TURNER — Newly appointed state Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen wound up his first Listening Tour with a public forum Tuesday night at Leavitt Area High School, posing questions his department is seeking to answer.
Educators “need to meet the needs of every child that enters school,” he told the nearly four dozen people in attendance. “We need to build a 21st-century school.” He said he’s seeking feedback on how to “build a system to get us where we need to go.”
He said the department is seeking to answer the following questions:
• Where are there successes?
• Where are educators frustrated and where is the system getting in their way?
• What should the department be doing?
• What do people want these schools to look like?
• What do they want these schools to be doing?”
In response to a comment that every two or three years teachers have something new thrown at them, he indicated that part of the problem was the lack of a comprehensive plan showing where people want the schools to be in 10 or 15 years.
Most of the questions and comments seemed to fall in several areas: teacher qualification, charter schools, technology and standards-based education.
Bowen said more teacher training should be done by the local districts and through digital means to better meet local needs and reduce time and travel expenses.
He supported charter schools, but agreed there were many details to work out to make the system fair. He said any charter school legislation should include provisions to permit public schools more flexibility in their search for excellence.
Bowen said he also favored expanded use of technology, but there were questions of how best to apply it and how best to use available funds. In his former position as director of the Center for Education Excellence at the Maine Heritage Policy Center, he said he wrote articles in favor of making digital instruction more available to let students proceed at their own pace and to make more courses available. He said he could picture a future in which children of various ages were working together based on their grasp of the subject.
The commissioner spoke favorably about standards-based education. He said this was a system being devised under the direction of the governors and Education Department heads of all states, which will establish uniform standards for course content and uniform tests without federal intervention.
He also spoke about mandates and red tape that burdened educators. He said he felt administrators should be trying to relieve the load on teachers so they could be free to do their job. And he said that every level, up through his department, should be trying to simplify the job of those below them.
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