In 2006, there was so little interest -- or confidence -- in the Kansas City, Missouri, School Board that not one person challenged the incumbents and the election was canceled. This year, the race is packed with candidates vying for at-large and sub-district seats. From now until the election on April 6, we're profiling each of the candidates, starting from the top of the ballot.
Now a college graduate, Rea still lives in the Northeast. As a youth development liaison for the Mattie Rhodes Center,
he works daily with kids who are better schooled in street violence
than spelling and arithmetic. "I've got bullet holes in my backdoor,"
he says. "I fall asleep with helicopters hovering too many nights. I
understand what they're facing and what they're up against."
As an adult poised to start a family of his own, Rea also understands what parents are up against. He knows many distrust the Kansas City, Missouri, School District
and work long hours for tuition costs or relocate their family
altogether. "I don't want to have to make the same decision my parents
had to make," he says.
As a candidate for the school board, Rea wants to change the district to make that decision a no-brainer.
Rea characterizes himself as an average student with average grades. His senior year at St. Mary's he started making plans to join the military, not attend college. It was just two weeks before graduation that Rea was awarded an athletic scholarship at Park University to run cross country and track. His mother had always been involved in civic affairs, often taking her son to community meetings and lobby days at the state legislature, so Rea jumped into political science and public administration. He was hooked after his first course. By 2007, as Kansas City's mayoral race picked up, Rea already knew the work of Mark Funkhouser by way of studying his audits and financial reports in his classes.
"At the time, I thought that might be a cool campaign to jump on," he says. "So I volunteered, knocked on doors, did all that stuff and he offered me a job. I don't think any college junior would turn down a full-time position like that. So I took advantage of the opportunity."
Just weeks into Funkhouser's tenure the first controversy erupted, when the mayor appointed an anti-illegal immigration activist to the city's Parks Board. "We had chaos within the first few weeks with the Frances Semler situation," he says. "I was naïve enough in that position that I didn't know what I was walking into, that it would present challenges I hadn't considered. I was really torn."
At that time, Rea says, there were no other Hispanic men or women in the upper ranks of city government, either serving as department heads or working with the mayor, city manager or city council members. "As the political pressure picked up, I wouldn't have felt good about abandoning that post," he says.
The chaos never settled, but Rea stuck around to see through some of Funkhouser's initiatives. Most notably, the aide worked on the Mayor's Night Kicks program, a summer soccer league for at-risk kids, and helped cement a new partnership with the Cristo Rey school, helping students secure city jobs to help pay their tuition. Last year, when the Mayor traveled to New York to tour to Harlem Children's Zone, Rea was part of the city delegation.
With his background in youth development, Rea says, he'd already considered a bid for the school board. But when the resignations of Ingrid Burnett and David Smith opened two seats in 2008, Rea, just 23 years old, was too young to serve. By the end of 2009, he was ready to leave Funkhouser's administration and felt the field didn't reflect the district's diversity. "Nobody stepped up as far as the Hispanic community goes, so I decided to leave the office take the opportunity," he says.
He didn't tell his family until Christmas eve and only had two weeks to collect signatures. Despite the snow storms, Rea and his volunteers gathered more signatures than any other candidate. He chalks up the support to the voters' desire for change. Like his parents, he knows residents are leery of taking a chance on public schools and that hesitancy is causing Kansas City to hemorrhage taxpayers. "We're talking about a shrinking tax base with already strained resources," he says. "We've got to make the district a viable option, make it attractive for families, not make it an incentive or motivation to leave."
To do that, Rea says, the board needs to be more transparent. If he gets a seat at the table, he'll push to stream meetings live on the Internet or on television. He'll make sure the board sticks to governance, not management, and avoid personality conflicts that send officials packing if they "cross the wrong board member." Even more importantly, he says, he'll make sure the board follows through on it promises.
"In the history of the district they do all these great plans and then put them on the shelf," Rea says. The evolving Strategic Plan, pulling input from hundreds of Kansas City residents, can't be another exercise that gathers dust once its completed, Rea says. "If we fail to follow-through we're going to destroy the already fractured sense of trust we have [within the community]," he says. "There's a lot at stake with this plan right now."
As for Rea's strategy, safety is a top priority. "Parents feel very uneasy sending their kids to the Kansas City School District," he says. "Their perception is that it's not safe; it's rowdy and raucous and disorderly." Last week, a survey from the district's teachers' union showed a staggering number of educators had either been victim of or threatened with physical violence from a student. "Try teaching -- or learning -- in that kind of environment," Rea says.
That's not to say the district is devoid of success stories. To regain community trust, Rea thinks the district needs to do a better job highlighting -- and expanding on -- what's working. He wants to see all of Kansas City's high schools participating in the A+ Schools program, a state partnership that provides college financial aid for high-achieving students. He wants to see parents getting phone calls, not just when their kids are in danger of dropping out, but when their students improve their grades. He wants to see school board members writing opinion pieces for the newspapers and working harder to win community partners. "I don't think we've allowed civic or philanthropic organizations to be at the table," he says. "We've pushed folks away who have a lot of money and influence."
With schools closing and possible teacher lay-offs, Rea knows he's jumping into a political firestorm. But he says he's ready. "Leaving the mayor's office, there is no more chaotic environment that you can find," he says.
This week's candidate forums:
American Federation of Teachers
All-candidate forum
Thursday, February 18
Immanuel Lutheran Church, 1700 Westport Road
6:30-8:30 p.m.
