More unfortunate headlines

(Unfortunate headline number 1)

Also on page 1 of the 12/3 Education Week:

Parents Get Schooled on New Math Standards

Schools around the country are holding math nights, sending letters home, and posting videos on their websites to teach parents about the Common Core State Standards for mathematics, which require students to use calculation methods that many parents never learned.

Math nights?

Like this one?

Reminds me of that great piece of advice from the Math Trailblazers people re: how to deal with parents:

Be pro-active with parents. Don’t wait until complaints hit. People have done a lot of things to involve parents, from math nights to big math carnivals, where the kids teach the activities to the parents. There are letters in the program that go home to parents.

Math nights are never a good sign.

How to Get Parent Buy-In

Hello! and how Math Trailblazers saved my district

UPDATE 10/26/2013: Wrong again. Here and here.

Hi everyone -

Sorry to be sooooo absent. I got stuck in the middle of a math post the other night, and then got swallowed up by the new semester.

Will get back to the chart ASAP, but in the meantime, sneak preview:

After introducing timed worksheets two years ago, my district has some of the best math scores in Westchester County, a development that required a mere 10 (or was it 12?) years of sustained local Math War, annual Parent Uprisings, the creation of Kitchen Table Math and the Irvington Parents Forum (followed by threat of legal action issued by the union), and the election of two anti-Trailblazers members (here, too) to the Board of Ed. (Three now, counting last spring's election.)

All this to get Mad Minutes.

Turns out Mad Minutes is enough to raise student achievement. Through the magic of synchronicity, I happened to be re-reading my 72 pages of notes from Morningside Academy's Summer School Institute 2012 (I gave a short talk on precision teaching at my college!), where I found this:

Chief Joseph [a school in Montana] - they had no aims, no celeration aims, no peer coaching...they just had the kids practice computation (& some other things) - last 30 minutes of the day (worst time to ask kids to do anything) - real simple - use daily chart - timer on, timer off - use practice sheets & chart - by June the kids at the Chief Joseph school were now scoring at the 80th percentile while district kids were in low 60s - ITBS Chief Joseph School (Precision Teaching) Great Falls, Montana school district (comparison) THAT IMPROVEMENT was just from drill and kill at end of day

In other words, doing nothing but introducing timed worksheets works. Achievement goes up.

I wonder if we are the only district in Westchester County with Mad Minutes?

We may be.

Meanwhile Dobbs Ferry, next door, which adopted Singapore Math a few years ago, has an 8th-grade pass rate half ours (30% in Dobbs; 61% in Irvington). From what I gather, Dobbs has always been devoted to progressive education, to a degree Irvington has never been (again, as far as I can tell). I'm sure that accounts for it.

Dobbs hired a math coach who gives interviews to the local paper saying Singapore Math "isn't about finding the right answer" and is about extensive use of hands-on manipulatives. I remember being so horrified by the first story on Dobbs' adoption of Singapore Math that I wrote a letter to the editor. (Wonder if I can find that now....)

We've still got Math Trailblazers and we're killing them.

We don't want Math Trailblazers; parents have been protesting Trailblazers for years. The result: the administration & board dug in their heels, and we are today the last man standing: the very last district in all of Westchester still using Trailblazers. (Though in theory Trailblazers has been 'hybridized' with Singapore Math.... "Hybridizing" Math Trailblazers with Singapore Math is the kind of desperate measure administrators have been driven to.)

Thinking it over, I have to believe that Trailblazers is a major reason for the fact that my district now uses timed worksheets.

Parents hated Trailblazers so much that they stormed the ramparts every year, year in and year out; the issue never went away.

Usually the dogs bark and the caravan moves on, but not in this case. The dogs kept barking; there was no escape. So every year there was a scramble to fix Trailblazers until finally a part-time interim curriculum director (who had previously worked in Chappaqua, the one district far ahead of us) started talking about "automaticity" and brought in timed worksheets.

I used to always say: if you want to have parent uprisings every year, adopt Math Trailblazers.

Now I'm thinking: if you want timed worksheets, adopt Math Trailblazers and suffer through 10 years of parent uprisings.

Will get my chart finished & posted soon, I hope. Lots more to tell on various fronts.

I am lobbying now for timed worksheets in grammar, reading, and writing.

