REA Rejects Maven

The local teachers union—the Richmond Education Association—has chosen not to endorse the maven in the school board election this year. Who did they choose? Well, I bet it was either John Lloyd, or Jonathan Mallard, or Adria Graham Scott. The REA will make their choice public next week.

I guess I should be bitter. I guess I should complain of discrimination. If they chose Jonathan, I should yell “age discrimination”; if they chose Adria, I should yell “sex discrimination;” if they chose John—well, John is as old and as male as me, so I don’t know what I should yell. But you know as the old saying goes, you can lead the REA to water but…

So what did the REA turn down? I am publishing the REA questionnaire and my responses so you can know.


"1. At a time when expectations for student achievement are increasing and funding resources appear very limited, what actions would you take as a School Board member to encourage and promote student achievement?

First, I am not willing to accept that resources are necessarily limited. When I am on the School Board I will work for adequate funding for Richmond Public Schools. Over the last two years, the mayor and the city council have imposed budget limits on RPS, which have actually lowered the percentage of the city’s annual budget that goes to our schools. I do not consider the School Board to be bound by any future funding limit from the council and mayor. Under state law it is the responsibility of the School Board, not the council or mayor, to prepare the budget for the school system. When the School Board submits a budget based on an arbitrary ceiling imposed by the mayor and council rather than one based on the true needs of our students, it is abdicating its statutory responsibility.

Regardless of the funding available, I intend to establish higher expectations for our students. We must have more rigorous course curricula. We must have more gifted and talented programs. We must have more honors courses in high school. We must no longer be satisfied with our children graduating high school. Our goal for them must be to continue their educations past high school. I have heard some people in this city say that because of their disadvantaged backgrounds many of our students are unable to perform at a higher level. I cannot accept this. We must understand the difficulties many of our children face from growing up in poverty. However, we must never accept poverty as an excuse. I believe that children will perform at the level we set for them. If we ask them to merely pass SOLs that is what they will do. On the other hand, if we insist that they excel, I am convinced they will do so.

2. Are you familiar with the RPS Operating Budget for 2008-2009? If so, are there areas or programs you believe can be reduced or eliminated in order to create a budget savings or free money for other programs or projects? Are there areas or programs you would consider off-limits to budget cuts? Are there areas/programs that you consider underfunded?

I have reviewed the RPS operating budget. Quite frankly, it is hard to tell from the budget what areas or programs money is being spent on. I see RPS spending broken down by Object Class (like salaries, benefits, supplies and materials). I see the budgets for each individual school. I see a long list of budgeted expenditures broken down by the office that spends them. But I don’t see much in the way of program descriptions. I see detailed organizational charts, but no indication of what each box on the chart does. I will have to do more research to determine whether there are programs that can be reduced.

There is one line that I have serious difficulties with—internal audit. I do not know why RPS needs an internal auditor. It also doesn’t seem to me that the internal audit function is working. The one thing that an internal auditor should be doing is making sure that an external auditor does not find serious instances of mismanagement. Obviously, the internal audit function at RPS has not done that. Internal audit is funded at $445,000 for fiscal year 2009, an increase of $22,000 over last year. I’m not sure it is worth it. (The City Council has authorized a study of whether the RPS auditing function should be incorporated into the City Auditor’s office).

I’m also not quite sure what we are getting for the half million dollars we will be spending on New Direction start-up costs.

Since our school administrators and our teachers are the most precious asset that we have in RPS, I would consider any cut in salary or benefits to them to be off-limits. RPS must show our teaching professionals that we appreciate all that they do for us. We cannot consider cutting their compensation.

I intend to add to the RPS budget for next year funding for four International Baccalaureate primary years programs, to be instituted at two elementary schools north of the river and two south of the river. The IB primary years program will teach our children critical thinking skills and show them how everything in the world is interconnected. It will better prepare them for the complex world they will face fifteen or twenty years from now. The IB programs will not be honors or magnet programs. They will be full school programs and all children attending the neighborhood school will be IB students. These full school IB programs are working successfully throughout the country.

I am also open to trying other things. In deciding where RPS goes next, we need to look at such things as extending the school day by an hour each day to provide more learning time, extending the school year to provide more learning time, offering bonuses to teachers to teach in the schools that have the highest concentration of students receiving free or reduced lunches, making pre-K available to all children in Richmond, and providing incentives to students for staying in school and for learning.

3. a) Are you familiar with the Richmond Public Schools Capital Improvement Program Budget FY2008 – 2012 and the Capital Improvement Projects Ordinance No. 2007-59-108? a) Do you believe that this program budget will address all of the school maintenance, renovation and replacement needs of Richmond Public Schools? Explain your response. b) As a member of the School Board what will you do to make sure this plan is implemented?

a- I have studied the capital improvement budget and the ordinance. However, without examining every building in the district, I cannot possibly know whether adequate funding has been budgeted to cover all the needs of the system. I must trust that the incumbent board, RPS administration and their contractors have adequately assessed the district’s capital needs.

Having spent most of my career at the Government Accountability Office examining the operations of large organizations, I know that there are often significant changes made between planning and completion of projects. I assume that as we go forward with these capital improvements we will find that the program budget probably underestimates some of the costs.

b- In the ordinance, the City Council has assigned to the mayor and the Chief Administrative Officer responsibility for implementing the capital budget. Therefore, as a member of the board I can make sure that the plan is fully implemented only by watching and by using the board’s political influence to keep pressure on the Administration. If there is insufficient progress I will ask the citizens of Richmond to pressure the mayor to get the job done.

4. In the last five years, two high schools and two middle schools were consolidated, three elementary schools were closed, and two alternative programs were moved into existing school buildings. Do you support further restructuring which could include the closing of additional schools and changes in attendance zones?

The School Board is responsible for making sure that the taxpayer’s dollar is being spent lawfully and efficiently. If it is clear that restructuring will save money, I will support it. The disruption of restructuring can be minimized by tying school closing and zoning changes to the construction of new facilities or renovation of existing facilities. Without having studied the performance of every school in the system, I cannot now address specific needed restructuring changes.

5. Do you believe that there is a correlation between staff morale and student achievement? If so, what would you do as a board member to improve the morale of RPS employees?

There is certainly a connection between teacher morale and student achievement. If a teacher does not look forward to going to school each day; is not enthusiastic about helping students to learn; feels unappreciated by administration, parents or students, it has to affect student performance. Both my wife and daughter are teachers and I know that their students learn better when their teachers are “up” for the day. I have seen this in classrooms both at Westover Hills and Carver schools. When a teacher is having a good day and is really enthusiastic about teaching, the students sense this and they catch the enthusiasm. When, however, the day is not going well, the students sense this and they have more difficulty learning.

When I am on the School Board, I intend to spend as much time as possible in the elementary, middle and high schools in the fourth district. I intend to interact with teachers and let them know that I appreciate what an important job they are doing. I will also be there to listen to them so that I can really appreciate their concerns. I will work with school administrators to establish some kind of awards or recognition programs for teachers. It is not enough to wait for one week per year to show teachers that we appreciate them.

6. Health insurance costs have been rising for many years, and the costs to RPS employees for their share of health care premiums are becoming prohibitive. Would you support maintaining the same benefits for employees without increasing the cost to employees?

To me, any increase in health care costs for employees is equivalent to a cut in salary. Therefore I will support the same benefits without increased costs for employees.

7. In your opinion, is the administration of RPS structured in such a way as to optimize both its efficiency and effectiveness? If not, what changes do you believe would lead to a more efficient and effective administration?

After carefully examining the RPs organization charts included in the 2009 school budget, I can honestly say that I can’t answer the question. However, I understand from School Board Vice Chair Lisa Dawson that RPS is finally getting around to hiring a consultant to do the staff audit recommended last fall by the Crupi Report. This study will inform the School Board whether particular functions and positions within the RPS structure are providing adequate value to merit being funded in the future.

Further, as I stated on my blog “Our next superintendent must understand organizations. RPS is often accused of having too much bureaucracy. The superintendent needs to be able to analyze the RPS organization and eliminate those positions that are unnecessary in giving our children an excellent education.” Assuming that the next superintendent is chosen after I am on the board, I will try to assure that the successful candidate has that skill.

8. The REA believes that the RPS Standards of Student Conduct contains appropriate standards for student behavior, as well as fair and suitable responses to violations of the code. What actions do you believe should be taken when the building administration does not enforce the RPS Standards of Student Conduct? What actions do you believe should be taken when the central administration does not enforce the RPS Standards of Student Conduct?

All RPS policy must be followed both within schools and at central administration. The job expectations for all school administrators and all employees at central administration must make it clear that the board expects that the Standards of Student Conduct will be enforced. There must be some disincentives described for those who refuse to enforce these or other policies.

We need to experiment with incentive programs to discourage unacceptable behavior in school. When my wife was teaching at Langston Hughes Middle School in Fairfax County, she planned and implemented an experiment called “Panthers on Track.” Using money supplied both by the School Board and by the private sector, Panthers on Track provided a May out-of-school reward for those students who had a certain number of points by a cut-off date. Each child in the school started the year with sixty points and would lose points for each disciplinary problem. For those children who did not have the requisite points the reward day was spent attending presentations by police or guidance counselors, making up missing work, or spending time setting goals. During the first year of Panthers on Track, the number of school incidents requiring discipline decreased by half.

9. What motivated you to seek election to the Richmond School Board?

First, when I was a child, my father had a severe case of Multiple Sclerosis. He was unable to work. My mother had to stay home to care for him so she also couldn’t work. If it were not for my grandfather, who provided housing and financial support, we would have had to go on welfare. Coming from this poverty situation, I am convinced that had I not received a high quality public school education I would never have achieved what I did in my life. I thus owe a debt to my parent’s generation for providing me with a first-class public school education. Now that I am retired, I have time to pay that debt forward by working to make sure that all the children of Richmond receive a high quality education to prepare them for achieving their life goals.