KCMSD District Advisory Committee
All-candidate forum
Monday, February 22
Manual Career and Technical Center, 1215 Truman Road
6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Kansas City Call
All-candidate forum
Tuesday, February 23
Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center, 3700 Blue Parkway
6-8 p.m.
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PS--the most grievous of errors! I asterisked to indicate a note below, but didn't add the note. Here it is:
*Is it by accident that so many students fail? The following quote by Woodrow Wilson is from John Taylor Gatto's book entitled The Underground History of American Education (online for free at johntaylorgatto.com), in which Gatto posits that schools have actually been used for more than a hundred years, not as places to educate and uplift the general population, but to separate the "leaders" from the "followers/future factory workers/consumers of mass quantities. Not everyone might have wanted to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company; most were content with an adequate living, benefits and retirement plan. But we're losing these jobs to overseas workers (who after all, want to feed their families, too). Now what?
We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
- Woodrow Wilson
from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association
Jan. 9th, 1909
In any endeavor, there is a first priority. No matter what you do, whether it's building a house, writing a song, or preparing your taxes, something is THE most important thing to do first.
In education, that THING is the deep alignment of the curriculum, instruction and assessment. If we are about the business of teaching, which we are, and we care about the students, which we do, then we must first know what it is that the students should be learning.
Otherwise, the assessment tests act like a glorified IQ test, and only tell us what we already know--that children of higher income families will do well, and children of lower income families won't.
As it is, students, parents, teachers, districts, states and countries are discombobulated. No one knows what we're supposed to be teaching the children, because educators and politicians everywhere worry too much about the sacred sovereignty of their little patch. Kansas City and St. Louis students, in particular, suffer because guess what? We're poor. But not only do we "fail", we're blamed for being bad and stupid. But when more affluent systems brag about their high test scores, all they're doing is taking credit for the parents' hard work, and last time I looked, that really is cheating. The students of higher socio-economic status could be staying at home watching cartoons, and not go to school a day in their lives, and they'd still score well on the achievement tests. So I'm not exaggerating in any way when I say that this is child abuse at its worst. I wonder that many suits haven't yet been filed for educational malpractice, on behalf of all kinds of students, rich, poor and in-between.
Studies show that in schools, districts, states where the curriculum is aligned, deeply aligned, students succeed. Private schools, by the way, are particularly good at aligning their curricula, instruction and assessment, and in particular, Catholic schools. There is an elementary curriculum that feeds into a mid-level, which feeds into a high school, which feeds into a university level curriculum, if I'm not mistaken. I'd be happy to be corrected on this, if I'm wrong. But in our state, our students are measured by a test that we can't even look at! In the bad old days, the norm-referenced tests were designed that way--after all, it'd be like cheating on an IQ test! But for the past few decades--yes, DECADES!!--we've known that criterion-referenced tests are more equitable and more effective. Is the purpose of testing just to categorize people*, or is it to diagnose strengths and weaknesses so that the learner may learn?
Well, in Missouri, it's still against the law to know what's on the tests (although federal and state laws both mandate criterion-referenced tests). And it's PARTICULARLY against the law to know what's on the national tests (the NAEP) that the state tests riff off of. But by law, our tests are supposed to be criterion-referenced. So this half and half test is kind of like being part cow and part frog.
By law, we could be seeing what sort of things the kids need to know, and plan the instruction accordingly. But by law, we can't. We still think that's cheating, but let me ask you this. If a doctor needs to know how to do surgery, would we make her study years of say, furniture-making, because it would be "cheating" to study surgery before the test?
So, Mr. Rea, while your parents sacrificed for you to go to private school, they need not have. If our schools, districts, state had done curriculum auditing in 1979 when it was developed by Dr. Fenwick English (yes, thirty YEARS ago) we would have 1) decided what we wanted the students to know, in clear and measurable terms and 2) taught it, then 3) our children would have succeeded and we wouldn't be in this mess. And by the way, that doesn't mean we have to "dumb down" anything, or that we have to "teach the test". It means we have to know what the experts think is important for children to learn (or better yet, BE the experts who know), and then make sure they learn it.
Like night follows day, success follows when we plan for success. When students are challenged with a robust curriculum, they have little time for bad behavior. A woman I deeply admire told me today that our students are enslaved by the low expectations of others. We can either let that remain the status quo, or change it. I believe you plan to change this, but I certainly hope that you consider how this must happen.
The biggest problem facing many KCMSD classrooms is something that is rarely discussed in the news: the absolute chaos that administrators allow in their buildings.
The district has a document called the Student Code of Conduct which provides for a rather strong disciplinary plan. However, many administrators simply ignore it and allow chronic misbehavior to derail classes on a daily basis.
What I'd like to see happen is this...
The school board is in charge of governance, but it's also responsible for evaluating the job performance of the superintendent. The school board should tie a large part of the his evaluation to whether or not schools are safe and orderly - and he should be made aware of that. A fax number should be established where teachers can fax carbon copies of conference cards that receive either no administrative action or action which is not pursuant to the Student Code of Conduct. The school board will designate a committee (perhaps local volunteers) to maintain a database tracking those submissions. The superintendent will be reprimanded (or possibly removed from his job) if it's found that the schools are unruly and not following policy (which the school board is responsible for setting). Therefore, there will top-down incentive for maintaining safe and orderly schools. Principals will feel the pressure, and they will ensure that their buildings offer an environment conducive to learning.
It's just an idea, but something has to be done. Our schools are out of control, and many teachers find themselves unable to teach. The answer is not additional professional development. The answer is for the KCMSD to start operating like a legitimate school district and stop tolerating the chaos that plagues our buildings.
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