School Board Candidate Questions: Karen Smith District 3 Challenger

On Nov. 2, residents of Montgomery County will be able to vote for candidates for Districts 1, 3 and 5 and at-large for the Montgomery County Public Schools Board of Education. Despite what district voters lives in, they will be able to vote for the open seats in all districts and the at-large candidates. The at-large seat represents the interests of residents countywide. Patch reached out to all school board candidates and will report their answers as they come in. Some have yet to respond, but we will run their answers if they get them into us before the election.

Karen Smith, a Bethesda resident, has been involved in Montgomery County Council of PTA for the past 11 years. She has worked on various MCPS committees and in 2007 she served as litigator, representing parents in their appeal of the Board's decision to close the Secondary Learning Centers. Smith has a background in math, computers and law.

Patch: What are your top two priorities should you win?

Karen Smith: 1) Clarify the budget process by bringing in professional management auditors to help us do a perfomance audit, so that we can increase transparency and identify what we can cut with the least harm to the classroom during the lean times coming.

2) Change the tone of MCPS to be more collaborative, with both parents and staff. We should welcome parental input at every level. We need to listen more and litigate less. Also, MCPS has many intelligent and thoughtful teachers and administrators. Any proposed changes in curriculum and instruction will work better if teachers and administrators are brought in to the process in a school-by-school, genuinely collaborative effort. Recurring mandates from above without consultation are part of what drives good teachers to take jobs in private schools for less money.

Patch: How do you rate the current Board of Education?

Smith: Too much of the time, the superintendent has been making major program and policy decisions, negotiating financial deals with private companies, and with employee unions, with little to no consultation with or oversight by the board. I believe he has done so with the clear expectation that the board will simply rubberstamp whatever he has already set in motion. That has resulted in unelected private persons having complete control of our public school system, with zeroaccountability.

While some on the board have supported this approach, others have been trying to: 

i) re-assert the board's traditional role in setting long-term policy goals and in program planning and re-evaluation;

ii) to hold the superintendent and other MCPS staff accountable for their actions; and

iii) to engage the community more fully in decision-making processes.

I plan to support these efforts, with a further emphasis on pushing for thoughtful, research-driven, curricular development and effective instructional practices.

Patch: What will you look for in a new superintendent?

Smith: I will be looking for:

1) someone with vision, energy, purpose and will;

2) someone who is looking to educate each child to his or her potential, insofar as is possible with the means at our disposal;

3) someone who will set a new tone for MCPS, one that is open, accountable, collaborative and responsive, with both parents and staff;

4) someone who will help to inculcate the attitude that every child should be treated in the way we would all want ours to be treated;

5) someone who knows that "special education" is a label calling for specialized instructional and assessment techniques that work, not an excuse for academic failure and a catalyst for legal fees; and

6) someone who is interested in raising not just standards, but expectations, for all students, regardless of income level or disability.

Patch: What is lacking in the Montgomery County curriculum?

Smith: Focus on what has been proven to work, cohesiveness and a structure that helps teachers to teach and students to learn. Where these things have been introduced (or improved), good things are already happening (e.g., the middle-school World Studies curriculum).

No Child Left Behind describes the "'essential components of reading instruction' [to be] explicit and systematic instruction in (A) phonemic awareness, (B) phonics, (C) vocabulary development, (D) reading fluency, including oral reading skills, and (E) reading comprehension strategies." 20 U.S.C. §6368(3) (emphases added).

I do not believe that the district's reading curriculum contains all of these "essential components," and I think that it should. Specific, sustained focus on building all of these components into our reading curriculum would help us to identify dyslexic students at an earlier age and to target appropriate interventions to struggling students earlier, when such interventions are both less expensive and more effective.

Our current K-8 math curriculum has left many of our students struggling to fill gaps in their understanding in the higher grades. I believe that the Common Core standards in math will help to alleviate this problem, as it lays out many fewer objectives per year, and allows the teachers the time to teach this smaller set of essential math skills to mastery. Once implemented (over the next few years), this should improve math education within MCPS substantially.

Patch: How can the board continue the work it has done with the test achievement gap with fewer resources over the next few years?

Smith: The smaller class sizes Jerry Weast used to attack the problem of disproportionate performance by socioeconomic status were the expensive part of the solution. Better reading curriculum and instruction is the less expensive part, as discussed above.           

We need to pay attention to what the research data tells us in other ways, as well. Once a class size gets bigger than 25, the marginal difference in educational outcomes from adding one more person is not meaningfully different from adding five to 10 more people. We need to find ways to use this creatively, so that we can bring more resources to bear on the kids that need that extra, focused help to catch up.