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John Knox
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John Knox was the District 8 representative on the Clarke County Board of Education in Georgia. Knox won in the general election on May 24, 2016.[1] Knox did not seek re-election in 2020.
Biography
Knox graduated from Huffman High School in Birmingham, Alabama. He later received his B.S. in mathematics from the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Knox holds a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Wisconsin. His professional experience includes working as an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia.[2]
Elections
2016
Four of the nine seats on the Clarke County Board of Education were up for general election on May 24, 2016. There was no primary. District 2 incumbent Vernon Payne, District 4 newcomer Jared Bybee, and District 6 incumbent Charles Worthy ran unopposed. John Knox defeated A. Kamau Hull in the District 8 race.[1]
Results
| Clarke County School District, District 8 General Election, 4-Year Term, 2016 |
||
|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Vote % | Votes |
 John Knox |
52.18% | 431 |
| A. Kamau Hull | 47.82% | 395 |
| Total Votes | 826 | |
| Source: Georgia Secretary of State, "General Primary and Nonpartisan General Election May 24, 2016," accessed December 14, 2016 | ||
Campaign themes
2016
Ballotpedia survey responses
John Knox participated in Ballotpedia's 2016 survey of school board candidates. In response to the question "What do you hope to achieve if elected to the school board?" the candidate stated on April 21, 2016:
| “ | I know from long experience, having served on 7 different boards of directors of educational and religious organizations for a total of 34 years, that what you hope to achieve and what you *actually* achieve are going to be two distinct sets. It is a bit like how U.S. presidents get elected with one agenda--domestic policy, for example--and then their legacy becomes something entirely different--say, foreign policy. So, unlike someone with less board experience, I understand the need for flexibility and adaptability. If you go in with an agenda and then steamroll ahead and do it, chances are that you weren't really reading the situation correctly and doing what the board and the organization you serve needed to have done.
That said, here are some very modest but, I hope, achievable goals even if my time is swallowed up by the unexpected-that-always-seems-to-arise: 1. The biggie: leave the Board and CCSD better than I found it. I've tried to do this on every single board I've served on, and I would claim that I am 7-for-7 (not just due to me, but definitely related to my efforts). Board members who have served with me have endorsed me, and you can see what they say at www.knox2016.com/endorsements.html 2. Specifically, I want students to be a higher priority--including but not limited to their safety. I was just at a Board meeting tonight where 89 parking spaces for administrators threatened to swallowed up a community garden, and the contention around that issue swallowed up an hour of the Board's meeting time. As public commenters pointed out, how does this benefit the students? It doesn't. Since I am a currently active classroom teacher, I have a daily reminder that the students come first. I want to leave the Board with a sense that students were regularly the main priority--not administrators, not parking places, not students' test scores, not shiny awards. The students. 3. I want to fend off the state from taking over local schools. If that happens, then the whole purpose behind school boards, not to mention public education, begins vanishing. A state takeover will probably result in "chronically failing schools" by whatever definition is used on a particular day being outsourced to a company just as transparent and friendly as your cable provider. No one thinks that's a good idea--this is not a partisan issue. 4. I want the public to feel like their school board actually cares and listens to them. The current structure of Board meetings and enforcement of rules at meetings is off-putting. Speakers are on a shot clock; questions are not answered in real time; and the setting has hostility seemingly built into it. School board members have a laundry list of "thou shalt not"s regarding their behavior and actions, hamstringing them. And when you go to the meetings, there are always, always sound problems that literally seem to be muting the voice of the people. To modify a cringeworthy Bushian quote from the 1990s, the Board's interaction with the public seems to be summarizable as: "Message: I Don't Care." That's just not me. As a teacher, my door's always open. I go out of my way to talk with students. On the campaign trail, I am the antithesis of the metrics-driven candidate. If I knock on just three doors in an hour but have great conversations with potential voters, then it's a good hour. I'd be exactly the same way on the school board: open, transparent, gathering information on where the public stands and what questions need to be asked, which tires need to be kicked. And that's an essential difference between putting a teacher on the Board vs. someone else from another background: I am for the students, for good ideas, for ascertaining the truth via asking questions, and I'm allergic to falsehood and pretense. These are not detailed programmatic goals. But, if achieved, I think these would add integrity to the Board and instill more confidence in its good will and intentions. This is needed right now, much more than some grand silver-bullet plan to fix everything that sounds good but is impracticable. Let's start by putting the students first, managing our own schools well, and working together.[3][4] |
” |
Ranking the issues
The candidate was asked to rank the following issues based on how they should be prioritized by the school board, with 1 being the most important and 7 being the least important. Each ranking could only be used once.
