Get on Board

With a week to go in the campaign season for local elections, school board members and wannabes are turning up the volume on their respective campaigns. But due to the current popularity of test-score-boosting, teachers’-union-busting Pedro Garcia, the candidates have little to run on.

In fact, the greatest competition at times erupts between candidates who clamor equally to endorse the school director’s agenda while very quietly slipping in reform ideas of their own—and arguing about those. No one, it seems, wants to criticize the new school savior head-on, but still few embrace him fully.

Take District 8, for example. In this 90 percent white swath of south Davidson County that encompasses Oak Hill, Green Hills, Forest Hills and Belle Meade, incumbent Kathleen Harkey is attempting to fend off a challenge from Mary Chris Waller, an operations manager at a local network security firm. And both women sense their politically prudent common ground.

“I think both of us are for change and for Dr. Garcia,” Harkey says.

“I am behind change,” Waller says, in a sort of political ditto. “I support many of the changes Dr. Garcia is bringing about.”

But Waller’s allegiance isn’t blind. “We seem to still be expanding the bureaucracy over at Bransford Avenue [the Metro schools’ central office],” she says. “It seems to me that there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians in this system.”

Harkey, on the other hand, believes Garcia’s reforms—which include focusing on student achievement, reallocating school resources based on maximum effectiveness and emphasizing principals’ autonomy and ability—do decentralize school authority. “Garcia is really empowering principals to be the lead teachers in the schools,” she says. “And we’re very intentionally putting resources back into the classroom—with great consistency. Every school should start with the same base level [of support].”

Waller agrees on the resource question. “There should be [adequate] supplies and textbooks—everything [students and teachers] need in the classroom,” she says. “But all we talk about is tests, and we need certified teachers in the classroom.”

Standardized testing—an integral part of Garcia’s results-based reforms—is one of the few issues about which a small handful of candidates openly disagree. And of the eight candidates competing for four separate seats on the school board, there is no more vocal critic of testing than Lorinda Hale.

Hale, a political newcomer, hails from Antioch, where she’s the founding president of John F. Kennedy Middle School’s Parent Teacher Student Organization (PTSO). Like all the other candidates, Hale is no critic of Garcia; in fact, she served on the citizens’ advisory panel that recommended Metro hire him. She agrees with Garcia’s vision. It’s the implementation that’s the problem.

“I am very much for improved student achievement,” she says. “The emphasis on student achievement is long overdue in Nashville...and [standardized] testing is a very quick way to get an answer, but unfortunately it’s not a very thorough answer. We need to find other ways to measure our children’s progress.”

Hale’s opponent in District 6 is incumbent Mebenin Awipi, a Tennessee State University professor who Metro Council appointed in April to serve the remaining term of Vern Denney, who went to work for the school administration. Awipi disagrees with Hale. “At what point is there too much reliance on testing?” he asks. “The national standards are fairly well-established. You take measurements and compare them year to year.”

But to Hale, education isn’t that simple. “Education is learning to think critically, not learning to take tests,” she says. “If the only thing you’re learning to do is regurgitate, you’re not getting a meaningful education. After all, tests can’t measure a child’s love for a good book or his appreciation of art and music.”

Awipi thinks the jury’s still out on Garcia’s reforms and has no critical thinking of his own to share. “One year is too short a time to pass judgment on Garcia’s agenda,” he says. “We didn’t expect him to come in with a magic wand and fix everything.”

For his part, Awipi contends that curriculum improvements must be continued and that “the school board has to be a good steward of any additional resources given by the Metro Council.”

But Hale, the polite but passionate school mom, persists. “Student achievement has to be coupled with engaging students in a love of learning. We’re trying to look good on paper and neglecting to give our children the critical thinking skills that they’ll use throughout life.”

Hale might find an unlikely ally in Raul Lopez, the Hermitage businessman who’s fighting fellow challenger Martha Ann Hood and incumbent Kathy Nevill for the District 4 seat. Lopez, campaigning as the “strong conservative voice” for the school board—he believes e-mail for teachers is a frivolous expenditure, and sore-bottom discipline is sorely lacking in our schools—would probably agree with Hale that Metro schools are trying to look good on paper, or in the paper.