UPDATE 10/25/2013: Wrong again.

The Precision Teaching Book

My copy arrived today!

The Precision Teaching Book by Richard Kubina and Kirsten K. L. Yurich.

From Chapter 0:

Creating a sound educational program, like the Direct Instruction reading program, takes determined effort in the planning, creation, implementation, and subsequent review and revision of the curriculum. In other words, engineering a learning environment expressed by a well balanced, potent curriculum occurs through a reasoned and rational process. Effective learning environments establish desired behavior and require no less than a systematic analysis of human behavior.

You mean...writing an effective curriculum isn't something you can pay teachers a stipend to do for 3 days over the summer?

Even when you hire a Trailblazers consultant from Bedford?

We've had years of strife over Trailblazers here in my district, culminating in the middle school teachers complaining that kids were coming into 6th grade not knowing what they needed to know. In response, the answer was ... not to adopt Singapore Math.

The answer was to "hybridize" Trailblazers during a 3-day curriculum development stint one summer. After hybridization, Trailblazers would no longer be our curriculum; our curriculum would be Irvington Math. Problem solved.

Rejiggering Trailblazers has been an ongoing project. A year or two before we hired the lady from Bedford, I went to a board meeting at which the then-assistant superintendent for curriculum (we've had several), confronting that year's uprising, said impatiently, "People say Trailblazers is our curriculum." She rolled her eyes. "It isn't. We write our own curriculum."

That's been the answer forever: there's no problem with Trailblazers because Trailblazers isn't the curriculum.

In a couple of weeks, I'm off to the precision teaching workshop at Morningside Academy in Seattle...

and then there was one

Bedford drops Trailblazers, adopts Singapore Math.

Is that a fork in your pocket, or are you ....

at Charts and Graphs

(photo thanks to Barry G; punchline thanks to Matthew T)

spiral curriculum in a charter school

When Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of Steve Ross, the former C.E.O. of Time Warner, and the founder of the Ross Global Academy, a charter school in the East Village, was told, last month, to expect a 9 A.M. phone call from the outgoing New York City schools chancellor, Joel Klein, she feared that it would not bring good news. Her academy, which was founded five years ago amid considerable fanfare—it promised a so-called spiral curriculum, encompassing the history of civilization across all cultures, and also offered instruction in eating organically and yoga—recently had the distinction of getting the worst progress report of any charter school in the city, with seventy-five per cent of its students failing English and seventy per cent of them failing math. The school, into which Ross and members of her board have poured eight million dollars of their own money, has had six principals, has occupied three locations, and lost three-quarters of its teachers last year; its charter is up for renewal this month. At eight-thirty on the appointed morning, Ross’s phone rang; on the line was Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor. “He said the most extraordinary thing,” Ross recalled last week. “He said, ‘I am informing you that the Department of Education is going to recommend a non-renewal.’
Spiralling
The New Yorker
by Rebecca Mead
January 17, 2011

If only someone would say the same to my district's "department of curriculum."

And see: The Trouble with Math by Ralph Abraham (pdf file)

And so much more: multiple intelligences, spirals, innovation, the whole child.... The Concept of Spiral Curriculum at Ross School



Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era

the things money can't buy

Currently, Irvington students are at about the state average with 40 per cent of eight-graders enrolled in algebra.
District opts to stick with Trailblazers math program

I have been underestimating per pupil spending here. According to the budget, it was $28,300 this school year. However, audited financials show $30K per pupil last school year. We're probably at $32K this year.

a parent on Trailblazers homework

I encountered this in my 3rd grader's homework. He learned his math tables from 1-5 and knows the 10s and 11s. His homework consisted of 30 multiplication problems; 7 of them were problems that he had never seen before.

9 x 9, 6 x 9, 7 x 6, blank x 7 = 49, blank x 6 = 36, 9 x blank = 63, and blank x 9 = 45.

The worksheet was called "Tracking Down Facts." He was upset by this. It was not covered in the classroom so he had no idea what to do. Leaving them blank is not an option for him -- he hates to get in trouble. He likes to do his homework on his own so he doesn't want to ask me for help. His feelings were anger, frustration, anxiety, hopelessness, desperation and finally he broke down and asked me what the answers were.

