POLICY

Under the recently passed SB362, 10 school districts will have the opportunity to opt out of the Georgia Milestones test and create their own alternative assessment system. Tye will ensure that SCCPSS aggressively pursues this option and allows our teachers to play a central role in developing a more accurate, less invasive assessment system for our children. 

• We must reduce standardized testing (see above) so that teachers can focus on teaching, not test prep.
• The board must ask the Superintendent to provide more detailed reports on teacher recruitment and retention, so as to inform better policies.  For example, we do not currently have public reports on turnover at individual schools (which likely masks very high turnover at low-income schools), nor do we receive reports about the quality of the teachers who are leaving. We should be making special efforts to retain our top-performing teachers, yet we do not even track their departures. 
• We must work to adopt a budget that pays teachers at a rate that is on-par with similarly educated professionals. On average, teacher compensation is 11% lower than similarly educated professionals, despite the fact that teaching is one of the most intellectually, emotionally, and even physically demanding jobs there is. 
• Finally the board should proactively engage more teachers in our policy-making process. Teacher input on policies is invaluable, and we need to elicit more of it when making decisions that affect teachers and students. This means at the very least:
  • Using district-wide, anonymous surveys of teachers to inform policy
  • Scheduling at least a portion of board meetings at times when teachers can reasonably attend them, and encouraging educators to do so

• Our first job is to funnel funds away from an overly centralized administration and towards individual schools—our students and their teachers should receive a far larger share of our budget than they currently do.
  • In 2006, we spent less than 1% of our budget on business administration, but today that has increased to nearly 4.5%!
  • Tye supports reducing business administration to 2006 proportions, so that we can send $20 million per year back into our schools. 
• We must also eliminate waste, especially from salaries and contracts that benefit powerful adults over vulnerable children.

Our schools are increasingly segregated, both racially and economically—over the last decade, 15 SCCPSS schools have become re-segregated, yet research shows that integrated schools cut the achievement gap in half. We must serve all of our children by taking the following steps: 

• Create high-quality magnet programs within low-income neighborhood schools that attract an economically diverse student body while also serving the local community.
• Assess entry requirements for specialty schools and create policies that ensure low-income students are not discriminated against or otherwise disproportionately prevented from attending these schools. 
• Fund the necessary wrap-around services, such as family counseling and healthcare, in low-income schools.