Second, since I have been in Richmond I have volunteered in the schools as a Micah volunteer at Westover Hills Elementary, as a CAG member at Westover Hills, and as the Micah team captain for my congregation at Carver Elementary. I have watched excellent, dedicated teachers enabling their students to learn. I have worked with individual students helping them overcome their learning difficulties. Now, it is time for me to move into a position where I will be able to help more than just a few children.

Finally, I have two grandchildren living in Richmond, the oldest of which will start RPS in 2009. So, I have a selfish reason for wanting to make sure that the education we give our children is the best possible.

For me, providing a world-class education to all the students of this city, regardless of ethnicity or economic situation, is a matter of social justice. This city’s future is its children and I am committed to making sure we provide them with the skills they need to compete in the world they will face in ten or fifteen years.

10. Like most school districts, Richmond is experiencing a teacher shortage as many veteran teachers are retiring and teachers with less than five years of experience are resigning to go elsewhere, while the supply of new teachers remains low. What ideas do you have for retaining experienced teachers and for attracting and retaining new teachers?

First, we must make sure that RPS’s compensation package for teachers is as good as the surrounding jurisdictions. We cannot attract teachers if we don’t pay as much as our competitors.

Second, we must demonstrate to our teachers that we value them by treating them as the professionals they are. We must show them recognition for the miracles they perform on a daily basis. We need to create something like an “order of Richmond heroes” for those of our teachers who choose to teach in our more difficult schools. Everybody in the city, from the mayor on down, has to make honoring teachers a high priority. We need to make each week “teacher appreciation week.”

We must also provide more help to our younger teachers. We must use our experienced teachers or retired teachers as coaches. We need to provide as many professional development opportunities to our teachers as we can. There will probably be some beginning teachers who discover in their first two years that teaching is not the right career for them. However, we must make sure that none of them abandons teaching because we didn’t provide them with the help they need to succeed.

As I indicated in my answer to question 5, I intend to spend as much time as I am able interacting with the teachers in Fourth District schools. I will demonstrate to them as best I can that I really appreciate what they are doing for our children.

11. Describe what you believe should be the relationship between the Richmond School Board and the Richmond Education Association.

In most areas, the School Board and the REA should be partners. As I indicated in the statement declaring my candidacy, the School Board shouldn’t make decisions or implement new programs without consulting with the REA.

I attended two of the public meetings for the board’s New Direction last fall and I was very upset to learn that teachers knew almost nothing about the plan. How can the board plan an entirely new framework for our public schools without involving teachers in the decision making? How can the board implement a proposal that will require teachers to do much more work without talking to the teachers first?

When I am on the board, I will make sure that we get REA input on matters we consider before making decisions.

12. The perception exists that cronyism is rampant in RPS. If so, do you view it as a problem and how would you address it?

I’m not sure whether the perception of cronyism is accurate. If it does exist in RPS, it certainly is a problem. Every position in central administration and every position in each school should be filled on the basis of merit, not on the basis of who you know. If the problem is real, we must make it clear to everybody with authority to hire personnel that decisions must be based on merit. We cannot afford the public perception that hiring or promotion decisions in RPS are made on other than a merit basis.

13. Richmond must compete with surrounding school districts (Henrico, Hanover, Chesterfield, etc.) to employ personnel. Do you believe that Richmond must maintain competitive salary schedules in order to retain and attract employees? What would you do as a member of the School Board to ensure that this happens?

I certainly agree that Richmond Public Schools must maintain competitive compensations packages in order to retain and recruit personnel. As a member of the Board, I will examine the compensation packages of surrounding jurisdictions to assure that we remain competitive.

14. Are you familiar with the current salary schedules for Richmond Public Schools employees? If so, do you think any adjustments need to be made in these schedules? Please explain your answer.

The current salary schedule for teachers is very strange. If my math doesn’t fail me, teachers spend two years in step 4, four years in step 5, three years in step 6, two years in step 8, seven years in step 13, two years in step 15 and reach step 20 after thirty two years of service. This makes no sense to me. Time in step requirements should be fairly uniform over the salary schedule. Freezing teachers with eighteen years experience in a single step for seven years can’t possibly be good for morale.

15. Some people believe that teacher compensation should be based upon how well their students score on certain standardized tests, such as the SOL assessments. What thoughts do you have concerning pay for performance and merit pay plans?

Generally, I support merit pay systems. I believe they provide incentives to employees to perform better.

However, I have serious reservations about measuring teacher merit by the achievements of their students, especially on standardized tests. There are too many factors other than teacher quality that affect student performance. This year at Carver, I worked with one girl who was trying to cope with watching her uncle die of gunshot wounds, another child who was living with her grandmother because both her parents had “passed,” and another child who was kept out of class for two weeks just before SOLs because her vaccinations were not complete. Obviously, how these children perform on standardized tests depends on a lot more things than their teacher’s skills.

Merit pay for RPS teachers would make sense only if the system is “handicapped” to take into account the difficulties that many students experience for many years because they have not been properly prepared before beginning school. A teacher who has a class of 18 students, all of whom receive free or reduced lunch, cannot be fairly measured against a teacher who has a class of students, none of whom need meal subsidies.

I read that Prince Georges County, Maryland, and its education association have agreed on a merit pay provision in their contract. I also understand that the District of Columbia has merit pay provisions in its teacher’s contract. I have heard that these are based on teacher choice. Teachers can opt to remain subject to a seniority system for salary promotion. Or, they can opt to participate in the merit pay system, which will allow for more rapid salary promotion for those teachers that excel.

16. The Standards of Learning and Standards of Accreditation are having an enormous impact on student instruction. Do you believe that RPS should be doing more to insure greater success for all of our students?

Clearly RPS should be doing more to promote the success of all our children. However, I am concerned that our SOL-based curriculum is not teaching our children what they need to know.

Because they are multiple-choice tests, the SOLs require our children to learn facts. They are “what” and “where” and “when” tests; they are not “how” and “why” tests. We should be teaching our children skills, not facts, but the SOLs push us in another direction.

We need to prepare our children to compete on a global scale. Teaching them facts makes no sense because most of what we teach our children today will be just historic curiosities in fifteen or twenty years. We have to teach our children how to think, how to gather information, how to make decisions, how to understand that everything is related, how to communicate (even though I cannot even imagine the technology they will use for communication) and how to relate to a world of different people from different cultures.

Our teachers need to find a way to prepare our children for the SOL tests they must take and at the same time give them the tools to succeed later in life. We need to teach our children the skills they will need to function fifteen or twenty years from now. If we teach them how, they will be able to find the facts they need to know electronically or, if they still exist, in books. At the rate knowledge is expanding we can never teach our children all the “facts” they need to know. We need to teach them to think.

17. For a number of years, RPS has had difficulty finding qualified substitutes to place in the classrooms when regular teachers must be absent from their jobs. As a solution, current employees are often asked to teach the students of absent teachers in addition to their own class. Do you believe that those employees should receive additional compensation for assuming the extra workload?

I believe that teachers or other school professionals who are asked to serve as substitutes should be compensated for the extra work that they do in dealing with the additional students.

However, this is only a Band-Aid approach. We need to fix the substitute problem. We must make sure that we pay substitutes enough to attract them. We also need to do some serious marketing. We need to dispel the belief among potential substitute teachers that RPS is not a good place to work. We also need to make use of student teachers as potential substitutes. Further, students in our three local universities could make excellent substitutes. We need to work with the universities to find a way to use these students as substitute teachers.

18. Do you support outsourcing RPS school services by contracting for these services from private, for-profit companies? (Such as, transportation, school security and custodial services.)

As a taxpayer in the City of Richmond I am in favor of procuring services at the lowest possible cost so long as the services are performed competently. If, in fact, the private sector can provide those services as well and more cheaply then we can do them in house, we have an obligation to outsource. On the other hand, as someone who has spent his entire career as a government employee, I question whether the private sector can really provide services as well and as economically as public employees.

19. Should RPS provide training to educational support professionals to become licensed teachers and/or to advance to other higher positions?

Yes, RPS should provide training to educational support professionals to help them become licensed teachers or to advance to higher positions. Money spent improving the qualifications and abilities of staff is always a good investment. It also shows that RPS cares about its employees. Further, because these individuals are already working for RPS, it is more likely that they will continue their careers at RPS.

20. Truancy is a major issue in Richmond Public Schools. The city now has the responsibility for addressing truancy. The program has not been successful and the truancy rate is increasing again. As a School Board member, what will you do to address this very serious problem?

Truancy is a serious problem. However, to deal with it we need to determine its underlying causes. I think that truancy at the secondary school level may be caused, in part, by a student’s unsuccessful experience in elementary school. If a student feels he is not succeeding in school or that she is stupid, that child is not going to want to be in school where his or her negative perceptions might be shown to be true. Providing a better elementary school experience for children will make them more anxious to go to middle school and high school.

If on the other hand, a child is truant because he doesn’t have adequate clothing, or has inadequate health care, or she has to babysit for a sibling, we are facing entirely different problems. We need to have greater support from Communities in Schools or similar organizations to deal with those non-academic problems that make it less likely that our children will attend and succeed in school. These are not problems that our schools are designed to deal with. Richmond needs to minimize these problems for our children if we expect them to stay and succeed in school.

We need to consider incentive programs to get our students to come to school and concentrate on their studies. I have read of some schools that actually promise students a cash payment at the end of the year if they meet attendance requirements and they perform well academically. We might combine this with a team approach in which the rewards are given to all members of a succeeding team. This will provide peer pressure on all the children in the team to attend school and do their best.

21. Are you familiar with the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also referred to as “No Child Left Behind”? If so, what is your understanding of this law?

