<p>Parents brought a suit against the school district’s new math adoption and won. Fascinating.
[Judge</a> rejects Seattle’s high school math program](<a href=“http://www.seattlepi.com/local/415049_math04.html]Judge”>http://www.seattlepi.com/local/415049_math04.html)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.seattlepi.com/dayart/PDF/mathtextruling_20100204.pdf[/url]”>http://www.seattlepi.com/dayart/PDF/mathtextruling_20100204.pdf</a></p>
<p>Just another judge who doesn’t understand his own function.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, I tried to fight the introduction of a similar math curriculum in our elementary school. Now, the first generation of students who did this curriculum from the start, are not taking the state standardized tests, and guess what? The administration and school committee are all upset about the dip in scores.</p>
<p>This “whole math” basically forbids arithmetic in favor of doing things in one’s head. Borrowing and carrying are dismissed as “rote.” Students are encouraged to “discover their own meaning.” It sounds, to many parents, as if is is too difficult, but the reality is, that it is dumbed down.</p>
<p>Engineers and mathematicians in our state gave up on local efforts to oppose, and worked to change things at the state level. Professionals who use math are especially bothered by the idea that the answer does not matter, only the process.</p>
<p>My daughter, who was 7 at the time I was involved, was on an insulin pump and had to do math every time she ate. A mistake could kill her, just as a mistake could wreck a bridge or space shuttle flight.</p>
<p>In my opinion, authority over curriculum should rest with the School Board. However, if a community wants the courts to have an oversight role, then they should be free to grant them that authority. The court found it had jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 “to evaluate the School Board’s decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law.” Many facts were marshaled against the Board’s choice (for example, findings that this text book series would create difficulties for home schooled children, and possibly lead to declining test scores especially among certain groups such as English language learners.) If the Board had other evidence to back up their decision, apparently they did not present them persuasively to the judge.</p>
<p>What appears to be happening here is that the School Board is favoring novel, unproven approaches to math instruction. Parents observe bad effects on their children. They ask the courts to step in. The court, after reviewing the evidence, finds it favors the complaining parents. Is this sort of issue better settled in School Board elections than in the courts? Maybe so, but states apparently have latitude to set up their own checks and balances processes.</p>
<p>I am not arguing that the School Board’s decision was correct; indeed it sounds like the classic case of a superintendent doing something because it sounds “cool” to other superintendents. (I’m old enough to remember the whole language debacle) But at the same time, educational decisions need to be left to the educational authorities; otherwise you have chaos. It looks to me like the cited provision was designed to deal with issues such as hiring and firing of employees.</p>
<p>With over ten thousand different school districts all over the country, each setting its own standards and curricula, there is bound to be some very bad cases somewhere. </p>
<p>For science and math education, there should be uniform national standards and curricula, like in many asian and european countries.</p>
<p>Agree with the above. When our daughter was in elementary school, something called MIC math was introduced instead of the traditional curriculum. We called it “mickey mouse math” and supplemented with math instruction at home.</p>
<p><em>snort</em> I <em>remember</em> the Discovering Math series, using it as a student. I remember it as being pretty awful.</p>
<p>However, I think some people are too down on the idea of <em>any</em> innovative approach to math and science curricula. Look at all the people who hate the emphasis of things like set theory, number bases other than 10, boolean algebra, etc, in elementary school math. And yet, learning that sort of material early will put any future computer scientist or digital electrical engineer, or anyone in any field that uses discrete math - fields that are pretty important to innovation in the modern world - at a great advantage. Arithmetic is important, and I agree that some educators are too happy to drop it in favor of the shiny new stuff, but it’s not the <em>only</em> important mathematics subject that can (and, IMO, should) be learned early in a student’s schooling.</p>
<p>I think about “quality” of HS math every time a clerk or cashier balks when I hand over $5.28 for a $5.13 charge. </p>
<p>I agree that the courts have no place deciding issues of capriciousness. But having put three kids through our school system, I’ve grown somewhat cynical about the motives of public school administrators. Perhaps some of that cynicism had reached the distant shores of Seattle?</p>
<p>I’ve been on school boards, and the process can be very capricious & arbitrary, just depends on the district.</p>
<p>I come from a math family and I found Everyday Math other whole math offerings to be a great idea as an extra for my math minded kids, but I think every one needs rote math work to begin…if you already understand it you need fewer problem sets, but you still need rote. We taught DD long division the old way in 5th grade, THEN she understood that creative stuff. Her grade had EM as a pilot for several years in a row.</p>
<p>I remember reading a study (by David Geary and colleagues at U of MO I believe) conducted by investigators in the US and China concerning the differences in math problem-solving for elementary students from each country. The Chinese children solved more problems correctly than did the US kids. A closer look showed that the problem solving strategies used by each where nearly identical. The difference was that the Chinese kids had much better basic math skills. Turns out good problem solving depended on fluency with computation as much as on strategy.</p>
<p>But Liping Ma also reports that Chinese teachers have better math skills, too. And she shows how they can explain basic arithmetics much better than their American counterparts (and she does not like the terms “carrying” and “borrowing”).
That seems to be independent of the kind of curriculum that is used, and even of the educational level achieved by the teachers. Ma claims that in China, teachers reach a 9th grade level education before going on to Teacher’s College.
