifiable reputation of a school provided by students and/or parents who have attended/know of the school and so forth. Yes I would favor letting parents move their kids to charter schools, but I don’t think it would be necessary to give them money to do it. Charter schools already receive public money, so that part is taken care of, unless I am missing something else that you may have in mind.

Also, do you favor figuring out a way to pay teachers according to their effectiveness, rather than simply allowing unions to negotiate the same payments for everyone, regardless of their skills in properly educating kids?

Finally, figuring out a way to pay teachers according to their effectiveness is a real puzzle because there are many factors involved in judging a teacher’s effectiveness. For example, if you are using scores of kids on standardized tests, how can a teacher be fairly evaluated on the basis of test scores of kids 1) who deliberately guess and don’t try at all to correctly answer test questions; 2)who didn’t sleep well or at all the night before the test and therefore couldn’t or didn’t even try to do their best; 3) who purposely “trash” the test answers by filling in the bubbles to create “artistic” patterns on the test answer sheet, like making the bubble-in answers into the shape of an “S” or an “X” and so forth; 4) who have been taught by a succession of transient substitute teachers, some(or all) of whom were not properly certified/credentialed to teach algebra 1, chemistry, biology, etc.; 5) who slept through the majority of a teacher’s classes (and let’s say that the teacher happens to have been a California Teacher of the Year), and therefore didn’t really hear, much less understand what the teacher was teaching, which prompts this question: Is it the teacher’s fault that a student sleeps through his/her classes or is it the student’s fault, or maybe is it the parent’s fault? My point is that to evaluate the “effectiveness” of a teacher when there are so many iffy factors, unanswered/unanswerable questions which may come into play is so fraught with complexity, variability, irrationality that I wouldn’t even attempt to do it, especially if test scores are the basis of judging a teacher’s effectiveness. And I am not the only one who feels this way. The American Psychological Association, the National Council on Measurement in Education, And the American Educational Research Association all caution against using test data designed for one purpose (measuring student achievement) for another purpose (measuring teacher effectiveness) [see California Teacher, Sept./Oct. 2009, p. 12].