As I indicated recently in my blog , I am very much opposed to the No-child-left-behind law. “I am convinced it was planned by people who are opposed to public education. With its constantly escalating requirements it seems deliberately designed to make public school systems fail.” No-child—
· encourages teachers to teach to the test,
· assumes that the only factor that determines a child’s success is the school,
· places its emphasis only on reading, writing and math, which discourages schools and teachers from teaching other subjects,
· makes no allowance for students who do not speak English,
· is based on the assumption that standardized tests can actually measure student learning, and
· makes it harder for some school districts to hire “qualified” teachers.

We can only hope that the Congress, in its wisdom, will make significant changes before extending the law. In the meantime, as I suggested in my answer to question 16, we must help our teachers to teach in a way that guarantees our students do well on their standardized tests and at the same time teach them the skills they need to survive in the future world they will face when they finish college.


So, trusted reader, I ask you, why would REA choose someone else? I trust the voters of the fourth district will disagree.

Please Sir, Can I Have Some More—Vouchers, That Is

After reading Republican Delegate Chris Saxman’s OpEd in the August 11 Times-Dispatch , I am a changed man. Delegate Saxman’s concern for the poor children trapped in a system of failing government schools is so genuine that I need to rethink my attitude. Up until now I had thought that Mr. Saxman’s creation, School Choice Virginia, was just a mechanism for opponents of public education to move a big chunk of the public education dollar to private schools or homeschoolers. Now I realize that Mr. Saxman‘s motives are pure. But, Mr. Saxman is missing a big part of the problem. So…

Today I am announcing the creation of Police Choice Virginia and Fire Choice Virginia to further free the Commonwealth’s poor from coercive government services. The two groups will lobby the General Assembly for legislation granting choice to the poor when faced with crime or fire. Under the legislation, each poor family will be issued Virginia Police Vouchers and Virginia Fire Fighting Vouchers. These vouchers will afford these families the choice of using either government or private police and fire fighting services when they are faced with a crisis.

It doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to know that the poor in our society are the victims of failing police and fire departments. Just look at the evening news and it is clear that the bulk of violent crime takes place in poor neighborhoods. This is a clear indication that our government police departments are not doing an adequate job in protecting the poor. And, wait until the winter. Almost all the victims of space heater fires will be the poor. Clearly the government fire departments are not protecting them.

Isn’t it about time we gave the poor the same choice that the wealthy have. You don’t see banks using government police to guard their money. No, they hire Brinks or Pinkerton or some other private police to protect their assets. Shouldn’t the poor have the same option? Police and fire-fighting vouchers are the solution to this inequity.

The availability of these vouchers will encourage the development of efficient private companies providing police and fire-fighting services. The competition from the private sector will be good for the government police and fire departments. Knowing that they have lost their monopolies in fighting crime and fires, the government departments will have to do a much better job or risk being closed down completely. It will clearly be a win-win situation.

With the poor being rescued from intrusive government services by school vouchers, police vouchers and fire vouchers, we will be well on our way to a government-free society. Next year I will form Library Choice Virginia, Social Services Choice Virginia, Parks and Recreation Choice Virginia and Public Works Choice Virginia. Soon, every citizen in the Commonwealth will be walking around with a wallet full of vouchers. We will all have choice and we will all be so happy!

Public Education Under Attack

The Richmond Times-Dispatch would not publish this letter I wrote. They said it was too long. Well, I figure that I know a place to publish it where being too long is never a consideration. Here it is, beloved reader.

Editor
RTD

I must take issue with your support of Republican Delegate Christopher Saxman’s creation of School Choice Virginia in your July 25 lead editorial. Although you portray school choice as a way to help poor people choose their schools, the fact is that School Choice Virginia, to the extent it is successful, will significantly weaken Virginia’s public education system by diverting tax dollars to other education providers.

Regardless of the rhetoric of Delegate Saxman, the true nature of School Choice Virginia is clear from the membership of its board of directors. According to Tyler Whitney’s article in the July 23 Times-Dispatch, the board will include representatives of “church schools, the Virginia Catholic Conference, home schoolers and the Family Foundation of Virginia.” None of these are exactly supporters of public education. Church schools and home schoolers are participating in School Choice Virginia because they want a slice of the public education money pie. They are not altruistic supporters of public education. The slice of the pie they are trying to get will be at the expense of our public schools.

The Virginia Catholic Conference “represents the public-policy interests of the Commonwealth's Catholic bishops and their two dioceses.” It engages in advocacy on issues of respect for life, social justice and education and family life. The advocacy done by the Virginia Catholic Conference is important in the continuing advancement of the Commonwealth. However, in the area of education, the Virginia Catholic Conference’s main goal is to attain public financial support for its parochial schools. Again, the public funding it seeks will reduce the amount of money available for our public schools.

As for the Virginia Family Foundation, its website indicates that its “vision is to establish a Commonwealth of strong families who are guided by faith and protected by a principled government.” The Family Foundation’s five-year plan seeks to 1- Establish Virginia as the most pro-life state in the nation. 2-Protect the institution of traditional marriage. 3-Reinforce the rights of parents to make life-altering decisions in their children’s lives. 4-Limit the undue burden placed on families by state government. 5- Reestablish Virginia as the national model for religious liberty. In the area of education, the Virginia Family Foundation favors tax credits for families “that choose non-public schools.” Attending non-public schools, presumably, will enable parents to raise their children “free from intrusive government involvement.” As in the case of the other supporters of School Choice Virginia, the tax credits that the Virginia Family Foundation seeks will inevitably result in less available funding for public schools.

In your editorial you say that school choice is good for two reasons. First (not in the order you set them out) you say that choice is needed because “different families have different needs.” Certainly that is true, but I’m not sure that “different needs” justify using public funds to support private and religious schools or home schooling. The differing needs of families can be met within our public school system.

I don’t understand the obsession with choice. When I reached school age, my parents had only one choice—enroll me in the local neighborhood school. My neighborhood public schools provided me with a top quality education. When my children reached school age, my wife and I had only one choice—enroll our children in the local neighborhood school. Our neighborhood public schools provided our children with a superior education, which not only allowed them to be admitted to the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia but also prepared them for their successful careers.

Second, you say that choice “would introduce competition where it’s needed most.” Presumably, you agree with the statement by Kevin P. Chavous, quoted in Tyler Whitney’s article, that competition “will force the [public school] system to be all it can be.” Proponents of school choice constantly argue that competition will make public schools better. However, has anybody demonstrated that competition from private or parochial schools and from home schooling actually improves public school performance? Sometimes competition does not strengthen competitors. Sometimes, especially if one of the competitors has an unfair advantage, it results in the other competitor simply dying. Diverting funds to private or parochial schools to get public schools to perform better is like the outmoded medical practice of bleeding the patient. Bleeding may or not have cured the disease, but it nearly always managed to kill the patient.

We cannot fix our education system by paying parents to choose options other than public schools for their child’s education. The key to providing a first-class education to all our children is to involve the entire community—parents as well as those without school-age children, teachers, the business and academic communities, faith-based and civic groups—in making our neighborhood public schools work. Let’s use our public dollars to support and perfect what the Virginia Constitution calls for—“a system of free public elementary and secondary schools for all children of school age throughout the Commonwealth.”

Maven On The Air

Tonight I am announcing that the maven’s super, hi-tech, beautiful, spanking new, you’ve-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it campaign website is up and walking. For those of you who are curious, go see it at bertberlin.com.

However, because of the shocking nature of the website I make this disclaimer:

1- Parental discretion is advised.

2- Do not view if you have uncontrolled hypertension.

3- Avoid at all costs if you are pregnant or may become pregnant.

4- Do not view alone.

5- Do not view if you have urinary incontinence.

6- Side effects may include headache, nausea, diarrhea, painful joints, blurry vision, and/or fatigue. In several cases insanity was reported.


View at your own risk!

Middle Class Obsession Revisited

Well, the maven was in too much of a hurry yesterday. I left out one more important reason why we need to attract more Richmond parents to enroll their children in our neighborhood schools. That reason is money.

As I said back in March,

The City of Richmond receives less state education payments per student than do our neighboring jurisdictions of Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico. The major reason for this disparity is that Richmond has so few children enrolled in its public schools compared to its population and tax base. Thus, under the state’s “composite index of local ability-to-pay,” Richmond appears to “need” less funding per student. If our school enrollment continues to drop, as projected by RPS, we will get less and less money from the state.
You Got Trouble Folks! Right Here In River City

What the state funding formula means is that despite the fact that Richmond needs to spend more per student than our neighboring school districts because we have far more special-needs students and because the 70% of our children receiving federally subsidized meals need a lot more school services than do their middle-class counterparts in the suburbs, we are actually receiving less state education funds per student than Chesterfield, Hanover or Henrico counties. The state formula rewards the school districts that have higher student enrollment even if those jurisdictions don’t really need to spend more money per student.

There are two ways that we citizens of Richmond can deal with this grossly unfair state allocation formula. First, we must urge our state senators and delegates to change the funding formula in the General Assembly so that such need factors as number of special needs students and percentage of poverty students is included in the formula. Second, we can do what is necessary to attract to Richmond Public Schools the children in our city whose parents are considering other options for their education. Simply from the standpoint of receiving adequate education funding from the state, we cannot afford to allow any more of our parents to opt out of Richmond Public Schools.

Am I Obsessed With Middle Class Parents?

My baby son—thirty years old, six foot four inches tall—is acting as my Jiminy Cricket. He told me that he thinks my concentration on attracting middle class parents to RPS as a key issue in the school board campaign goes against my commitment to social and economic justice. He thinks that I should concentrate on fixing our schools for the students who are already in attendance. He also worries that the parents of students who already attend RPS will think that I don’t care about their children.

Well, Ethan, I hear you loud and clear. However, there is method to my apparent madness. For several reasons, I know that we must convince all parents in Richmond that they are stake holders in RPS if we are to make it into the first-class school system it needs to be.

