My Goal in Blogging
I started this blog in May of 2008, shortly after my election to the School Committee, because I believed it was very important to both provide the community with an opportunity to share their thoughts with me about our schools and to provide me with an opportunity for me to ask questions and share my thoughts and reasoning. I have found the conversation generated on my blog to be extremely helpful to me in learning community views on many issues. I appreciate the many people who have taken the time to share their views. I believe it is critical to the quality of our public schools to have a public discussion of our community priorities, concerns and aspirations.
This link is to my latest Education Matters column (July 9, 2010, Amherst Bulletin), which examines our current school budgets and the spending choices we are currently making (
http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/176325/). I'd be interested in hearing thoughts about both our current choices and alternative choices from parents, teachers, students, and community members.
11 comments:
I don't know why the high amount of money we spend per student isn't causing more upset among the tax paying population here. It's very troubling. The special ed dollars are eating up a huge chunk of the budget pie. The regular curriculum gets narrower focusing only on the bare minimum. How is this high cost per pupil benefiting EVERY child?
It's not. Regular ed kids are getting less and less Look at the charts presented in the budget documents. The slice of the pie taken by special education is increasing although it is not clear whether or not that segment of the population is growing substantially.
Catherine, do you have the per-pupil costs for regular education students versus special education students? Looking at that over time would be helpful.
Interesting article on creativity study:
http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/07/10/creativity-test.html
Sorry, wrong link. Here is an article addressing the study. Interesting read.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
wow-great article on creativity. Here's a clickable link:
Newsweek article
I think the real looking needs to be done at the administrative costs in special education--This comparison between sped and reg education that somehow has left one to believe that sped kids 'get more' than 'regular' ed kids is way off balance. It's the administrators who pocket the difference--whose pockets are weighed down heavily from this huge difference. Want I want now is to see the 'sped evaluation' was supposedly called for way back when...
I spoke about this issue at a SC meeting and had the following posted in the paper. Why there is not more urgency to our disproportionate spending or our high level of per pupil spending is a mystery to me.
"Over the past 10 years the cuts to the General Education Budget represent a 10% cut to the school budget but a 30% reduction of the General Education budget. In that same time period the SPED budget has increased 1% to 3%. Rising health care costs explain some of the General Education budget cuts. However there is an apparent lack of balance in the reductions taken across the board. When questions have been raised in the past, why is the SPED budget so large? Why can’t we find cuts there? The answer always comes back "there are state mandates that must be met and we have to spend the money to meet them”. However during the budget process this year many areas were identified for cuts to the SPED, Intervention, and ELL budgets. While these cuts would have made things more difficult, it clearly shows that there is room between where the spending levels are now and where the state mandates our services to be. If there is room to take money from SPED, Intervention, and ELL, why over the last 10 years has the general education budget which serves 80+% of the student body, been the major focus for educational cuts for our school system?
While I do believe that proportional cuts might be fairer I am not sure they are required. I believe a reduction in the SPED, Intervention, Ell budget of maybe 3-4% and an increase in the General budget to match would give back most of the much needed programs to 80% of the student body. While it is easy to say that the majority of the kids in general education do just fine, I believe the disproportionate cuts are unfair to those in general education who might achieve more by being challenged with the improved education these limited resources could provide."
Catherine,
I was wondering if anyone has looked into our shrinking enrollment in terms of school age children. Do we just have fewer school age kids in the 4 towns or are they going elsewhere? If they are going elsewhere is the data being gathered (as the administration says it is) and solutions being considered to retain more students in the district?
It seems to me that the IMP math program at ARHS encourages and teaches students how to think creatively in problem solving whereas the traditional math program teaches kids how to grind out answers over and over without a lot of the creative thinking.
What exactly does the traditional method hope to teach kids about math and thinking in addition to solving X number of problems on a homework sheet or a test?
I think this calls into question what exactly we want our schools to educate our children in. Do we only want automatons who can score big on standardized tests? To what end?
J. Dewey raises the obvious question:
Are standardized tests ALWAYS the ultimate arbiter of whether we are doing a good job or not educating our children?
It seems to me that we have enough sophisticated math minds in town to answer that question in a conclusive way, at least for the field of mathematics.
I highly doubt that teachers of non-IMP math at ARHS are only teaching students how to be "automatons who can score big on standardized tests."
I'm sure that there is a good amount of discussion and creative thinking in all math classes at ARHS.
But no one really knows because very little of what we are doing as a school system gets evaluated.
Post a Comment