Editorial
Board Approved
No one has ever confused our school board with the Algonquin Roundtable. For years, the men and women who have presided over our school system have fit snugly into two groups: lazy and out-of-touch intellectuals and, well, lazy and out-of-touch bureaucrats. Whether they were authoring budgets that were $20 million in the red or simply passing on much-needed measures of reform, our board members have long been poor stewards of public education in this city.
But ever since the 1998 elections ushered George Blue, Deidre Macnab, and David Shearon into power, the board has improved dramatically. Its members show up to parent meetings and avidly track the latest research on education. More important, they don’t shy away from tough decisions. Case in point: This month, the board voted 8-0 to empower Bob Crouch, the school system’s director of research and evaluation, to review data showing the progress of children in the classroom. Previously, only a handful of people in the school system had access to this information.
So what’s so important about this? Essentially, it enables the director to learn which teachers are doing a good job and which ones aren’t. Top-shelf teachers can then work with the under-peforming instructors to improve their skills. No one will be fired, we hope, before they are given seasoned professional guidance.
Last fall, the board announced that only 47 percent of Metro’s third-graders were reading as well as others their age. The board considers third-grade reading scores to be an important benchmark of achievement and wants 70 percent of third-graders to read above the national median by 2001. Let’s be real here: They’re not going to hit that target.
But board member Murray Philip, himself a key player in the board’s revitalization, makes an excellent point. In past years, the board would have responded to slumping test scores with a clumsy initiative that, for example, might have examined how teachers instruct reading throughout the county. Instead, this time, the board rightly applied its focus to helping the system’s lagging teachers while leaving its aces alone.
This is one small move. But it’s reflective of a school board that favors tough, practical solutions instead of feel-good measures that ultimately prove useless. Interestingly, while Mayor Bill Purcell campaigned heavily during last summer’s elections on improving education, he has since done little but advance clever wordplay on the issue during cute photo-op visits to schools. It’s the board that’s done the hard work. For once, let’s give them their due.