First, as I have said before (The Next Superintendent) we need to look at Richmond Public Schools as a business. “At one end we take in young minds ready to learn; at the other end we produce young men and women who are prepared to deal with their life goals, whether in college, in the business world or in the military.” As with any business, in order to succeed RPS has to have a great product and to market it to all its prospective customers. And just like Coca Cola, which will never be happy until it controls 100% of the soft drink market, we should never be satisfied until we attract all the children in Richmond to RPS.

Second, as I have also said before (An Open Letter to Doug and Jackie and Paul and Bill and . . . ), the continued hemorrhaging of our middle class parents to the suburbs to find what they perceive of as a better education for their children is not healthy for our city. Further, the continued use by parents of the RPS open enrollment policy to avoid sending their children to their neighborhood school is not healthy for the neighborhoods of Richmond. As I said in my open letter to mayoral candidates back in March,

Providing great schools for our children is not just a matter of economic and racial justice. It is vital to the overall health of the city. A city with a population composed of just the old and the young, with nobody in between, is not healthy. A city population of just the affluent and the poor, with no middle class, is likewise unhealthy. When the middle class leaves a city it takes with it a significant part of the tax base.

If we want to have a city that is vibrant and safe and a wonderful place to live, we must invest in our public schools. How can we attract people to live in Richmond if we do not have great schools? How do we attract businesses to Richmond? Do we tell them this is a great place to work but advise them that their employees should live in the counties because our schools just aren’t that good?

Third, I am concerned that if middle-class parents are not committed to Richmond Public Schools, the number or people advocating on behalf of our public school children will decrease further in the future. As I said here at the end of April, if the number of students attending Richmond Public Schools continues to decrease by about five hundred student each year,

it means that the number of voters in the city who consider adequate funding of the public schools to be in their own best interest is shrinking. How many of the current members of the City Council represent a district in which the quality of and funding for Richmond Public Schools is really a make-it or break-it issue? Will the winning candidate for mayor in November really need to capture the parent vote to be elected?”
School Issues: The Playing Field

Fourth, there is a practical reason. I am convinced that strong parental involvement is necessary to make our neighborhood schools work.

GreatSchools.net, beside ranking schools on student academic achievement, also ranks schools based on parent assessment of several factors, including parent involvement. In describing what the parent involvement ranking means, GreatSchools.net says:

Evaluate the quantity and quality of parent involvement. In a highly rated school, parents play important leadership roles on the school site council, PTA and in other organizations. A school with strong parent involvement attracts a large percentage of parents to school functions. The school offers a variety of opportunities for parent participation, such as school events, classroom projects and schoolwide committees. Parents are respectful of teachers and the principal, and the teachers and principal seek out and value input from parents.

Let’s look at the three elementary schools in district four (sorry about my obsession with district four, but that’s the place I live and understand best). The latest data published on the RPS website shows the approximate economic background of the students of our schools. At Westover Hills, about 76% of the students are receiving federally subsidized meals. At Southhampton, 67% of the students are receiving subsidized meals. At Fisher, only 27% of the students receive subsidized meals. On GreatSchool.net, the three schools are rated on parent involvement as Westover Hills, 2 out of 5; Southampton, 4 out of 5; and Fisher 5 out of 5.

These figures are not surprising. I believe that most middle-class parents have more time available to get involved in their child’s school than do most parents who are not earning as much. Let me make it very clear, I am not suggesting that less affluent parents care less about their kids than do those with greater income. I don’t believe for a second that a parent’s concern for his or her babies varies with income.

I know that if we can get middle class parents in the Westover Hills zone to commit to their neighborhood school that parent involvement will go up. The same is true for Southampton. The experiences of such north side schools as Munford, Fox and Holton make this clear. And, when parental involvement goes up the educational experience of all children at that school will improve significantly.

So this is why I spend so much effort trying to win over middle class parents. We must make them see themselves as stake holders in RPS. Once we are able to convince all the parents in the city that what happens in our public schools matters to them, I know that every child in our schools will benefit.

Neighborhood Schools: TheThree Ps

The first time I wrote to School Board Chair George Braxton I said,

In the years I have lived in Richmond, I have noticed a very strange demographic pattern. About half the people in my neighborhood are empty-nesters like my wife and me. Most of the rest of my neighbors are young couples, either without children or with pre-school-age children. When children in my neighborhood reach school age, their parents do one of three things: 1- they move out of Richmond to Chesterfield or Henrico counties; 2- they send their children to private school; or 3- they home-school their children. I think that the only children who attend public school are those whose parents cannot afford any of the other options.

Two days each week, I tutor at Westover Hills School. In both of the classes I work in, all the children are African-American. In fact, almost all of the children in the school are African-American. I have looked at the statistics on the Richmond City Public Schools website, and I find that in most of Richmond's public schools African-Americans constitute 80% or more of the student body. My experience, and those statistics, indicates to me that although more than thirty years has passed since the end of "massive resistance," Richmond still has segregated schools. This segregation is not the result of the law but of the perception by those parents who can afford other options that their children cannot receive a quality education in Richmond public schools.

What I find particularly troubling with regard to Richmond's segregated schools is that no one seems to talk about them. I hear a lot of talk about building new school buildings or how many children are passing SOLs. But nobody talks about whether children can get a quality education in segregated schools. Nobody talks about how to overcome the perception by middle class parents that keeps them from sending their children to Richmond public schools.

I think that not much has changed since I sent that e-letter. I have discovered that there is another tool that middle class parents use to keep their children out of neighborhood schools—Richmond Public Schools’ open enrollment policy. Aside from that, it is still clear to me that the parents living in Westover Hills, my neighborhood, do not send their children to Westover Hills Elementary School, and that the parents in neighborhoods like Stratford Hills and Southampton do not send their children to Southampton Elementary School, their neighborhood school. It seems that the only fourth district neighborhood school that is being used by residents of its neighborhood is Fisher.

About two years ago, Fourth District City Councilperson, Kathy Graziano, invited residents of the Fourth District to “take back our schools.” I had real difficulty with the “take back” language, which I thought suggested that our schools had somehow been stolen from us. Nonetheless, I answered her call and became involved with what became Friends of Fourth District Schools (FoFDS). FoFDS has been quite successful in other aspects, but we still have not cracked the parent confidence problem.

So, what is it that stands between fourth district middle class parents and our neighborhood schools? I have heard—

I don’t want my child to stand out in class because she is different from the other children.

I can’t risk my child’s future on an experiment.

The other children in the class are low achievers. They will bring my child down to their level.

I’m concerned that my child will not be safe in the neighborhood school.

If my child goes to RPS he will never get into a good college.

As a father who has guided all three of his children through public schools (and later through public colleges) in Virginia, I can understand these concerns. The lives of our babies are precious and we want only what is best for them. But, I wonder how many of these concerns are based on reality. I wonder how many parents have even walked into their neighborhood school to see if their fears and concerns are valid. Most important, I wonder whether parents are looking at their neighborhood school with themselves in the equation.

In certain neighborhoods in the city parents have united to make their neighborhood school work for their children. I know, for example, that the parents in my daughter's neighborhood on the north side of Richmond have decided to make Linwood Holton work as their neighborhood school. Now, Holton has become a superior school with a diverse student population. It is working. It is working because of the partnership between the principal of Holton and the parents of the neighborhood.

Recently, at a school board meeting, I spoke with a member of the board from the north side of the river. We spoke about the Patrick Henry charter school and about public schools in general. She asked me why we "south siders" couldn't do what the parents in Munford, Fox and Holton have done. She said that all we had to do was put together a group of determined parents to go into our neighborhood school and simply inform the principal that we were enrolling our children and that we expected him or her to make the education experience work for our kids. We need to enroll several of our children, join the PTA and make sure that the school works for us.

So here is my plan for "Parents Partnering with Principals.” Parents of four year olds who will be starting school in September 2009: form a group and visit Westover Hills or Southampton and tell the principal that you intend to enroll your child in their school. Tell her that you expect that she will do what is necessary to see that your child receives a quality education in her school. I will go with you. I will support you. You parents of three years olds: start doing the same thing. You have an extra year to get things together and make things work. Parents of two year olds: ditto. Join your neighborhood school’s PTA. It is never too early.

What I really don’t understand is what we have to lose. We in Richmond pay a lot more in taxes than our neighbors in the counties, whether we are homeowners and pay tax as part of our monthly mortgage payments or are renters and the cost of the tax is passed on to us by our landlords in our rent. Our tax payments entitle us to certain services from the city, the most important of which is a top quality public education for our children. You parents have chosen to live in the City of Richmond for a reason. Does it make sense for you not to use your neighborhood school? To me it’s like paying to be a member of a swim club and never using the pool. It makes no sense.

Parents have made neighborhood schools work for them in the cases of Munford, Fox, Fisher and Holton. Are we not capable of doing the same thing? Parent, you need to get involved in Friends of Fourth District Schools and work together with other parents. Get your neighborhood association actively involved in making your neighborhood school work. We have three good elementary schools in the fourth district. We can make them even better and we can make them work for our children if we are only willing to try. It’s all a matter of the three P’s: Parents Partnering with Principals.

One more thing, and this is addressed to Richmond’s business community. You need to get more involved in Richmond’s neighborhood schools. I don’t understand how you can expect Richmond to reach its full potential as a great city if we don’t have great schools. How do you expect to attract other businesses to the city? Do you tell them that Richmond is a great place to do business but that their employees need to live in the counties if they want good schools for their children?

And, finally, to those of you in the real estate business: Wouldn’t it be nice if you could start listing houses in Southampton and Stratford Hills and Westover Hills and Forest Hills and other fourth district communities as being within walking distance of great neighborhood schools? Wouldn’t it be nice to start showing these homes to young couples and tell them that the neighborhood is family-friendly because of the neighborhood school? Get involved, you can make it happen.

