• We can do more to ensure our curriculum is appropriately rigorous.

  MCAS scores alone cannot measure if our approach to subjects like Math and Language Arts is as successful as possible. Benchmarking with other schools (including private schools) and with other districts (even ones abroad) is necessary. Anecdotal evidence suggests to me, for example, that middle and high school students elsewhere at many levels are reading more and more difficult material.

• We can do more to help kids who struggle.

  Some kids need more help -- not more challenge. We need to make sure it's easy for these kids and their parents to let the schools know when it's all too much. We need to pay more attention to the group of kids who don't quite need IEPs, but who do need special help. And we need to make sure that kids who need special education services are given what they need.

• We can pay more attention to the quality-of-life aspects of schools that affect academics.

  Recess and snack time in the younger grades, drug awareness in the older grades, and discipline in every grade, can have direct and indirect effect on academic performance. While most of these are issues for particular schools to resolve, the School Committee can help problems get heard, help answers be found, and help build consensus for improvement.

• We can do more to challenge students at different levels of ability.

No system can be perfect for everyone, and much good work has been done; but continuing to improve is a must. There are still kids at every school, and at every level, who are drifting - or mischief-making - because they are not appropriately challenged academically.

Is this just about 'smart' kids? No, it is not.

It's about the bored high-schooler who could do more, but not quite as much as next level up. It's about the kids in middle school who don't quite qualify for special education services, but who can't keep up with everyone else speeding ahead. And, yes, it's about high-achieving students of all ages left to make it on their own.

We can do more. How?

If you don't follow these matters closely, you may not know there is heated disagreement as to how to change this. Much of the heat is due to the all-too-frequent acceptance of a false choice: either rigid tracking, with all its injustice; or rigid imposition of sameness, which excludes so many.

In fact, there are real problems and real advantages to both grouping by ability -- and to not grouping by ability. The trick will be to assess the real needs of our actual students and find fresh solutions that go beyond ideology, combine the best of each and discard what's bad.

As a parent, I have been part of the effort to push for good solutions for four years, speaking at School Committee meetings and conferring with School Committee members and administrators privately. If elected to School Committee, I will continue to work to end the false choices. I'll do so either through the subcommittee that has made good progress on these issues or outside it, as seems most effective.

• We can challenge more appropriately with qualitative, as well as quantitative assessment: Regular "Customer" Satisfaction Surveys

MCAS scores can be extremely valuable assessment tools, but MCAS scores alone are not sufficient indicators of success. There’s no standardized test, for example, to measure effort: whether kids have too much homework, whether they are overwhelmed, under-stretched, or if potential is being left untapped.There's no standardized test to see if parents are satisfied with class-size, bus service, or anything else.

Instead, we have got to ask the people who know: parents, kids, and teachers. Surveys have been done, and they've been helpful. But they need to be done with regularity. The data would provide insight and context that standardized test scores don’t, and can't, deliver. Surveying should include, in addition to present school families, recent Natick High grads, to see if their high-school education prepared them for work or college, and families who leave the system for other towns, or for private, charter, or home school.

• We can do more to keep the arts in education.

The schools deserve huge credit for taking the arts seriously and devoting resources to both curricular and extracurricular arts education. This must be maintained and expanded in the English/Language Arts departments and elsewhere.