The Vanguard sat down with Sheila Allen, who is finishing up her first term on the Davis School Board and will be running for re-election this fall. Sheila Allen’s time on the board has been tumultuous, as she has served now with four different Superintendents since 2005, and lived through school closings, pink slips, budget cuts and huge numbers of late night meetings.
So why is Sheila Allen, having been through all of that, running for re-election? “I have learned so much over the last five years,” she said. “I want to be able to apply that knowledge and be able to continue to help the students of Davis.”
“It is such worthwhile work,” she said, “such a good use of my time.”
When asked her goals, she acknowledged, “Really, it is the budget that is the number one thing that we have to keep our eye on. The budget affects everything.”
“I want to make sure that the budget decisions that we make are fully-informed and include community discussion,” she said. “If there are further cuts that need to be made, [I want to be sure] that we really look very carefully at those kinds of decisions.”
“Being the eternal optimist that I am,” Sheila Allen said, “I’m hoping that four years out – since I’ve had to witness the dismantling of so much of education – I would like to be a part of putting it back together even better.”
Finally she said, “[We] need to be fiscally solvent, we can’t not be solvent.”
The budget for Sheila Allen, and probably most people, is the clearly number-one goal, but secondly within those challenges and limitations, she wants to maintain the district’s programs that many in this community would consider great.
“That is very tightly-wound with the budget, but not necessarily [so]. There are some of our programs that can continue on with other kinds of support that aren’t necessarily… state funded,” she said. She is looking towards more community support.
She is looking at ensuring a broad education, which to her means programs beyond simply reading and math. That means an expansion of music and arts, or at least in tough times the preservation of the types of programs that so many districts have had to put on the back burner.
“Every kid is a whole being,” she said, “they’re not just a test score for math and reading.”
Ms. Allen’s third priority is to make up even more ground on the achievement gap issue. She was on the original achievement gap task force with Jim Provenza. “If you look over that original report,” she said, “we’ve implemented a number of those suggestions. But there’s a lot of them that we have not.”
In addition to the achievement gap, but along similar lines, she wants to see more early childhood education. That would include expanding the preschool program and focusing on the early years, even as the district is having to watch its finances.
The budget, however, has been, and remains, the critical issue. It will drive most of the policy and the discussion, and draw much of the attention that the district will have in the next four years.
“I was just reading that the Governor today said he may not sign a budget before he goes out of office,” she said. “We have a constitutional responsibility, where we have to have a budget and we have to meet a deadline and we do. So does the legislature and the governor, and it’s so unfair why we have to and they don’t.”
She said that while she hopes there is a budget, she believes that it would be very difficult to attempt to create their own budget, when the state’s budget and the amount of funding is completely up in the air.
“We would have to have our best guess and carry forward, but it’s going to be really hard for us if we don’t have some kind of firm number,” Sheila Allen said. “I don’t think this coming year is going to be much better, but I don’t have an exact idea on the extent of that.”
This uncertainty is why she argues that she did not want a parcel tax in November. As she pointed out, the deadline has already passed for the 120 days out of the election. From her perspective, 120 days before the November election, the board would have had to know, for the following year, how much was needed. She just did not see that as practical.
“We would have to know and I was not willing to make a guess,” she said. “So I’m hoping by the first week of May, minus 120 days, we will have some better information to work with. I am willing to have the conversation and talk to the community to see if they’d be willing to either have an additional parcel tax – we haven’t decided whether to either have an additional parcel tax – or to roll it together with Q and W.”
“We still have a little bit of time, we have a year left for Q and W, so the timeline has not run out on that,” she said. Q and W refer to Measure Q, the parcel tax passed in 2007 and Measure W being the parcel tax passed by the voters in November of 2008. “Probably we’re going to need do something, but we don’t have enough information right now.”
But will May be problematic for the teachers again? “Yes,” Sheila Allen said, “for the people getting the pink slips – I totally understand that, because I’m still laid off from my position at the health department. So I know the realities of that.”
“I would hate to lose the opportunity to know what it is that we need,” she said. “Maybe we’d ask for too much – and that wouldn’t be good. Or maybe we wouldn’t ask for enough so then they would receive a pink slip and lose their jobs.”
