Remarks delivered at the 12/16/25 meeting of the Wilton-Lyndeborough School Board
I’ve attended many school board and budget committee meetings over the past six years in person and online, and I have read all the minutes from both boards since August. I was surprised when an administrator at a recent meeting mentioned some recent standardized test results, one of which was under 50% proficiency and the other just over, with the comment that “at least we are above the state and national averages”, and there was zero reaction from anyone on the board.
It struck me at the November joint board meeting that I had never heard anyone on either the school board or the budget committee discuss how to improve our schools’ actual academic performance. I’ve heard about bake sales and field trips and sports field repairs, but I have never heard a board member ask, “Why do we rank so low on the state achievement tests, and what can we do about it?” For the record, our district does quite poorly on state standardized proficiency tests:
FRES: ELA 46%, Math 39%.
Middle School: ELA 50%, Math 31%.
High School: ELA 50%, Math 31%. State Average ELA 55%, Math 42%
The top five-ranked elementary schools in New Hampshire have ELA proficiency scores above 80%, with nearby Mason Elementary the best at 90%, and similarly high math scores.
(I’ll grant that state standardized tests may not be the most valid way to assess educational achievement, especially at the high school level. But I have also heard the administration talk about how they are very “data-driven” in managing the schools, and what better data do we have?)
My complaint as a voter here is that we don’t seem to be getting much value for our money. With approximately 550 students in the system, the current proposed budget of nearly $16.8 million represents a cost per student of over thirty thousand.
But aside from the poor productivity of our school spending, the test scores also tell me that our schools are failing to educate more than half of the children in our towns. Why don’t all of our students (at least those who are not seriously learning disabled) meet the state standards, which I expect have been dumbed down over the decades since we were kids?
If our schools were a business, they would have gone bankrupt and disappeared a long time ago as their customers would have left because of the bad quality of service. We already see that trend growing as more families opt for charter, private, or home schooling. And it is a tragedy on a human level, for every child and family we are failing. Studies show that illiteracy is a prime cause of failure in life, including unemployment, crime, addiction, and mental illness. And highly successful Americans such as Dr. Ben Carson, Justice Clarence Thomas, and JD Vance show that education can overcome even the worst socio-economic disadvantages.
Now this is important: I am not criticizing the school board or budget committee, nor any member of either. You all volunteered for these positions and put in long, hard hours without pay because you care about our community, and you all deserve our thanks and honor for that.
But I think you may be victims of bureaucratic capture. Your position is similar to what the cabinet secretaries face in our federal government – you are viewed by the “professionals” in the bureaucracy as summer tourists who are in position only temporarily, and who don’t know the system and how to play it as well as they do, so you can easily be kept in the dark and your orders resisted. You must rely on the people you supervise to give you the information you need, but they will give you what they need instead.
Over a long time, the education-industrial complex has set up a system that protects their interests in part by making the system nearly incomprehensibly complicated (for example, the state education standards and the state-mandated budget spreadsheet format) and by training their supervisors – you – to avoid focusing on serious matters and filling your time with trivia. They provide goals and action plans that are classic bureaucratese: vague, abstract, heavy on buzzwords, and not measurable as to what will be done and when. I refer you to the Superintendent’s District Goals document of September 9th.
And I’m not going to blame them either, because acting in one’s own best interests is natural human behavior. So we end up with a culture of non-accountability: Nobody is responsible for producing tangible, measurable results; there is no consequence for failing to do so, so we don’t get any. Even better, anyone who criticizes the system is accused of “not caring about the children”.
Nobody, that is, except for our teachers, who are at the cutting edge, supporting all the burdens of the system imposed on them by both bureaucrats and parents. And here I must point out that I have no criticism of our teachers. They are doing the best they can in a system that simultaneously makes ever-increasing demands on them and cripples their ability to do their job. Every day spent on standardized tests, every IEP report and meeting, every stupid pedagogy idea espoused by “education” PhDs in universities, every counterproductive or politically motivated curriculum regulation demanded by the state bureaucrats (“Common Core” reading and math for example), is time they can’t spend helping the kids to learn. Most teachers I’ve talked with do many hours of unpaid work at home on nights and weekends.
But by statute, the school board does have the responsibility to provide an education for the towns’ children. Schools are not really a sacred, social institution, but a service business, and you are like the board of directors of that business. The customers of the business are the families of our towns, and the shareholders are the taxpayers who are forced to pay for all of it. The customers aren’t satisfied, and the shareholders have hit the limit of what they can afford to pay. The cost per student is simply outrageous.
I’m asking you, as the directors of our school district, to put your time, attention, and energy into improving the quality of academic education here. Find out what the best-performing schools are doing in curriculum, teaching methods, and materials, that we could copy or adapt. What do the top five schools, with proficiency over 80%, do differently from us? Look not only at other public schools. Also look at private schools that achieve extremely high learning outcomes. Look also at the great teachers of our times. Can we teach math as Jaime Escalante did? Can we use the “Guerrilla Curriculum” methods of John Taylor Gatto? Can we use the methods developed by Elon Musk’s schools to teach math, science, and ethics?
I believe you should focus your efforts on our elementary schools, LCS, and FRES. Children who are literate and numerate and who can express themselves clearly in writing and in speaking have a foundation that leads to success in learning and in life. It’s logical to assume that any weakness in middle or high school was caused at the elementary level. Looking at the FRES numbers, that’s where we get the most value for the effort.
You should also ask, “Is there anything counterproductive in the way we teach basic skills such as reading and math that could cause learning or behavior problems leading to Special Ed diagnoses?” Because I would also expect that improving curriculum and pedagogy methods would decrease the demand for Special Education, since remedial tutors and CBTs would no longer be needed. Fixing FRES will both improve outcomes at all levels and lower costs at the same time. It’s a win-win.
I’ll end with a note about the open-enrollment situation. In his report at tonight’s meeting, the Superintendent’s Report asks, “How do we develop and implement innovative programming and opportunities in academics, co-curricular and athletic programs that will motivate students outside of our district to tuition into our schools, particularly our high school?” I suggest that if we were among the top five districts for elementary education, families would line up to send their children to us without any expensive, fancy high school programs.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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