I sat down with him and asked him what 9 x 10 was and he knew and then I asked him how he could do some easy math to figure out what 9 x 9 was. He got it and painfully worked out all the other problems. This is how my child is learning math with Trailblazers. How did this scenario play out in all the different homes in town?

This is not helping children think through math problems -- it is teaching them how to cope.

I think parents assume that homework is a review of material covered in the classroom -- at least in early grades. I think that parents would be shocked to know that this is one of the core principles of Trailblazers: let the child struggle through problems they have not seen before and come up with their own strategies to solve them and then painfully explain their answers.

Singapore Math pilot in New Milford: SPED students ahead of general ed students

Steve H's question - whether any of us knows a district that has replaced Everyday Math, TERC, Trailblazers, etc. with Singapore or Saxon - has prompted me finally to post the material I saved on New Milford, CT's 2006 pilot program comparing Everyday Math, Saxon Math, and Singapore Math. (I can email copies of the various reports produced by the district cijohn @ verizon.net.)

My favorite line from the Pilot summary:

The pace of [Singapore Math] ... is quicker than anything we do and quicker even than our curriculum calls for. As a result, some sped students actually perform AHEAD of their non-special education peers in successfully handling content -- almost by definition becoming non-sped students!

Memorandum
April 10, 2006
Pilot Summary
page 3

The result of New Milford's admirable -- and unusual -- commitment to piloting a math curriculum before buying it?

A recommendation from the assistant superintendent that the district not adopt the curriculum that produced the best results:

The recommendation regarding the mathematic materials to be used to deliver
New Milford’s mathematics curriculum is as follows:

The district would use the following mathematic materials:

Kindergarten - Saxon Mathematics

• Grade One – Saxon Mathematics
• Grade Two – Saxon Mathematics
• Grade Three – Saxon Mathematics and Everyday Math (all classes)
• Grade Four – Saxon mathematics 1/3 – 2/5 of classes
- Everyday Mathematics 2/3 - 3/5 of classes
• Grade Five – Saxon mathematics 1/3 – 2/5 of classes
- Everyday Mathematics 2/3 - 3/5 of classes
• Grade Six – Saxon mathematics 1/3 – 2/5 of classes
- Everyday Mathematics 2/3 - 3/5 of classes

TO: Dr. JeanAnn C. Paddyfote, Superintendent
Members of the Board of Education
FROM: Thomas A. Mulvihill, Assistant Superintendent
DATE: April 10, 2006
SUBJECT: Recommendation Regarding Math Materials K-6
p. 1

Parents and other bystanders often assume that schools are interested in 'what works' but repeatedly fail to come up with what works because of fads. A school adopts the latest fad, the latest fad fails inside the classroom, and the school moves on to the next fad. Which also fails to work inside the classroom.

The 'pendulum' idea -- an educational pendulum swings back and forth from one extreme to the other -- is a variant of this idea.

In my experience, neither of these accounts captures what goes on inside the black box. Not that I know what goes on inside the black box. Still, I know enough to state as fact that public schools don't generally 'evaluate' success one way or the other. Every new initiative that is rolled out is assumed to be good and successful right up to the moment the next initiative comes along 3 years later, according to plan, and is also assumed to be good and successful.

In some ways, the New Milford pilot program is the ur-example of public school indifference to results. In New Milford's case, the district actually did evaluate three programs, found one program in particular to be startlingly successful -- and then decided not to adopt that program.


Westchester County

Here in Westchester, Scarsdale & Dobbs Ferry have adopted Singapore Math, and BOCES is sponsoring Singapore Math workshops (pdf file). I believe my town will adopt Singapore Math within the next couple of years, too, though we'll see.

Whether or not Singapore Math in Westchester will bear a close resemblance to Singapore Math in Singapore remains to be seen.

change

from The Rivertowns Enterprise, 5-22-2009:

Camp told the Enterprise on Wednesday morning that she was pleasantly surprised¹ by her first-place showing and attributed the support she received to the large-scale door-to-door campaign she ran, covering, in her estimation, about 80 percent of the community.²

"I believe the school system is too expensive and there needs to be more improvement in academics--they're not what they should be," said Camp.

