> *Leader of the 1960s and 70s domestic terrorist group Weatherman *”Kill all the rich people. … Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.” *Participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the *Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972 *Currently a professor of education at the University of Illinois
Born in 1944, Bill Ayers, along with his wife Bernardine Dohrn, was a 1960s leader of the homegrown terrorist group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society. Characterizing Weatherman as “an American Red Army,” Ayers summed up the organization’s ideology as follows: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”
Today Ayers is a professor of education and a Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois. He has also authored a series of books about parenting and educating children, including: A Kind and Just Parent; To Become a Teacher; City Kids; City Teachers; To Teach; The Good Preschool Teacher; Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools; and Teaching Towards Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom.
In his most recent screed, Fugitive Days, Ayers recounts his life as a Sixties radical, his tenure as a Weatherman lieutenant, his terrorist campaign across America, and his enduring hatred for for the United States. “What a country,” Ayers said in 2001. “It makes me want to puke.”
Ayers was an active participant in Weatherman’s 1969 “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago, where nearly 300 members of the organization employed guerrilla-style tactics to viciously attack police officers and civilians alike, and to destroy massive amounts of property via vandalism and arson; their objective was to further spread their anti-war, anti-American message. Reminiscing on those riots, Ayers says pridefully: “We’d … proven that it was possible — we didn’t all die, we were still there.”
A substantial portion of Ayers’ book Fugitive Days discusses the author’s penchant for building and deploying explosives. Ayers boasts that he “participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.” Of the day he bombed the Pentagon, Ayers says, “Everything was absolutely ideal. … The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”
On another occasion, Ayers stated: “There’s something about a good bomb … Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down.”
All told, Ayers and Weatherman were responsible for 30 bombings aimed at destroying the defense and security infrastructures of the U.S. “I don’t regret setting bombs, said Ayers in 2001, “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
In 1970, Ayers’ then-girlfriend Diana Oughton, along with Weatherman members Terry Robbins and Ted Gold, were killed when a bomb they were constructing exploded unexpectedly. That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, “tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”
After the death of his girlfriend, Ayers and his current wife, Bernardine Dohrn, spent the 1970s as fugitives running from the FBI. In 1980 the two surrendered, but all charges against them were dropped due to an “improper surveillance” technicality. Ayers’ comment on his life, as reported by Peter Collier and David Horowitz in their authoritative chapter on Weatherman in Destructive Generation, is this: “Guilty as sin, free as a bird, America is a great country.”
Notwithstanding his violent past, Ayers today does not describe himself as a terrorist. “Terrorists destroy randomly,” he reasons, “while our actions bore … the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.”
In Fugitive Days, Ayers reflects on whether or not he might use bombs against the U.S. in the future. “I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility,” he writes.
In 1999 Ayers joined the Woods Fund of Chicago, where he served as a director alongside Barak Obama until the latter left the Woods board in December 2002. Ayers went on to become Woods’ Chairman of the Board. In 2002 the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was employed.
>VILLAGE COUNCIL SPECIAL PUBLIC MEETING APRIL 28, 2008 7:30 P.M.
1. Call to Order – Mayor
2. Statement of Compliance with the Open Public Meeting Act
MAYOR: “Adequate notice of this meeting has been provided by a posting on the bulletin board in Village Hall, by mail to the Ridgewood News, The Record, and by submission to all persons entitled to same as provided by law of a schedule including the date and time of this meeting.”
3. Roll Call
4. Comments from the Public (Other than Pease Building and Filing of Declaration of Intent of Grant Application for Pease Building)
5. ORDINANCE – INTRODUCTION – #3121 – Permit Use of Graydon Pool by Residents of Paramus – Permits Paramus residents to join Graydon Pool for the 2008 summer season, and establishes the fees for these out of town residents to join
6. RESOLUTION
08-100 Authorize Settlement of General Liability Claim
7. Explanation of Advantages of Accepting the Gift from David Bolger – Councilman Harlow
8. Explanation of Advantages of Filing for the State and County Historic Preservation Grants – Councilman Mancuso
9. Comments from the Public Pertaining to the Pease Building and/or the Filing of the Declaration of Intent of Grant Applications for the Pease Building
10. RESOLUTIONS
08-101 Authorize Filing of Declaration of Intent of Grant Application for Pease Building – Garden State Historic Preservation Trust Fund Capital Preservation Grant for Historic Preservation 08-102 Authorize Filing of Declaration of Intent of Grant Application for Pease Building – Bergen County Historic Preservation Trust Fund
A quick internet search reveals that Ms. Botsford’s ASCD organization’s heavy buy-in with respect to “Authentic Assessment” may have its intellectual roots in work published in 1999 by the same American Educational Research Association (AERA) that recently hired Bill Ayers in concert with the American Psychological Association (APA) and the National Council for Measurement in Education (NCME).
Consider the following ASCD paper (copied verbatim from https://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/menuitem.d6eaddbe742e2120db44aa33e3108a0c/template.ascdexpressjournal?articlemoid=7b7f89b094a75010VgnVCM1000003d01a8c0RCRD&journalmoid=f36f89b094a75010VgnVCM1000003d01a8c0RCRD):
(Begin quote)
A Policymaker’s Primer on Testing and Assessment
Dan Laitsch
Standardized testing plays an increasingly important role in the lives of today’s students and educators. The U.S. No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires assessment in math and literacy in grades 3–8 and 10 and, as of 2007–08, in science once in grades 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12. Based on National Center for Education Statistics enrollment projections, that will be roughly 68 million tests per year, simply to meet the requirements of NCLB. Such an intense focus on assessment, with real consequences attached for students and educators, makes it imperative that policymakers understand the complexities involved with assessment and in using assessments as part of high-stakes accountability policies.
As policymakers continue to establish and revise state and national assessment and accountability systems, two overarching questions must be addressed:
Do current tests supply valid and reliable information? What happens to such assessments when high stakes are attached to the outcomes?
The American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council for Measurement in Education (NCME) have jointly released The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (1999), a detailed set of guidelines on assessment use. Within these guidelines, the associations note that although tests, “when used appropriately, can be valid measures of student achievement,” decisions “about a student’s continued education, such as retention, tracking, or graduation, should not be based on the results of a single test but should include other relevant and valid information” (APA, 2001, paras. 9, 14). In a position supported by its Leadership Council, ASCD takes a similar stance (see box).
ASCD Adopted Position on High-Stakes Testing, 2004
Decision makers in education—students, parents, educators, community members, and policymakers—all need timely access to information from many sources. Judgments about student learning and education program success need to be informed by multiple measures. Using a single achievement test to sanction students, educators, schools, districts, states/provinces, or countries is an inappropriate use of assessment. ASCD supports the use of multiple measures in assessment systems that are
Fair, balanced, and grounded in the art and science of learning and teaching;
Reflective of curricular and developmental goals and representative of content that students have had an opportunity to learn;
Used to inform and improve instruction;
Designed to accommodate nonnative speakers and special-needs students; and
Valid, reliable, and supported by professional, scientific, and ethical standards designed to fairly assess the unique and diverse abilities and knowledge base of all students.
Complexities in Assessment On both the individual and system levels, assessment poses issues worthy of consideration.
Individual Assessment. Multiple forms of assessment are important because of the potential effect of human error within even well-designed systems. Researchers at the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy found that human error in testing programs occurs during all phases of testing (from design and administration to scoring and reporting), and that such errors can have a significant negative effect on students when high-stakes decisions are made.
In 1999, researchers found that individuals involved in the assessment process made numerous errors across the different phases of the assessment process, resulting in significant negative consequences. For example, 50 students were wrongly denied graduation; 8,668 students were needlessly required to attend summer school; and 257,000 students were misclassified as limited-English-proficient (Rhodes & Madaus, 2003). In January of 2003, more than 4,000 teacher candidates were incorrectly failed on their certification tests due to an ETS scoring error (Clark, 2004).
Systemic Assessment. Using test results to evaluate educational systems is also problematic. As highlighted in a recent presentation at ETS (Raudenbush, 2004), the general concept of using tests for this purpose assumes there is a causal relationship between the system (treatment) and the test score (outcomes); however, assessment systems as currently designed are not structured to determine causation (there are no comparison or control groups). The assessment systems assume that school effects cause any differentiation in scores, but those differences could be the result of other, uncontrolled-for variables, such as the effect of previous schools or the effect of wealth or community characteristics (Popham, 2003; Turkheimer, Haley, Waldron, D’Onofrio, & Gottesman, 2003). According to Raudenbush, using school-mean proficiency results (NCLB’s basic accountability mechanisms) to evaluate schools is “scientifically indefensible,” and although value-added assessment (which measures year-to-year gain) addresses some issues, it, too, presents a flawed analysis of schoolwide performance, particularly when there are transitions between schools or significant differences in earlier educational experiences.
High-Stakes Accountability The addition of high-stakes consequences to assessment systems in order to motivate change in educator behavior adds one more serious degree of complexity. High-stakes accountability mechanisms generally rely on operant theories of motivation that emphasize the use of external incentives (punishments or rewards) to force change (Ryan & Brown, in press). Other theories of motivation, however, suggest that such reliance on external incentives will result in negative and unintended consequences (Ryan & Brown, in press; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Operant approaches to motivation focus on behaviors (that is, the reward or punishment is designed to cause behavioral change), but the testing movement focuses on outcomes (the achievement of specific scores) regardless of behavior change. These conflicting goals result in a situation where the ends (higher test scores) become more important than the means (changes in educator behavior) used to achieve those ends. In other words, because the rewards and punishments stemming from the testing program are attached to conditions that educators may not have control over (including school and classroom resources, community poverty, social supports, and so on), educators are left to make changes in variables they do control (such as student enrollments, test administration, and classroom instruction).
