The View from Hillsboro - Advocating for Public Schools

Surprises

I really look forward to this little campaign. I want to talk with ordinary people and listen to their opinions and ideas. I am betting I will be very surprised by what I learn, like I did a few days ago.

Last week I attended an event organized by the Chalkboard Project here in Hillsboro. Attendance was pretty low (around 20 people).

One pleasant surprise in the two hour conversation was hearing many people say "I would be in favor of a sales tax if I knew that the money was going to fund education". This was not one of the limited number of topics that the organizers wanted us to talk about, but it kept coming up in what people were saying about stable funding for education and parental involvement.

My feeling is that there is a strong level of support for public school funding among the general population, in spite of the successes of measure 5 and other revenue limiting initiatives in the past two decades. A proposal that were easy to explain and that specifically funded education (and the Oregon Health Plan, if I had my say) would have a good chance of passing the scrutiny of the voters. So why do our elected state representatives and senators consider this type of idea toxic and carreer-limiting?

The other surprise in the conversation at the Chalkboard Project event was the very strong opinion against parent involvement expressed by one teacher who attended the meeting. She basically said something along the lines of "I am a teacher and I know that I am doing, and I don't like having parents come into my school and volunteer because they are not trained professionals and don't know what they are doing". Clearly it was not the prevailing position among the people who attended. Not surprisingly, since parents who care enough to attend this type of event are probably people who value parental involvement. But this surprised me nonetheless.

In my mind a greater level of parental involvement (both in terms of quantity and quality) in a teacher-led school environment can provide great benefits and help reduce the achievement gap. It is not a matter of using parent volunteers as a replacement for teachers in a limited funding environment, but rather of learning from some of the successes of the parent-led homeschooling model, and of making education a responsibility of the community, not just of the teachers. While I am not a trained education professional, I am perfectly capable of helping a first grader practice her reading. I do it at home every day, I am sure I could do at my local elementary school.

But I can see that this idea may be a tougher sell than I had imagined.

posted by Unknown @ 7:05 AM