School Committee members in Glocester (RI) were recently brainstorming about how to raise test scores in their elementary schools. Parents pointed out that perhaps buying at least one textbook per child might help (free subscrip required):
Members of the School Committee were surprised to hear last night that the schools don't have enough textbooks to go around.
Students, especially in fourth and fifth grade, share books during the day and don't bring them home at night. They do their homework based on what they remember from class, and their parents can't brush up on lessons learned decades ago because they don't have the appropriate materials.
Several parents complained to the School Committee last night after one of them mentioned the issue during a discussion about curriculum coordination among the Foster, Glocester and Foster-Glocester schools.
School Committee members were stunned. Some said they had sat on the board for years and didn't hear about a lack of textbooks until last night.
Sounds like parents weren't complaining loudly enough. And what is with all the fiddle-faddle here from educators about how kids don't each need their own textbooks, or don't need to be taught from textbooks, or how teachers need the money instead to buy supplemental material? If the textbooks are poor quality, buy better ones (and as the article points out, "new" doesn't necessarily mean "better".) But it's ridiculous not to give each kid a textbook to take home in order for doing homework.
I don't remember a single class in my K-12 years where each kid didn't receive a textbook, battered and ancient though it may have been. In fact, since textbooks were recycled from year to year, and we had to write our names in them at the beginning of each year, it was socially imperative to check the front of the book to see who had your book the year before. If it was a really skanky person, you could blame any poor standing in the course on getting a "jinxed" textbook with "cooties."
Okay, so we had a lot of free time on our hands, out in the farmland. But we also had textbooks.
Posted by kswygert at October 22, 2003 08:28 AM