EDUCATION FORUM

The Saipan Tribune invited its readers this week to submit questions that will be posed to all Board of Education candidates. The responses of the candidates will be published each Saturday this month. Today, we feature the response of Don Farrell. Some of the questions that were asked the candidates include the following:

1. What new ideas do you have to help the board change and improve the Public School System?

2. What do you think is PSS’ biggest challenge for the next four years and how will your membership on the board help to address this challenge?

3. What is the responsibility of the board in helping preserve the CNMI’s indigenous cultures?

4. How will you work with other board members to ensure harmony, consensus, and cooperation in board deliberations?

5. What contribution will you make to the board to help CNMI students, as a whole, to equal or surpass the academic achievement of students in the mainland?

6. Students in the CNMI often have little opportunity for laboratory experience and training in the sciences, because basic laboratory equipment has not been supplied for courses such as biology, chemistry and physics. How do you propose to help students prepare for careers in medicine, nursing and other technical fields where laboratory training is important?

Perspectives on education

By Don Farrell
Special to the Saipan Tribune

Thank you very much for inviting me to express my opinions on the issues raised by your readers. I offer them from the perspective of a professional schoolteacher and a former member of the CNMI State Board of Education.

Let me begin by addressing the question of resolving the problems that have recently arisen between the PSS professional teaching staff and the Board of Education. I came to the Marianas in January 1977 as a contract schoolteacher for the Guam Department of Education. As such, I lived through the terrible Guam Federation of Teachers’ strike of 1980 that crippled the delivery of quality education to the youth of that island for nearly a decade. Because of that experience, I am opposed to education unions and board-union contracts. I recognized then that their system broke down because of artificial barriers that were created between an obstinate board that would not listen to teachers and an equally obstinate group of union leaders who made unrealistic demands on the Board.

Teacher-management problems can be overcome by a board that will address problems as they arise, individually and directly. We proved that during my previous tenure on the Board when we eliminated the dual wage system between local teachers and non-resident contract teachers by raising the salary of local teachers to match those given to contract teachers, thus giving all teachers equal contracts.

To temper that, let me say that I am a teacher at heart, always have been, always will be. I believe that quality education occurs in a community where the parents, teachers, students, and community members are all actively involved in the public education process, working within the scheme of “sight-based management.” I have learned that the ultimate teaching experience occurs when a trained teacher has the full support of the community and the school administration within a proper classroom environment, supplied with adequate, ample and appropriate resources, and with a group of students who are eager to learn.

Education takes place between teachers and students, not in a boardroom or the principal’s office.

I gained additional classroom experience with the CNMI Public School System when I moved to Tinian in 1987 with my wife, Carmen Muna Dela Cruz, and our family. Then, after writing the History of the Northern Mariana Islands, I was elected to the board of education, where I served for four years, ultimately serving as its chairman.

One of the last projects I initiated while chairman of the board was a study to develop a system-wide, employee evaluation process. We contracted Dr. Ione Wolf of the College of Education, University of Guam, to develop first a teacher evaluation system, followed by a principal evaluation system and then the commissioner evaluation plan. I will try, once again, to convince my colleagues to implement this program.

Principals must be hired based on qualifications, evaluated regularly based on performance, and those found wanting must be replaced.

If elected to serve on the board again, I will work hard to ensure that all of the principals in all the public schools in the CNMI meet the basic standards that are set by board policy. Principals must have at least five years of classroom experience, or they cannot understand the needs of a teacher in a classroom. Principals must have demonstrated enough desire to be a principal to have attained a master’s degree in education, to gain the respect of the teachers that work in their school. Without mutual respect between principals and teachers, communications will break down and the quality of education will be hampered.

In my opinion, principals should not be given the sole authority, the individual power, to arbitrarily decide the fate of any Public School System employee, and certainly not a professional teacher. If I am elected, I will do my best to convince my colleagues to adopt a policy that no professional educator can be terminated or have their contract non-renewed without cause, and any notification of termination or non-renewal of a contract must come from directly from the commissioner of education.

In my opinion, the most difficult part of a commissioner’s job, and therefore the characteristic that I will look in a candidate for commissioner, should the need, is their ability to properly evaluate principals. A commissioner must have the ability to reprimand principals who have a chronically high turnover rate among teachers and other education professionals, particularly special education instructors. A commissioner must have the ability to recruit and hire highly qualified principals, just as the commissioner must have the responsibility to hire highly qualified teachers. A commissioner, and the Public School System as a whole, will be successful only if the quality of principals continues to improve, so that the quality of teachers will improve. Improved national test scores will validate the system.

Let me conclude with what I believe is the root of the problem that continues to hold back progress in our Public School System, and that is money. It is not so much a matter of not having enough of it, there never will be. The problem is that the money is not available to the system when it is needed. Every year, the professional technical staff at PSS Central builds a well-thought-out budget that is scrutinized by the board to ensure that it is sufficient to meet the needs of the students and the requirements of federal law. And every year it gets held up by the politics of the CNMI budget process. Therefore materials get ordered late, buses go without maintenance, and replacement equipment is slow to arrive. It is the politics of the budget process that is impeding the Public School System’s ability to improve the quality of education for the students in the CNMI.

The only way to correct this problem is for the question to be addressed in next year’s Constitutional Convention. For the Public School System to be truly politically autonomous, it must be given a constitutionally guaranteed annual budget that will be available for expenditure at the end of one school year, to be utilized for the following school year. The Board of Education is elected, just as are the Legislature and the governor. The board should be elected at a different time from the general election to separate it completely from the political process, and then given the total authority and responsibility to oversee the PSS budget, separate from that annual political battlefield called “The Budget.”

If the Public School System is given a separate budgeting process, then the Public School System can plan for gradual improvements in the quality of education, including such things as equipment for science laboratories, vocational education programs such as business education, tourism education, auto shop, electronics and computer sciences, activities to support preservation of indigenous cultures, and interscholastic athletic and academic competition.

School is not just readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic. A school is supposed to help parents build a complete individual who will become a productive member of the community. It must be enjoyable, not be a jail sentence.