For a while now, there’s been chatter about Newton’s schools and math—rumors that the schools don’t have math curriculum and just wing it, and rumors that the schools are teaching Russian math, for example—and what’s being taught where.
In a recent interview with the Newton Beacon, Superintendent Anna Nolin cleared things up.
It turns out there is math curriculum in every school in Newton, but the middle and high schools have no universal curriculum, and Nolin is looking to change that.
Not just math
Math curriculum pretty uniform for classes in kindergarten through the fifth grade. Those grades use a curriculum program called “Investigations.”
“It is an inductive reasoning curriculum, which means that there are investigations which are loosely like science-based,” Nolin said. “The kids investigate it. They try to solve a problem and apply a mathematic principle, and then at the end, the traditional algorithm is taught. This is why it drives certain folks crazy, because the way we learned math was we just memorized the steps to algorithms.”
Curriculum varies, though, in higher grades from school to school. And that includes other subjects in addition to math.
“The two high schools couldn’t be more different. The course requirements are different. That’s a problem,” Nolin explained. “When you look at the high school, you’ll see North looks different than South in terms of the way they’re executing curriculum. No one’s doing anything wrong, but we’re not doing it like a district, right?”
Kids are still learning and being tested. But a lack of consistency creates a problem when trying to measure success.
And it’s not just math. The inconsistency in curriculum runs throughout the district in every area of study.
“It just creates upset with parents,” Nolin said. “If one high school has a certain set of courses, then the other doesn’t. People ask, ‘How come I can’t have that?’ Or, ‘Why don’t we look like this?’ ‘Do we have the same procedures for getting into courses?’ ‘Who gets picked as advanced?’ All of that is a mystery, until we have the same system for everyone.”
Striving toward cohesion
The variation also creates a problem when it comes to setting up learning intervention for kids who need it.
“Now, there are multi-level classes at the high school. I don’t know how we know what level they’re in, either, because we have two high schools, different curricula, different assessments,” Nolin said. “So you can see it’s a hot potato.”
And having so many differences in course offerings creates perceptions that don’t match reality when it comes to Newton’s schools—like the rumor that Newton teachers don’t have math curriculum—something Nolin has seen since she started her job last summer.
“When I was doing my barbecue tour [meeting with parents and community members during the summer] last year, somebody said to me, ‘Oh, well, North is the performing art school,’” Nolin mused. “And then I went to the next barbecue, and they were like, ‘Well, South is the performing art school. And I was like, ‘Neither is—they’re both comprehensive high schools. So we have some work to do.”
That work will include creating a consistent set of curricula for every school at every grade level.
“We need to make the curriculum the curriculum,” Nolin emphasized. “We need to act like a school system, not a system of schools.”