| Education policy |
|---|
 |
Click here to learn more about education policy in Georgia. |
| Education on the ballot |
| Issue importance ranking | |
|---|---|
| Candidate's ranking | Issue |
| Improving relations with teachers | |
| Closing the achievement gap | |
| Improving post-secondary readiness | |
| Improving education for special needs students | |
| Balancing or maintaining the district's budget | |
| Expanding arts education | |
| Expanding school choice options | |
| “ | The whole district, and District 8 in particular, have serious issues that don't fit into this template. Safety is an issue after a rape, and a four-week-long delay in admitting that the rape occurred has the public and the teachers concerned about process, discipline, transparency, and accountability. Meanwhile, a ballot initiative coming in November could lead to one district school being taken over by the state (and then presumably outsourced to an outside corporation). My top three priorities are 1) putting students, and students' safety, first; 2) defending our schools from outside takeover; and 3) providing open, transparent and inquisitive leadership. Those very current and local issues override most of the choices above at this crucial moment in our school district's history. Relations with teachers have been harmed by the mishandling of the rape and its consequences, so I put that first. Teacher retention is going to be tough this summer. The school targeted for takeover has been put on the hit list because of low standardized test scores owing to severe socioeconomic disadvantages, so I put "closing the achievement gap" second. My own personal research has indicated that our students are having more trouble getting into local colleges, so I chose that for third.[4] | ” |
| —John Knox (April 21, 2016) | ||
Positions on the issues
The candidate was asked to answer nine questions from Ballotpedia regarding significant issues in education and the school district. The questions are highlighted in blue and followed by the candidate's responses. Some questions provided multiple choices, which are noted after those questions. The candidate was also provided space to elaborate on their answers to the multiple choice questions.
| Should new charter schools be approved in your district? (Not all school boards are empowered to approve charter schools. In those cases, the candidate was directed to answer the question as if the school board were able to do so.) |
|---|
| No. This is a confusing question right now in Athens, because our district has just opted for and been approved to become a "charter school district." The wording has everyone baffled. To try to answer the question as intended, I say no. Let's improve the public schools; charter schools have not been the answer even where highly touted (as in Wisconsin). |
| Which statement best describes the ideal relationship between the state government and the school board? The state should always defer to school board decisions, defer to school board decisions in most cases, be involved in the district routinely or only intervene in severe cases of misconduct or mismanagement. |
| The state should only intervene in severe cases of misconduct or mismanagement. |
| Are standardized tests an accurate metric of student achievement? |
| No. If you had "hell no" as a choice, I'd check that. I'm a professor at the University of Georgia, and I can confirm statistically (after having taught over 5,000 students in my intro classes at UGA over 15 years) that SAT scores can go up 100 points without any appreciable improvement in actual academic performance. Many of my colleagues feel the same way about the GRE at the graduate level, as well. In short, I don't believe standardized tests tell us much about 18-year-olds and 22-year-olds. So I'm definitely not going to change my mind about them when you are testing children as young as eight years old. I do believe that standardized tests are a fairly accurate metric of how similar your socioeconomic background is to the people who wrote the test. So, in other words, we are testing for upper-middle-class whiteness. To paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, I hate standardized tests. Hate hate hate hate hate standardized tests. Hate them. Hate every simpering stupid vacant student-insulting moment of standardized tests. Hate the sensibility that thought anyone should take standardized tests seriously. Hated the implied insult to the students by the belief that anyone could be measured by them. |
| What is your stance on the Common Core State Standards Initiative? |
| It's more complicated than the facile partisan politics that are usually discussed with regard to Common Core. It's not a vast left-wing conspiracy. What I have seen of the science standards relating to my research specialty of atmospheric science are good, although I felt like weather lost even more ground to climate than I might have suggested. But the most cogent criticism of Common Core I have heard, again from my listening tour across our district, is this: Common Core sets a high bar that's just not attainable at schools where students are so far behind the socioeconomic eight-ball. It's designed for a future in which most everyone goes to college, and thinks in the ways that college students think. And that is a mismatch with the realities of schools within urban school districts--not for everyone, but for many. I will continue to be talking to teachers and principals about Common Core, because I want and need more input from those who know best. So, my current stance is "Good intentions, but wonder about the wisdom of implementation across all schools and all students." |
