League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
Alameda County, CA November 4, 2014 Election
	Karl Debro Answers Questions Candidate for School Director; Oakland Unified School District; Trustee Area 4

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of Oakland and asked of all candidates for this office.
Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

Questions & Answers

1. How do you plan to get parents and the community more informed and involved in educational policy and programs?

We are all so busy now. We are overly informed and overly involved. People need a reason to plug in. Any plan to inform and involve must focus on providing something that people want, giving some value to those you seek to include. For that reason I'm going to discuss my plan within the context of a key goal of mine: dramatically improving the quality of our secondary schools.

Our secondary schools are not as good as they should be; at the same time, there are some things going on in our secondary schools too. My top priority is to dramatically improve the quality of our secondary schools. I believe achieving this goal will significantly improve secondary enrollment and revenues while passing savings to families that would rather save the money for college tuition that they are now spending on private high school tuition.

But people are busy. They will not get involved unless they see real value in getting involved. Informing the community of the quality programs that already exist in our secondary schools is a start to attracting more involvement. But we also need to expand top programs and build new programs that will fully prepare our students for competitive college admission and career pathways. Engaging the community, especially parents, in dialog about what sorts of secondary programs they would like to see in OUSD schools is crucial. Below, I offer a sketch of steps in this direction.

1. Reach out to parents that left traditional OUSD schools (charter, private, home school and those that moved out of Oakland). Develop a clear understanding of why they chose to take their kids elsewhere. What drove their decision to opt out? What did other options offer that our schools lacked?

2. Reach out to elementary school parents to understand what their concerns are about enrolling their kids in our middle schools.

3. Reach out to top charter and private schools to learn from them. What are they offering and how they are delivering value to their families?

4. Reach out locally and regionally to community, industry, colleges (both 2-year and 4-year) to better understand what opportunities lie ahead for the best prepared youth and how to help kids that attend our schools access those opportunities.

5. Create and implement a plan of action to re-vamp our secondary education programs.

6. Engage in a continuous and public cycle of data collection, analysis, reflection and refinement of the improvement plan.

7. Repeat steps 1-4 as a matter of routine institutional practice.

2. What will you do to raise the incentives and motivation for students to study, stay in school, and choose a skilled trade or a college career?

I learned long ago that students do not need incentives. Students that are successful are motivated. Students that are not successful appear unmotivated, but after 25 years in the classroom I realize this is not true. If you think about it, it's obvious. No student enjoys failing. Some stop caring, but not because they are unmotivated. They stop caring because they don't know how to succeed. Success feels out of their reach. What such students really need is to be taught how to succeed. Schools, especially secondary schools, teach math, English, science, history, and so on . They do not teach students how to succeed in school. I led an AVID (http://www.avid.org/) program that was among the best in the country. In AVID, you teach students how to succeed in school. Once students see that they are fully capable of success, they don't need to be motivated. They want success.

The other big consideration here is access to real job/career opportunities and a broad, clear career pathway to those opportunities. While I believe that all students should be college ready, I know that many kids prefer a trade to university. (Being college ready serves such students well in that they can avoid taking remedial college classes, and many of the college readiness skills are required in career training as well.) They prefer working with their hands to sitting in classrooms. Further, I have seen how the knowledge that a good job awaits anyone that completes a career pathway automatically makes, otherwise (for them) pointless academic coursework much more meaningful.

3. What is educational equity? Using your definition, how will you address the most critical issues of inequity facing Oakland public schools, and how will you attempt to resolve this issue as a school board member?

Ultimately, educational equity is about interrupting historical patterns of marginalization such that being African American, or Latino, or first generation to college, or low income, or an English learner does not make you less likely to succeed in school.

In education, we speak of equity in terms of the strategic uses of resources to improve access, and outcomes; usually in terms of student demographic data such as race, ethnicity, gender, family income, first generation to college, and so on. The idea is to notice when our schools are perpetuating historical outcomes that have repeatedly marginalized the same communities; and to interrupt that perpetuation.

