According to Rupa Datta, this is an exciting time for the K-12 educational landscape and she believes she can help the District 97 Board of Education navigate that terrain.
Datta, vice president and senior fellow at the Center for Excellence in Survey Research at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, says her professional expertise uniquely positions her to understand areas such as government funding, regulation and privacy concerns — particularly in a time of increasingly diminishing state and federal budgets, greater standardization, and iPad-based learning applications.
“You need lots of different expertise and my portfolio would be helpful,” she said in a recent interview with Wednesday Journal. “What we really want is to have consistently high quality instruction for our kids.”
In a 10-candidate race for four D97 board seats, Datta understands that the sharper she can bring her particular skill set into focus, the better chance she has of standing out in that crowd of candidates. But there’s more to her observations, she noted, than just touting her bona fides.
The mother of two Beye Elementary students and a five-year resident of Oak Park (she moved here from California in 2009) said that a seat on the D97 board would be a natural next step for someone who searches out and analyzes educational policy for a living.
Datta chaired the data subcommittee for the district’s Committee for Legislative Action, Intervention and Monitoring (CLAIM) before moving from that post to chair an ad hoc committee on dashboards and benchmarks, which was tasked with recommending ways to better track information about district progress. She’s also served on the Measurement Evaluation Committee for the Oak Park-based Collaboration for Early Childhood.
Datta said, through her work on those committees, she learned that the status of the district’s inter-school knowledge sharing, and its information-gathering abilities in general, could be greatly improved. There’s also room for improving how the district communicates helpful information to students, teachers, faculty, staff, parents and the wider community, she said.
“I would like to see us really focus on consistently high-quality instruction through better information, increased engagement with key stakeholders and using those two things to sharpen our choices about how we invest our resources,” she said.
“We have such talented and committed people in our district. The parents and teachers and support staff are the people who really understand what students are going through, and we should figure out ways to better incorporate those ideas into initial decision-making and improving and/or revising decisions after they’re made.”
Datta said the new teachers contract is a case in point.
“I think the contract is a great advance for the district, but it’s a first step,” she said. “It didn’t pass [the Oak Park Teachers Association] unanimously and I think it’s important for us to implement it and to make sure the implementation goes well. So we need to follow up on the concerns that teachers still have that kept it from passing unanimously. There are always intended and unintended consequences of this kind of major transformation and the district needs to be vigilant about understanding how people are reacting, what their questions and concerns are, and how to address them.”
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.comÂ