As predicted by Ryan and Brown, the change in these variables is complex and includes consequences that policymakers could not have intended, such as narrowing the curriculum and associated training to tested subjects (Berry, Turchi, Johnson, Hare, Owens, & Clements, 2003; Moon, Callahan, & Tomlinson, 2003), increased push-out of underperforming students (Lewin & Medina, 2003), and increased manipulation of test administration (Rodriguez, 1999). A recent survey conducted by the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy found that 75 percent of teachers thought that state-mandated testing programs led teachers in their school to teach in ways that contradict their own ideas of good educational practice (Pedulla, 2003).
Assessment Types, Uses, and Scoring Because much of the responsibility for the use of assessments resides with the users, it is important that policymakers understand in general what tests can and cannot do, as well as the appropriate ways in which tests might be used as part of an accountability system.
At best, tests are an incomplete measure of what a student knows and can do. A final score measures only the student’s performance relative to the sample of items included on that specific test. This is why educators argue for the use of multiple measures in evaluating students—so that a more complete picture of the student can be generated. Educators use assessments that cover a variety of purposes and measure differing levels of knowledge, skills, and abilities. For an assessment to work well, it must be consistent with the instructions of the test maker. Using a test for a purpose for which it was not intended can result in invalid or unreliable outcomes. The same is true regarding use of a test that has not been fully validated, or using tests where the scoring parameters have been set for political or public relations purposes rather than measurement purposes.
Thus, it is critical that the appropriate assessments and measures be used for the identified policy or educational goals. Three general areas to consider when examining assessments are test type (such as achievement tests or aptitude tests), test use (for diagnostics, placement, or formative or summative evaluation), and the scoring reference (raw scores, norm-referenced scores, or criterion-referenced scores).
Test Type. Achievement and aptitude tests, although similar, attempt to measure two different concepts. Achievement tests generally measure the specific content a student has (or has not) learned, whereas aptitude tests attempt to predict a student’s future behavior or achievement (Popham, 2003). Although student outcomes on these tests may be related, it would be inappropriate to use the tests interchangeably because they measure different constructs. The SAT is an example of an aptitude test that is frequently misused by policy activists to make content-focused judgments or comparisons of student achievement.
Test Use. Tests are used to help diagnose areas of student strength and weakness, as well as specific learning difficulties. Tests can also be used to guide school readiness and placement decisions, and to make formative or summative evaluations. Formative evaluations are structured assessments designed to gauge the progress of students as measured against specific learning objectives. Such assessments are used to help guide instruction so that teachers and students have a general idea of what learning outcomes have been achieved, and where further focus is needed. Summative assessments, on the other hand, are used to evaluate achievement at the end of specific educational programs (for example, mathematics achievement at the end of grade 10).
Scoring. The way in which tests are designed to have scores reported—as norm-referenced or criterion-referenced—also plays a key role in test usage. Norm-referenced tests are designed to result in a score spread, so that students can be compared to their peers and placed in a hierarchy by percentage. Scores reported from a norm-referenced test, therefore, are broken out in such a way as to ensure that half of the test takers score in the top 50 percent, and half score in the bottom 50 percent. Because the goal is to differentiate between test takers, when test items are created and validated, items that are too easy—or too hard—are discarded because they fail to differentiate between students. Even if a norm-referenced test is created from a set of state standards, it is exceptionally difficult to use such a test as a summative assessment because important content items may have been discarded in the test building process for being deemed too easy or too hard (Popham, 2003; Linn & Gronlund, 1995).
Criterion-referenced tests, however, do try to focus specifically on student outcomes relative to a fixed body of knowledge. Criterion-referenced tests can result in the majority of students scoring above, or below, a specified cut score. And, in fact, a criterion-referenced test should be positively (or negatively) skewed, depending on the success of the students and teachers in addressing the body of content from which the test has been constructed. State assessments designed to measure the achievement of students relative to the state’s content standards should be criterion-referenced.
Test scores are also occasionally reported in raw scores, which are simply the total of correct responses. Unfortunately, the raw score is frequently misinterpreted because it is reported without interpretation. A test that is particularly difficult (or easy) may have an unusually low (or high) average score. Without knowing the context of the test or the scoring, it is impossible to make a judgment as to what the raw scores say about the performance of test takers.
Interpreting Test Scores
Linn and Gronlund (1995) offer five cautions for interpreting test scores:
Scores should be interpreted in terms of the specific tests from which they were derived. In other words, student scores on a reading test should not be taken to represent students’ general ability to read; rather, the scores should be examined only in light of the skills the assessment was intended to measure. For instance, a reading test that measures a student’s ability to sound out words would not tell us how well a student comprehends the main idea in a paragraph of text. Scores should be interpreted in light of all the student’s relevant characteristics. A student’s score on a specific test may be influenced by many variables, including language background, education, cultural background, and motivation. A low score does not necessarily indicate that the student does not know the material or that the system has failed to engage the student.
Scores should be interpreted according to the type of decisions to be made. Test scores should not be generalized to actions beyond the original purpose of the test. Scores should be interpreted as a band of possible scores, rather than an absolute value. Because tests are only an approximate measure of what a student actually knows and can do, the student’s true abilities may differ from the measured score. Most tests include a measure of standard error, which can be used to help determine where a student’s true score may lie. For example, the true score for a student scoring a 68 on a test with a 4-point standard error is likely to fall within the range of 64 to 72.
Scores should be verified by supplementary evidence. This is perhaps the single most important admonition for test users. No test can ensure the accurate measure of a student’s true performance; other evidence should be examined. Allowing students to retake the same test does not provide supplementary evidence of performance. Instead, alternative measures, such as classroom performance, should be used to help make accurate determinations of student abilities.
Constructing Assessment Systems
In constructing assessment systems, test makers can draw from a variety of item types and formats, depending on the type of assessment being created and its purpose. For example, although selected-response tests (such as multiple-choice tests) are easy to score and offer a reasonable measure for vocabulary, facts, or general principles and methods, they are less useful for measuring complex achievement, such as the application of principles or the ability to generate hypotheses or conduct experiments. Such complex abilities require more complex item constructs, such as those found on constructed-response tests, which may include essay questions or actual performance assessments.
On the other hand, performance and portfolio assessments (authentic assessment assessments) allow students to more intentionally demonstrate their competence. Although such assessments may resemble traditional constructed-response tests, their goal is to mirror tasks that people might face in real life. For example, they might require students to demonstrate writing competence through a series of polished essays, papers, or poems (depending on the type of writing being assessed), or to design, set up, run, and evaluate a science experiment. Other types of performance assessment include speeches, formal presentations, or exhibits of student work.
Portfolio assessments, although similar to performance assessments, are designed to collect data over time and can also include measures from traditional assessments. The goal of portfolios is to allow teachers, students, and evaluators to gauge student growth by examining specific artifacts that students have created. Students in British Columbia, for example, are required to present a Graduation Portfolio Assessment, which accounts for 4 of the 80 course credits required to be awarded a diploma (BC Ministry of Education, 2004). The portfolio documents student work in grades 10–12 in six domains: Arts and Design, Community Involvement and Responsibility, Education and Career Planning, Employability Skills, Information Technology, and Personal Health. Although districts have approached the requirement in different ways, Surrey School District, which has the largest enrollment in British Columbia, is helping students create electronic portfolios that will provide Web-accessible evidence of their academic performance. In Providence, Rhode Island, the Met School has gone one step further and eliminated grades and traditional tests altogether, evaluating student work completely through publicly presented portfolios (Washor & Mojkowski, 2003).
Constructed-response tests—including performance and portfolio assessments—provide a richer evaluation of students, but they are much more time-consuming for teachers, students, and evaluators; they are also more expensive and difficult to administer and score in a large-scale standardized manner. Connecticut school officials are currently in a dispute with the U.S. Department of Education regarding assessment costs, because they don’t want to “dumb down” their constructed-response tests by dropping writing components that require hand scoring (Archer, 2005). Even so, the educational richness inherent in authentic assessments suggests that policymakers take seriously the possibility of incorporating a deep evidence base in assessment and accountability models.
Assessment and Ethics The ethical practices related to testing and assessment further complicate the picture. As highlighted by Megargee (2000), the ethical responsibilities for assessment are split between the test developer and the test user—the developer being responsible for ensuring the tests are scientifically reliable and valid measures, and the user for “the proper administration and scoring of the test, interpretation of the test scores, communication of the results, safeguarding the welfare of the test takers, and maintaining the confidentiality of their test records” (p. 52). This separation of ethical responsibility between test makers and consumers results in a loophole that allows commercial test makers to sell assessments to clients even when they know the tests will be misused. Additionally, although the education profession has taken responsibility for creating ethical standards, it currently has no mechanisms for enforcement.
Conclusions
Policymakers face a daunting challenge in designing school assessment and accountability systems; however, professionals in assessment have worked hard to provide the basic outline for policies that can support positive assessment systems. These systems cannot be implemented cheaply, and when cost-saving compromises are made, serious damage to both individuals and systems (school and assessment) can result. Therefore, policymakers should work to carefully understand (and adjust for) the trade-offs they make as they seek to create cost-effective accountability systems. It is not an understatement to say that the lives of individual students will be positively—or negatively—affected by the decisions they make.
In an effort to increase both the instructional use of assessments and public confidence in such systems, states should work to keep these systems transparent, allowing relevant stakeholders to review test content and student answer sheets. Teachers, parents, and students cannot use test data to improve instruction or focus learning if they are denied access to detailed score reports. In fact, states may be required to give such information to parents. Washington State officials recently decided to give parents access to student tests and booklets because they determined that under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), exams were defined as part of a student’s educational records and, therefore, must be made available to parents—and to students once they reach 18 years of age (Houtz, 2005).
Professional associations and psychometricians have focused on creating standards for test use (AERA, APA, & NCME, 1999), some of which have been delineated here. Due to the split between assessment creators and consumers regarding ethical responsibilities for test usage, as well as the lack of professional enforcement mechanisms, it is imperative that policymakers incorporate the recommendations of assessment professionals as they create systems that use evidence from standardized and large-scale assessment programs.
