It is tempting (and politically appealing) to endlessly renovate and re-build school buildings, however it is more important to give children better education.
It sounds strange that majority of current members of school committee do not have children in APS. It would be valuable to have members of SC more in touch with real struggles of children. During elections, incumbent members of School Committee get significant advantage due to political inertia and established track record, however this advantage is not indicative of any benefit to children. This is exacerbated by the fact that voters are grown-ups, and their perspective is distorted by politics. We need SC to benefit children who do not vote. In addition, parents constitute minority of voters, and we need to mitigate tyranny of the majority.
It would be a valuable source of information where APS failed students when families made this decision. It is wasteful that APS doesn't conduct these surveys.
To my surprise, there are no such surveys conducted by APS, as if nobody cares how children feel about a certain class. Was the class too easy? Too hard? Was the pace too fast or too slow? Was the teacher effective at delivering the material?
In addition, this is to identify teachers who are grossly negligent and abusive towards students. From personal experience, there are teachers at APS who regularly belittle children on every small opportunity, sometimes publicly humiliating them.
It is also imperative to make aggregated and anonymized responses publicly available to parents.
As I described during one of the hearings, MCAS scores are over-inflated due to a significant percentage of children attending enrichment math courses such as RSM, AoPS, KUMON. Arlington schools should not take credit for students who are supplementing their math at their families' expense.
Aligned with Arlington Math Parents vision, we need to provide accelerated pathways for children who are ahead of the class. Academic boredom is detrimental to both academic and emotional wellbeing of students .
When a student already attended certain class (for example, pre-calculus) outside of APS, and desires to use it as a pre-requisite for a higher-level class, this should be allowed by APS administration.
Current APS math curriculum, based on combination of TERC and Desmos, is inadequately weak. While marketed as "developing a deep understanding of math concepts", it only facilitates children memorizing magic words like "proportional reasoning". Just using these magic words gets their grade up (see example). While academically behind international standards, children are graded by using the proper wording in explanations. This is not a proper way to learn math. There are multiple available curricula offering more intuitive and proper approach.