| How should the district handle underperforming teachers? Terminate their contract before any damage is done to students, offer additional training options, put them on a probationary period while they seek to improve or set up a mentorship program for the underperforming teacher with a more experienced teacher in the district? |
| Offer additional training options. This is a bit of a false-premise kind of question, because most of the teachers I know in our district are so *over*performing that it's not a big issue. Underperforming administrators are more common, but no one ever seems to ask what to do with them, except promote them. I chose "offer additional training options" because the other answers seem more punitive, presumably ignoring just how hard a job pre-college teaching is. The last choice has a false premise built into it, namely that a better teacher will be a "more experienced" teacher. In such a hard job, I think the underperformers are more likely to be older, burned-out teachers, not younger, inexperienced ones. The latter may not be great, but I highly doubt they are "underperforming"--they are likely working ridiculous hours while still finding their sea legs as a teacher. I consider that different from "underperforming." |
| Should teachers receive merit pay? |
| Yes. Name a job where someone does *not* get higher pay for being unusually proficient at it. In particular, name a high-paying job where this is *not* the case. CEOs? Merit bonuses out the wazoo. Head coaches? Ditto. Athletes get additional pay for meeting benchmarks or winning awards. It seems absurd to me that we would not want to reward teachers, of all people, for doing their jobs exceptionally well. It has to be handled fairly, and so that those who teach the most challenging students are not punished for taking on that crucial job. And it should not be done to such an extent that the base pay situation is ignored; the whole teaching force is underpaid to begin with. But I have no philosophical objection to merit pay. |
| Should the state give money to private schools through a voucher system or scholarship program? |
| No. Public schools emphasize access; private schools, by definition, emphasize exclusivity. Which do we need more in 2016? Access to education, in particular an education as good or better than that found at private schools whose homogeneity work against them. Let's build up the public schools again; they were once the envy of the world, and my own life was transformed for the better by them. |
| How should expulsion be used in the district? |
| Sparingly, but not never. I have had a longtime principal tell me recently that, after witnessing a physical assault on another principal at a district school, that the students responsible should be kicked out. Discipline is a huge and knotty issue in our district right now. PBIS is in place, and restorative justice is being discussed as well. At the same time, I have teachers tell me that they are afraid for their safety. There's a whole lot of work to do here. But this much seems obvious: scared students can't learn, and threatened teachers and administrators can't lead. That has to change. |
| What's the most important factor for success in the classroom: student-teacher ratio, the curriculum, teachers, parent involvement or school administration? |
| Teachers. All of the above' is the only truly correct choice, of course. Successful schools in my experience have 1) strong principals who 2) recruit great teachers and 3) retain them because the principals 4) have the teachers' backs and 5) get out of their way and let them do their thing in the classroom. For me, the essential ingredient, if we have to choose one, is the teachers. Great teachers find a way to overcome all the hurdles of too-large classes and brain-dead curricula and no-shows at all the parent-teacher conferences and even Dilbertian administration. |
Recent news
The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms 'John Knox' 'Clarke County School District'. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.
See also
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Georgia Secretary of State, "Qualifying Candidate Information," accessed April 18, 2016
- ↑ John Knox for Clarke County School Board, "About John Knox," accessed May 18, 2016
- ↑ Ballotpedia School Board Candidate Survey, 2016, "John Knox's responses," April 21, 2016
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
| 2016 Clarke County School District Elections | |
| Clarke County, Georgia | |
| Election date: | May 24, 2016 |
| Candidates: | District 2: Incumbent, Vernon Payne District 4: Jared Bybee |
| Important information: | What was at stake? |
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