Frequently Asked Questions

By Jose Escarce

Dr. Escarce answers questions about why he is running for the School Board, his qualifications, and the major challenges facing the District.

I've always been very interested in education. It has played a crucial role in my own life and I believe it represents the best hope for people to achieve their potential as productive and socially conscious citizens. I am also a strong believer in public education as one of the most important and valuable institutions in our society; if done right, it can be a great equalizer. The Board of Education provides an opportunity to participate in shaping the present and future of public education in our school district. I consider the opportunity to serve on the Board a tremendous privilege and responsibility.

2. What has been your personal involvement with education in our community?

I've been a School Board member since 2000. I was School Board Vice-President in 2002-03 and I am currently School Board President. I have been a member of Community for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS) since shortly after it was founded. I have three children in our public schools, one each in elementary, middle, and high school.

3. What makes you stand out among the other candidates? What special attributes, talents, and abilities will you bring to our district?

I have brought to our district leadership, open-mindedness, intelligence, thoughtfulness, compassion, ability to build consensus, and honesty and integrity. These are coupled with a genuine devotion to liberal education in its traditional sense--i.e., an education that develops and fosters students' appreciation and understanding of the history and legacy of humankind, with its failures and triumphs, and encourages reflection as a prelude to action. I believe I've shown these qualities during my first term on the Board, and that I've contributed greatly to improving the culture of the Board and the quality of its deliberations.

4. What do you feel is the number one challenge facing our schools today?

Our schools, like many others throughout the nation, face numerous challenges, from budgetary pressures, to putting a top principal in every school and an excellent teacher in every classroom, to helping every student fulfill her academic potential and develop her character, to providing a well-rounded education that includes the arts, to maintaining strong community support. In the big picture, however, the number one challenge facing our schools is that of fostering the engagement in learning, intellectual development, and academic achievement of all our students, irrespective of the advantages or disadvantages with which they may come to us. This is very difficult to accomplish under the best of circumstances. It is especially hard under the financial constraints California imposes on its public schools, constraints that require constant, painful trade-offs. Adequate funding is not sufficient to achieve success--unflagging conviction, talent, and effort are essential as well--but adequate funding is certainly necessary.

5. Although standardized test scores show increasing improvement in our schools, significant differences among economic and cultural groups still exist. What can the District do to continue the overall success in academic achievement while significantly closing the achievement gap?

First, getting more young children ready for kindergarten would help immensely. It's a tragedy that our nation and state do not fund public preschool for all children. Second, we need to improve and expand our intervention programs. The ongoing evaluation of these programs should provide a useful road map for improving them and targeting our resources. Third, we need to afford disadvantaged students greater opportunity, encouragement and support to tackle our most challenging curricula. Our recent efforts to make our most challenging courses--like honors and Advanced Placement courses--accessible to more students appear to be meeting with great success. Fourth, we need to strengthen our outreach to families that are currently uninvolved in their children's education. Again, I'm hoping that the ongoing evaluation of intervention programs will guide our efforts on this dimension.

6. Do you think our schools offer adequate programs for high-achieving students?

Our District excels in this regard. Our schools offer a challenging curriculum at all levels, and most of our students score proficient or better on the rigorous California standards. Our middle schools teach Algebra 1 to many 8th graders, and they have recently started offering Algebra 1 to the most talented 7th graders. Our high schools boast exceptional honors and Advanced Placement programs. Santa Monica High School offers 18 different Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which enable students to earn college credits if they score high enough on end-of-year national examinations administered by the College Board. In the last five years, the number of Samohi students taking AP courses has doubled, as has the number of AP exams taken by these students. Simultaneously, the number of top scores on AP exams has more than doubled. Malibu High School offers 15 AP courses and also excels on AP exams. In fact, both Samohi and Malibu High are among the top 1-2% of public high schools nationally on AP participation and performance.

7. What is your view of the redesign of Samohi? What do you think should be the priorities in moving forward?

I supported it when it came before the Board and still do. While redesign is a work in progress, and the outcome won't be known for a few years, in my view it holds considerable promise for improving the experience of many students on the huge campus. At the same time, I'm not convinced that many of the most disengaged students will be substantially helped, but only time will tell and we need to track this closely. In the meantime, we need to pursue other, alternative approaches for helping the most disengaged and at-risk students.

8. The Special Education Strategic Plan calls for a re-tooling, or re-engineering of the system and the move to a prevention model. What is your position on the Special Ed Strategic plan and how would you fund it?

I support the Special Ed strategic plan. In fact, the district has little choice but to develop a strategy for implementing the plan. Currently our special education costs are rising quickly anyway. A smart and thoughtful strategy for implementing the strategic plan will improve the quality of our Special Ed program and curb cost growth in the intermediate term even if expenditures are required in the short term. I also believe that the Superintendent and the Board are poised to provide strong leadership on improving Special Ed.

9. What is your position on Charter Schools?

I reject the "market" rhetoric that charter schools introduce competitive pressure that leads public schools to improve. There is no research suggesting meaningful gains in achievement in public schools resulting from competing charters, and the risk to public schools is substantial. Moreover, the track record for charter schools themselves is spotty at best. On the other hand, I do share concerns that large, comprehensive high schools are not for everyone. As a result, I would be willing to support a limited number of carefully selected high quality charters, including smaller high schools, that fill particular "niches" currently missing from our District.

10. What role should standardized tests play in K-12 education?

I believe there is a role for standardized testing in our schools. In my view, a public education system totally lacking in assessments of student learning against external standards is doomed to letting academic rigor slip, even if unintentionally. However, standardized tests should be used mainly as diagnostic tools to help individual students and to evaluate and improve curricula. They should play a very limited, if any, role in evaluating student and school performance, and they must always be complemented by a variety of other forms of assessment. Moreover, it is essential that students gain the skills assessed by most standardized tests through immersion in engaging, challenging and rigorous curricula, and not by teachers "teaching to the test." To date, our District has largely escaped the negative impact of standardized testing, such as teachers teaching to the test and the narrowing of curricula to cover only tested subjects. But I do worry about the potential eventual effects of the "No Child Left Behind" law if it is not modified substantially. I will remain vigilant to ensure that standardized tests are used to improve the quality and richness of the education we provide to our children, not to weaken it.

11. How do you view the current proposal to separate the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District?

Since I was elected to the Board, I have worked very hard to represent all the students in our District, including those from Malibu, and I plan to continue to do so. I have listened to our parents, students and teachers in Malibu and have supported proposals to meet their particular needs and concerns, such as allocating additional resources to finish construction at Malibu High School and modifying the District's mandatory transfer policy for high school students who commit certain disciplinary infractions. At the same time, I have come to realize that, despite the Board's best efforts, Malibu's distance from and small size relative to Santa Monica have led some parents in Malibu to feel that they are not well represented. These parents would like more local control of their schools, and argue that Malibu has grown and matured enough as a city and community to have its own school district. I take these arguments for community self-determination very seriously. Therefore, I support the parents' efforts to move forward with the administrative and democratic process that will determine whether Malibu can and should create its own district. Ultimately, separation would have to be approved by the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the California Department of Education, and most important, the voters of Malibu.

Concerning separation itself, I do not yet have all the information I need to decide for myself whether I believe it's a wise move. The main test for me will be whether separate school districts can provide the same quality of education to their students that our joint district currently provides. I anticipate that the data being compiled by the parents, with the help of our district, to support their petition for separation will be very useful in this regard.