Broadening the Debate

My younger son, who is sojourning in Richmond this summer while he tries to make some career decisions, e-mailed me and said he thought my post yesterday was too negative. He thinks I might have insulted my fellow Richmonders by suggesting we are still thinking in 20th Century terms. Well, I don’t think we in River City are so easily offended. But just in case: Reader, I am deeply sorry if you think I was suggesting that we in Richmond are not as smart or sophisticated as our neighbors to the north.

The point I was trying to make is that in our thinking about Richmond Public Schools we are trapped in 20th Century terms. I think the questions raised at the Richmond Crusade for Voters forum Tuesday night indicate that. I also think that the issues that we candidates are concentrating on are the same issues that candidates have been raising for years. We have an obligation to educate ourselves and then educate the voters.

My friend Michael, the political guru I mentioned yesterday, tells me that voters cannot handle more than three issues at a time and that I have to get my message across in thirty seconds or I’ll lose their interest. I got the same kind of e-mail advice two months ago from Paul Goldman, everybody’s second choice to be our next mayor. Now, Paul and my friend Michael have been involved in politics for a long time so I guess they know of what they speak.

But they are talking about getting elected. I am talking about the children of Richmond. We cannot talk about their futures in thirty second sound bites. We need to take a long hard look at the education we are providing them. These are our babies and we are responsible for preparing them for the rest of their lives.

This doesn’t mean that I am not going to continue acting like a politician between now and November 4. I will concentrate on my three issues—making our neighborhood schools work for all children, being accountable for the taxpayers’ money, and involving the whole Richmond community as stakeholders in RPS. I will talk to each of my neighbors for only thirty seconds each. I will put up signs and maybe give out bumper stickers. I will inundate the voters of the fourth district with all kinds of campaign stuff.

However, the election is going to be over on November 4 and, whether or not the voters of the fourth district choose me to represent them on the school board, I still have to worry about the quality of education we are giving our children. We owe them a bright future and they are not going to get it unless, right now, we the citizen’s of Richmond make a commitment to do it right.

My older son is right. Our children need to be prepared to compete on a global scale. We need to give them the critical thinking skills they need to succeed. My friend Michael is right. Most of the content of what we teach our children today will be just a historic curiosity in fifteen or twenty years. So we have to teach our children how to think, how to gather information, how to make decisions, how to understand that everything is related, how to communicate (even though I cannot even imagine the technology they will use for communication) and how to relate to a world of different people from different cultures.

But, dear reader, let’s face two simple facts: 1- the federal “no-child-left-behind” law, although it will be amended, is still going to be controlling what and how we teach our children; and 2- Virginia SOLs are not going away.

The “no-child” law is one of the most disastrous of the disasters that George Bush has bestowed upon our country in the more than seven years he has been president. I am convinced it was planned by people who are opposed to public education. With its constantly escalating requirements it seems deliberately designed to make public school systems fail. We can only hope that the Congress modifies it significantly before extending it.

I have very mixed feelings about SOLs. I realize that our school systems must be held accountable for educating our children and that we need a way of measuring their success. However, the importance that SOL scores have assumed makes it more and more likely that our teachers are being pressured to teach “to the test.” And, unfortunately, I think the SOLs force us to teach our kids the wrong things.

Because they are multiple-choice tests, the SOLs require our children to learn facts. They are “what” and “where” and “when” tests; they are not “how” and “why” tests. We should be teaching our children skills, not facts, but the SOLs push us in another direction.

I spent a good time of this past year tutoring fifth graders at Carver Elementary School. Because Carver was not an accredited school in the past, there was a tremendous push to have the children pass their SOLs. Teachers were encouraged to spend most of their classroom time teaching subjects that would be tested and spending little time on things that would not be tested. The only thing that counted at Carver was SOL scores.

In previous years I tutored fourth graders at Westover Hills for the Virginia history SOL. It was all about what happened, when did it happen, and where did it happen. These fourth graders were just filled up with facts. If they ever appear on Jeopardy and the subject is Virginia history, they should do well.

Unfortunately, history is not just a series of facts. History is a continuous process of development, in which everything is connected. If we teach our kids that tobacco was the basis of Virginia’s early economy, they may remember that for a test. But, we never teach them “why” tobacco became so important. We never impress upon them that things happen because of choices that people make. They need to know not only that Virginia is where slavery began in this country, but that slavery was introduced as a deliberate economic decision. They need to know that had another choice been made the terrible institution of slavery could have been avoided. They need to know that decisions made at the time of our nation’s founding led eventually to the Civil War ninety years later. They need to know that the decision to rely on canals for transportation in the 18th Century led to Virginia not being a railroad center and to the decline of Virginia’s economy in later years.

We need to teach our children the skills they will need to function fifteen or twenty years from now. They don’t need to know facts. If we teach them how, they will be able to find the facts they need to know electronically or, if they still exist, in books. At the rate knowledge is expanding we can never teach our children all the “facts” they need to know. We need to teach them to think.

That is why I am so committed to bringing the International Baccalaureate primary years program to RPS. Except in the diploma program during the last two years of high school, IB is not an honors program. It is a method of teaching. It is based on teaching children critical thinking skills and showing them how everything in the world is interconnected. Sure, they will learn the facts they need to pass the SOLs, but they will learn them in a way that will enable them to use them in a meaningful way.

Last summer, the maveness took me along to tour Chicago while she attended an IB convention. During the course of several days I met many IB teachers. They were all dedicated, enthusiastic and had high morale. I can’t imagine that any of them were not anxious to go to school every day, even in May.

At one dinner I sat with part of the faculty of an elementary school in Albany, Georgia. The school’s demographics were similar to schools in Richmond: African American 84%, White 7%, Hispanic 8%. Sixty six percent of its students were receiving subsidized meals. I learned from these teachers that this school, which has the rather impressive name of International Studies Elementary Magnet School (ISEMS), had been a failing school. Its students scored very low on Georgia’s version of the SOLs. After becoming an IB primary years school, the performance by ISEMS students improved considerably (Remember that IB is not an honors program; every student in ISEMS is an IB student). ISEMS is now rated an 8 out of 10 by GreatSchools.net. (By comparison, the only elementary schools in Richmond rated 8 or better by GreatSchools.net are Fairfield Court and Munford at 10, JEB Stuart at 9, and Broad Rock, George Mason and Fox at 8).

Will IB work at Richmond elementary schools? I think so. But we will never know unless we try. Are there other approaches to teaching and learning that we might try in Richmond? Treasured reader, what do you think?

Welcome to Richmond . . .

I was at my first candidate forum last night. (It would make no sense to call it a debate because there was very little debating going on). It was a very strange format, since all the candidates on the ballot (write-ins were not invited) from all nine city districts were sitting side by side. We were given two minutes each for an opening and closing statement and two minutes (later shortened to one minute) to answer specific questions. It went 20 opening statements, 20 answers to three questions and then 20 closing statements. I don’t know how anybody in the audience kept track of all that rhetoric and even figured out who is running against whom.

I know your curiosity must be at a fever pitch, so I will tell you the three questions we were asked. First was “have you ever worked for Richmond Public Schools and spent time in the classroom, and are you in this board race for personal gain?” Second was “what is the most important problem facing Richmond Public Schools?” Third was the question that is my personal least favorite “Do you favor charter schools?” All of us candidates, on each question, were consistently pro-change, pro-child and pro-accountability. It was all very pleasant; the only candidates raising their voices seemed to be the ones running against incumbents.

Now, let’s step back a few days. I had asked a bunch of my friends and family to help me polish up my campaign message. My son, Josh, who lives and works in the DC area and edits publications in the international bio tech industry, advised me,

This is a key point – those kids will be competing for jobs against peers from Richmond, Virginia, the East Coast, the U.S., China, India, etc. That’s the 21st Century. So they better step it up. (On an aside, once you win, you should really try to foster communication, among kids/teachers with kids/teachers in other countries to work on joint research projects remotely via the Internet. Those connections could be more valuable than anything else the school could provide).

Hey, my Numero Uno son, what does this have to do with “are you in it for personal gain,” “what’s the biggest problem,” and “do you love charter schools”? Josh, you are talking about an issue that isn’t even a remote blip on the radar down in River City.

A friend, who is a Democratic pol up in Fairfax County and recently managed a successful campaign for county-wide office, came back with this advice,

Here's my thought: I have a grandchild. I'm concerned about her future. Education makes a difference. Our children will learn about science and math in elementary school. By the time they graduate from high school, the science they learned before will be outdated. New discoveries will replace old ideas. The pace of change is at lightning speed. Our schools must teach our children how to learn and inspire their curiosity and imagination. That's what will enable them to survive in the world just around the corner. Do our public schools do that now? Not on your life. I care about my granddaughter. You care about your grandchildren and your children. Getting by won't prepare our kids for the 21st century. I will fight to make our public schools relevant and effective for 21st century learning. They aren't now. Our kids deserve better. I'll work tirelessly for the kids, not for me.

Michael, you like Josh are raising a very significant issue. But you are missing the point—this is Richmond, USA. Here we are concerned with whether our schools are accredited. Here we are concerned about whether parents have enough school choices for their kids. Here we are concerned about high school graduation rates. Here we are concerned about whether our school administration is handling our tax dollars properly. We haven’t even begun to think about whether the SOL-based education that we give our children will prepare them for the 21st Century issues they will face as adults.

If I ran a campaign based on the issues you suggest, I fear that people around here would look at me dazed and confused. It would take me weeks just to figure out a way to explain it to them. Here we are down in Richmond, barely 125 miles from you guys, and we simply don’t have the same school issues. Our issues are all issues that other places have dealt with long ago.

But, it’s like the old joke:
A plane lands at Richmond International (we have an AirCanada flight now, so we truly are international). As the plane is taxiing to the terminal, the flight attendant announces—
“Welcome to Richmond. Be sure to set your watches back twenty five years.”

Does Anybody See What I See?

My political advisers tell me I write too much. Now, I ask all of you who have been reading me for years, have you even known this maven to use excess verbiage?