“That’s no fun,” she said, referring to getting a pink slip, “But in the end, hopefully we will be able to maintain programs by maintaining teachers.”
She said we are looking at around $600 right now to sustain our current level of programs and wipe out our structural deficit. However, Ms. Allen warned, that could change. “Who’s to know what is going to come down from the state,” she said.
While the times are challenging, Sheila Allen did point out, “I can say for certain, overall, we’re doing better than most places. That’s for sure.”
“We are a smaller organization than we used to be, so we have made the ongoing cuts in many different areas. Just like most places, everyone is trying to do more with less,” she added.
Sheila Allen applauded, particularly during these tough times, the willingness of the community to step up and not only support education, but to fund it. “They not only know the importance of education, they fund it,” she said. “I know of other places that give lipservice to education, but they’re not willing to open their pocket book.”
When looking at the boom and bust tendencies of the state, Sheila Allen suggested that the point of Proposition 13 was to attempt to even things out because there were huge discrepancies between various localities, where some had a huge amount and others had very little. The idea then was to even things out.
“But,” she said, “over time that has eroded, so places like [Davis] can pass parcel taxes. We’re doing more of local funding [and] other places have less. Again, other places get more money for their lower-achieving students and more kids with those kinds of needs. So the idea of people [getting] funding from the state has really washed out over the years.”
“It would be my preference to have fair and equal funding for the whole state,” she said.
However she said while she did not have “control” per se, she said that she had a stronger voice and a better ability to make change here in Davis. “I’m doing what I can with the tools that I’m given currently,” she added.
Moving away from the budget, again she talked about her goal of universal preschool on DJUSD campuses. “I would love to have preschool at each of our campuses,” she said, “They have it in West Sacramento. If West Sacramento can do it, why not Davis.”
A private organization provides early childhood childcare at each of our campus through CDC. CDC provides needed services at each of our campuses, providing before and after school care to people who need it.
While not disparaging their work, she wants the district to be able to provide those services themselves. “I believe that the school district – which it’s really their goal to provide education – [that] it would be more appropriate for us to be doing that than for the private entity that makes pretty good money.”
She also wants to have at least the option of a full-day kindergarten. “We don’t even have a single campus that has full-day kindergarten. I have heard from many a working parent who would love to have that option.”
She cited two reasons why such an option would improve education for students. One of them is to help the working parent who otherwise would need childcare or additional assistance.
However, from an educational standpoint, she argued that this is a way to help shrink the achievement gap. “From educational research,” she said they have found that the achievement and those things, “are all wrapped into having access to a preschool and more education at the very beginning – that achievement gaps doesn’t start out like this.”
She said this demonstrated the distance, holding her hands far apart to illustrate the current gap. “It really helps to squeeze that down,” she said, “it serves two purposes, having kids whose parents need it and helping kids who educationally need those couple of extra hours in the day to be able to learn.”
Looking forward, the key issue will be the parcel tax. While it is a difficult decision to put it off until May, Sheila Allen believes it was the right call, given the lack of certainty about the budget 120 days off from the November election.
“We made a fully-informed decision to not have the parcel tax,” she reiterated. They did a full phone survey that guided that decision. “We didn’t just say we don’t want to do it in November, because in May people won’t be paying attention and only the parents will be voting then. We fully intend to inform the whole community and hope to have a high participation in the election.”
She also cited the finances and the fact that a mail-in election is significantly less expensive than even a November election where they already have an item – the board elections – on the ballot.
Finally she talked about the current board make up, and her colleagues Gina Daleiden and Tim Taylor ,who are running for re-election as well. “I have really enjoyed working with them. I think that we have a highly functioning board – all five of us. Our previous superintendent and our current superintendent have [formed] a highly-functioning leadership team.”
“One of the key things that lead to us being highly-functioning is that we have diverse ideas and diverse opinions,” she said. “We do not always vote the same way. Not the three of us, not the five of us. Everybody has been on opposite ends of votes.”
She cited Valley Oak as a key example, as one that she fought for but lost. However, she continued to work with her colleagues on a host of other issues.
