The Importance of the BOE Election

It's easy to think your vote in a school-board election doesn't matter much, but it matters a lot. Our public schools account for approximately 60% of all local property taxes, and the quality of our schools is the single biggest factor in maintaining the value of homes in this community.

So I ask all voters in South Orange and Maplewood to: 1) vote on Tuesday, April 17, from 2-9 pm at your usual polling place; and 2) think critically and sensibly about the candidate choices on this year's ballot.

Some of the candidates have tried to frame this election as a choice between candidates who are for or against a system of academic leveling in our secondary schools. This is an outright misrepresentation. But even worse, this frame shifts the focus toward an "us-vs.-them" political cynicism and away from student needs. Our students don't need politicians or ideologues on the Board of Education. They need better teachers and better curriculum in their classrooms.

For current BOE member Wayne Eastman and his running mates, Jeff Bennett and Madhu Pai, what matters most is the results our schools achieve. Beliefs are important, but outcomes are what BOE members get elected to deliver. On this score, no candidate in this election comes close to Mr. Eastman. Before joining the BOE, he served on the board of the Community Coalition on Race, where he participated in a long-running and successful effort to work with the local real-estate community to stop steering families to neighborhoods based on the color of their skin. On the Board of Ed, Mr. Eastman helped recruit superintendent Brian Osborne, whose tenure has yielded the first measurable narrowing of the black-white achievement gap in our district in the past 20 years. Mr. Eastman also was a co-author of the "District Goals"--the strategic plan that has guided our district in:
--expanding full-day kindergarten
--vastly improving English language arts curriculum and beginning the same for math
--instituting an inclusion model for students with special needs
--developing a comprehensive, professional-development focused teacher evaluation system
--expanding access for all students to Advanced Placement courses
--negotiating a contract that led to teachers sharing in the cost of health-care benefits
And much, much more. And doing it all of it while dramatically lowering the annual rate of school-tax increase from an annual rate of 5%-6% to 2%.

Mr. Eastman, Mr. Bennett and Ms. Pai are campaigning on a platform that pursues strategies for BOTH continuing to narrow the achievement gap and continuing to raise expectations for all students. It's important that we not help lower-performing students reach yesterday's benchmarks—but rather that we help them catch up and leap forward, because our increasingly global society keeps raising the bar.

There is so much conflicting data on K-12 education in America that the result is very often a sea of uncertainty. Data on the efficacy of leveling or deleveling are notably inconclusive. But the one irrefutable conclusion of all education research is that the quality of the teacher in a classroom matters far more than any other variable in how much students in that room will learn. There is also strong evidence that the more schools ask of their students, in terms of academic rigor, the more they learn. Mr. Eastman, Mr. Bennett and Ms. Pai are the candidates who are squarely focused on expecting more from our students, our teachers and our schools—and on judging success on the basis of student performance. (See www.VoteSOMA2012.com) Mr. Bennett is also the only candidate among six who is a former K-12 classroom teacher.

Please get to the polls on Tuesday and make your choice. Please encourage your friends and neighbors to do the same. Turnout for Board of Ed elections usually runs low; one or two or five votes can make a huge difference. I hope you'll join me in voting for candidates who will base their decisions on data and results, rather than on some ideological litmus test.