Recent Origins of Standardized Testing
Much of the theory and many constructs undergirding standardized assessments evolved from work done on standardized intelligence testing. British psychologist Sir Francis Galton, French psychologist Alfred Binet, and an American from Stanford University, Lewis Terman, are generally credited as the fathers of modern intelligence testing (Megargee, 2000). The work of Terman and Binet ultimately resulted in the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, which is still in use today. The SAT—an aptitude test (a test that attempts to predict a student’s future achievement)—came into being in 1926 to help predict a student’s likely success in college, and the Graduate Records Examinations (GRE) were introduced a decade later. In 1939, David Wechsler introduced an intelligence scale that broke intelligence into discrete pieces, in this case verbal and nonverbal subtests. The first large-scale use of standardized intelligence testing occurred in the U.S. military during World War I, when more than 1,700,000 recruits were tested to determine their role (as officers or enlisted men) or denote them as unable to serve. Standardized achievement tests, which attempt to measure the specific knowledge and skills that a student currently possesses (and not general intellectual ability or potential for future achievement), came into widespread use in the 1970s through minimum competency testing (Popham, 2001).
The evolution of intelligence testing has been turbulent, with researchers still debating whether intelligence is a single construct referred to as “g” (Gottfredson, 1998) or consists of many different intelligences, such as Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences posits: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist (Checkley, 1997). In addition to debates about how to define intelligence, scientists are trying to determine how much of it—if any—is hereditary and how much is learned—that is, influenced positively or negatively by the environment in which a person exists. One recent study, for example, found that the effects of poverty on intelligence could overwhelm any genetic differences, emphasizing the complex nature of intelligence (Turkheimer, Haley, Waldron, D’Onofrio, & Gottesman, 2003).
Historically, intelligence testing has also been used in ways that many people today find offensive. The eugenics movement of the early-mid-20th century used intelligence testing to identify individuals who were “feebleminded” (or had other deficiencies) so that they could be institutionalized or placed in basic-skills tracks (Stoskopf, 1999b). Eugenic policies were created to “strengthen” the genetic makeup of Americans, and scientists who supported these policies provided the impetus for U.S. immigration restrictions in the 1920s and sterilization laws that were in effect through the 1960s—resulting in the sterilization of, at a minimum, 60,000 individuals (Reilly, 1987). As recently as last year, a candidate for U.S. Congress from Tennessee, James Hart, garnered almost 60,000 votes running on a platform of eugenics (Associated Press, 2004; Hart, 2004; McDowell, 2004).
Early IQ testing, which was greatly affected by culturally biased items, also resulted in the tracking of African American children into low-level courses and vocational schools, on the basis of the assumption that they had generally low mental abilities (Stoskopf, 1999a). In 1923, Carl Brigham, who later helped create the SAT, published A Study of American Intelligence, which alleged on the basis of U.S. Army testing that intelligence was tied to race. Brigham recanted his findings in 1930; however, his work was used extensively to provide “scientific” evidence for racist policies in the 1920s (Stoskopf, 1999a).
[Extensive bibliography omitted]
Dan Laitsch is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, and is coeditor of the International Journal for Education Policy and Leadership.
ASCD Infobrief July 2005 Number 42 Assessment Policy
>The New Jersey Department of Education provides a web page containing a list of links relating to “Language Arts Literacy”.
While the list is admittedly alphabetical, it is nonetheless at least a little funny (ha-ha, “isn’t that sweet justice” funny) to this observer that Chicago-based Mr. Bill Ayers’ AERA organization and Ridgewood-based Ms. Botsford’s ASCD organization are listed together at the top of the official links page (found at https://www.state.nj.us/education/aps/cccs/lal/assoc.htm).
Note the innocuous descriptions of the two organizations, each of which has its own rather aggressive public agenda not necessarily in line with the best interests of New Jersey’s school-age children, IMHO.
(Begin Quote)
American Educational Research Association (AERA)
AERA is concerned with improving the educational process by encouraging scholarly inquiry related to education and by promoting the dissemination and practical application of research results.
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
ASCD is an international, nonprofit, nonpartisan education association committed to the mission of forging covenants in teaching and learning for the success of all learners. ASCD provides professional development in curriculum and supervision; encourages research, evaluation, and theory development; and disseminates information on education issues.
It seems Mr. Obama’s friend Bill Ayers of Weather Underground fame is now seeking revolutionary change by another means.
Query whether people like Bill Ayers will expect the White House doors to be thrown open to them in the event Mr. Obama is elected.
Putting national implications to one side, though, the following information and related open-ended question also seems relevant to the Ridgewood district’s current struggles with a certain willful, inscrutable administrator currently populating Cottage Place. Enjoy!
(Found today, Monday, April 28, 2008, on https://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/. For information about the AERA organization that recently elevated Mr. Ayers to the upper echelon of its leadership, see https://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/search/label/AERA.)
(Begin Quote)
Bill Ayers is not a “professor of English”
In fact, he is a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
I haven’t heard if Obama has corrected himself on this. However, this is what I’m interested in:
The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.
[…]
Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.
[…]
Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.
(Sol Stern in the City Journal)
Maybe the media should be questioning Obama and McCain about their views on Ayers in this influential position. Some readers might believe doing so would be a demonstration of “gotcha” politics, but I really would like to hear their answers.
Posted by Tex at 7:23 AM 6 comments Links to this post
As the merry month of May approaches so do Bergen’s five nonpartisan municipal elections in Mahwah, Ridgewood, Teaneck, Ridgefield Park, and Garfield. The candidates are out making stump speeches, local civic organizations are putting their two cents in, and the opinion sections of the weekly newspapers are chock full of commentary on the candidates and on the issues. This is all well and good, but what do the campaign finance reports say about the candidates and their campaigns?
MAHWAH – Sitting mayor Richard Martel may have been convicted of DUI back in 2006, but that hasn’t phased his fund raising efforts one bit; Martel has out raised his opponent, former councilman Gary Paton, nearly six to one.
The overwhelming majority of Martel’s contributions have been below 300 dollars and have been raised in the past six months, with Martel only carrying over about $500 from his 2004 re-election bid, suggesting a strong base of support among township voters. In stark contrast, 88% of challenger Gary Paton’s campaign cash came from one Gary Paton.
RIDGEWOOD – Bergen’s sign vendors and print shops shouldn’t count on having a very strong year in Ridgewood. Incumbent councilwoman Betty Wiest leads the pack with a whopping $2090 raised to date, followed by former Clinton administration policy wonk Paul Aronsohn, and longtime village cop Keith Killion. Jacques Harlow’s report is MIA and Anne Zusy’s campaign does not have a bank account. TEANECK – The dominant candidate thus far in the fundraising department in this race is incumbent councilwoman Monica Honis. “Team Teaneck” (Elnatan, Robinson, and Hameduddin) generates most of their money from large $300+ contributions mostly from sources located outside Teaneck and the rest of the candidates are either majority self funded or have yet to break the $3500 barrier in fundraising.
Team Teaneck does possess the organizational edge though, as three candidates are operating as one significantly reducing expenses and broadening their base of potential donors.
With the exception of Honis, the other two candidates running with the endorsement of “Teaneck United,” a local civic group in opposition to Team Teaneck are not enjoying the sort of support one would expect of true grassroots candidates, lending support to the notion that Teaneck United is simply a Wienberg astroturfing operation. 66% of Barbara Toffler’s campaign fund came courtesy of her checking account and Audra Jackson has yet to break the $3500 mark in fundraising.
The numbers suggest that the residents of Teaneck have opted out of the latest battle between Joe and Loretta, instead writing their checks to Monica Honis or not at all.
GARFIELD – If winning elections was a simply a matter of out-fundraising your opponent, then this year’s municipal contest in the “city of champions” would have to go the incumbents, who have raised five times as much money than their primary threat of challengers Bonnano, Demarco, and Vistocky. Maverick candidate Gaetana Raymond’s campaign fund consists of a loan she made to herself and Richard Derrig’s campaign fund has yet to take in more than $3500 in contributions.
So where have Calandriello, Aloia, Delaney, Krone, and Moskal been spending all of that money, aside from the printer and the sign guys? Donating to all of Garfield’s various civic organizations, that’s where. One will be hard pressed to find a church, club, or other organization operating in Garfield who has not recieved a check from this slate of candidates.
RIDGEFIELD PARK – Challenger Frank Scerbo has purchased some lawn signs, and fellow challenger Junior Hernandez hasn’t cracked $3500 yet. As for the rest of the mostly incumbent candidates who are running together, their ELEC filing is MIA. The real winners in Ridgefield Park seem to be the village’s DPW, as a drive through the village recently revealed it to be sign-less for the time being, and with a slate of popular incumbents taking on two poorly funded challengers, we are willing to bet it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
THE RAW NUMBERS
LAST NAME FIRST NAME MIDDLE INITIAL MUNICIPALITY RAISED SPENT ON HAND
All candidates running as part of a joint campaign committee had the amount split equally amongst the candidates.
All candidates whose filings stated that they had not broken $3500 were assigned $2000 as the amount raised, $1000 as the amount spent, and $1000 as the cash on hand amount for mathematical purposes.
All of the Ridgefield Park candidates either did not have ELEC filings or had ELEC filings and were under $3500
>Why corruption thrives in N.J. By BRAD HAYNES Associated Press Writer April 26, 2008
You’d think a six-year streak of corruption convictions by federal prosecutors would be a powerful deterrent to New Jersey officials who consider abusing their power for personal gain.
But the Garden State outpaced its neighbors in federal corruption arrests last year, and the state’s top prosecutor expects just as many officials collared this year.
Since 2002, 128 public employees in New Jersey have been convicted on federal corruption charges. About a third of those were elected officials, including state lawmakers, mayors and town council members.
