Been working on some math lately. (Yes, I have a headache.)
I am going for an interview later this week for a curriculum position at the district level. The job is overseeing the curriculum for social studies in the middle and secondary schools in my district. Our district is fairly large, serving about 53,000 students.
In my interview prep, I wanted to be able to drop some bombs with regard to reforms in the interview. My big point is going to be about textbooks… getting rid of them that is.
That’s right – I said it. Stop social studies textbooks adoptions immediately and focus on bringing SS classrooms to a one to one. Here is my math that I have been throwing around.
We enroll just over 24,000 students in the middle and high schools. If we were to purchase textbooks for all of these students (we actually purchase more, since many students are enrolled in more than one SS course) it would run the district about…
$1.6 million… based on a $70 textbook.
I say, textbooks schmextbooks!
We purchase test for social studies every five years (roughly). Why? In the district’s 163 social studies classrooms we could go one to one with netbooks for about…
$1.2 million… based on a $300 netbook. This is a bomb that I am going to drop in my interview. We should stop textbook adoptions and put the capital into technology and professional development to implement that technology. The craziest part is that it would shave about $400k from the district budget.
Thoughts?
More to come…
Mike Meechin, M.Ed.
mike.meechin[at]gmail[dot]com
@innovateed
Meechin for School Board 