1. Offer voters a chance to make sure that all of the candidates are, on some level, suitable for public office
2. Give different candidates' campaigns a chance to show how well-organized they are
After last night's District 5 forum at Rosebank Elementary, I can attest that all of the candidates have the ability to speak in public and have some clue as to what the school board does.
Given that I support Elissa Kim for this office, you can take further observations with that bias in mind. That said, I will be as empirical as possible.
On the issue of item #2, about 40 Kim supporters were there, most wearing T-shirts. I saw a few people Gracie Porter stickers -- maybe 6 to 8? Four or five people were wearing John Haubenreich T-shirts. I saw no one wearing Erica Lanier stickers or T-shrits. She did have palm cards, though, as did the other candidates.
I assume that most of the non-adorned members of the crowd were likely affiliated on some level with a campaign and not expressing it publicly for one reason or another. That, or they had some professional interest in being there.
(N.B. I saw Rachel Bell for the first time. I hope she will be a decent judge because the guy she defeated, Mike Jameson, is one of the smartest and most humane public servants I've met.)
Out of the 150 or so people there, my (completely non-scientific) guess is that fewer than 20 were genuinely undecided and seeking knowledge. My reasoning is that most of the people who show up for these things have 1) been encouraged by a campaign and/or 2) have some other type of vested interest and thus have already made up their minds, at least privately.
****
I have no idea what those hypothetical 20 undecided voters thought after last night. It's hard for me to hazard a guess as to which issues actually would spark one of the voters to choose one candidate over the others. Obviously, though, the candidates definitely made plays for different perceived segments of voters. Harnessing my inner Google, these are the themes I picked up on:
Haubenreich: community-based schools; supporting teachers; supporting staff; seek input from entire community
Kim: student achievement; best practices; attract and retain talent; measure, track, and stategize
Lanier: parent communication; transparency from leadership; involve parents; reach out to community
Porter: district on a good trajectory; stay on the path; experience; district has shown a lot of improvement; speak for kids who don't have a voice
Please note that these impressions are highly subjective. Other people who listened to the same forum I did undoubtedly came away with different takeaways.
****
For this election, I'm far from a persuadable voter.
I've spent the past seven years either teaching students, teaching teachers, earning a master's degree in education, working for public officials who are trying to improve schools, organizing in low-income communities for better schools, organizing to put candidates in office who will push for better schools, or some combination of the above. In addition, I'm married to one of the best teachers in the state. (I may be biased, but that doesn't mean I don't think it.)
N and I spend nearly every waking moment on something related to improving education. I don't mean to sound self-righteous. (One day, I'll tell the story of how just how much I struggled as a teacher.) This is just meant to be evidence that the topics being discussed last night are not just items on agenda to me. My life is pretty much consumed by the question of how we improve the life trajectory of all students.
It is my firm belief, backed up with mounds of evidence*, that our public education system is damaging the potential of the overwhelming majority of our students. Since I have an equally firm belief, backed up with years of working with hundreds of Nashville students, our kids are as capable of learning as any student anywhere, I conclude that we are in a crisis.
District 5, in particular, is in a crisis.
I've worked for enough campaigns to appreciate the difference between what a candidate thinks about what's possible in an office, what a voter thinks about what an elected official can do, and how a candidate crafts a message to a voter. These forums aren't academic conferences. I realize that I'm not the target audience.
I wasn't looking for anyone to pound on a table, yell, or jump up and down. Hysteria, anger, and any other wild emotions are a detriment to actually getting anything done. But I wanted some sense that candidates believed that things are not OK, that we are not just a few steps off, that this district graduates some 4,000 students a year and less than a third are college-ready and this is a disaster for our kids, our families, and Nashville as a whole.
Increasing student achievement is the chief issue facing MNPS and everything else should be dealt with in terms how it affects it. Support staff work rules, how to spend the tax money, charter schools, neighborhood schools, who the next superintendent will be -- does it improve student achievement? How much? How fast?
If another candidate had done a better job than Kim of convincing me that he or she understood this, that he or she was willing to focus on this every board meeting, I would've returned my "Kim for School Board" T-shirt and headed out to knock on doors for that candidate.
That didn't happen.
Elissa Kim remains the best choice for District 5.
* Fact of the Day: MNPS has made the state's "High Priority Systems" systems list every year since the list started in 2005-2006. Even Memphis hasn't made it that many times.
**
11:59 update: edited for clarity and link troubles
No comments:
Post a Comment