Those numbers back up New Jersey’s reputation as a corruption hotbed, fueled by TV shows like “The Sopranos.” Experts say the state’s labyrinth of local boards, commissions and councils has created fiefdoms where fraud and abuse flourish.
Even high-profile corruption cases like this month’s conviction of former Newark Mayor Sharpe James won’t end the culture of corruption rooted in many levels of New Jersey government, according to U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie.
“In parts of the state, there have been decades and decades of corruption through generations of public leaders,” Christie told The Associated Press. “I don’t think you’re ever going to end it.”
Since taking office as the state’s top federal prosecutor in 2002, Christie hasn’t lost a corruption case. But he said putting corrupt politicians behind bars is only part of the solution _ to make a measurable dent in the political culture, citizens must hold their elected officials accountable.
“What we’ve been able to do over the past six and a half years is shine a really bright light on the problem,” he said.
Making his task tougher is the shape of New Jersey government itself. Political experts say political power is scattered among the state’s 21 counties, 566 municipalities and 616 school districts, giving corruption more pockets in which to hide.
“There’s an inordinate number of boards, commissions and regulatory authorities,” said Peter Woolley, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “The sheer complexity of New Jersey’s municipal government makes for an atmosphere where it’s much more difficult to identify corruption.”
In 2007, corruption arrests in New Jersey’s single federal district outpaced New York’s four combined districts and Pennsylvania’s three. Compared to 44 federal corruption charges in New Jersey last year, federal prosecutors charged 23 public officials in Pennsylvania and 36 in New York.
U.S. attorney’s offices in Delaware, Maryland and Connecticut each reported a dozen or fewer public employees facing corruption charges last year.
Jay Stewart, executive director of the Better Government Association, a Chicago-based public watchdog organization, said three states, New Jersey, Illinois, and Louisiana, stand out as the nation’s corruption capitals.
“It’s always the same trifecta,” Stewart said. “It’s become part of the political culture _ part of the flavor of the state.”
New Jersey’s federal corruption arrests in 2007 included:
_ Six former mayors, including James, who was convicted of steering cut-rate city land to a one-time mistress.
_ Assemblymen Alfred Steele and Mims Hackett, Jr., charged with trading public influence for bribes. Steele pleaded guilty in October. Hackett has pleaded not guilty.
_ State Sen. Wayne Bryant, charged with steering millions to a medical school in exchange for a no-work job worth tens of thousands of dollars every year. He has pleaded not guilty.
_ Five Pleasantville school board members convicted of steering public contracts in return for bribes.
Of New Jersey’s 150 public employees facing federal corruption charges since 2002, 49 held elected office, including 18 mayors, 15 councilmen and six state lawmakers. All but 20 defendants pending trial were convicted by plea or by jury. Two officials charged in 2005 died before they were tried, according to an AP analysis of U.S. attorney arrest announcements.
The corruption cases ranged from Motor Vehicle Commission employees selling fraudulent licenses to politicians peddling their influence for kickbacks.
The elected officials included 28 Democrats and 16 Republicans, but Christie _ a former top Republican fundraiser appointed by President Bush _ insists his prosecutions are not influenced by his political affiliation.
“If we were just going after people based on their political party, then where is the line of innocent people who were acquitted?” Christie asked. He said the bigger share of Democratic defendants results naturally from prosecuting in a state with a Democratic majority.
Democrats control both houses of the New Jersey Legislature, the governor’s office and both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats. Registered Democrats in the state outnumber registered Republicans by a 3-to-2 margin.
Few of Christie’s critics question his record, but some point to a lucrative contract awarded to his former boss as a sign that the U.S. attorney isn’t above the backroom politics he prosecutes.
Last fall Christie picked former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s legal firm to monitor an orthopedics manufacturer that settled a federal lawsuit. Democrats say Ashcroft’s firm wasn’t qualified for the job, which was worth an estimated $27 million.
“I applaud the work Christie does as prosecutor, but the bottom line is: He doesn’t get a free pass,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J. “Contracts like this invite favoritism and backroom politics _ the very thing he is fighting against.”
Christie has denied any conflict of interest in the decision and said the former attorney general and his firm were qualified for the monitoring work.
Last month, the Justice Department began requiring that contracts for federal monitoring of corporations
At a New Barclays Venue, Hoping for More Exposure By BILL FINLEY
PARAMUS, N.J. — This northern New Jersey city is more than shopping malls. Paramus will host its first PGA Tour event in August when The Barclays comes to the Ridgewood Country Club.
Ridgewood is nestled among the town’s many malls and is just off the Garden State Parkway and Route 17, but it is an oasis in an otherwise bustling borough. Founded in 1890, it has hosted a number of major golf events, including the 2001 Senior P.G.A. Championship, the 1935 Ryder Cup and the 1974 United States Amateur. The list will officially grow Aug. 18 when The Barclays, the first of four events in the 2008 PGA Tour playoffs for the FedEx Cup, begins.
The Barclays had been played at the Westchester Country Club in Harrison, N.Y., since its inception in 1967. According to Rick George, the chief of operations for the PGA Tour, it was decided the event would benefit from a change of scenery.
“Moving an event around to different clubs in a market can be very beneficial and that was kind of the thought process when we were looking at sites to host the event,” George said. “In Ridgewood Country Club, we felt this area would embrace this event as far as the crowd, the gallery and the corporate response. We made a decision that we thought would give this tournament a chance to be even more successful.”
Ridgewood is a 27-hole course that is divided into three nine-hole courses. The Barclays will be contested on what is called the Championship Course, a hybrid consisting of holes from each of the three courses.
“I look forward to the best players in the world playing one of the best golf courses in the world,” David Reasoner, Ridgewood’s head golf professional, said.
The 2009 Barclays will be played at Liberty National in Jersey City. The PGA Tour has not determined where it will be afterward. There have been discussions about the event eventually returning to Westchester.
Tiger Woods did not play at the 2007 Barclays, saying at the time that he was physically and mentally drained. When Woods made the announcement, there was some speculation that he opted out of the tournament because he did not like the course at the Westchester Country Club. It is unclear whether he will compete this year, but Tour officials are optimistic that he will.
“We hope all the players will play all four of the FedEx Cup events,” George said. “The way it is scheduled this year, you don’t have to play four in a row with the way the Ryder Cup is scheduled. That will be beneficial to our players and their schedule. I think our players will be enthusiastic about playing at the Ridgewood Country Club.”
>Despite skyrocketing gas prices, Village Manager Jim Ten Hoeve and Director of Operations Frank Moritz are still commuting back and forth to Village Hall, from their respective out-of-town homes, in Village owned & maintained SUVs.
Ten Hoeve, who lives in Hawthorne, is assigned an unmarked, black Dodge Durango 4WD (EPA rated at 12 mpg city driving).
Moritz, who also serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Ridgewood Water, commutes to Ridgewood from his home in Hasbrouck Heights. His assigned municipal vehicle is a white, unmarked Ford Explorer 4WD (EPA rated at 13 mpg city driving).
Although unmarked, both vehicles do have state issued “Municipal Government” license plates.
Many North Jersey communities are being forced to increase their fuel budgets by tens of thousands of dollars as a result of rapidly rising fuel costs.
We only gained 4,700 jobs in all of 2007 – well below the 29,400 jobs that were originally estimated.
Anybody want to do some quick math on what those numbers will look like if you throw an 800 percent toll hike in 14 years into the mix?
Right. But never fear, New Jersey. The state’s Chamber of Commerce is still foursquare behind the governor’s toll hike plan.
“The New Jersey Chamber of Commerce applauds the Corzine administration for putting forth a bold and aggressive plan designed to reduce out-of-control state debt and create stable long-term funding for much needed transportation projects,” the chamber said today, according to the Ledger.
Has it occurred to the Chamber that at the rate New Jersey is losing jobs – and residents – that if this toll hike goes through, that those much needed transportation projects will be much less needed, unless they apply to roads leading out of here?
“What the job data show is that corporate America is not doing its expansion in New Jersey,” said James W. Hughes, an economist and dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “The disparity between the nation’s job growth and New Jersey is so high.”
Question to the Chamber: Why exactly is corporate America going to choose New Jersey to relocate to when they are facing an 800 percent hike on the toll roads?
Here’s an even scarier statistic: New Jersey’s January job loss of 9,500 was 56 percent of the nation’s 17,000 job loss — even though New Jersey accounts for only 3 percent of the nation’s population, according to the Ledger.
And the toll hike plan is going to turn that around how?
“The job numbers are just awful, and they reflect New Jersey’s standing in the economic world, which is not very high,” said Philip Kirschner, president of the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, a statewide business advocacy group. “Jobs are not being created here, and I think part of it is the perception that this is a state that has not adopted business-friendly policies, and can’t get its own fiscal house in order.”
Question for Gov. Corzine: Before you ax the Commerce Commission, can you get someone to explain how an 800 percent toll hike is a business-friendly policy?
Corzine’s point man on the toll hike plan, Bob Franks, was out at Eagleton last night, urging critics to “lower the rhetoric.”
“For the first time in my adult life, I truly fear for the state of New Jersey,” Franks said. “If we don’t make some serious changes in the way we govern ourselves, we run the risk of passing on fewer opportunities.”
Question for Bob Franks: How is an 800 percent toll hike going to create more opportunities for New Jersey’s middle class?
Meanwhile, before he jetted off to campaign for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Corzine was still touting his toll-hike plan at the Tick-Tock Diner yesterday. He said that he plans to continue his Town Hall meetings, but he expects a “broader discussion” now that he has unveiled his budget cuts. But he bristled at questions at whether the cuts were a way to get people to support his toll hike plan.
“It is a false and cynical assertion that we’re trying to use this to somehow back-door people into” supporting his toll plan, Corzine said, according to Gannett.
