Two candidates running on a “TNT” platform, won election to the LCPS BOD today, with turnout around 3% of registered voters. TNT stands for Teaching Not Testing, and is pretty much the teacher’s union position in NM, and nationally. The two winners are Edward Frank and Maury Castro who both subscribe to the TNT “platform”.
Mr. Frank stated in an issues document that he would support charter schools “only if they are part of the public school system and are not for profit.”
He also does not support common core standards. Mr. Castro would not support any new charter schools and is also against common core standard implementation.
Public policy issues in education are extremely complex. What is supported one day, can sometimes become anathema the next, as trends and approaches blow through the educational policy world over the years and decades.
Opinions differ, interests differ, but education is one field that needs an active democratic process, as we believe, along with many, that universal and quality education underlies any successful attempt at self governing such as our American experiment requires.
Education is also a central part of our economy locally, and statewide, and 3% are not close to representative of the interests of the community as a whole. Clearly for this, and other areas of governance , our electoral process is failing to get needed citizen involvement.
PSA generally doesn’t take or promote policy positions of a partisan nature ; we do support innovation and believe that the means to bring that about includes, among other initiatives, charter schools, which were established by law, for the most part, as a way to provide innovation and experimentation when the public schools, for whatever reason, fail to provide it.
PSA would like to see innovation in education continue to have outlets for trial and error such as charter schools can provide; we have a long period of learning by doing ahead …to master all that online tools can do to support public education.
Common core standards seem to have become a foggy issue… originally thought to help promote educational standards nationwide…and supported by moderate reformers. Presently, to interested observers such as PSA, the ongoing scrum seems impenetrable and obtuse. We lack an understanding of what is “really going on” with this important policy decision. Would someone be able to explain it all in readily understandable terms?
We’d be all ears if so. But we do understand that educational policy is irreducibly contentious, and that public spirited individuals and groups will disagree on what is best, and that’s part of getting to better solutions. PSA doesn’t have all the answers. We just want to be part of the process coming up with some solutions.
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