In any event, they tell me I can’t use any of my beautiful prose in my campaign literature. But, I created it. I can’t simply relegate it to the recycle bin. So I will entrust it to you my loyal readers.


My Vision for Richmond Public Schools

I see Richmond Public Schools providing a first-class education to all the children of our city regardless of ethnicity or economic situation.

I see the parents of Richmond choosing their neighborhood school as the first choice for their child’s education

I see all the people of Richmond joining together to make sure our children are adequately prepared for the Twenty-First Century.


Now, you may say I’m a dreamer and that this vision of Richmond Public Schools can never come to pass. But, as a great national leader once said, “If you will it, it is no dream!”

Maven Out of Race

In a move that shook Virginia politics to its very core, the James River Maven, AKA Bert Berlin, has withdrawn his name from consideration as the Virginia running mate for presumptive Democratic nominee Barak Obama. In a secret letter, the maven informed Obama that “under no circumstances” would he accept the Donkey Party’s VP nomination.

The maven’s withdrawal makes it increasingly difficult for Senator Obama to implement his Virginia strategy. Prior to the maven, former governor Mark Warner and Senator Jim Webb had withdrawn from the VP race. Sources for Governor Tim Kaine have indicated that he expects and intends to complete his term, making it unlikely that he would accept the Virginia nomination either. This leaves the field of qualified Virginians willing to serve as Obama’s running mate virtually empty.

On the bright side, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is still looking for a Virginia running mate. Local speculation indicates that Representative Eric Cantor is high on McCain’s “Virginia Veep” list. Elephant Party regulars, concerned with Cantor’s lack of name recognition, are working behind the scenes to convince former governor and senator George Allen to consider accepting the nomination. If Allen cannot be swayed, Virginia Republicans may pressure former governor Jim Gilmore to accept the nomination. Gilmore, who is already his party’s nominee in this year’s race for the United States Senate, apparently is up to the task. At a recent party Gilmore was overheard saying, “I’m no more qualified to be Vice President than I am to be senator. Why not run for both?”

Or course, it just might be that neither presumptive nominee will be able to implement his Virginia Vice President strategy. That would leave Virginians to face the terrible truth that the Commonwealth is no longer the breeding ground for vice presidents. Rather than being the key battleground state in this fall’s election, Virginia, with its thirteen electoral votes, might be relegated in importance to the middle tier of states, ahead of Massachusetts and behind Georgia. Oh what a blow to the Old Dominion ego!

Boy, Was I Wrong

Thanks to Dan for catching me in a significant mistake. In my previous post I suggested that school board members make $1000 per week. That should have been per month. Hell, if Richmond actually paid its school board reps $50,000 per year, I would be ranting and raving about money misspent. I suspect there would also be lots more candidates.

Fear and Loathing, 2008

(With great appreciation to the late Hunter S. Thompson and his book “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”)

Reader, the conversion from blogger to politician is not easy. There are some important things to learn. Just this week I learned the important lesson that if you don’t want your posterior kicked real hard you’ve got to keep it covered.

This all started a few weeks back. It was that weekend in early June when the thermometer hit triple digits. The maveness and I were gathering signatures for my petitions at the farmers market at Forest Hill Park. At ten o’clock it was already over 90 degrees, the sun was beating down unbearably and this maven made the careless mistake of leaving home without it (a bottle of water, that is). I was hot; I was dizzy; I was grumpy (even grumpier than usual). A woman asked me for my opinion on charter schools.

Well, beloved reader, you know that I endorsed the Patrick Henry charter school on these very pages. What you might not know is that on that dastardly hot Saturday in the park, I knew that the Richmond school board had already approved the charter application of the Patrick Henry Initiative. I figured that the charter school issue was a fait accompli and I really wanted to talk about the 1200 or so elementary school students in the Fourth District of Richmond who would not benefit from the Patrick Henry School. So, I gave the woman a rather weak politician-like answer.

The next thing I know, a friend emailed me to say I had to address a posting on our local news blog, Hills and Heights. I went and read the thing. The woman in the park, who I now learned was named Common Sense Mom, challenged me to explain my views on charter schools and explain why I would oppose charter schools in general yet support the Patrick Henry charter. Now, if I had been acting as a politician rather than as the lawyer I was trained to be, I would have ducked this thing with some glib language and all would have been well. But no! I fired off a multi-paragraph treatise on charter schools and public schools in Richmond. (If you are interested, you can see my foolish prose on Hills and Heights as comment number 23). Well, Common Sense Mom and her friends Jennifer C. and S. Martin started kicking hard at my unprotected bottom. It has taken me almost a week to put out that fire.

So, I am learning.

Communicating as a politician is very difficult. As you know, trusted reader, I usually write a subject to death. If it takes me four typed pages to express myself, so be it. You can’t do that as a politician. You’ve got to condense everything down to about thirty seconds of writing. Believe me, for this maven to say anything in thirty seconds is darn near impossible. But the experts say that you can’t keep a voter’s attention for more than thirty seconds so you have to get your message across short and sweet. So, there’ll be no more analyzing issues for the maven. From now on it’s shoot from the hip.

If you haven’t been keeping track there are now five people running for the fourth district seat on the school board. It had been six, but two weren’t able to submit 125 valid signatures and their names were not put on the ballot. Yesterday, another candidate emerged. I assume that because his name is not on the ballot he will have to stage a write-in campaign.

Reader, this is insanity! Why would anyone invest their time, effort and money to get elected to a position that pays about one thousand dollars per week? I figure that if I am elected and spend about twenty five hours per week doing the job, I will be working at an hourly rate less than any job I’ve had since I was a junior in college.

But, nobody ever accused this maven of acting intelligently. Throughout this campaign, I’ve got to continually remind myself that I am doing this for the children.

I expect that I’ll be writing more soon to test out some new ideas. Reader, thank you for being tolerant of my spending so little of my time communicating with you.

Has Anyone Seen The Maven?

Okay, let’s get this straight. Despite the rumors circulating in the neighborhood, this maven has not been abducted by an alien spaceship. I am not hurdling through space toward a distant galaxy where (depending on which version you believe) 1- I will be tortured and vivisected and eaten for dinner or 2-I will be crowned king and will reign in bliss for eternity served by 24 beautiful alien virgins. For one thing, the aliens in question, the Krrz32ms (or something like that), are vegetarians and therefore wouldn’t eat me. For another, since they reproduce by exploding into hundreds of slime balls rather than sexually, they really don’t have any virgins.

Reader, don’t look at me like I’m lying. Right now I am looking at a mirror and I see my reflection very clearly. Doesn’t that prove that I am here and not hurdling through space? (Of course, I have been having these really weird dreams for more than a week. And, those Krrz32ms are really devious. They just might have burned my reflection in the mirror so I would think that I am here rather than in deep space.) No, it just can’t be! Borrowing words from Sam Clemens, the reports of my abduction have been greatly exaggerated.

Well, Maven, if you weren’t abducted, where have you been?

Dear reader, it’s my secret identity. Ever since he has become a candidate for the Richmond school board, I can’t get any sleep, let alone have time to think or write. It’s always about the campaign—filling out forms, writing and rewriting position papers, gathering signatures, talking to strangers (which my mother warned me never to do), twisting arms, begging for money. Hey, he even hijacked this blog to solicit political contributions! With all he has been doing, I haven’t had time or energy to ponder the events of the day. It’s not surprising that I haven’t written anything meaningful in more than a week.

Maven, we have been waiting for your views on the latest fight between the mayor and the city council over the annual budget.

hmmmmmm

Maven, are you yawning?

Trusted reader, I find another fight between Doug and the council to be rather boring. Haven’t we been through this time and again? Does it all really matter? I think I represent most of the people within the sound of my voice when I say that I wish both the mayor and the council would simply go away. Why can’t it be January so we won’t have to deal with these endless temper tantrums and power struggles? I hope that the voters of Richmond will finally show some smarts and elect people in November who are interested in governing rather than playing king of the hill.

So, Maven, what do you want to write about?

First let me eat some lunch.

A Brazen, Bold-Faced Attempt to Part You From Your Money!

Having analyzed the issue for a while, I have concluded that this maven needs to spend at least twenty thousand dollars to get elected to the Richmond school board. I was told that it costs about five thousand just to send a mailing to every household in the fourth district. If I do that twice, that alone comes to ten thousand. Then, I am told I will need professional-looking glossy two-color literature, lawn signs, bumper stickers, stationery, etcetera and etcetera. (Palm cards ~$500 per thousand; lawn signs ~$500 per hundred; bumper stickers ~$200 per hundred; lapel stickers ~$200 per thousand).

The big problem is that I don’t have twenty thousand dollars. In this day and age, they don’t pay mavens very much. So, I need to raise money. I thought of a car-wash, but since gas is so expensive nobody drives any more. I would sell cookies, but then hundreds of vengeful sprites in green or brown uniforms would picket my house. A yard sale would hardly produce enough. I even thought of calling Hillary for a loan, but I understand she is all loaned out.

With this dilemma, I consulted my guru—“The 21 Most Important Rules for Winning a Campaign” by Steve Grubs. (I don’t know if Mr. Grubs is really a guru, but the book was free.) Rule number 1 is “Send out your family and friends letter.” This is a letter that every candidate should send out to his nearest and dearest begging for their support. The theory is that if people who know you won’t support you then you may have to rethink your decision to run for office. The unwritten subtitle to rule number 1 is “How to antagonize your relatives and end life-long friendships.” But, I will have to take the risk.

Then I thought of you guys out in cyberspace. They say that Senator Obama has raised millions of dollars—one hundred at a time—from his online family. I don’t need millions, but it might just work. So I will modify Mr. Grubs’ rule by sending out this friends and family e-letter.