By the way, New Jersey was the third highest-ranking “outbound state” last year, with 61 percent of all moves originating in New Jersey leaving for other states, according to a recent migration study. Sixty thousand people left the state.
Question for the governor: And that 800 percent toll hike is going to reverse that trend how?
TO: ALL NEWS MEDIA FROM: PROSECUTOR JOHN MOLINELLI DATE: APRIL 21, 2008
Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli announced the arrest of Mark Nobles, D.O.B.: 06/20/1985 of 328 South Broad Street, Ridgewood, New Jersey, on charges of Sexual Assault (second degree crime) and Endangering the Welfare of a Child (third degree crime-2 counts). A fourteen (14) year old juvenile was also taken into custody and charged with Sexual Assault (second degree crime) during the investigation which resulted in the arrest of Mr. Nobles.
The arrest came about as a result of an investigation conducted by members of the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Sex Crimes and Child Abuse Squad, under the direction of Chief Joseph Macellaro, and the Saddle Brook Police Department, under the direction of Chief Robert Kugler.
On Friday, April 18, 2008, a fourteen(14) year old female disclosed to detectives from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office that she had been sexually assaulted by twenty two (22) year old Mark Nobles and a fourteen(14) year old male on Wednesday, April 16, 2008. The incident occurred in Saddle Brook, New Jersey after the victim and several other juveniles had been supplied with alcohol by Mr. Nobles.
On Friday, April 18, 2008, twenty two(22) year old Mark Nobles and the fourteen(14) year old juvenile were placed under arrest by members of the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, Sex Crimes and Child Abuse Squad, and the Saddle Brook Police Department.
Honorable Patrick J. Roma, J.S.C., set bail for Mark Nobles at 100,000.00 with no 10% cash option and no contact with the victim or her family. In lieu of bail, Mr. Nobles was remanded to the Bergen County Jail. The fourteen(14) year old juvenile was remanded to the Bergen County Juvenile Detention Center.
Prosecutor Molinelli states that the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and would like to thank the Saddle Brook Police Department for their assistance and cooperation in the investigation. CHARGE INFORMATION FORM
DEFENDANT: Mark Nobles DOB: 06/20/1985
LAST KNOWN ADDRESS: 328 South Broad Street, Ridgewood, NJ
MARITAL STATUS: Single
PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT: NAR Towing, Ramsey, NJ
ARREST INFORMATION FUGITIVE: NON FUGITIVE: X
ORIGINATING AGENCY: Saddle Brook Police Department
CASE DETECTIVE: Linda McNulty DATE AND TIME OF ARREST: 4/18/08 @ 5:30 p.m.
AGENCIES AFFECTING ARREST: Saddle Brook Police Department Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, Sex Crimes andChild Abuse Squad CHARGE AND STATUTE CITATIONS
2C:14-2c(4) Sexual Assault (1 count) 2nd Degree 2C:24-4a Endangering the Welfare of a Child (2 counts) 3rd Degree
ARRAIGNMENT INFORMATION ARRAIGNMENT DATE: April 23, 2008 @ 5:30 p.m. JUDGE: Honorable Nicholas Nasarenko, J.M.C.. BAIL AMOUNT & CONDITIONS: $100,000.00 with no 10% cash option No contact with the victim or victim’s family.
LAST DAY to REGISTER for MUNICIPAL ELECTION is APRIL 22nd
The Village of Ridgewood will be holding its Municipal Election, to elect three Councilmembers to the Ridgewood Village Council, on May 13, 2008. The terms are for four years. The polls will be open from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Sample ballots for the election will be mailed out one week prior to the election, and the polling places are the same as the ones used in all other elections.
The last day to register to vote for the Municipal Election is Tuesday, April 22, 2008. Voter registration will take place in the Village Clerk’s Office from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on that day, and the Deputy Village Clerk will also be in the Library lobby on April 22nd from 4:30 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. to register voters.
An absentee ballot application must be received by the Bergen County Clerk’s Office no later than Tuesday, May 6, 2008 in order to allow ample time for the absentee ballot to be sent to the voter. After May 6th, voters may vote by absentee ballot by going in person to the Bergen County Clerk’s Office, One Bergen County Plaza, Room 130, Hackensack, NJ up until May 12, 2008 at 3:00 p.m.
If you have any further questions about the Municipal Election, please contact the Village Clerk’s Office at 201-670-5500 ext. 201 or ext. 205.
> The debate over mathematics curricula is prominent as we vote on April 15th for two seats on the Ridgewood Board of Education (BOE). That’s why I’m voting for Sarah-Kate Maskin and Greg Lois . They are the only two candidates that are flatly against the BOE’s march toward reform math. This march continues even as evidence mounts that reform math curricula including TERC, Everyday Math, and CMP2 are worsening the broken system of mathematics education in the U.S.
Reform math was dealt a major blow in September 2006 when the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) reversed its 1989 call for students to ‘discover’ free-flowing solutions to mathematical problems. Instead, the NCTM called for a return to fluency in basic arithmetic for grades K-5. Yet our BOE responded last year by continuing to tout the 1989 standards, and expanding Everyday Mathematics in our elementary schools, and introducing CMP2 to our middle schools.
Hundreds of Mathematicians have dealt additional blows by signing petitions against reform math. Notable was Alan Greenspan ’s comment in his recent autobiography: “I always wondered how you can learn math unless you have a thorough grounding in the basics and concentrate on a very few subjects at a time. Asking children to use their imagination before they know what they are imagining about seemed vacuous to me.”
Parents who brought these concerns to the BOE were met with condescension.
Greenspan’s view was reinforced in the long-awaited report by President Bush ’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP). The report calls for fluency and automatic recall of basic arithmetic in K-5, and for concentration on fewer subjects to allow mastery. But reform curricula in our schools, including TERC, Everyday Math, and CMP2 don’t value or teach fluency, and they quickly skip over many subjects, not allowing time for mastery.
The NMAP report should have dealt the final blow to reform math, but not for the Ridgewood BOE. Instead of honestly comparing current curricula to the NMAP recommendations, they trolled the report for sound-bites that justify their actions.
It’s time for a change in the Ridgewood BOE. That’s why I’m voting for Maskin & Lois. While there are many other issues, curriculum choice is paramount. Votes for Maskin & Lois are against clinging to the pendulum as it swings to the extreme of the next education fad. Votes for Maskin & Lois are for critical thinking and sound curricula.
>Answers of Sarah-Kate Maskin & Greg Lois, Candidates for Ridgewood Board of Education To “10 Questions” Posed by The Ridgewood Blog March 21, 2008
1) Would you support the expansion of the BOE from the current five member board to a seven member BOE?
Answer: Ridgewood is a “J” district- that means that Ridgewood is one of 25 schools that falls into the highest categorization of personal income of its residents. Out of these 25 school districts, 14 have nine board members. Of the remaining eleven that we have data for, only four districts (including Ridgewood) have 5 members of the Board.
Given the size of our student population (second-biggest in our “J” category) and the small size of our Board one would expect that this small-decision making body would be more agile than a larger board.
Our experience in observing this board indicates that this “agility” which is born from “smallness” is wasted: we do not have a dynamic, quick-moving board. In opposite, we have a board that seems overwhelmed and which does not seem to question the administrators.
We would support the expansion of the Board from five to seven members.
[Our research on the other “J” districts follows:
Bedminster Township, New Jersey K-8. 620 students. Nine board members.
Bernards Township School District 5,404 students. Operates K-12. Nine school board members.
Chester Township Public School District K-8 only, approximately 1,500 students. Nine board members.
Cranbury School 650 students. K-8. Nine board members.
Essex Fells, New Jersey K-8. 271 students. Five board members.
Glen Rock Public Schools K-12. 2,472 students. Nine members.
Haddonfield Public Schools K-12. 2,377. Nine members.
Harding Township, New Jersey K-8. 321 students. (Bd of Ed website down).
Ho-Ho-Kus Public School K-8. 650 students. Five members.
Little Silver School District K-8. 802 students. Seven members.
Mendham Borough Schools K-8. 650 students. Nine members.
Mendham Township Public Schools K-8. 926 students. Seven members.
Millburn Township Public Schools K-12. 4,573 students. Nine members.
Montgomery Township School District K-12. 4,917 students. Eight board members.
Mountain Lakes Schools K-12. 1,631 students. Nine members.
North Caldwell Public Schools K-6. 731 students. Website down.
Plainsboro Township, New Jersey Plainsboro and West Windsor are part of a combined school district, the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District. 9,016 students. Nine members.
Ridgewood Public Schools K-12. 5,551 students. Five members.
Rumson School District K-8. 986 students. Nine members.
Saddle River School District K-5. 207 students. Five board members.
School District of the Chathams K-12. 3,380 students. Nine members.
Tewksbury Township Schools K-8. 753 students. Nine members.
Upper Saddle River School District K-8. 1,344 students. Seven members.
West Windsor Township, New Jersey See Plainsboro. Plainsboro and West Windsor are part of a combined school district, the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District. 9,016 students. Nine members.
Woodcliff Lake Public Schools K-8. 895 students. Seven members.]
2) “In light of the unexpected departure caused by Mr. Brooks, what have you changed in your approach to a search for a superintendent candidate and what changes you have, if any, in the criteria for the superintendent candidate?
Answer: We would start by conducting a search within our current staff to find a “home-grown” replacement.
Instead of simply “listing qualities” of a “dream superintendent” we think it is more important to (a) identify the problems we are facing and then (b) describe what type of leader we need in Ridgewood to address our problems.
(a) Problems – the challenges we expect our next Superintendent to deal with:
Our leadership staff (Principals) and teaching staff have had to endure a ‘revolving door’ of Superintendents. We need someone who is committed to Ridgewood – who will live here and become part of the community. This will inspire our staff and leadership and show that our superintendent is here to stay, and not just “passing through.” Permanence will lend credibility to our next Superintendent.
