The Education Budget #5: Should Navigation 101 Get Lost?

From the Senate budget (p. 92 line 37):

$3,220,000 of the general fund--state appropriation for fiscal year 2010 and $3,219,000 of the general fund--state appropriation for fiscal year 2011 are provided solely for the dissemination of the Navigation 101 curriculum to all districts, including disseminating electronic student planning tools and software for analyzing the impact of the implementation of Navigation 101 on student performance, and grants to at least one hundred school districts each year for the implementation of the Navigation 101 program.

Nav101 is a curriculum/intervention program designed to provide individualized lessons for kids grades 6-12 and help them plan for their future. It's labor intensive--to do the "advisory" periods requires changing the schedule twice a month, meaning that the other classes get shortchanged on those days. Reaction from teachers is mixed depending on who you ask--in my district some teachers love it, others hate it.

All that said, if you didn't fund Navigation 101 with state money you could save 40 teaching positions.

If relationships are the heart of student success, then let's give them teachers to have relationships with instead of spending money on curriculum.