Beloved reader, I need your help to finance this campaign. If you’ve been reading the maven for even a short while, you know where I stand on the issues (and millions of other things that are totally irrelevant). As I explained recently, I am clearly the best qualified person to represent the children of the fourth district of Richmond on the school board. And, as you know, I am running partly in response to your outpouring of cyber-requests that I do so.

I ask that you donate $100 or more, if you can afford it, or $50 or even $25. Please make out your check to:

Bert Berlin 4 School Board

and send it to

5401 Dorchester Road
Richmond, VA 23225

The election laws of the Commonwealth require that my campaign committee keep records showing the full name, complete mailing address, occupation, and name and location of employer for every contribution received. This information will not be reported if your cumulative contribution is $100 or less for the entire campaign.

Cyber-friends, my mother thanks you, my father thanks you, (or at least they would if they were still living), my Maveness thanks you and, most of all, I thank you.

Approved by Bert Berlin 4 School Board

School Issues: The Children (Part A)

One of the girls I tutor, Squaisha, is making real progress in school (in part, I hope, because I’m her friend). Then, about two weeks ago, just a month before the SOLs, she was not in school. Her teacher told me that she was out because she hadn’t received her vaccinations. By the time she was properly vaccinated, Squaisha missed about eight days of school. SOLs are next week and I am worried about how well she will do. This is the same Squaisha who lives with her grandmother because both her parents “passed.” (I never had the nerve to ask the teacher how Squaisha lost both her parents.) Of course, if Squaisha does not pass her SOLs this year, she will become part of a statistic that shows that Richmond Public Schools does not do as good a job educating its students as do the suburban school systems. It makes this maven angry to think about it.

Let’s look at the statistics from the Richmond Public Schools website. In the school year 2005-06, the most recent year for which statistics are posted, 77% of the elementary school children and 75% of the middle school children in Richmond Public Schools receive federally subsidized meals. (Eligibility for the federal meal subsidy is generally considered an indication that a child comes from a low-income family). The percentage of students receiving subsidized meals in high school dropped to 47%, I assume because many high school students do not eat at school at all.

So, what’s the significance of so many of our children receiving subsidized meals? Last August, in an article in Style Weekly, Don Cowles of Initiatives of Change was quoted as saying that school systems with more than 50% of their students receiving subsidized meals “simply do not succeed.” Well, Richmond Public Schools has a percentage of children receiving subsidized meals considerably higher than 50% and as a system it certainly is succeeding. See Richmond Public Schools are Pretty Damn Good.

Yet, children like Squaisha are struggling. Why? In the April 2008 issue of Educational Leadership, published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Richard Rothstein says,

If you send two groups of students to equally high-quality schools, the group with greater socioeconomic disadvantage will necessarily have lower average achievement than the more fortunate group.
Why is this so? Because low-income children often have no health insurance and therefore no routine preventive medical and dental care, leading to more school absences as a result of illness. Children in low-income families are more prone to asthma, resulting in more sleeplessness, irritability, and lack of exercise. They experience lower birth weight as well as more lead poisoning and iron-deficiency anemia, each of which leads to diminished cognitive ability and more behavior problems. Their families frequently fall behind in rent and move, so children switch schools more often, losing continuity of instruction.
Poor children are, in general, not read to aloud as often or exposed to complex language and large vocabularies. Their parents have low-wage jobs and are more frequently laid off, causing family stress and more arbitrary discipline. The neighborhoods through which these children walk to school and in which they play have more crime and drugs and fewer adult role models with professional careers. Such children are more often in single-parent families and so get less adult attention. They have fewer cross-country trips, visits to museums and zoos, music or dance lessons, and organized sports leagues to develop their ambition, cultural awareness, and self-confidence.
(To access Mr. Rothstein’s article, go to the ASCD website.)

As Dr. James Cruppi stated in his report to the greater Richmond business community last November,

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the Richmond public schools are getting large numbers of children who are not ready for school, who grow up in single parent homes that don’t (or find it difficult to) reinforce education, require nutritional support, and live in a community environment that makes it very difficult to study and learn. . . . Were these problems in the counties, the schools would also have problems.

The fact is that children like Squaisha come to school carrying terrible baggage. That she is doing well (at least until the fiasco of her missing inoculations) testifies to her remarkable determination to succeed. As I pointed out last fall,

It is clearly not [the] fault [of our students] that they come to the race with a ball and chain around their ankles. I see these children every week and almost all of them are eager to learn and they are making remarkable progress despite the difficulties of their lives. They have dedicated, hard-working teachers. Their schools are run by competent, demanding principals.

Considering that so many of our children live in poverty, it is not so surprising that they do not score as well on SOLs as students with more affluent parents living in the suburbs.* Further, since parents with children approaching school age compare the SOL scores of city and suburban schools they conclude that the city schools are simply not as good.

If is very important to realize, however, that SOLs measure the progress of students, not schools. No school takes SOL exams. Only students do. If students in city schools do not perform as well as students in suburban schools, it does not necessarily mean that the city schools are not as good. As pointed out by Mr. Rothstein, above, if you send two groups of children to schools of equal quality, “the group with greater socioeconomic disadvantage will necessarily have lower average achievement” than will the group without such disadvantage.

I would love to do an experiment. I would love to exchange the student populations of a school in the city and a school in the suburbs. (We wouldn’t tell the parents about the experiment so that their behavior towards their children would not change.) Every day for an entire school year I would bus the suburban kids to the city school and the city kids to the suburban school. The school buildings, administrators and teachers would stay with the original school. I bet that at the end of that year, the suburban kids, now in the city school, would be outperforming the city kids, now in the suburban school. I would make that bet because I am convinced that the disadvantages with which many of our low-income students start school stay with them throughout their educations. Likewise, the advantages that more affluent students carry with them into kindergarten stay with them throughout their educations. Of course, we can never do that experiment and so we will never know whether I would win my bet.

Many of the children who attend Richmond Public Schools have problems that the schools are simply not equipped to deal with. To expect our schools to fix these children’s lives is unreasonable. The entire Richmond community must dedicate itself to improving the lives of our low-income children before they are enrolled in school, thus enabling them to begin their formal education with learning skills equal to their more affluent classmates. This will require us to address some of the issues raised by Dr. Cruppi in his report. Remember, Dr. Cruppi titled the section of his report dealing with RPS “Give Richmond Public Schools a ‘Product’ They Can Work With.”

Does this let RPS off the hook? Definitely not. As I stated when I announced my candidacy for the school board, we must demand excellence from our all students, teachers and administrators. We must not allow the disadvantage that some students have when they enroll in RPS to become an excuse. We need to set high expectations for all our children and then help them to meet these expectations. We may need to consider such options as city funded pre-kindergarten for all children, adding time to our school day for additional learning, offering “signing bonuses” to attract high quality teachers to the schools where our low-income students are concentrated.

All of these options will be costly. However, our children have only one life. Can we deprive them of the quality education that they need because it is too expensive? All of us in the Richmond community must commit ourselves to making sure that all of our children will succeed.

*I realise that many children from low-income backgrounds enter school with all the learning skills they need and achieve at a level equal to more affluent children. The comments in the Cruppi report and the observations by Mr. Rothstein apply to low-income children in general.

School Issues: The Players*

The dispute over whether the Richmond School Board should approve the establishment of a public charter school in the old Patrick Henry building has revealed the schism that exists among the players in the Richmond Public School Game. According to today’s TD, Richmond set to vote on charter school, the proposal is supported by

A very vocal, active group that includes, but isn't limited to, parents of school-age children.”Patrick Henry Charter School Now" signs are prevalent in the areas surrounding the school, but they also can be spotted throughout the city.

It is opposed by

the state's chapter of the NAACP … joining forces with representatives from the Richmond Council of PTAs and the Richmond Education Association.

So, what is it about the Patrick Henry Initiative (PHI) that has Richmond residents so vehemently divided?

I won’t waste your time describing the charter school proposal. It is adequately described in the TD article today and strongly advocated for in yesterday’s op-ed by PHI head Richard Day. (I have given up trying to find an online copy of that piece). Further, I expressed my views on the initiative last month. Patrick Henry Charter School? What is crucial is that the PHI has made a whole lot of people in Richmond fighting mad (or, perhaps, revealed that they are already mad). On this issue, some people have “drawn their line in the sand” and consider it the “mother of all battles.” Why?

Of the many distinct communities in the city, the two most relevant to this school dispute are the students currently enrolled in our schools (and their parents and advocates) and the pre-school-age children of middle class parents who are not yet enrolled in any school. The children currently in our schools are overwhelmingly African American and about 70% of them receive federally-subsidized lunches in RPS (a clear indication that their parents or guardians have economic difficulties). The not-yet-enrolled children are mostly, but not exclusively, white and their parents are doing well enough economically to have other options than RPS for their education (private schools, home-schooling, moving out of the city).

A basic rule of the Richmond School Game is that a significant portion of the parents in our city do not have confidence that RPS can give their children the excellent education they need to succeed in life. The difference between the two groups is that most of the parents or guardians of the children currently enrolled in our schools have no viable option other than RPS, while the middle-class parents whose children are approaching school age are not “stuck” with RPS.

So, what do the parents, guardians and supporters of our current school population want? They want all of our city schools to provide a first-class education to their students. They want a school system that is racially, ethnically and economically integrated. (They perceive RPS now as racially and economically segregated.) They fear that any initiative or RPS policy that permits parents to choose which schools in the city their children attend will further segregate our schools and will decrease the quality of the education received in the remainder of the schools. They oppose the RPS “open enrollment” policy because they believe it concentrates middle-class, mostly white, children in only three or four of our elementary schools, while leaving the remainder of the schools predominantly black and poor. They think the inevitable result will be that the children not in the favored schools will receive an inferior education. Similarly, they oppose charter schools because they believe they will further segregate the children in our city to the detriment of those students for whom the charter school is not a viable option.

