Paul Bass Photo
Thirty years apart, Amber Moye and Darnell Goldson ran for student office at Hillhouse High School, and won. Now they’re running against each other for a Board of Education seat — and this time only one of them can win.
Moye (pictured), a 27-year-old teacher and education policy student, is challenging incumbent Goldson for the Democratic nomination for his elected seat representing District 2 on the Board of Ed. (The district includes Wards 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29 and 30.)
The two candidates will vie next week for the Democratic Town Committee’s endorsement at a party convention. Whoever comes up short will have the option of collecting signatures to run in a Sept. 10 party primary or as an unaffiliated candidate in the Nov. 5 general election.
Both came up through the New Haven public school system and graduated from Hillhouse, Goldson in 1979, Moye in 2010. Goldson served as student body president, Moye as junior class president. Goldson, who’s 58, currently serves as president of the Board of Education.
“We need constructive leadership,” Moye said in an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program when asked why she’s running.
Moye said the board needs to focus more on policies and decisions that help kids and less on politics and infighting. Asked if she would join the effort by some current board members to force Superintendent Carol Birks out of office, Moye, who in the past has spoken in favor of Birks, chose not to take a position. Instead, she said, “I would be collaborative” with whoever is in the job and with her fellow board members.
“Whether we keep her or whether she goes,” Moye said, the board and the school community need “healing and reflection” to move forward.
Christopher Peak Photo
Goldson (pictured filing reelection campaign paperwork at the city clerk’s office), who has called his vote to appoint Birks a mistake, said in an interview with the Independent that he welcomes a discussion about “constructive leadership.” (Click here to read a previous story about his reelection quest. Click here for a previous story about how Goldson sought to ease tensions among school officials without spending extra public money.)
“I have been working for three and a half years to move this district forward in a positive manner,” Goldson said. “It took leadership to fix that Creed problem. I think it took leadership to get ourselves out of three leases that totaled more than $1.5 million that is now directed to our students as opposed to landlords who live outside the district. I think it takes leadership to end contracts with outside consultants who were lining their pockets without providing constructive services to our students.”
He criticized Moye for making conclusions about leadership without having attended more Board of Education meetings first. “Despite that,” he added, “I think she’s a bright young lady. I think she has a future in New Haven if she’s willing to put in the time to learn the facts.”
Mr. Redeaux’s Inspiration
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Inspiration: Math teacher Fred Redeaux.
Moye’s route to a school board candidacy can be traced to her years as a science nerd at Sheridan Middle School and then an honors track student at Hillhouse High School. She “loved” school here, she said. And she had inspiring teachers at Hillhouse, including the late Jack Paulishen and math instructor Fred Redeaux.
Their lessons have found their way into Moye’s campaign platform.
Paulishen imparted a love of civic engagement to his students. He also impressed the importance of “standing up for what you believe in” and “challenging systems that are unjust,” Moye said.
Redeaux helped her understand math better. He taught an “Understanding Numbers” course. Moye, who already knew Redeaux as her class advisor, wanted to take the course. But she was discouraged from signing up because the course wasn’t considered an honors track class. “Despite the system that said no, he found a way” for her to fit the course into her schedule, Moye recalled. She said that she wants to bring that same spirit — of finding ways to work around systemic obstacles — to the Board of Education.
She also wants to reexamine how New Haven teaches its students math. She criticized “Singapore Math,” the approach behind the current lower-school “Math In Focus” curriculum. It focuses on teaching students to master fewer mathematical concepts in fuller depth.
After graduation from Howard University, Moye spent a year teaching back in New Haven at Celentano School under the Teach for America program. She said she saw firsthand how the Singapore approach limited her third-grade students. It had them focusing on specific tasks — like carrying out four-digit addition and subtraction rather than three-digit, a goal of the Common Core curriculum — at the exclusion of understanding the “why” behind how math works. As a result, they had more trouble picking up other concepts, she observed. “They’re still struggling with the idea of number sense.”
She said she supports a greater focus on understanding how math works. She spoke of how her students could perform four-digit addition and subtraction, but “they couldn’t manipulate a two-digit word problem that required multiple steps. Their concept of math hasn’t quite gotten there yet.”
“It is not as aligned to the Common Core curriculum as it should be,” Moye said of the math curriculum. “I was able to really study the Common Core. … The processes we are teaching is different.”
Moye continued working for the city school system for four years.
In the WNHH-FM radio interview, Moye was asked about a controversial proposal to create an all-boys charter school within the public school system. Moye said she would prefer to look at existing programs to address unmet needs rather than “add that [new] layer. We need to look at what we have going on before adding something to our pool of things to deal with.” The higher suspension rates of students of colors, especially black boys, does deserve more attention, she said.
“I am not happy with the way students are being treated” at charter schools, she added.
New Haven, like other cities, is looking to attract talented young African-Americans like Moye to town, or back to town, to serve as teachers. Right now most teachers are white, while most students aren’t. Moye suggested revisiting the criteria for hiring new teachers.
“That’s a statewide issue. In the state of Connecticut, 90 percent of our educators are white. There is a significant level of educators of color in the state of Connecticut who don’t have jobs. Are there human resource practices that are intentionally pushing folks of color out? Part of that comes around values. What do we identify as assets?” Moye said.
“Within my own community,” she added, “leadership is engaging in your church, engaging in your sorority or fraternity or engaging in community service.”
In addition to teaching, Moye has studied education policy in a graduate program at Columbia University. Currently she’s working for a summer educational program at the Foote School.
She argued that her experience is needed on the board.
“On a board of seven, when only one person identifies as an educator, we have a problem,” she said. “I value multiple perspectives at the table. But we need to ensure we have voices and minds at the table who are thinking critically about the content. We have that 22K [enrolled students] that are expecting us to get stuff done for them. We need to think about what they need before we think about our own self-interest. We have to prioritize them.”