Among her first priorities Camp said is to recommend the district eliminate the Math Trailblazers at the elementary level, which some parents³ have criticized. She vowed to "spend taxpayers' money like I spend my own -- very carefully."
p. 18

This election, 5 candidates ran for 2 seats; the board president and her running mate were challenged by 3 reform candidates. 1500 people cast votes for BOE, and Robyne's total was 801. John Dawson, also a reform candidate & a teacher in Yonkers, received 621.

Robyne was the only candidate of the 5 who was not endorsed by a newspaper.


¹ pleasantly surprised = stunned
² a force to be reckoned with
³ many parents

Journal News endorsements
Unfair description of Irvington voters
Irvington Budget approved; stricter bus limits defeated; board president ousted

am I hearing things?

Click on this link.

Then tell me if the web site is talking to you.

The answer better be 'yes.'

Scarsdale adopts Singapore Math

Scarsdale looks to Singapore for the new math
By Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy • The Journal News • October 9, 2008

...[T]he Scarsdale school district adopts Singapore math in kindergarten through fifth grade, replacing Trailblazers, used in the district for a decade.

The textbook series, written by the Ministry of Education of Singapore, is called Primary Mathematics, and Scarsdale is the first public school district to use it in New York as its core curriculum.

Until last year, the district used Trailblazers, textbooks aligned with the so-called reform mathematics - often derided as fuzzy math - based on recommendations originally published in 1989 by the influential National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

That approach called for a de-emphasis on manual arithmetic in favor of students' attention to the process leading to the answer. Math texts following the reform philosophy also have been criticized as covering too many topics in a haphazard sequence.

"The mainstream U.S. math curriculum is often seen as being a mile wide and an inch deep," said Nancy Pavia, the district's math helping teacher.

In 2006, the math council released the Curriculum Focal Points report, which identified important mathematical topics in each grade - from kindergarten through eighth - that students need to understand deeply and thoroughly for future mathematics learning.

This report was, at least in part, the result of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, an international assessment of the mathematics and science knowledge of fourth- and eighth-grade students around the world. The study found that students from many Asian countries outperformed their U.S. counterparts.

Of the 46 countries that participated in the study, U.S. eighth-graders ranked 15th in 2003. That was the nation's best score in the three years the study was conducted (in 1997 it was 28th), but it still was behind most other industrialized countries.

Singapore topped the list every time. Math taught in Singapore is part of a national curriculum designed by the Ministry of Education. It emphasizes the development of a strong number sense, mental-math skills and a deep understanding of place value.

"The curriculum is based on a progression from concrete experience, using manipulatives, to a pictorial stage and finally to the abstract level," Pavia said.

Last year, a 30-member committee of Scarsdale teachers and administrators reviewed the district's curriculum based on the Focal Points report.

[snip]

The new textbooks will look a lot "cleaner and clearer" compared with Trailblazers, which is heavily language-based.

"There will be fewer words on the pages, and it will be less confusing to students," she said.

Trailblazers used a "spiral approach," touching upon many concepts each year and revisiting the same topics in later grades, all while not learning them to mastery.

Cadalzo explains it thus: "In second grade, for instance, the children use multiplication tables from 2 to 5, but they haven't memorized them; and when they come to third grade, we end up relearning them. But now, they will have learned them in second grade and we can just concentrate on multiplication tables for 6, 7, 8 and 9."

The lack of drills in U.S. schools might help explain the popularity of the Japan-based Kumon tutoring centers, which have sprouted throughout the states as parents look for supplements to cement the basics. The Kumon math program focuses on drilling children on basics.

There are 1,500 Kumon centers in North America, including one in Scarsdale, home to a consistently high-performing school district.

"As an Asian mother, I am very happy with the new curriculum," said Indian-born and -raised Shobha Bhatnagar, mother of an Edgewood second-grader.

[snip]

Jeffrey Thomas, president of SingaporeMath.com, the Oregon-based U.S. distributor of Primary Mathematics since 1998, estimated that 1,000 schools nationally are using the books as a supplement, with 200 using them as their core curriculum.

"Initially, most of the demand came from parents of homeschooled children and the gifted and talented programs, but now it's the mainstream schools," he said. "We are very proud to add Scarsdale to the list. They are a class act."

[snip]

"Scarsdale is not a district to rest on its laurels. We are always looking to do even better," she said. "We want to give our students every opportunity to learn math to their full capacity because, ultimately, they will be competing in the global economy."