See her book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics.</p>
<p>I found a site about a school that held training sessions to apply Ma’s insights:</p>
<p>[Kathleen</a> Bransfield • First Grade Math](<a href=“http://quest.carnegiefoundation.org/~mellinger/lampkin/KB.htm#]Kathleen”>http://quest.carnegiefoundation.org/~mellinger/lampkin/KB.htm#)</p>
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<p>This is a classic problem everywhere, with lots of subjects. I do not think most of the pedagogy used today is based on any evidence that its better than another. </p>
<p>I agree with Somemom and others that say you can have both. Rote arithmetic and rules are necessary foundations…but having more conceptual math added to the equation earlier on (no pun intended) has huge value too. I don’t see why it has to be an either/or situation.</p>
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<p>It has to be “either/or” because ideological snobbery is really fun!</p>
<p>“For science and math education, there should be uniform national standards and curricula, like in many asian and european countries.”</p>
<p>Yeah but regardless of who’s in power, who’s making the decisions, and when they’re being made, regardless of what tests and experiments they employ they’ll decide something stupid that’ll fail miserably. I don’t know why Europeans are doing better at Math than Americans but national standards won’t work, atleast not in America. </p>
<p>“I think about “quality” of HS math every time a clerk or cashier balks when I hand over $5.28 for a $5.13 charge.”</p>
<p>Assuming you’re handing a $5 bill, a quarter, and 3 pennies, and are expecting a dime and nickel back, more coins are in transaction than if you just handed them the $5 and a quarter. If it were me I would be confused as to why you’re giving me the 3 pennies as well.</p>
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<p>Just to be a tool? It’s fun messing with cashiers at the grocery store, and unlike the people who work at fast food restaurants, there’s no plausible way they can spit in your food without you seeing them. My hobby is go into stores like that at rush hour (such as when people try to stock up for upcoming storms) and pay the 16-year old clerk with a Ziploc bag full of old coupons that may or may not be expired (1/2 of them are from the wrong store), pennies, Canadian money, and a wad of bills worth at least 1.5x the actual cost of the purchase. Then I can adopt a superior attitude about the mindless plebe as he struggles to figure it out in time to keep the 80 people in line behind me from strangling either of us.</p>
<p>If you are really interested in what some parents and educators think about Seattle Public schools and accountability/quality of education [Seattle</a> Public Schools community blog](<a href=“http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/]Seattle”>http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/)</p>
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<p>I think Qwertykey and Jahaba are being unfair to Newhope. There is no reason to believe that Newhope is trying to unload unwanted coins when there is a queue. I do something along these lines all the time in order to get rid of useless pennies. If I were to hand in a quarter for a $.013 charge, I would get back one dime and two pennies. If I were to hand in two dimes, I would get back seven pennies. Newhope’s solution not only gets rid of unwanted pennies but also reduces the number of coins.
Now, I usually say “Can you give me back one dime and one nickel?” rather than rely on the cashier to calculate on her own.</p>
<p>To get back to the issue of math education, I have read that the reason why math curricula keep on changing is that it is easy to see that US children are not as proficient in math as they should be. But it is not possible for schools and school boards to change their home environments, or to hire differently trained teachers (and the problem begins in k-6 where the teachers are usually generalists with an emphasis on literacy rather than math). So the easiest thing to fix is the curriculum. The problem with some of the new curricula is two fold: lack of teacher familiarity with the pedagogy and lack of parental familiarity with the pedagogy. When a new curriculum is introduced, there is often a period of training for teachers, and learning for them. But when this initial period of training is over, no further training is provided. Yet, teacher turnover is very high; this means teachers hired after the curriculum was introduced do not get trained in the new pedagogy. Either they ignore the curriculum and fall back on their own knowledge or they interpret the curriculum in ways that can be quite ridiculous.
Parents do not get training in the new curriculum and don’t know how to help their kids and get very frustrated. And yet, some of the new curricula do expect parents to provide reinforcement.</p>
<p>On a different note, I was talking to a Chinese person who claims that Chinese children have an easier time learning arithmetics because of the Chinese language. Eleven is expressed as Ten plus one; twelve as ten plus two and so on. He also said that the concept of zero is far more obvious in the Chinese language than in English, making the “decomposing and regrouping method” preached by Liping Ma (who prefers these terms to borrowing and carrying) easier to understand. Rote learning and practice, sure; but based on a full understanding of what is being learned, rather than mere procedural knowledge.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about Qwerty, but I’m just kidding. I know that no one actually does that to mess with cashiers at a grocery store (someone like that would be pretty pathetic, a vibe that I don’t really get from NewHope).</p>
<p>This situation may be specific to the Seattle Public Schools, which have been mirred in inertia, bickering and lack of focus since the 1980s. The SPS has had a tendency to hire Superintendents with no history in the Pacific Northwest and whom come in with smoke-and mirror solutions, in the opinion of some of us. Ms. Goodloe-Johnson came to the SPS recently and like every new superintendent, brings forth a “new” idea with the intent to quickly impress. Whether it’s new math, school uniforms or military-style classroom teaching and school governance, these new superintendents all want to be able to point to some other “innovation” when student achievement doesn’t look so great.</p>
<p>Oh, should a judge be deciding school curriculum? Probably not, but some school leaders regularly demonstrate that they can’t make practical (and beneficial) decisions on their own.</p>