During the last school board election, two candidates running for the same seat debated about many topics related to the WW-P school district, but agreed on one point: The math department needs improvement.
While WW-P students score highly on standardized and advanced placement tests, the candidates, Brett Boal and eventual winner Stan Katz, pointed out that the way students are selected for the advanced placement track is flawed.
The school board is undertaking a K-12 curriculum review of its math department, and a key figure and decision maker in that review is the high school mathematics supervisor, Christopher Herte.
Herte, who lives on Wellington Drive in West Windsor, took over the position three weeks ago. Herte has experience with a curriculum review, having been through one in East Brunswick, his last school district. “It’s great that high achieving districts want to continually improve.”
Herte says he has not yet been able to look very closely at perceived or potential problems in the department, but has spent his time thus far familiarizing himself with personnel, and preparing for the curriculum review.
“We had an initial meeting. We discussed programs that we need to develop. We want to look at our current curriculum, make sure it’s working with our teachers, and we want to do all we can to provide our community with the best possible math program we can have,” says Herte.
Herte says the review will address the issue which was raised during the school board election. “We’re going to look into placement methods, and find out how we can best help our students achieve success.”
Herte says for the review to be a success, it should accomplish three things. He says: “We’re looking at our programs and asking, ‘do they meet needs of all students?’ A goal we discussed was looking at our instruction, finding if it is delivered in a matter that provides students to achieve district and state goals. A big area is to look at the implementation process, so it’s not just a review and report, it’s a process of implementing the changes we find will be improvements.”
Herte, who has a masters from New York Institute of Technology and a doctorate from Dowling, was invited to present a research paper at the Oxford Round Table in Oxford, England. Herte presented his paper, “The Relationship Between Teacher Assessments and NCLB Mathematics Testing,” in July. His paper discussed the statistical increases in student achievement following changes in curriculum and instruction.
Herte has a son at High School South and a daughter at Grover Middle School. The family moved here from Long Island four years ago when Herte’s wife, Diane, was transferred to the area for her job at Merrill Lynch.