Ridgewood is heading into a crisis with the infrastructure in our schools. In the next 3-5 years our community-members (taxpayers) are going to have to face up to the years of neglect our lovely buildings and grounds have endured. This will be expensive. In the next several months and years not only does our Board have to show the taxpayers of Ridgewood they can exercise fiscal responsibility, but our superintendent must lead us towards the necessary reinvestment and rebuilding of our school infrastructure. This new Superintendent must demonstrate fiscal responsibility in order to convince the taxpayers that any ‘Second question’ or capital improvement monies will not be “frittered away”-the Superintendent must lead the way and build a community-wide optimism in rehabilitating our crumbling schools.
We have an instructional crisis in Ridgewood-our district has become embroiled in “Math Wars.” Our next Superintendent should have a strong instructional background so she/he can steer our district clear of “fads,” “experiments,” and “unproven reforms.”
The Superintendent must reduce our overhead and “flatten” the organizational tree. For example, why have the facilities supervisor report to the Business Administrator? The facilities manager should report directly to the Superintendent. This will “free up” our business administrator (and maybe we will not have to hire an assistant for our business administrator). Our next superintendent must reduce inefficient staffing.
(b) To adequately address these problems, Ridgewood’s superintendent should possess the following qualities:
Possess the highest standards and maintain the highest aspirations for Ridgewood – demonstrate a belief that Ridgewood can be #1; Show a commitment to Ridgewood (permanence); Be fiscally responsible and prepared to reduce waste; and Have a strong instructional background.
3) What is your plan for ensuring Ridgewood kids receive a world-class education?
Answer: The Maskin-Lois plan is: (a) The Board must set the following goal for our school leadership and instructional staff: We must be #1 in Bergen County and #1 in New Jersey. Tolerance of other standards of success (such as the Board’s discussion of simply ‘meeting state standards’ and espousing success via state test scores) is a waste of time. Let’s focus on getting back to where we should be: #1. (b) The Board must select and support an outstanding new Superintendent. (c) The Board must create community-wide support for massive infrastructure improvement, including facilities, technology, and grounds. As set forth in our other answers, the Board must establish credibility within the community by demonstrating fiscal responsibility (doing more with less, identifying efficiencies, and cutting out the waste). The Board must come up with a sustainable and responsible plan to repair our school buildings in a timely fashion, involve the community, and secure the resources necessary to support the infrastructure development.
4) Do our HSA’s have a purpose beyond fundraising? If so, what is it and how can you help them achieve it?
Answer: We have a talented, educated, and capable parent community that is willing to help our schools achieve excellence. To ask our HSA’s to solely fundraise diminishes the possibilities our parents can offer to benefit our schools, children, and faculty.
We believe the role of the HSA should be an avenue for parents to express their ideas, concerns, needs and goals within each school involving all topics that impact our children. The HSA’s in return can provide the parent voice by communicating directly to the principal at their meetings and then to the superintendent. This allows for changing that avenue from a one-way street to a two-way street.
5) What role should NJ’s state standards or lack thereof play in selecting our curriculum and do you agree with the direction the academic program has taken in Ridgewood Schools?
Answer: Our goal must be to be #1 in Bergen County and #1 in New Jersey. That does not mean “#1 in NJASK, GEPA, and HSPA testing.” There is a need for improvement regarding our academic programming.
One example is the Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop. Our model is effective in producing solid results for elementary student achievement in both reading and writing. However, grammar and language mechanics are missing from this model. We should include grammar and language mechanics into our program.
Another area of our academic programming that must be addressed is the methodology of instruction dictated by district administrators. Our children spend a disproportionate amount of time working in groups or partnering with other students throughout all academic domains.
Our district must unify our curricula throughout all of our schools. Unifying the curricula will save tax dollars, guarantee the same content is provided to each student, and eliminate the divisiveness felt among parents that “one school is better than another.” We all live in Ridgewood, and creating unity has powerful results.
6) Is a “state teaching certification” enough to satisfy our standards for teachers we hire?
Answer: Of course not. By law, all teachers must be state certified. That is merely the “minimum” requirement. We must continue to recruit outstanding teachers and invest in our teachers (continuing education, workshops, etc.). Ridgewood traditionally hired only those teachers who had at least three years experience. We would consider a return to this practice to ensure our children have experienced teachers.
7) Would require redistricting our elementary and middle schools to lower the student teacher ratio?
Answer: There are many things we could do to lower the student-teacher ratio in our schools.
For example, Benjamin Franklin Middle School has a very high student-to-teacher ratio. The ratio of students to teachers at Benjamin Franklin is nearly 25 to 1. The New Jersey middle-school average is closer to 19 to 1.
Principal Orsini took an innovative approach to this high student-to-teacher ratio: he looked at ways of re-scheduling the class offerings to maximize his student-to-teacher ratio. The school is moving to a different scheduling system and Principal Orsini expects that this change alone will reduce the student to teacher ratio at BF. Changing the schedule is obviously a more cost-effective approach than simply hiring more instructional staff and does not require redistricting.
The mission of the school board and their administrators, consultants, leaders, etc., is to find and encourage efficient and innovative solutions to district problems, like the high student-to-teacher ratio at BF.
8) How do you think the recently released report of the President’s Math Panel should impact and inform our current discussion of Ridgewood’s math curriculum?
Answer: The recent math panel report does not support the adoption of reform math teaching methods in our schools. The Math panel found that knowledge of basic math facts (using standard algorithms to solve equations) is necessary to comprehend math concepts.
It is a waste of learner’s time and taxpayer dollars to re-train our teachers and re-purchase new instructional materials to teach reform math.
We believe the traditional math instructional model, which has always been used in Ridgewood, best follows the math panel recommendations.
The report also recommends moving away from the spiral topic sequencing approach that reform math advocates espouse. The reform math currently in use at some of our elementary schools relies on a spiral approach and eliminates standard algorithms. At the middle school level, ‘Connected Mathematics Program 2 (CMP2)’ was rolled in for the sixth and seventh graders. It will follow them next year as they enter eighth grade. This middle school math program follows a spiral approach to learning and instruction.
After reading the President’s Math Panel Report, we strongly urge our administrators and Board to jettison all reform math programs from our district as not meeting the recommendations of the report.
We believe a traditional math program provides the necessary content and rigor to prepare our students mathematically and these suggestions are outlined in the Report. Any quality traditional math program inherently builds into its text both strategies and problem solving skills that reform math so highly promotes. Textbooks are a must. Sarah-Kate has sat on curriculum committees and knows it is absolutely possible to unify our districts math instruction with a top quality, proven successful program for this coming September.
For your information, below is a letter that Ms. Maskin emailed to our Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction on March 17, 2008.
Dear Ms. Botsford,
I am sure you have had an opportunity to read through the President’s Math Panel report that was released last week.
Now that it is published with its clear recommendations regarding K-8 mathematics, the district, I hope, will abandon its idea of partnering with a local university.
Short of the implicit response to re-train our teachers, I can’t imagine that this said partnership could possibly offer anything as insightful and detailed as outlined by the President’s National Math Panel. This august and inclusive assembly of experts spent two years researching and collecting information–something we could not do given our limited resources.
The guidance has been provided and I am sure that this report can truly help our district find a resolve to the current state of math programming here in Ridgewood.
Most importantly, do you still see any reason why delaying the implementation of a math program is necessary given its huge cost of another lost year for so many of our students. I look forward to your reply.
Regards, Sarah-Kate Maskin
9) The BOE believes it has sought ways to improve communication with parents. Has it been successful and if not, what will you do to enhance this aspect of the board’s communication?
Answer: 70.6% of survey-takers said that the current Board does not “accept or want parent input” and 69.7% said that they “don’t feel well-represented by this Board.” (Source: web survey taken by Maskin & Lois for School Board – available online at https://www.OurRidgewoodSchools.com). Based on the results of our polling, the Board has not been successful in improving communication with parents.
Communicating with parents and the community is incredibly important because we are facing several challenges in the coming months: the hiring of a new superintendent, the restoration of a mission of excellence (we must be #1 in Bergen County and #1 in New Jersey and not accept anything less), and the fiscal pressures presented by our decaying infrastructure.
Our campaign exemplifies how to communicate with parents and the community: we have sent direct mail, sent email, created web surveys, drafted a website, and we have individually responded to questions presented by the community (in person at HSA meetings and through correspondence, like these responses). We do not think that the community’s communication expectations should have to change once campaign season is over and the lawn signs go to recycling.
We think the Board must do more to make their website responsive, to incorporate surveys and polling where appropriate, and to consider moving meetings away from Cottage Place and into the individual schools (The BOE has said they can’t hold meetings in the schools because of the location of the TV cameras . . . if the Orchard HSA can webcast their meetings remotely, surely the Board can too!)
Our district’s communication is one way and ineffective. The Board talks about being transparent but in reality, falls short. One of our goals is to provide the public with all information. Currently, the Board and administration impart carefully selected items that equates a partial picture.
There is a chain of command a parent must undergo when voicing their concerns about an educational issue. What has happened specifically regarding math could just as easily be about any issue. It is not the topic; it is the attitude of the Board that is of great concern and we would like that to change to truly represent the parent and tax-payer voice. It is our intent to make sure that no parent must experience the exasperating ordeal of being ignored. These are our children and our hard-earned tax dollars. Parents should be heard and respected in the process. Ms. Brogan does not share in this philosophy; her actions over the past few years demonstrate this point.
We would:
• Provide board minutes on the BOE website; • Provide tallies of how Board members voted on issues before the Board; • Hold Board meetings in all of the schools (on a rotating basis); • Allow write-in (or emailed in) questions to be read into the record at public meetings if a resident can not attend; • Continue our use of web surveys (see www.OurRidgewoodSchools.com) to include annual reviews of each school by the parents and community; • Consider increasing the size of the Board to better address and represent taxpayer’s and resident’s issues (from 5 to 7 members); and • Encourage community participation in the work of the Board committees.