The Vanguard will have interviews with Gina Daleiden and Tim Taylor in the coming days. Previously we posted our article on Mike Nolan, who is the challenger to the board election and the one non-incumbent.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
As we struggle with balancing school work and day care Sheila hits the bulls eye by wanting to open the child care issue especially the needs of working families and half day kindergarten. I hope the others follow her lead.
dmg: “While not disparaging their work, she wants the district to be able to provide those services themselves. “I believe that the school district – which it’s really their goal to provide education – [that] it would be more appropriate for us to be doing that than for the private entity that makes pretty good money.”
She also wants to have at least the option of a full-day kindergarten. “We don’t even have a single campus that has full-day kindergarten. I have heard from many a working parent who would love to have that option.””
If we are in the process of firing teachers and increasing class sizes, possibly cutting the number of days school is in session, and thinking of implementing an increase in the parcel tax just to keep teachers employed, how are taxpayers going to afford funding after school care and full day kindergarten?
If the parcel tax does not come with strings attached–most importantly, one which prohibits the School Board from increasing class size for the period in which the tax is in effect–I will actively oppose any increase in the parcel tax.
To my mind, it is wrong for the District to ask for more money and then, when the state cuts its budget, the District signs deals with its employees (teachers, admins and others) which lock them into wages which were based on the same or higher amount of money from the state. The result (over the last few years) has been to lay off a lot of employees (including teachers) and to not refill their positions when individuals retire or leave for other reasons. That has meant larger class sizes and reduced school activities and services (including libraries) at the very time Davis residents are paying many times more per year in the parcel tax.
If the district wants to raise this tax, it has to work out deals with its employee groups which allow the district to reduce (or increase) salaries and benefits after the state money comes in. It should not be the case that the DTA or other bargaining groups hold all the cards once the state cuts the budget for schools. I am not against good teachers making good money–good teachers are underpaid in Davis. But the District’s funding is subject to the state budget, and if the District has less state money to pay its teachers, that reduction needs to be automatically spread across the board so that class sizes are not increased and that services are not decimated.
By the way, if you care about education policy, you should read this series from the Los Angeles Times ([url]http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/14/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815[/url]), which began a few days ago and will continue for a few months. It has created a firestorm among the CTA. They are already organizing boycotts against the Times.
This is the most salient part: [quote]Most districts act as though one teacher is about as good as another. As a result, the most effective teachers often go unrecognized, the keys to their success rarely studied. Ineffective teachers often face no consequences and get no extra help.
Which teacher a child gets is usually an accident of fate, in which the progress of some students is hindered while others just steps away thrive.
Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.
The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student’s performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.
Though controversial among teachers and others, the method has been increasingly embraced by education leaders and policymakers across the country, including the Obama administration.
Among the findings:
• Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial gap at year’s end between students whose teachers were in the top 10% in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math.
• Some students landed in the classrooms of the poorest-performing instructors year after year — a potentially devastating setback that the district could have avoided. Over the period analyzed, more than 8,000 students got such a math or English teacher at least twice in a row.
• Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.
• Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.[/quote]
how are taxpayers going to afford funding after school care and full day kindergarten?
Nice to have, but doesn’t seem realistic for a few years.
Agree with some of Times article. In the private sector customer satisfaction has become commonplace. When are students or parents (customers) asked to eval teachers ?
I like Sheila Allen’s input on SB. However I find the ‘getting along so well’ tiresome as mainly a couple of the others are silly and joke around way too much. Too cutsy to be taken seriously I think.
Elaine and WDF: It’s a long term goal, I specifically asked her if money weren’t an issue what would she do. Why did I ask that? Because otherwise, everything would have been about the budget, which is fine but doesn’t provide much depth.
To Rich Rifkin: Having taught in the public school system I have some basic questions that should underlie any premise to establishing a merit based system:
1) What criteria are used to determine which teachers are better?
2) Who decides what the criteria will be?
3) How do you keep workplace politics out of the evalution system?
4) How do you factor in the issue of some teachers being assigned brighter kids than other teachers?
