3,100 parents took survey on Wake’s math program. But will public get to see the comments?
The comments that more than 3,100 parents made about the Wake County school system’s controversial high school math curriculum may not be released to the public.
MGT Consulting Group collected the parental comments as part of a third-party review of the Wake school system’s use of the MVP Math Curriculum. School officials say that the individual parental surveys are not public records, but they’ve asked MGT if they’d be willing to release the documents.
Still, it’s unclear whether the surveys will be made public. The parents who took the surveys were told their responses would be kept confidential, according to Simmie Raiford, MGT’s vice president of Pre-K to 12 education.
“The public records and the public information compiled by the agencies of N.C. governments or its subdivisions are the property of the people,’ Blain Dillard said at the Feb. 4 school board meeting. “I assert that a government agency cannot hide public records simply by hiring a contractor to manage them.”
Dillard is a Cary parent who has been a leader in the fight against the MVP math curriculum. He has made multiple public records request for the parent surveys.
MVP changed how math is taught in Wake County
Since the 2017-18 school year, Wake has used materials from the Utah-based Mathematics Vision Project to teach high school-level math based on Common Core standards. Instead of hearing a lecture and memorizing formulas, the focus has shifted to students working in groups to solve problems while teachers act as facilitators.
MVP uses the concept of “productive struggle,” in which students learn through increasingly challenging problems.
Critics say MVP doesn’t teach the materials, resulting in students coming out of the class struggling to understand what they would have mastered from a more traditional math course. They say it has forced families to pay for private tutors to help their children learn the material.
Wake has made changes in how MVP is used this school year. The district also paid MGT $112,789 for a report released in December that recommended that the district continue using MGT.
MGT made seven recommendations for improving use of MVP, including providing better training for teachers and additional resources for students.
Parental surveys not public records
As part of its report, MGT released a summary of the parental responses, including how 53% said MVP has frustrated their kids, 55% said their child’s math performance has declined and 61% said it’s not an improvement over prior curriculum.
Dillard says Raiford told them that MGT collected more than 200 pages of written comments from parents. He said getting the comments, even in a redacted form, would provide a “treasure trove of enlightenment.”
Tim Simmons, a school district spokesman, said Wake didn’t request access to the raw parent survey results in part because some opponents to the MVP curriculum had questioned whether a prior internal review was impartial.
This week, Simmons notified Dillard that a district legal review determined that the raw parental surveys are not public records.
“MGT is not an agency of North Carolina government and the information was not made or received by WCPSS,” Simmons wrote in Wednesday’s email to Dillard. “Further, WCPSS has no legal obligation to request the information from MGT so that it can be provided to you or any other requestor.”
But Simmons said that the district has decided to ask MGT for the individual survey responses so that Wake can voluntarily disclose them.
“If the contractor provides this information to WCPSS, the school district first will need to review the responses to remove any confidential information, such as student identifying information,” Simmons wrote.
Brooks Fuller, director of the N.C. Open Government Coalition, said it’s common for government agencies to hire consultants to do third-party reviews. But he said agencies would be better served by having access to the data collected by the consultant.
“At the end of the day, the school board should want this information and inform the public of what it means,” Fuller said in an interview. “They should want the data.”
This story was originally published February 22, 2020 at 10:00 AM with the headline "3,100 parents took survey on Wake’s math program. But will public get to see the comments?."
