Election 2011: District 66 Candidates on Curriculum

What do you think of the district’s current curriculum? What changes, if any, would you make?

As the parent of a first grader, my experience with the district's curriculum is limited at this time; however, I have been extremely pleased with my son's progress these past two years. I appreciate the curriculum guides available for all grades on the district's website; however, I would also like to see more content provided to parents describing the philosophy of the curriculum chosen and why it was selected over other methods. Though I am not an expert, I believe the curriculum to be appropriate and competitive with other local schools based on discussion with parents within and outside of the district.

At the board level, we evaluate curriculum continuously. In the past few years, we have reviewed the math curriculum and science curricula. These reviews are critical because they identify gaps or changes needed. For example, with science, we worked to re-align the curriculum so that it builds upon itself year to year, which is key to student learning. We need to continue to look at how to make social science and science more aligned with our reading and math goals so that there is cross learning occurring. Also, Response to Intervention is giving us an opportunity to support students on an individual basis within the existing curriculum—RTI's success is critical to the success of our students.

I believe the district has a process to regularly update its curriculum, working closely with District 99, which seems to make sense to me (science being the latest update if I’m not mistaken). I haven’t looked at that process in detail so I don’t know where it needs improvement, but at a high level I like the fact that it’s being reviewed regularly.

U.S. education in math and science is ranked below average compared to other developed countries. We need to improve our educational system, and not just the curriculum. We need to ensure our schools have teachers that are well prepared to increase the potential of our students. At the same time, we need to ensure that our students are getting challenged enough to reach their individual potentials. The district's curriculum might be at par with our nation, but we need to evaluate it if it is at par with the students from countries that are ranked above the U.S. Our district is going in the right direction as it has started to increase the focus on math by adding programs such as Response to Intervention for math. We need to do the same for science and need to continue to evaluate if what we have in place is making a difference and if more needs to be done toward bringing our education to the top to ensure our future generation can compete successfully in this global economy.