5) How do you factor in the issue of some teachers working in neighborhoods where education is not valued, e.g. gang infested, low income, parents not well educated, students expected to work before/after school to supplement family income/work on farm
6) How do you factor in teachers who work in areas where many kids come from broken homes?
7) Why aren’t our teachers being taught basic, sound teaching techniques in our teaching colleges?
8) Our teachers are being given suboptimal textbooks to teach from, that are not straightforward, often written and newly published from a local university professor out to make a name for the university/himself/herself
9) There is no national standard to give guidance – teaching norms vary widely from state to state
10) Teachers often spend 90% of their time on discipline problems in the classroom, bc administrators are not backing teachers up on this issue
11) Teachers are often making do with outdated equipment, ratty and too few textbooks, lousy facilities (I had a heater blow up in a portable classroom I was teaching in, crammed with 42 students)
And the list goes on. I am not necessarily against holding teachers accountable, if it is not done in a vacuum. There are many factors that contribute to students not learning, including lackadaisacal administrators all the way up to the federal level administrators, who see no reason to standardize education so that all states are responsible for ensuring our students attain a certain minimal leval of competency.
Frankly, the only way the school system is going to really change is to push for more school vouchers and charter schools, so that parents have a choice where to send their children. I didn’t used to think this way, but I have been slowly convinced it is the only way to overcome the indemic inertia that is gripping our current public education system which is so resistant to change…
9) There is no national standard to give guidance – teaching norms vary widely from state to state
That’s not exactly true, Elaine. There are national standards. Often you find states failing to agree to them because of parochial values (some states want to set the bar lower) or don’t like being dictated to by federal government. California recently signed on to national standards for math and English in k-12. It was one of the components of No Child Left Behind:
California signs on to education standards
[url]http://www.latimes.com/news/local/education/la-me-standards-20100803,0,5257880.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+latimes/news/education+(L.A.+Times+-+Education)&utm_content=Google+Reader[/url]
Frankly, the only way the school system is going to really change is to push for more school vouchers and charter schools, so that parents have a choice where to send their children. I didn’t used to think this way, but I have been slowly convinced it is the only way to overcome the indemic inertia that is gripping our current public education system which is so resistant to change…
Elaine, what do you think of Diane Ravitch’s writings on the matter? Ten years ago, you two might have seen eye to eye on education. Since then she has changed her mind about charter schools and recent efforts to reform education, much of which she originally endorsed and pushed for.
Review of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
[url]http://www.washingtonmonthly.com//features/2010/1003.kahlenberg.html[/url]
“it would be more appropriate for us to be doing that than for the private entity that makes pretty good money.”
I had to laugh at that line. Put preschool in public hands and guaranteed they’ll turn it into a huge money loser. We’re talking parcel taxes, pink slips and cutbacks and at the same time putting full day kindergarten and preschool into the equation? What are they smoking?
I had to laugh at that line. Put preschool in public hands and guaranteed they’ll turn it into a huge money loser. We’re talking parcel taxes, pink slips and cutbacks and at the same time putting full day kindergarten and preschool into the equation? What are they smoking?
Your comments don’t make much sense to me, which rather makes me ask that same last question of you.
CDC was generally not a great value for us. We used it once for half a year many years ago. Our kid got picked on and the staff didn’t seem to have much control of the situation. I didn’t find CDC to be a preschool program at all; it’s day care, it’s babysitting. There wasn’t any notable effort to enrich the kids, teach them, or develop them.
We have used DPNS (Davis Parent Nursery School), however, which has a partnership with the school district. It isn’t free, however. We thought it was a really good, enriching program with very professional staff. But it isn’t exactly accessible to all kids; gotta have money and an adult family member willing to volunteer.
We’re talking parcel taxes, pink slips and cutbacks and at the same time putting full day kindergarten and preschool into the equation? What are they smoking?
Also, note Greenwald’s comment above to give you the appropriate context for that idea:
I specifically asked her if money weren’t an issue what would she do. Why did I ask that? Because otherwise, everything would have been about the budget, which is fine but doesn’t provide much depth.
[i]”I have some basic questions that should underlie any premise to establishing a merit based system:
1) What criteria are used to determine which teachers are better?”[/i]
I’m not an expert on grading teachers. However, if you read the LA Times article, I think that approach makes sense.
