To the Editor:

As a taxpayer and parent of children in the Voorheesville School District, I have a high level of interest in the quality of the education and in controlling costs. And, having been on the Voorheesville School Board including serving as president of the school board for four years, I provide the following insights that I hope you will find useful.

It makes a huge difference who serves on the school board. As voters, we choose the individuals. Then the board has to function to set the policies for the district and provide the guidance to the superintendent. Critically important is that we elect thoughtful individuals who will do the hard work to understand a wide variety of issues and contribute to decisions with consideration of the whole district, not just their own children or their pet causes.

I heartily endorse Doreen Saia and Mike Canfora for the school board. However, I recommend strongly against candidate Adam Shelmerdine. My reasons are outlined below.

Although our education process is strained along several axes — financial, testing, safety, etc. — it is also a time of great hope and progress. For the first-time ever, tools are emerging that can enable educators to have real feedback to improve what and how they teach.

I will side with those who argue that the Common Core has been introduced in a horrid way. And that using the English language arts and math tests to evaluate teachers is years premature. But the Common Core is one of the links in enabling significant year-over-year continuous improvement in what and how we teach.

The Common Core is designed to reduce the amount of attention on memorization, increasing time for deeper understanding of skills that are critical for individuals to succeed in life and work. Testing plays a large part of this. Results can be broken down to specific learning standards.

Normal classroom tests usually are intended to evaluate the success in learning the local curriculum in the period immediately prior to the test. This is not the purpose of the ELA and math tests for the Common Core; the tests are primarily oriented towards improving instruction. This includes understanding which parts of the instruction are effective and which aren’t; understanding whether any key concepts have been missed; and making sure the instruction is at the appropriate level. 

It is understandable for a parent to ask, if this does not grade their children, why should they bother taking the test. But there is a very large value to doing so. Do any of us want our children wasting time and being bored by being taught material they already understand well? Have we not all had the experience of being instructed on something where we have not had the prior concepts necessary to understand the material?

Some have complained that the tests have questions about material that the children have not been taught. This is intentional and necessary. This is not a test where our children are expected to get 100 percent.

The Common Core ELA and math tests are not to evaluate whether the children studied hard. The results are not used in grades the children receive. On this type of test, if a student tests 100 percent or even close, the instructors don’t really know what the child knows. This is called topping out.

If some of the students have near perfect scores for three years in a row (a common occurrence with the previous state tests), we don’t know if they are getting better or if they actually knew that much to start with and we have been wasting their time for three years. No one would know if a child was actually able to read four grade levels above, thereby dooming her or him to boredom and stagnation for years.

Rather than protest by withdrawing the student from the test, what I have done with my children is inform them that this is not about them. It is a way for the school to know if it is doing a good job. By thinking of it as a game and doing the best they can, it helps make sure that classes in the future will be more interesting.

And it may be of some solace to know that it is planned for the future to have adaptive tests, whereby, based on the child’s responses in a section, the following questions are selected to focus in on the child’s level of ability at the time. This would greatly reduce having questions that are too hard or too easy for the particular student. I think this is something we should be advocating to have happen as soon as possible.

The process can work like this:

— Test results are reported tied to specific learning standards. This includes the ability to look at the results in insightful ways such as, “How are the top part of the class doing, the middle, and the lower performing?” Or, “How are the boys doing and the girls doing?”

This leads a teacher to insights such as: “The bottom and middle groups are making excellent progress but the higher performing group has made little progress — they weren’t challenged.”  Similarly, the results might show that, while the average of the class looks good, there is a portion of the class that didn’t master some particular key concepts.

— The teachers can then correlate this with their curriculum mapping where they have a plan of what curriculum standards they teach at each point during the year.

The results of this analysis help the teacher identify exactly what parts of the instruction are or are not effective in meeting the learning standards. This is true not just in a general sense, but provides understanding of what works and what doesn’t for specific groups of children.

— The teachers then can focus attention on improving the curriculum where most improvement is possible and not interfering with those aspects that are working well.

These types of tools are entirely different than telling a student or teacher that they are good or bad. It focuses on continually improving the teaching process. In the educational parlance, this is known as using testing to inform instruction.

If students opt out of testing, the effect is that sometimes we will:

— Teach material they already know;

— Teach some concepts when they don’t have the basis for understanding;

— Miss whole concepts they need; and

— Continue to use methods that don’t work well for at least some of the students.

This prior discussion is relevant because one of the candidates for the school board, Mr. Shelmerdine, rather than working to make the process better, has been actively advocating for parents to opt their children out of state testing. Although there are certainly specific cases where that may be warranted, in my opinion it is irresponsible for a member of the board or a potential member of the board to try to generally influence parents to have their children refuse these tests.

If we want our programs to continuously get better, we need the feedback from assessments which are tied to the Common Core learning standards and where there is stretch so we know what the students really can do.

This is not just about testing. We need members of the school board who will research topics, deeply taking into consideration all the factors and working for the long-term good of our children and taxpayers, not individuals who take public positions prior to doing the research.

Of the three candidates running for election to the Voorheesville School Board, I can recommend two. Doreen Saia has been diligently serving on the board. Mike Canfora has not been on the board, but has been involved and constructive.

For example, he was a major force in a task force at the elementary school to consider how to deal with foods that are allergens to some students. Originally, this group was comprised of two highly polarized groups: One was for completely eliminating foods that were allergens; the other group was fighting what it saw as unreasonable restrictions on the right to feed their own children as they saw fit. Mike was key in helping find common ground and reaching a consensus on a very contentious subject.

In addition, Mike is an accountant and will be helpful as we continue to face tough financial challenges while maintaining and increasing quality at a price the taxpayers can afford.

On the other hand, Adam Shelmerdine, rather than investigating deeply the issues and seeking constructive solutions that will benefit all, has espoused a flashy simplistic response and advocated that others do the same.

I recommend Doreen Saia and Mike Canfora for Voorheesville School Board.

David Gibson

Prior president of the Voorheesville School Board

Editor’s note: David Gibson is a trustee of the Voorheesville Public Library, and is running for re-election to that post on May 19.