For example, consider the Engineering Academy at Oakland Tech. By all accounts, an excellent program, the student body within the Engineering Academy (last I checked) was not reflective of the student body at large at Tech. Educational equity is about examining demographic data and looking for patterns of disproportionate resources, access and/or success. And then asking questions.

For instance, "Engineering is an excellent program, but as we look at the data, it is clear that it is underrepresented in terms of African American, low income and female students. Why?"

It is critical at this moment NOT to leap to solutions.

Instead, careful inquiry is needed. The idea is to strengthen the program by increasing representation of those currently under-represented, thus interrupting the perpetuation of marginalization.

In an earlier response, I spoke about AVID (http://www.avid.org/). AVID is a key strategy in addressing educational equity. AVID's national data show that roughly 90% of AVID graduates complete the college entrance requirements. (The OUSD rate for the class of 2013 was 39.4%, according to the CDE, http://data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/) More importantly, AVID gets these results without watering down standards. In fact, AVID pushes its students toward more rigor as a means of eliminating the achievement gap.

On the other end of this question is the high dropout rate in Oakland. I currently direct a program for dropouts at Contra Costa College, called Gateway to College (http://www.gatewaytocollege.org/). We recruit dropouts to the college, provide them with wrap-around support, and enroll them in college classes. They earn their high school diplomas while taking college classes. Thus, they enter as dropouts; but they leave as college students with high school diplomas!

I will use the many lessons I have learned as AVID Coordinator and Director of Gateway to College to address the most critical issues of inequity facing Oakland public schools. Part of my approach will be to improve and broaden the AVID and Gateway to College programs that already exist in OUSD. Another part will be to apply the hard lessons gleaned from the combined 15 years I have lead these two outstanding programs to inform my work on the board.

4. What can the School Board do to hire and retain high quality teachers and encourage diversity among staff?

First, we have to pay much higher wages for teachers, school administrators, and school support staff. We have to improve the working conditions for those that serve our kids directly every day. You cannot hire and retain high quality teachers otherwise.

Second, we must provide the highest quality support and professional development for our teachers and site administrators. At the Montclair farmers' market about a week ago, I met a teacher from Edna Brewer. She talked about how little support she received in her first year. I met another Oakland teacher, while walking precincts, who told me that she quit the profession because there was so little support.

I believe that society does not fully understand the complexity of the work successful teachers do. A good teacher engages, and keeps engaged, an entire classroom of kids while leading them on a 180-day academic journey. Every minute of every day of every year. I recently substituted in one of the classes for my Gateway to College students at Contra Costa College. I taught high school and middle school for 25 years. I loved it. And I was good at it. But my most recent teaching experience was in grad school. I was rusty. The experience made me appreciate, perhaps more than when I was actually teaching every day, just how complex a job teaching is.

As for diversity, this will continue to be an issue for some time. I do believe there are already efforts afoot to grow our own. Supporting and growing those efforts could greatly improve diversity.

For me, however, this question is a kind of paradox. I've spent about ten years in positions responsible for hiring staff. I believe that if you create a work environment that truly values diversity, you will attract and retain a diverse workforce. I also believe that you cannot create that kind of environment without having a certain kind of consciousness (described below) to begin with. In terms of the classroom, I believe the race of the teacher is less important than the consciousness of the teacher. That is, I'd rather have a high quality staff that is less diverse than a more diverse staff that is not high quality. A huge part of being high quality is the consciousness of the teacher, the capacity to truly care about all students, hold all students to high standards, and support all students throughout their struggles to live up to those standards, especially those students that our institutions have not served well---African Americans, Latinos, low income, first generation to college, English Learners, immigrants, boys.

We also need to attract more men to the profession.

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Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League.  Candidates' statements are presented as submitted. References to opponents are not permitted.

Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: September 24, 2014 14:31
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