Finally, we remind you that the ultimate communications tool is your vote: if you do not like the direction the school system is heading, vote for change!
10) Where would you rank the quality of our facilities and fields on a scale of 1 to 10? How would you handle the responsibility of ensuring that our facilities and fields are maintained?
Answer: We give the quality and quantity of our recreational facilities a “5” out of “10.” Given that 1 in 4 residents of Ridgewood is a child (25%), versus a national average of 18%, open space and recreational opportunities are very important for our youth.
I direct you to the ‘Ridgewood Comprehensive Parks, Fields, and Recreation Master Plan’ (2nd Draft) (available here: https://www.ridgewoodnj.net/main.cfm?ArticleID=498). This plan provides a ten-year incremental map of recreational facilities development. The plan anticipates a ‘sharing’ of costs between the BOE and Village for fields and facilities (tennis courts, basketball courts, etc.).
The allocation of field resources (as opposed to the maintenance and creation of new resources) can be done more efficiently. A greater sharing of facilities between the BOE, the Bergen County park system, the YMCA of Greater Bergen County must be explored in addition to the sharing of township resources. The village has 16 parks and the BOE operates and controls 11 ‘active recreation facilities.’
Our Master Plan calls for the acquisition of additional properties over the next ten years. This is a joint plan involving the Village Council as well as the BOE.
We would fight to fully fund our infrastructure maintenance plan and improve our recreational fields. We do not think that we must “sacrifice” one part of our system (facilities, fields) at the expense of another.
The issue of field maintenance and recreational expense is really about the overall budget. Here is Greg Lois’ Letter to the Editor published in the March 21, 2008 Ridgewood News:
Dear Editor:
I asked Board Member Brogan whether she agreed with the statement that “The proposed 2008 budget does not include full funding for the infrastructure maintenance as presented in the LAN Associates district plan and does not include full funding for the recreational facilities maintenance and upkeep as set forth in the Schoor DePalma master plan.”
Ms. Brogan agreed with that statement.
She then went on to speak at length about why our district did fully fund the maintenance and recreational facilities plans. She specifically said it was problem of “allocating resources” and that the infrastructure needs had to be balanced with instructional costs, etc. The answer was quite lengthy and there was no time for other questions after the long response.
I am writing this letter because I do not want the attendees to get the wrong impression from Ms. Brogan’s response. Specifically, I want your HSA members to know that I do not subscribe to Ms. Brogan’s “shrinking pie” theory of the school budget, where we as Board members can do nothing better than just “slice up the pie” between competing school needs. I want your Association members to know that there is a more realistic and optimistic approach to addressing the district’s financial needs.
It’s not a static pie. The pie expands when efficiencies are found.
In order to most easily understand my approach to the school budget process I will provide an example of it in practice.
Benjamin Franklin Middle School has a very high student-to-teacher ratio. The ratio of students to teachers at Benjamin Franklin is nearly 25 to 1. The New Jersey middle-school average is closer to 19 to 1.
Principal Orsini took an innovative approach to this high student to teacher ratio-he looked at ways of re-scheduling the class offerings to maximize his student-to-teacher ratio. The school is moving to a different scheduling system and Principal Orsini expects that this change alone will reduce the student to teacher ratio at BF. Changing the schedule is obviously a more cost-effective approach than simply hiring more instructional staff.
In the BF example, the application of a different scheduling system (a time management system) “expanded” the budget “pie” and the school district is able to provide a benefit (lower student to teacher ratio at BF) without significant cost increase.
The mission of the school board and their administrators, consultants, leaders, etc., is to find and encourage these types of efficiencies. In relation to the budget, this really should be “job one” for the Board members. Not to throw their hands up, say “well this is all we can do” and give up. Not to lead us to believe that every added benefit (like lower teacher to student ratio) comes at the cost to some other district aspiration.
I was hoping to confront Ms. Brogan’s “shrinking pie” budget theory at the meeting. I am sorry we ran short of time because I really think that focusing on efficiencies and the application of technology (like the new time-scheduling system at BF) will be more successful for Ridgewood.
The question really becomes “how much more pie can we find?” in the current budget. I think there is plenty of efficiency to be found.
I have not given up on fully funding our infrastructure maintenance plan and improving our recreational fields. I do not think that we must “sacrifice” one part of our system (facilities, fields) at the expense of another (according to Ms. Brogan, “everything else”). Very Truly, Greg Lois
Please visit our website (www.OurRidgewoodSchools.com) for more information and information about our platform. Please contact the candidates with any questions regarding these responses. Sarah-Kate can be contacted directly at [email protected] . Greg can be contacted at [email protected].
>Poll Finds Almost Half of New Jersey Adults Want to Move Out of State Thursday , October 18, 2007
By Sara Bonisteel
ADVERTISEMENT Even New Jerseyans can’t stand living in New Jersey, according to a new poll that said nearly half of adults residing in the Garden State want to pull up stakes.
The Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Poll, released Wednesday, found 49 percent of those polled would rather live somewhere else.
New Jersey already is suffering from an image problem and bears the brunt of jokes because of its corruption and pollution problems. But 58 percent of those residents polled said the heavy financial burden of just living in the state is no laughing matter, and that’s why they want to leave.
Poll participants cited high property taxes (28 percent), the cost of living (19 percent), state taxes (5 percent) and housing costs (6 percent) as the main reasons they want out. The poll also found that 51 percent of those who expressed a desire to leave planned to do so, with adults under the age of 50 making between $50,000 and $100,000 the most likely to flee.
“If you have the ability to leave and you don’t see any possibility for change with the way the state is run — and that’s the No. 1 issue here — you have to vote with your feet,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.
The study did not surprise New Jersey’s politicians.
“The high cost of living in the Northeast is not news,” Brendan Gilfillan, a spokesman for Gov. Jon Corzine, said in an e-mail statement. “But it is one of the reasons Gov. Corzine has worked tirelessly to help poor and working-class residents of New Jersey by implementing the Earned Income Tax Credit, expanding S-CHIP and increasing — and sustaining — property tax relief.”
Gilfillan said Corzine also had cut costs by reducing the government workforce, though he noted people would continue to leave New Jersey as baby boomers retired.
“Demographics are only going to accentuate this trend, as the bulk of these folks have yet to leave the workforce,” Gilfillan said.
But Republican Assemblyman Richard Merkt said it was the fiscal policies of the governor and legislature that were to blame for the exodus.
“It’s no wonder that New Jersey is a national joke,” he said. “We’ve done it to ourselves with these just positively irresponsible policies.”
The Monmouth University poll, which was conducted over the telephone with 801 New Jersey adults from Sept. 27 to Sept. 30, did not predict a mass exodus, at least not yet. Of those residents polled, 44 percent would like to stay and 7 percent were not sure. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
But a Rutgers University report released last week found that New Jersey, with nearly 9 million people, is experiencing a population loss and said the number of residents who had left the state more than tripled from 2002 to 2006, with 231,565 people moving elsewhere.
The Rutgers Regional Report, which examined U.S. Census Bureau and Internal Revenue Service data, noted 72,547 people left in 2006, ranking New Jersey fourth — behind California, Louisiana and New York — among states with the highest population losses in the nation.
High prices aren’t the only thing driving people out. New Jersey ex-pats headed in droves to warmer climates, with 124,584 moving to Florida and 29,803 moving to North Carolina. Others (42,459) moved to neighboring Pennsylvania.
That migration depleted the state’s tax coffers of an estimated $10 billion in personal income and $680 million in sales tax, according to the Rutgers report.
“This really illustrates among a lot of other things that the public has thrown up their hands,” Murray said. “They don’t feel that there’s anything they can do that would change the situation.”
And unless there’s change, Merkt said, the flight will continue.
“One can only hope that the pendulum will stop swinging this way and start moving back the other way ’cause if it doesn’t, you’re going to see 9 million people suffer,” he said.
“Or you’re going to see the last person over the Delaware turn out the lights.”
>Ready, Set, Relax! is one town’s effort to stop hyper-parenting, in this exclusive excerpt.
Apr 05, 2008 04:30 AM Carl Honoré
Ridgewood is the sort of place that comes to mind when people talk about the American dream. Nestled in the woodlands of northern New Jersey, this quiet, verdant town of 25,000 souls breathes affluence and well-being. The locals work hard at high-powered jobs in Manhattan, but they enjoy the fruits of their labour. Large, handsome houses sit on spacious lots dotted with swing sets and trampolines. Luxury sedans and shiny SUVs glide along wide streets lined with oak, dogwood and maple trees.
Move in a little closer, though, and this happy portrait starts to fray round the edges. At the school gates, around the tables in the local diner, and in the supermarket parking lot, you hear the people of Ridgewood voicing the same complaint: we may live inside a 21st-century Garden of Eden, but we are too damn busy to enjoy it.
Many families here are scheduled up to the eyeballs. Caught between work and home, parents struggle to find time for friends, romance, or even a decent night’s sleep. Their children are in the same boat, filling the hours not already occupied by school work with organized extracurricular activities. Some 10-year-olds in Ridgewood are so busy they carry Palm Pilots to keep track of their appointments. Eating dinner or doing homework in the car while travelling to swimming or the riding club is common here. One local mother emails an updated family schedule to her husband and two sons every evening. Another keeps her timetable pinned to the front door and the underside of the sun visor in her people carrier. With so many schedules to mesh, with so much going on, even getting toddlers together for a playdate can be a logistical nightmare. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons was penned with places like Ridgewood in mind. It depicts two little girls waiting for the school bus, each holding a personal planner. One tells the other, “Okay, I’ll move ballet back an hour, reschedule gymnastics, and cancel piano. … You shift your violin lessons to Thursday and skip soccer practice. … That gives us from 3:15 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. on Wednesday the 16th to play.”
