Poor quality math curricula hurts the educational outcomes of our children, and compromises the work environment so important to retaining top quality teachers.

I have been concerned for some time about the quality of our Everyday and Impact Math programs being used in our elementary and middle schools. Personal exposure via my children, anecdotal commentary by fellow parents, discussions with Newton’s teachers, and a study of national literature and reviews strongly suggest that these two math programs are compromising the math education of Newton’s children. 

For one direct and alarming example, I met with a Newton South High School math teacher recently, and asked how well prepared the ninth graders are for high school math. The teacher laughed, and told me that the teachers tend to compress the year’s curriculum somewhat so they can create 2-3 weeks at the beginning of the 9th grade specifically for remedial math time. This person noted that the incoming students are weak on the fundamentals.

This is distressing to me on a couple of levels. First, as a top school system, this seeming gap in math capability among matriculating students is inexcusable; its repair should be a strong focus of our curriculum coordinators.

Second, this reflects a math program weakness in NPS that leaves this teacher less impressed with and less proud of working in this particular system. It feels great to be working within a well-oiled machine, and this feeling can be a compelling bonus above monetary compensation. Instead, we demonstrate to our teachers that the curriculum quality and progression is not tight and they must rely on their individual resourcefulness to compensate.  Is NPS blind to this reality?  One is left to wonder who is providing leadership in support of our teachers.

Well written, content-probing teacher surveys should help expose deficiencies like this to NPS. Let’s make this happen. This will benefit our kid’s education, and can help us clarify the non-monetary rewards we must offer our excellent teachers to keep them here.

I take a few things as givens right now:

1. The factor that dwarfs all others in impacting the achievement level of our students is teacher quality. Which means that in order to return to the top level school system we once were, we must hire, develop, and retain top-quality teachers.
2. Although class size has only been shown to be a meaningful factor in educational outcomes for the first few grade levels, Newton is not yet ready to grow class sizes across the board.
3. The rate of teacher compensation growth in NPS is too high, and this is why the CAG has called the economics of our school system “unsustainable.”
4. New revenue from overrides, new growth (development), closing tax loopholes for telecommunications companies, etc. is only a stopgap – cutting the growth rate of compensation is the only way we will get there, until our national health system costs are contained.

We are therefore left with this series of objectives – maintain the number of teachers we presently have, slow the growth rate of teacher compensation, and identify and implement all of the non-monetary features of a teacher’s work experience that will allow us to hire, develop, and retain top quality teachers as a means of taking pressure off of our budget.

A 2007 McKinsey and Company study found, in an analysis of school systems across the country and the world, that solid starting salaries are a key to hiring top teachers as an indirect means of acknowledging the import of the teaching profession and competing with other occupations available to new graduates. But they found that once teachers are in place, the rate of compensation increase is of secondary importance to factors such as:

• Functioning in a stimulating work environment;
• Receiving the support and guidance from strong supervisors including principals;
• Having opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues;
• Being given the opportunity and encouragement to innovate;
• Having access to high quality professional development;
• Career path options including “master teacher” roles.

It is incumbent upon us to perform broad, probing surveys of Newton teachers on a regular basis to try to tease out the non-monetary factors of working life that matter to them, that will help them grow, that will make them better teachers, and that will keep them happy working in NPS. It is incumbent upon us to be creative and clever, about how to provide for our teachers the features listed above at least cost.

The most responsible and considerate thing we can do is clearly admit these objectives to ourselves and communicate them to our teachers and the NTA. This is a pro-community and pro-teacher thing to do; it is the only decent, responsible, thing to do. If we are not clear about what our objectives are, we will certainly never achieve them.