>Some 60 Ridgewood residents and parents attended a public meeting of the Board and district principals last Monday. As advertised by the superintendent in his letter to the parent community, a proposed “plan” was to be articulated for addressing the issues that have led to the intense concerns many parents have expressed with the district’s elementary and middle school math programs.
After listening for an hour and a half as each member of the panel expressed their education philosophy, I was appalled to learn that the highly anticipated plan was to ‘partner with a local university’ so that they could tell us what we needed to do. What disappointed me even more was that there was zero deliberation of this supposed plan from any of the Board Trustees, given the fact that the constructivist math, which is the source of great parental concern, is the very product of the education departments within these local universities.
As was expressed by several speakers at the microphone that evening, the “partner” chosen will likely determine the outcome of what math program is implemented at our six elementary schools. If, as is expected, the university supports reform math and constructivist ideology, then Ridgewood will be seduced into abandoning our foundational math programs to welcome Everyday Math or TERC into all its elementary schools. This is neither a plan nor a solution to the problems clearly articulated over these past ten months and clearly defined in the focus group results for which the Board paid roughly $9,000 dollars.
We have extremely bright and talented people within both our district faculty and our community. Offering to punt the ball away to complete strangers is an insult to those who pay the taxes and to those employed by our district to provide such administrative guidance. We are the experts of the children of Ridgewood; the parents, the teachers, and the principals. It is a misuse of time (another year and a half!) and an expensive redundancy to rely on outside resources to direct us on how to best educate our own children. We already pay more than a few administrators quite handsomely to provide this expertise.
We are almost exactly in the same place that we were a year ago. The one progression is the acknowledgement by the administration for consistency of one math program to serve all 6 elementary schools. That this took an entire year to determine is shameful enough.
A university rightly has its own agenda and subset of interests. What guarantee is there that Ridgewood’s interests will be placed ahead of any university’s education ideology? This supposed plan shows a disturbing lack of confidence in those we’ve hired to administrate our schools. Every one of the administrative participants at Monday’s math workshop spoke of the need for our children to “think outside of the box” and be competent problem solvers. So thinking outside of the box means going outside of the town? Shouldn’t our Board, administrators and principals practice what they preach?
Don’t punt. This is a home grown problem that we have the resources to solve at home and the ability to solve sooner rather than later so that by September 2008, our students will be on the road to math success across the board. That’s nine months. We can do a lot in nine months. C’mon now.
Sarah-Kate Maskin