Unlike other towns, though, Ridgewood has taken a stand against overstuffed schedules. What started with a few moms grumbling over coffee at the kitchen table has blossomed into a mini-movement. In 2002, Ridgewood pioneered an annual event called Ready, Set, Relax! The idea is that one day a year this alpha town takes a breather: teachers assign no homework, extracurricular activities are cancelled, and parents make a point of coming home early from the office. The aim is to cast off the tyranny of the timetable, to let children rest, play, or just daydream, and to give families time together that is not built around driving to the next volleyball practice or band rehearsal.
Hundreds of households put down their planners to take part in Ready, Set, Relax! and the event has inspired towns across North America, not all of them as well-heeled as Ridgewood, to follow suit. To help out frazzled families, the school board in Sidney, N.Y., a blue-collar hamlet 210 kilometres northwest of here, no longer schedules any extracurricular activities or meetings after 4:30 p.m. on Wednesdays. In 2007, Amos, a small forest and mining town in northwestern Quebec, held its first activity-free day based on the Ridgewood model. Marcia Marra, a mother of three who helped set up Ready, Set, Relax! in tandem with a local mental health agency, hopes the tide is turning. “People are starting to see that when their lives and their children’s lives are scheduled to the hilt, everyone suffers,” she says. “Structured activities can be great for kids, but things are just out of control now.”
This is not a new panic. Warnings about children being overscheduled, racing from one enriching activity to the next, first surfaced in the early 20th century. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a popular novelist-cum-parenting guru, warned in 1914 that American parents were stripping childhood of its “blessed spontaneity” by placing “a constricting pressure upon the children to use even the chinks and fragments of their time to acquire accomplishments which seem to us profitable.” In 1931, Ruth Frankel, a pioneering cancer specialist in Canada, described how “the modern child, with his days set into a patterned program, goes docilely from one prescribed class to another, takes up art and music and French and dancing … until there is hardly a minute left.” Her fear was that overscheduled children would grow so jaded that they would turn “desperately to the corner movie in an effort to escape ennui.”
That same worry has reached fever pitch over the last generation. Books with titles like The Hurried Child and The Overscheduled Child have carved out shelf space in the library of modern parenting. Even the kids’ section has tackled the topic. In The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Pressure, the famous ursine family goes into stress meltdown because Sister and Brother Bear are enrolled in too many after-school activities.
Why are so many children so busy today? One reason is the rise of the working mother. When moms stayed home, it was easier just to let the kids play around the house. But as women entered the workplace and the extended family dissolved, someone else had to pick up the slack on the child-care front. Extracurricular activities fit the bill perfectly, promising not only supervision but also enrichment. Yet putting children on a tight schedule is not always a response to the child-care gap. Many stay-at-home moms also sign their children up for endless activities. Part of this is self-defence: when every other kid in the neighbourhood is booked solid, who is going to indulge in free play with your unscheduled child? In our atomized, bowling-alone society, organized activities are also a good way – sometimes the only way – to meet other parents. Nor does it help that many extracurricular activities are designed like a slippery slope: you sign up your 4-year-old daughter for a weekly dance lesson, and then, before you know it, she has a class every other night and is travelling across the country to compete. Rather than rock the boat, though, we persuade ourselves that lots of scheduled activities are just what children need and want, even when they tell us otherwise. The other day I watched a mother drag her 3-year-old daughter from a nursery school near our house. The child was weeping. “I don’t want to go to ballet,” she howled. “I want to go home and play.”
No one is saying that extracurricular activities are bad. On the contrary, they are an integral part of a rich and happy childhood. Many kids, particularly in lower-income families, would actually benefit from more structured activities. Plenty of children, especially teenagers, thrive on a busy schedule. But just as other trappings of modern childhood, from homework to technology, are subject to the law of diminishing returns, there is a danger of overscheduling the young. When it comes to extracurricular activities, many children are getting too much of a good thing.
Wayne Yankus, a pediatrician in Ridgewood since the early 1980s, reckons that 65 per cent of his patients are now victims of overscheduling. He says the symptoms include headaches, sleep disorders, gastric problems caused by stress or by eating too late at night, and fatigue. “Fifteen years ago it was unusual to see a tired 10-year-old,” says Yankus. “Now it’s common.” Recently he hired a therapist to spend one day a week in his office to talk to families about the need to prune their planners.
The extracurricular merry-go-round can also ensnare the family in a vicious cycle. Parents resent children for taking up so much time and costing so much money – Britons spend £12 billion a year on their children’s hobbies, half of which are abandoned within five weeks – while children resent their parents’ resentment. Activities overload also squeezes out time for the unscheduled, simple stuff that brings families together – relaxed conversation, cuddling, shared meals or just hanging out together in companionable silence. Yankus sees this disconnect in many Ridgewood households. “When the snow comes and the activities get cancelled, everyone is horrified because they’re suddenly stuck at home and have to deal with each other,” he says. “They don’t know how to get along without a schedule.”
Ridgewood does not shut down completely on Ready, Set, Relax! day. Some residents regard the event as silly or patronizing. Sporting matches arranged with neighbouring districts are not cancelled, and the homework ban is not always as strictly enforced as it could be, especially in high school. Yet the town does feel different on the big day. With fewer soccer moms running red lights, the traffic is less frantic. People are more likely to stop and chat than exchange a brief nod before pointing to their watch and rushing off to the next appointment. To many families, Ready, Set, Relax! has been an epiphany. More than a third of those who took part in 2006 trimmed their schedules afterward. Consider the Givens. The three children used to be enrolled in so many after-school activities that there was barely time to eat, sleep or talk. Even though she felt overwhelmed and often found herself jogging round the supermarket to save a few seconds, Jenny, the mother, somehow felt that it was her duty to keep the family maxed out on extracurricular pursuits. “Every activity that comes up you want your kids to try, and you fear that you are failing them if they are not busy every second,” she says. “You want the best for them, but always at the back of your mind, even if you don’t admit it, you have the fantasy that they might turn out to be brilliant at something, that by signing them up for an activity you might uncover some latent genius.”
In the Given household, that translated into an eye-watering barrage of art classes, Spanish lessons, soccer, lacrosse, softball, volleyball, basketball, baseball, tennis, scouts and book club. Every weekend, the parents would split up to ferry the children to their various activities. At home, time and tempers were short. Ready, Set, Relax! came as a wake-up call. On the first night, the Givens made Mexican food and chocolate chip cookies together. Then they got down Cadoo, a board game that had been sitting unopened on the shelf since Christmas. The evening rolled along in a riot of laughter and cuddles. “It was an amazing revelation for all of us,” says Jenny. “It was just such a relief not to be rushing off to the next thing on the to-do list.”
After the Ready, Set, Relax! night, the Givens cut back, keeping only activities the children are passionate about. Today Kathryn, 16, does an art class, Spanish lessons, and a book club. Chris, 14, plays on basketball and baseball teams while Rosie, 12, concentrates on soccer, tennis and lacrosse. The whole family is more relaxed, and the children are all doing better at school since the cutback. The spirit of Ready, Set, Relax! has rippled out into other initiatives in Ridgewood. Every Wednesday, weather permitting, about 80 children aged 4 to 7 are now let loose in the playground of the local primary school. This is Free Play Day and parents are confined to the sidelines. Left to their own devices, the children skip, play hide-and-seek and tag, make up stories, throw balls around, sing and wrestle. The noise is exhilarating, the child equivalent of a Wall of Sound. To many parents it is a revelation. “It never occurred to me to do this, to just let them play like this,” says one mother. “You always feel like you have to be organizing something for them, but actually you don’t.”
There is, of course, something absurd – even a little tragic – about having to schedule unscheduled time, yet given the world we live in, that is probably the first step for many families. And clearly the Ready, Set, Relax! movement reflects a wider rethink.
Harvard urges incoming freshmen to check their overscheduling ways at the door. Posted on the university website, an open letter by Harry Lewis, a former dean of the undergraduate school, warns students that they will get more out of college, and indeed life, if they do less and concentrate on the things that really fire their passion. Lewis also takes aim at the notion that everything young people do must have a measurable payoff or contribute toward crafting the perfect resumé. “You may balance your life better if you participate in some activities purely for fun, rather than to achieve a leadership role that you hope might be a distinctive credential for postgraduate employment. The human relationships you form in unstructured time with your roommates and friends may have a stronger influence on your later life than the content of some of the courses you are taking.”
Most families that ease the load end up spending more time eating together. In a hurry-up, hyper-scheduled culture, where dining al desko, in front of the TV or computer, in the street or in the car is commonplace, the family meal often falls by the wayside. One study found that a fifth of British families never eat together. The irony is that many of the benefits extracurricular activities, including homework, purport to deliver may actually by achieved through the simple act of breaking bread en famille. Studies in many countries show that children who have regular family meals are more likely to do well at school, enjoy good mental health, and eat nutritious food; they are also less likely to engage in underage sex or use drugs and alcohol.
A Harvard study concluded that family meals promote language development even more than does family story reading. Another survey found that the only common denominator among National Merit Scholars in the United States, regardless of race or social class, was having a regular family dinner. Of course, we’re talking here about meals where both parents and children ask questions, discuss ideas at length and tell anecdotes rather than just watch TV and grunt “pass the salt.”
Why does a proper family meal pay such handsome dividends? When it comes to diet, the answer is obvious. A 9-year-old boy is more likely to finish his greens, or to eat any vegetables at all, in front of his mom and dad than when he is dining alone at the computer in his bedroom. Sitting around the dinner table, taking part in conversation, also teaches children that they are loved and cherished for who they are, rather than for what they do. They learn to talk, listen, reason, and compromise – all those essential ingredients of a high EQ. Of course, no one is saying that family meals are always a bed of roses. Sometimes they are sheer hell. Gathering tired toddlers, sullen teenagers and stressed parents around the table can be a recipe for open warfare. But then, dealing with conflict is part of life, too.
Excerpted from Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. Copyright 2008 Carl Honoré. Published by Knopf Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
