Barry's letter to the NY Sun

Will get the Sun story on Texas rejecting Everyday Math (subscription required, I presume) posted at some point (horse chapter takes precedence). The Sun carried the story as front-page, banner-headline news. The word "fuzzy" appeared in the subhead.

In the meantime, here is Barry's letter to the Sun:

I am very happy to see that the New York Sun ran a front-page story about Texas' challenge of Everyday Math [Front Page, "Texas Challenges City on Math," November 20, 2007].

To my knowledge, the New York Sun is one of the few papers in the country that has covered this development. Given that Everyday Math commands a 20% market share of textbooks for K–6, Texas' decision is an important one.

The Everyday Math program does not cover math well and certainly does not pursue mastery of the material as other programs do such as Saxon, or Singapore's math program.

By placing this story on the front page, the New York Sun has done a great service and perhaps the story will be viewed as a long overdue wake up call to the educational damage such dangerously lacking programs have caused to our children.

BARRY GARELICK
National Advisor
NYC HOLD
McLean, Va.

This letter is a hoot:

Kudos for covering the important story of the Texas Board of Education rejecting Everyday Math, Grade 3 for its schools [Front Page, "Texas Challenges City on Math," November 20, 2007].

I have lived through Everyday Math with three children who are now in high school and beyond.

In my community, students flock in huge numbers to Kumon Math or other tutoring services because of the deficiencies in Everyday Math. Everyday Math and other Reform Math or Standards Based Math curricula have done a woeful job of preparing students with a sound math education.

Students who are taught by these curricula are typically calculator-dependent, and unable to perform basic math functions because they are deemphasized.

Greater emphasis must be placed on making math fun and expecting the students to discover how to solve math problems on their own. This topic needs more exposure across the country if we are to produce well-educated students capable of competing in our global world. Thanks for drawing attention to it.

MARGUERITE BLISS
St. Louis, Mo.

Gee.

Students don't get to discover stuff in Everyday Math and it isn't fun.

Who knew?

I'm a big fan of the Sun.

Today's banner headline:

Talks are set on ending battle of Iraq
Quiet Announcement Signals Start of U.S., Iraq Parley

And so the Battle of Iraq is to be brought to an end, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, "not with a bang but a whimper."

With the eyes of the world focused on the Middle East peace talks in Annapolis, Md., President Bush's war tsar, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, quietly announced that the American and Iraqi governments will start talks early next year to bring about an end to the allied occupation by the close of Mr. Bush's presidency.

Meanwhile, over at the Times, we've got:

Seeking a Mideast Path, Bush Offers a Nudge and After a Rough Start, Spitzer Rethinks His Ways.

This reminds me of another Times episode years ago when we were living in L.A. We subscribed to both Timeses: the NY Times & the LA Times.

The annual AIDS conference was on and both papers were covering the proceedings on the front page.

Early on, possibly on the first day of coverage, the LA Times reported that there had been a breakthrough in AIDS treatment. My memory (not fact-checked) is that one of the presenters had reported on 6 HIV positive patients he'd treated, not one of whom had progressed to AIDS.^* They were reporting a miracle. To this day, I remember sitting at the table, pouring over this story, wondering if it could possibly be true.

What did the NY Times have to say about the 6 patients?

Nothing.

The TIMES had a story on insurance discrimination against people with AIDS or some such.

I was horrified. How could the LA Times be reporting the first effective treatment for AIDS (and back then it was AIDS) and the NY Times have nothing? That had to mean the LA Times was wrong, I thought.

Next day, same thing. The LA Times had a second story on the new treatment for AIDS; the NY Times had another dreary prejudice-against-gays or AIDS-in-Africa boilerplate feature, the kind of AIDS story they'd been running for years and could write in their sleep.

By then I was getting nervous for the LA Times. I was thinking they had to have gotten the story wrong and were going to be Humiliated on the World Stage. (I had only a foggy notion of how newspaper journalism worked.)

I wish I could remember now how long it took the New York Times to pick up on the treatment story. I think they finally figured it out on Day 4. Meanwhile I was getting up every morning and grabbing both papers to see which world we were living in.

Were we living in a new world, the world in which AIDS would become HIV?

Or were we still living in the old world, the world of the epidemic?

The answer was that we were living in the new world and the New York Times had missed it.


^* I'm pretty sure the presenter was David Ho.