Repair relationships and renew trust between the school committee, educators, families, and the community.

• I intend to increase the trust families and community members have in the Newton Public Schools by being an open, visible advocate for them. That means being visible in the schools themselves and with the constituencies that comprise the school community as a whole.  It means standing up to be counted on local issues that have an impact on the schools, and actively engaging city council members and the mayor.  It means being proactive around state policy-making that impacts our schools.  It is not enough to be a manager – the Newton School Committee needs activists as well.
• I will work toward a more positive relationship between the School Committee and our staff unions. Academic excellence requires shared purpose and honest communication, both of which are undermined by the adversarial posturing that has marked recent years.  I am in favor of more a more open contract bargaining process – one that maximizes transparency and the shared interest in doing right by our students – and I am fully committed to ensuring that ongoing, respectful communication between the School Committee and staff unions is the default position, no matter what the issue.
• The most recent budget crisis made it painfully clear that the process and organization of NPS’ finances obscure what it really costs to run the school system.  Budgets that necessitate finding money and pushing known expenses out into the future ensure structural deficits – they are a lousy way to plan.  What’s more, they undermine public trust in the process itself.  I will advocate for budgets that are transparent about what our schools need to maintain excellence, even as I work to make certain those dollars are well-spent.  That is the only way to build and maintain community trust in the process and a key element of inspiring confidence in the system as a whole.

Ensure that the Newton Public Schools’ Portrait of a Learner is the true standard for improvement in planning, policy, and practice.

• The NPS Portrait of a Learner, developed with broad input from students, staff, parents, and community members, established a vision of what we want for (and from) students in the Newton Public Schools: adaptability, effective communication skills, critical thinking, empathy, and a learner’s mindset.  That vision should be what defines the purpose and progress of the school system, and it will guide my approach to policy-making as a school committee member.  I will keep it front and center and will work to ensure that work toward enacting goals contained in NPS’ five-year Strategic Plan are consistent with the Portrait of a Learner.
• The school committee should also advocate for the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to develop and adopt a statewide vision of a learner/graduate and use it to frame the standards that will replace the now-defunct MCAS graduation requirement that voters rejected last November.  Implementation of a statewide vision of a 21^st Century learner/graduate will create the permission structure necessary to move curriculum, instruction, and assessment out of the 19^th Century once and for all by committing to plan, teach, and assess competencies that students need, but are not well captured by pencil-and-paper testing.  What replaces the MCAS graduation requirement should not simply be a common core curriculum, nor should it be a way to return high stakes testing by way of the back door.  Massachusetts has an opportunity to do what several other states and high-achieving OECD countries have done, and local school committees should be at the forefront of advocating for change.  This is work I’m already doing and will continue to highlight if elected.

Empower educators to innovate and share their knowledge, expertise, & leadership with colleagues and the community.

• The Newton Public Schools’ most valuable resource is its dedicated, knowledgeable staff, whose expertise that can be brought to bear on many of the challenges the system faces.  However, unlocking that resource can be difficult in an education universe that contains research disconnected from practice, outside consultants brought in to “transform” local practice, and so-called, “High Quality Instructional Materials” sold to school systems by vendors who promise big results as long as their methods and materials are, “implemented with fidelity.”  Knowledge and instructional methods from outside the school system are not inherently bad, but my first inclination will always be to find out what in-house talent we can seek, and I will prioritize looking there first as we work to improve our educational program, make it consistent across schools, and still recognize that every classroom – every student – is different.  When I say that NPS’ staff is its most valuable resource, it’s far more than lip-service.
• There’s an important relationship between staff empowerment and job satisfaction – it is the same relationship that exists between student empowerment and citizenship – and in an era of declining interest in the field of education, it is now more important than ever to ensure that Newton remains an attractive place to work and grow professionally.  Dimensions of empowerment include participation in decision-making and governance, opportunities for leadership and professional growth, and the perception of being able to have an impact.  I believe that NPS has the capacity to do more in these areas.  In some cases, it can be a simple matter of better highlighting the work people are doing to ensure students are getting the best education possible.  In others, it might mean opening up decision-making in ways that recognize that our schools are miniature communities as well as workplaces and providing opportunities for emergent leadership.  I will look for these openings because they build staff capacity, provide a model for students of what good workplaces look like, and perhaps most importantly, help to develop and retain high quality staff.

Re-center the civic mission of public education in teaching & learning, school governance, and public engagement.

• The need to better educate for civic knowledge and engagement has recently become much more prominent issue than it has been for decades.  Nationally, more than a generation of neglecting the civic function of public schools has taken a toll that is on display every day, but the tools to fix it are also right in front of us – learning to disagree respectfully, being able to see through the eyes of others, understanding the media environment in which we live, and participating in school governance are some of them.  If we can better recognize that practices to build civic knowledge, skills, and engagement exist at all grade levels and across subject disciplines, we can be more deliberate about using them to nurture students’ sense of membership and efficacy in their communities.
• We need to understand that students’ out-of-class experiences also contribute to their civic identities, and act on that knowledge.  Notions about how and why to participate in civil society are formed through team sports, performance groups, and service projects.  In fact, lessons drawn from these involvements can have an impact on students’ sense of efficacy that an influence their classroom learning.  I think most people understand this on some level, and in 25 years of coaching debate and softball, I saw it firsthand – a lot.  In fact, the literature on both civic education and social-emotional learning are fairly aligned on the matter of how meaningful learning takes place, but we need to a better job enabling students to connect the dots by making the civic and (and academic) dimensions of their out-of-class involvements clearer.  In doing so, NPS can draw closer to realizing the Portrait of a Learner.
• Perhaps more than anything else right now, we need to recognize that building community within our schools is vital to everything else that they seek to accomplish.  A volatile and coarsened world has intruded on our children’s development to a greater degree than at any other time in our nation’s history, and schools must be a bulwark against the damage such polarization can do.  I do not suggest that we should ignore the world outside the classroom walls – dealing (age appropriately) with current and even controversial issues is well understood to be a key element of effective civic education – but we do need to start by emphasizing notions of belonging.  Looking within, every child of every background, identity and ability needs to feel accepted for who they are and respected for what they have to offer.  Looking outward, staff, parents, and community members need to push back against attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion.  What’s more, we all need to model for our youth how people who disagree on issues – sometimes viscerally – can still work together when the stakes for our kids are highest.  Our schools are at the heart of our community and must play a vital role in this.  For that reason, Newton’s school committee members should go beyond being managers, beyond being policymakers.  They must be willing to take on active leadership.

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