Priorities
My Solutions
Students first. Parents are entrusting the school board with the most precious thing they will ever have. Our kids must always take priority over all other interests. My opponent has accepted large contributions from labor groups. Who will he put first?
Establish a culture of high expectations—no more excuses. Leadership sets the tone in this regard. If leaders are frequently making excuses for failures or settling for mediocrity, this will infect the organizational culture. Students, parents and staff should be inspired to live up to higher expectations than currently projected by the school board.
Better prioritization of limited resources. Focus on data-driven choices that will have the greatest positive impact on getting great results. The school board has squandered generous taxpayer contributions on rapidly expanding bureaucratic costs for elaborate buildings that are not urgently needed. This robs precious resources from our kids’ classrooms.
Unleash the human spirit. Embrace healthy competition to spur creativity and innovation. Increase our support for charter and alternative programs, allowing parents the freedom of choosing the best school for their children. Reward our best teachers with more pay.
Bob Griffin
Here are a few of my many ideas for change:
Increase school district efficiency while supporting popular charter and alternative programs. Expand facilities to meet the high demand of charter and alternative schools. Since 1996, the Anchorage School District has seen enrollment drop by about 1,300 kids in the non-charter schools. During that time, we have built ten new schools with a total capacity of 7,600 students and have added 1,800,000 square feet of new floor space. Many schools are operating well below their capacity. That is wasteful and inefficient. Make excess school space available to help solve the overcrowding in our very popular alternative and charter school programs..
Expand Career Technology Education (CTE). CTE (similar to what was once called vocational-technical) does not mean compromising on standards. Finland has the led the world in PISA test scores for many years and about 49% of Finnish children choose a vocational track over a college prep track at age 15. Vocational skills are critical to our local resource-development economy but they are badly underserviced by our school system. I’m very excited about the current school bond issue to expand CTE in the district and believe more should be done. I’m also excited about the possibility of expanding CTE charter schools to help fill this urgent need of the local economy.
Promote healthy competition. Give school principals much more autonomy over their individual budgets, staffing and curricula so they can tailor their programs to the desires of parents and students. Allow liberal zone exemptions so parents have the choice to move their kids to the school that best suits them and use a weighted-student formula for funding so that district money follows the student to their school of choice. This is similar to techniques used in very successful school systems in countries such as Canada, Sweden and Belgium.
Give charter and alternative students access to state transportation funding. Allow charter school and alternative programs access to their share of funds the district collects from the state for transporting students. The state allocates $407/year to the district per average daily membership (ADM) for transportation. Therefore, the district collects about $1.5 million/year from the state for 3,500 alternative and charter students whom it does not transport. With this money, parents and staff could organize private-sector shared-transportation services through private van pools. This would increase safety in crowded drop-off and pick-up areas and decrease pollution.
Rethink the way we build our schools. We should revamp our Education Specifications and Capital Improvement Plan to better focus our resources on improving student outcomes. Projections that our kids’ performance will improve by attending elaborate schools have not panned out. Overly-expensive schools just rob resources from classroom instruction.
Incentivize performance. Provide cash rewards or other incentives where they make sense. A 2010 Harvard study showed that when second graders in Dallas were rewarded with $2 in cash to read a book in their spare time and then pass a comprehension test, their performance improved. For this test group, reading comprehension test scores rose dramatically—equivalent to four months ahead in development—compared to the control group of second graders who didn’t get the incentive. The study also showed that during the following year (third grade), when the cash incentive was removed the difference in performance over the control group was maintained. This is an example of using an extrinsic incentive to build a bridge to the intrinsic rewards of reading. The students were rewarded for a maximum of 40 books and in the end, the experiment cost $15 per student. Programs similar to this could be funded by corporate donations without using public money.
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