Recent test scores show that half of NH’s 4th and 8th grade students are failing a basic math assessment. This is one response from a parent and math expert who reports on education issues.
November 1, 2009
Follow the Child, where? To failure?
Governor Lynch signed on to the 1.2 million dollar “Follow the Child” program. You can’t miss the banners in many of the NH public schools or at the Dept of Ed in Concord. (I wonder how much money was wasted printing those banners)
With half of the 4th and 8th grade students failing a basic math assessment, you’d think the focus from the Lynch Dept of Ed would be, to improve the academic quality in mathematics. So does “Follow the Child” remedy these failures? Of course not.
“Follow the Child” is a federal program that enabled NH to spend $1.3M on a “philosophy”. One of the things this money was spent on was ‘student aspiration surveys’ from the Quaglia Institute. This is a program which was developed by Russell Quaglia who can be seen in this Video. (You will note at about 10 minutes in his disparaging remarks towards Republicans) His program simply “surveys” students on how they “feel”. No where will you find any academic content that can be used in the classroom to help the students learn their math facts. No where will you find anything that helps students in any other core academic subject.
People like Quaglia make a lot of money peddling their latest and greatest fad. He pocketed about $250,000.00 for his program in New Hampshire.
While it doesn’t hurt to get feedback from students sometimes, the question is, do we need to spend this kind of money on a program that does nothing to help those students who are failing at core subjects like mathematics?
Are we going to shape our public schools based on how students “feel”? Let’s face it, if your kids were to be polled on what they are served for dinner, you might get suggestions like, McDonalds, cookies, cake, and candy. I think we know that sometimes adults know better than children.
If a Superintendent, Principal, or Teacher wants to improve the quality in the classrooms and need some feedback from the students, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. However, lining the pockets of education salesmen doesn’t seem very efficient.
Let’s get back to focusing on what is clearly the failures in our public schools. Lack of academic content. Let’s spend our money wisely and look for ways to get the remaining students up to proficiency level.
We hire Superintendents, Principals and Teachers to educate our children. It seems like all of the micro-managing coming from the NH Dept of Ed does nothing to help them academically but certainly wastes a lot of tax dollars in the process.
Both programs do nothing to improve the “quality” of academic content in our public schools. They’re a lot of fluff and no substance.
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Anne Marie Banfield is a taxpayer, parent, math expert, and educational speaker and reporter who lives in New Hampshire