And, the middle-class parents of children approaching their fifth birthday, what do they want? (I will not talk of the parents who have already decided to opt out of RPS when their kids reach school age. We can do nothing to change their minds.) They want as much school choice as possible. For whatever reasons (I have written about this before) they have no confidence in their neighborhood school to provide their children with a quality education. They love Richmond and want to remain in the city. They favor the “open enrollment” policy because it allows them to place their children in Munford or Fox or Fisher or Holton elementary schools, which they see as the only schools that provide a top quality education. They also favor the charter school proposal because they believe it will give them another option for their children. (Of course there is no evidence that the Patrick Henry School, if approved, will actually give students a better education than the neighborhood school. But these parents will support anything they think will give them another option for their children).

People on both sides of the PHI issue are getting frustrated. With frustration comes anger. With anger comes some really inflammatory statements by people on both sides. These statements just raise the anger levels. I see people who I have great respect for saying things that they will probably regret when this whole Patrick Henry thing is over.

Each of us needs to take a couple of deep breaths and let our anger go. We need to realize that all the children in Richmond are in the same boat. We also need to realize that the Richmond School Game is not a zero-sum game. It is not true that if my child gains that your child necessarily loses. We can play this as a win-win game in which all the children in Richmond prosper. We must understand that the people on the other side are not evil. Parents and guardians on both teams in the game only want what is best for their children. We must stop demonizing each other. The futures of all our children are too precious for us to be engaged in a fratricidal war that will harm all of them.

So, everybody “COOL IT!” Let’s deal with these issues in an adult and reasonable manner. The pie is big enough for all our children to get their slice.

* Click here to see the first posting in this series.

Why I am Running for the School Board

Is the Press the Enemy?

In his book “Hardball” (wouldn’t that make a great name for a TV talk show?) CNN commentator Chris Matthews gives advice to politicians. He titles one chapter in the book “The Press is the Enemy.” In it he explains that politicians must be wary of the press because their objectives are not the same. The objectives of politicians are to get elected (or reelected) and to implement their policies. The objective of the press, however, is to publish a good story. The press is not concerned with whether politicians are elected or implement their policies unless, of course, it makes a good story. Therefore, the politician can never trust the press.

We in River City have seen recently how cautious public figures need to be in dealing with the press. Back in March, City Council member Ellen Robertson was reported in Style Weekly as accusing Richmond Chief Administrator Sheila Hill-Christian of being a criminal. The story caused Mayor Doug to strap on his six-guns and turned out to be embarrassing for Ms. Robertson, Ms Hill-Christian and the mayor. But it was a great story. Also, a few weeks later, Style Weekly highlighted a disagreement between school board member Kim Bridges and PTA council president Tichi Pinkney-Epps. It also made a great story, but both Ms. Bridges and Ms. Pinkney-Epps came out of the whole thing pretty bruised up.

Devoted reader, you may also remember that in January this maven accused the broadcast media of managing the news in such a way as to bolster the campaigns of Senators Clinton and Obama and downplay the campaigns of the other candidates. Choosing the President: It’s the Media, Dummy.

I was thinking about these things when I looked at today’s Times-Dispatch. As I expected the main article was about Mayor Wilder’s decision not to run for re-election. Wilder will not run for re-election. Right in the second paragraph was this statement,

Corporate lawyer Robert J. Grey Jr. is being mentioned as a likely candidate to run as heir to Wilder's vision of a strong mayor to lead city government.

I’m sorry! I have been watching the mayoral race from my observation post high above the mighty James River and I haven’t heard anything about Robert Grey. I’ve heard about Paul and Dwight and Jackie (who was in and out of the race without even splashing) and there are a few interesting other candidates. I also expect that City Council President Bill will be jumping in the pool soon. But Robert? Where did Robert come from? And what does “being mentioned as a likely candidate” mean? Can it be that our beloved metropolitan daily is the one doing the mentioning? Would the TD manage the news to encourage the candidacy of Mr. Grey?

And… Three weeks ago George Braxton announced that he was not running for reelection to the school board and on the very same day my secret identity announced he was running for the vacant seat. (I will not suggest that the timing was a coincidence). I sent an electronic copy of my announcement to all the local news outlets including the Richmond Free Press. The next issue of the Free Press reported Mr. Braxton’s announcement and said that no candidate had announced for Mr. Braxton’s seat. It also said that sources suggest that a former member of the school board would make a good replacement for George. Now, I cannot prove that the Free Press actually received my announcement before it reported that there was no announced candidate for the seat. But, just maybe, it was managing the news in suggesting its own candidate for the school board vacancy.

So, is the press the enemy, as Chris Matthews suggests? Trusted reader, I leave it to you to decide.

The Next Superintendent

Saturday, will be the second of four meetings the school board is holding to get citizen input on the search for our next Superintendent of Schools. So, I’ve been thinking about the kind of person we need to lead Richmond Public Schools. I think I know what I would like to see in a Super-superintendent. In the real world, however, we may have to settle for less.

As a prologue—

We have to think of Richmond Public Schools as a manufacturing business. At one end we take in young minds ready to learn; at the other end we produce young men and women who are prepared to deal with their life goals, whether in college, in the business world or in the military. In thinking of RPS as a business we need to look at the taxpayers of Richmond and the Commonwealth as the shareholders. These shareholders invest their tax dollars and realize their “profits” in the satisfaction that they have prepared a future generation to take up the baton. Like all businesses, the workers of RPS, from the superintendent to support staff in each school, are accountable to the shareholders for their performance. The business analogy must take into account the uniqueness of the “product” that RPS is producing. In addition to the taxpayer-shareholders our school system must also be accountable to the children, whose precious lives we have in our care.

Therefore, in no particular order—

Our next superintendent must be a leader. The superintendent needs the ability to get the myriad employees of RPS to follow her agenda. She has to be the motivator that gets everyone to work at their full potential. Leadership ability should be demonstrated by success in some leadership position either in academics, business or the military.

Our next superintendent must understand organizations. RPS is often accused of having too much bureaucracy. The superintendent needs to be able to analyze the RPS organization and eliminate those positions that are unnecessary in giving our children an excellent education.

Our next superintendent must be committed to accountability. The attitude of employees in any institution is set at the top. The superintendent must not only be honest himself, but also convey to everybody who works for RPS that their job is a public trust. He must make it clear that he will not tolerate any employee who uses taxpayer money improperly.

Our next superintendent must understand the Richmond problem. A significant number of parents in the City of Richmond have indicated their lack of confidence in RPS by leaving the city to find a better educational opportunity for their children elsewhere. The superintendent must be able to deal with this problem first by making RPS a superior school system and second by convincing parents that their children will thrive here.

Our next superintendent must understand our school population. Seventy percent of RPS students come from families with economic difficulties. The superintendent must understand the challenges that these children face in obtaining their education and must have a plan for how to help them reach their full potential.

Our next superintendent must have a vision for RPS. She must be able to articulate her vision of where she expects RPS to be going in the next two years, the next five years and the next ten years. She must be able to convince the taxpayers that their investment in RPS will pay off in class after class of productive young citizens. She must show us the route to greatness.

Our next superintendent must be a unifier. Making RPS into a world-class educational system requires the participation of teachers, parents, civic and faith groups and the business and academic communities. The superintendent must be able to unite these various stakeholders in a common purpose—the education of our children. He must also be able to work productively with the school board, the city council and our next mayor.

Mayor Wilder

Mayor Wilder has finally seen the pink slip I sent him1 and has announced that he will give up City Hall at the end of his term. On the Times-Dispatch website there were tons of emails from readers either condemning Mr. Wilder or praising him. This maven will not join the crowds.

I praise Mr. Wilder for his decision. I know it wasn’t easy for him. I also praise Mr. Wilder for his accomplishments while mayor. I wish him the best in his remaining months as our chief executive. I also wish him the best in his re-retirement.

Let’s get on with picking his successor.

Pick Me! Pick Me!

Well, treasured reader, I found out that I will have an opponent in my school board race. So it is time to explain why the voters of the fourth district should vote for me rather than “the other guy.”

1- I have life experience. I have raised three children, all of whom are products of public schools. I’m not sure that aging necessarily brings wisdom, but I’ve had lots of years to learn.

2- I am deeply committed to public education. It is the great equalizer. It is the one institution in our country that is designed to assure that all of our young people have an equal chance to see their life goals fulfilled.

3- I have two granddaughters who live in Richmond and who will be students in Richmond Public Schools. I thus have a personal stake in assuring that RPS becomes a world-class school system.

4- I have spent lots of time in Richmond’s schools. I have worked with principals and teachers and students and I understand the issues they deal with every day.

5- I spent most of my career working for the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO). The concept of accountability to the taxpayers has become part of my being. I will instill a sense of accountability in all RPS officers and employees.

6- I’m retired. This will enable me to devote most of my time to RPS. If you elect me, you will be getting a real bargain.

7- My faith has given me a strong commitment to social justice. I see providing a quality education to all our children as something worth fighting for.

8- I am a uniter. I will work to get all the stakeholders in RPS—teachers, parents, civic and faith groups, the business and academic communities—to understand that they are all in the same boat and must work together for the good of our children. I will convince parents in all economic circumstances that they are not adversaries fighting for a limited piece of the education pie.

9- I have no higher ambitions. I am not running for school board as a stepping stone to City Council or mayor or the General Assembly. Providing a world-class education for all our children is my only goal.

10- I have come to love the City of Richmond. I have no desire to move anywhere else. I understand that Richmond can never be a great city unless it has great schools. Therefore, I dedicate myself to achieving that goal.

11- I understand that politics is the art of getting things done. The word “compromise” is part of my vocabulary. I also understand that I do not have all the answers. I will work well with all the members of the school board.

12- I am impatient. I am tired of continuous discussions and planning. We know what has worked in other schools systems. It’s time to stop planning and start acting.

So, there is my not-so-dirty dozen. I hope that the citizens of Richmond will see that I am clearly more qualified for the school board than Brand X. I urge them to join me in my campaign for our children.