Studies have shown that family participating in education is twice as predicative of students’ academic success as family socioeconomic status. One 2008 study found that schools would need to increase per-pupil spending by more than $1,000 in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement. In Portland, during the 2008-2009 school […]

Your article about the Chicago Math program and the concerns parents have has been played out numerous times across the country and here in Maine over the past few years. Our district recently did away with Investigations in Data and Space for K-5 and Connected Math for Middle School. Our School Board considered many factors […]

What is the difference between constructivist math and traditional math? Your article didn’t exactly explain why parents should be concerned, or not. However, I’m not sure which is the greater concern, the math or the process. Isn’t it the obligation of the Portland School Board, or any school board, to hold public meetings on major […]

Portland schools recently spent $140,000 on a middle school math textbook. They failed to include parents in the process. The School Board will soon decide if they’ll give parents a voice in the selection process for the elementary textbook. The district could have selected the Singapore National Curriculum, the Saxon textbook series, a textbook that […]

In 1997, I started the Maine Mathematics Science & Engineering Talent Search program. In 2011, I was selected to a nationwide group to resolve the shortage of engineers in the U.S. In 2005, I received the University of Maine Educator Recognition Award for MMSETS. Over the years, we had over 4,000 students in the program, […]

Edgar Allen Beem’s column, “Worried about wireless,” is just plain wrong. He talks about, “individual sensitivity to radio frequency exposure.” We have had radio transmitters since around 1890, about 120 years now. In that time nobody has ever been proved to be sensitive to “radio frequency exposure.” There are people who claim to be sensitive, […]

Re: Paul Bachorik’s recent letter, he would seem to be naive in the extreme, along with too many others, to imagine that the damage resulting from the destructive decisions of the Bush-Cheney administration would almost immediately be resolved by a new administration. It will take take 10 years or more to begin to ameliorate the […]

Gov. Paul LePage looked as though he was going to blow a gasket Sept. 26 when NBC news anchor Brian Williams asked him on national television about his decision to order the Maine labor history mural removed from the Department of Labor offices. Noting that union workers at BIW helped win World War II by […]

The college drop-off was less traumatic than I anticipated, and the trauma was self-inflicted. He was ready. His room is excellent. His roommate is a responsible student/athlete. I thought the closest thing to a jock the University of Chicago had was a student/mathlete, but there you go. Parent Orientation was a two-day program culminating in […]

Although the parties have compromised and redrawn the lines defining Maine’s two congressional districts, there was an awful lot of recrimination that attended the process. While the issue isn’t likely to come up again any time soon, I thought I would review the underlying principles. The U.S. Constitution requires that congressional representatives be apportioned according […]