First meeting of the district board, which is made up of lots of reps from all the other boards but which (I am told) has very limited authority since this is vested in the individual boards. I think this board is more an efficiency of getting all the boards (how many are there—maybe 6?) to hear the same stuff at one place, rather than bringing it to a bunch of boards and repeating it again and again. Do we need this many boards and is this the best way to lead to quality education??? This is one of those big questions about consolidating districts.
Again I am impressed by the spirit of the board members who seem to be dedicated and forward looking and focused on quality. I am sure there will be times there are disagreements, but I want to trust each person’s motivation is doing what is best for producing quality education by effectively using resources.
The big content of this meeting was hearing about district wide curriculum work in science and math. Seems like a lot of effort by teachers to look hard at what they have been doing, what is expected in these subjects (from state policy, national standards, other schools, etc), and how to map what should be taught (and learned?). This can generate a sheaf of papers with all sorts of lists and goals and tables, and if this assured student learning, we’d have the most talented kids on the planet. Unfortunately, it isn’t all that easy and even with all the time this process of curriculum planning takes, the ultimate questions are how does this impact the teaching and learning process, and how do we assess to evaluate if and how these goals are being met (and then maybe most significantly, what adjustments are made to respond in areas we fall short of the goals?) (all questions asked by board members).
This curriculum goal writing is important and was sadly not done all that well decades ago so politicians stepped into the void and came up with usually endless lists of things they thought would be good for kids to know. So now teachers are spending a lot of time trying to align these long lists of standards with what they have already been teaching and what is in the textbooks they have and what kids can actually do and the time they have. Not a bad exercise, but time consuming and too often futile when a) they learn there is not enough time (for example lots of elementary schools in the
As one parent expressed in the meeting, there is a big, well researched national report that raises questions about spiraling math curricula (which includes our Everyday Math program). Changing this is a fairly major decision and while this might happen by working through these new curriculum guideposts and implementing them and assessing their impact, this will surely take longer than the time her kids are in elementary school. While the school system may have the time to evolve the curriculum or improve individual teacher practice, for families, there is an immediacy that this 3rd grade math curriculum or that 4th grade teacher isn’t working for their kid and that can’t really wait for next year (or beyond).
The other agenda items have to do with efforts at cost containment (esp related to Special Education spending), policies (mandated by the state or fed govt mostly), and contract negotiations (a sadly adversarial process where requests for salaries and benefits seem disassociated from the realities of the economy and the very limited (if any) increases seen in other occupations nationwide (and certainly in this region)). Regardless of how much we value our teachers, as so many people see no increase in pay and are asked to take on ever increased health care contributions, it’s hard to see how we can ask taxpayers to continually dig deeper to guarantee generous salary increases for schools (hence the challenge of contract negotiations). Best of luck to all those trying to work this out.
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