I think anyone who attended grade school (K-6) knows that there is a big difference between having a very good teacher and a lousy one. Most, at least one year in elementary school, got or will get a bad teacher. Hopefully, most don’t suffer the bad luck of getting bad teachers back to back years.
When I was a child, I had a terrible, awful, horrible, miserable 4th grade teacher. He was not an ogre or intentionally a bad guy. He did not raise his voice or threaten violence or use bad language. He just could not teach, and he could not control 30 4th graders. He was either fired or quit a year later–I don’t know which–after hundreds of parents complained how crappy he was.
By great luck, I got a wonderful teacher in the 5th grade and had her again in the 6th grade. Because of her, I was able to learn in the 5th grade everything I missed in the 4th. If I had had another terrible teacher in the 5th grade, my life may have gone off track. That’s how important it is to have good teachers (and keep them teaching and pay them bonuses for being good).
I think in Davis bad teachers generally don’t last very long, because a substantial percentage of parents will speak up if a teacher sucks and the teacher will be pushed out before getting established. In some other places, the parents are probably less active and less likely to speak up, and so unless a bad teacher leaves on his own (which probably is what mostly happens), bad teachers can ruin a lot of young lives.
At Davis High School, most of the teachers I had were excellent. (The student they had in me was not nearly so good.) However, I had a few teachers who were near the end of their careers who were unbelievably bad. One, a chemistry teacher, reaked of alcohol. He should have been fired. He was not. I don’t know why. It may have been a tenure issue. Or it might just have been that those in charge of the District at that time had more sympathy for him than they had for his students. I also had a US History teacher who told us he had been a boxer as a young man. His face looked like he had been beaten up a lot. By the time he was my teacher, he was punch drunk.
I tend to think the greater danger from bad teachers is in the early grades. That is when a child can get sent off course and may never recover. By the time a student reaches high school (and has 5 or 6 teachers), one bad teacher is usually tolerable.
I have read some education studies (from Stanford) which suggest that the best answer to the so-called achievement gap is to simply bias the teacher selection process, where lower-achieving students are placed in the classrooms of those identifiably good teachers year after year. The studies say doing that makes the most progress toward raising the test scores of low-achievers (of all races and ethnicities).
[i]”We have used DPNS (Davis Parent Nursery School), however, which has a partnership with the school district. It isn’t free, however.”[/i]
If you are lucky, you will get your child into this preschool program ([url]http://ccfs.ucdavis.edu/EarlyChildhoodLaboratory.html[/url]) at UCD. Back in 1967, I was one of the first kids to attend it. Everyone I know who has sent their kids there since has been very happy for it.
Checked Rich’s link, but not in depth… unlike DPNS (which is actually a Davis Adult School Program) it does not appear that a credentialed teacher supervises (as in DPNS) and although it serves sorta’ like ‘daycare’ and early education, the parent participation requirement at DPNS, is to improve the adults’ parenting skills. The program Rich refers to looks, at face value, to be a “lab” for folks who aspire to be daycare providers &/or early education, credentialed teachers. To each, their own. The two programs, in most likelihood, each have their place. Personally, don’t think there is any “luck” involved.
wdf1: “Elaine, what do you think of Diane Ravitch’s writings on the matter? Ten years ago, you two might have seen eye to eye on education. Since then she has changed her mind about charter schools and recent efforts to reform education, much of which she originally endorsed and pushed for.”
Thanks for the link. Thought provoking review. I still feel that choice with charter schools and vouchers (with all their imperfections) is the only way our school system is going to be forced to change. Otherwise, our educational system is going to stagnate right where it is.
Personally, I think one of the biggest problems in our school system has to do with the style of teaching and what is taught. The schools need to go back to the basics and drill. When I taught, it was the problem then. When my kids went to school, it was the problem then too. Basics such as the math tables, knowing what a paragraph is, very elemental things like that.
Comeon Elaine, teaching math tables, grammar and elemental things like that might take away from MLK or Cesar Chavez week. The left will never stand for that while in the meantime the rest of the world passes us by.