My APS high schooler is always in the auditorium when his teacher is out because there is a substitute shortage. What are your ideas for remedying this shortage, as well as remedying ongoing teacher recruitment issues?

Turner: Substitutes. Substitutes should be treated as a critical part of our recruitment and retention of quality teachers. At present, we do not pay substitutes a competitive wage, so I would look right away to raise pay. APS should also be more creative with incentive compensation, not only offering higher hourly rates on high-demand days (such as those adjacent to holidays or breaks) but rewarding substitutes who sub often or are available on short notice. I would also ask APS to focus on the recruitment, processing, and on-boarding of substitutes to make sure that our community is aware of the need, and to get new recruits efficiently into classrooms. HR should not be a bottleneck for ensuring in-school coverage when teachers are out. 

As a parent of an elementary student, I would like to know if you support standards-based grading. For my high school students, I would also like to know whether you support the recently adopted homework policy stating high school students cannot be given more than “a maximum of a total of 60 minutes per week per course.”

Turner: Certainly I support grading that is based on standards. However, as a parent of two APS students at a school that has adopted standards-based grading, I have concerns with the practice as it’s currently being implemented. First, the terminology is confusing and a student’s level is not easily intuited from the scale. “Approaching mastery,” for example, sounds in some ways like a higher ranking than “meets standard,” but it isn’t. “Insufficient evidence” makes it sound simply like a student hasn’t yet done any work that can be evaluated, but apparently it’s meant to be the lowest end of a four-tier scale. While there is no magic to a traditional “A through E” letter-grade scale, or a numeric scale, it is important that parents and students be able to derive some meaning from their grade, and SBG seems to lack that quality. In addition, while this is a problem for many parents, I have particularly heard some parents in the Hispanic community express confusion and concern that they are not able to tell how their children are doing in school. This is a barrier to full engagement with the education of one’s child, and seemingly a needless one. 

Second, the scale lacks an option to reflect that a student may be exceeding whatever standard applies to a particular skill. It’s just as important for parents to understand areas in which their student excels as it is areas where their student may struggle, in order to appreciate a child’s talents and encourage them to thrive.

Do you commit to reducing planning factors for class sizes? If yes, how will you pay for it?

Turner:  Yes, one of my top priorities is working to lower class sizes at all levels across APS. Smaller class sizes historically have helped to distinguish APS from our regional peers, and it allows our teachers to better differentiate among students within a class and to provide more specific and tailored feedbacks on assignments (including writing, something I hope to see APS focus on more in the coming years!). 

Lowering class sizes is not cost-free, and can be expensive. I would look to combine multiple approaches to pay for lower planning factors. First, growth among administrative staff can and should be examined closely; the Budget Advisory Committee has even recommended freezing growth at Syphax (something I agree with). Second, the planning factor concept can and should be applied to non-teacher roles in order to control costs, e.g., among administrators at Syphax and among in-school support such as technology coordinators and other positions that are presently allocated by school building, but potentially can be allocated by number of students. Third, I would pursue hiring a grant writer for APS to draw funding into the system. Many of our peer school systems have grant writers, and adding this role for APS has the potential to alleviate pressure on the APS budget by adding to available funding, rather than focusing only on cutting it. 

What concretely and specifically will you do to address learning loss and the achievement gap between APS students?

Turner: Both the achievement gap and Covid-era learning loss suffer from a lack of focused attention. Though almost all recognize these issues as concerns, APS and the School Board have not regularly and consistently committed sufficient attention to trying to address gaps. Over the past two years, APS has not had a sustained plan in place to address Covid learning loss. Prior to that, there were no specifically identified strategies for addressing achievement gaps and disparities in student participation in, for example, accelerated and more rigorous coursework. If elected, I will make it a priority to set the agenda—literally, by way of regular monitoring reports—to focus attention on these gaps, identify appropriate standards and benchmarks, and measure progress against them over time. 

Recently, the tone in some of Dr. Durán’s communications has been changing, and he has called attention to groups of students who are behind and where more resources are needed. I look forward to working with Dr. Durán to continue his efforts to identify our students in need of more support and to devote the resources to those students, and I will push for accountability in this area. 

Per APS’ Digital Learning Device Project: Phase II Study Findings report in February 2020, “Classroom observations and reports by teachers and students indicate that devices are used on average for roughly half of the school day across APS, with time utilizing devices more extensive in the upper grades. Student use of devices was observed in 37% of elementary classrooms visited, compared to 47% middle school and 62% of high school classrooms (please note this was pre-pandemic and before the one-to-one device policy in K-2 was established, so usage in ES may have increased since this data was gathered). Some students and teachers did describe cases of misuse of the devices at school and raised concerns that devices are a distraction from academic activities.” What are your views on device usage in school?

Turner: At the elementary level, I would significantly cut back on device usage, if not eliminate it. At the secondary level, where devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, reliance on technology is perhaps inevitable—but I would urge APS to consider how technology is actually advancing education, not just changing it, and to support that conclusion with evidence. APS also must ensure that students are restricted from accessing inappropriate content via their school-issued devices, something APS is recently beginning to address. 

If elected, I will also suggest that APS’s reliance on technology to communicate with families should be carefully evaluated. As one example, there are significant disparities across our schools in percentages of families completing the annual online verification process (AOVP), a strong indication that lower income and non-English speaking families may find online registration and access to be a challenge. That, in turn, should lead us to question whether making things like report cards, school communications, and assignments available only online is equitably serving our community. 

Finally, I recognize that devices provide access to written texts and multilingual resources that our students may not otherwise have without the device, and that this is a real and significant equity concern. However, it is a choice to rely on devices to address this particular inequity, by prioritizing access to books and educational resources via the internet instead of via our public libraries. I would encourage APS to partner with our excellent county libraries and other resources where access is the concern, and make it a priority to ensure that all students have the option to access and enjoy a physical book and not only an online app.