Textbook Tangles at MPUSD

Students lack some new materials, teachers worry about test scores

Thursday, November 18, 2010

The last thing the beleaguered Monterey Peninsula Unified School District needed to begin this school year was a major textbook snafu. But in August, some teachers in the district’s elementary and middle schools began classes without English language arts materials the district purchased last spring.

In some schools, the materials are still trickling in.

“It was an issue with the publisher,” MPUSD Superintendent Marilyn Shepherd says, adding that the 11,000 books were ordered on time. “They broke their contract.”

McGraw Hill has agreed to provide $300,000 worth of additional materials to compensate for failing to deliver on its $1.3 million contract with the district, she adds.

District officials could not provide specifics on which schools and grade levels were affected by press time.

But Mary Greenfield, a 6th-grade teacher who was on the district’s textbook adoption committee, says middle school texts purchased from a different publisher, Holt Rinehart Winston, also came in too late for teachers to review last summer. “The fact that materials were late is making us not use them as effectively, and yes, that could seriously impact scores,” she says.

Pressure to improve student performance on standardized tests is intense this year because MPUSD has failed to meet state benchmarks for five years, and faces sanctions if it doesn’t show significant improvement.

“It’s day 93, and you should be teaching page 139,” says Monterey Bay Teachers Association President Dennis Wright. “Whether we have the book or not, the beat goes on.”