In the past, Cadalzo's students came to their own understanding of math through guided exploration, which he conceded they were more "likely to forget." But this year he planned to teach the basics until his students can "feel it in their bones."

Sofia Lacagnina sat at her desk flipping through the pages of the slim Primary Mathematics, and said, "Trailblazers was fatter and heavier. This book is thin. I love this book."

Reach Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy at svenugop@lohud.com or 914-694-5004.

So.

Scarsdale gets Singapore Math.

Irvington gets Project Lead the Way.

That should prop up housing values in a crashing world economy.

Singapore Math 6B exit test

Here is a problem from the Primary Mathematics exit test for grade 6B (second semester, 6th grade):

An empty rectangular tank, 60 cm long by 50 cm wide, contains 3 metal cubes of edge 10 cm. The tank is being filled with water flowing from a tap at a rate of 10 liters per minute. If it takes 6 minutes to fill up the tank, find the height of the tank.

How many Scarsdale kids could do this problem?

Few. (I'll ask my friend the next time I see her.)

Here's another:

A car left Town A at 10:00 a.m. and travelled towards Town B at the average speed of 70 km/h. At the same time a truck left Town B and travelled towards Town A over the same road at an average speed of 50 km/h. If the distance between Town A and Town B is 420 km, at what time would the car and the truck pass each other?

I talked to the Admissions Director at the Masters School, which admits kids from Asian countries, about their knowledge of mathematics. She basically said: no comparison. (She said it politely. But that's what she said.) The kids they see, some of them, started algebra in 5th grade.

They're good at it, too.

Elite private schools in Manhattan, some of them, start algebra in 5th grade, too. Here in Westchester, however, not only do public schools not start algebra in the 5th grade, they are adopting constructivist curricula that progress even more slowly than the curricula they replaed. When C. went through grade school here he learned long division in 4th grade. Now the school, using Math Trailblazers, is teaching long division in 5th, and they're mostly not teaching long division at all. They're teaching forgiving division.

Fareed Zakaria needs to get a clue.


the deathless meme of the high-performing school

a Math Trailblazers word problem

Lefty's post about the new research on word problems comes just two days after I found this word problem in a 5th grade Trailblazers homework pack:

Lee Yah and Manny are setting up tables for the 5th-grade family craft show. Each table is 200 cm long. Tables will line up along 2 sides of the room which measures 12 meters each. [could I possibly have copied this sentence correctly??] Each participant who wishes to sell crafts pays a $15 rental fee for 1 table or $25 for 2 tables. Mr. Moreno tells the students that all tables have been rented. Only 2 people rented two tables. How much money will the school make on the craft show?

The first thought that sprang to mind when I read through this problem was: no child can possibly learn math from this.

I myself find the thing close to inscrutable. (Do the same people who write instruction manuals write word problems for Trailblazers?)

fyi: one of ktm's frequent commenters sent me this observation in an email just last week:

But what I have long worried about is that for some reason, the skills taught in reform math programs do not *transfer* well. I have never seen anyone talk about that, but I've seen it time and again. Their learning seems to be really confined to the particular context/problem they learned it in.

Query: Does teaching new concepts in a "real world context" have the inadvertant effect of obstructing the transfer of that learning to other contexts? Do kids who learn things in the abstract have an easier time of it?

I get $170.

Kendall/Hunt values your feedback!

They must have seen me coming.

it is important that Trailblazers is not put down

Scarsdale to try new elementary math programs
by Carrie Gilpin

In an effort to "see what's out there,” Scarsdale is trying out four math programs in 30 K-5 classrooms this year, according to assistant superintendent Paul Folkemer, and will settle on one of them, or remain with the existing program, Trailblazers, by spring. A few teachers at Scarsdale Middle School will also participate in the pilot math program.

"We have been very happy with Trailblazers and it has served us well for 10 years, but change is healthy and we want to see what is out there," said Math Committee chairman Nancy Pavia.

“The process is energizing, and puts the subject area on the front burner," said Folkemer. "It is good for us, and at the end, we could come out of this staying where we are with Trailblazers."

Implementing any new program next fall would also be "a budget issue," said Folkemer. "We don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but we won't be able to make any decision until a draft of the budget is completed. We will go in under the assumption that we have the funds to move forward by fall."

Each of the 30 volunteer teachers will test two of the four programs, substituting units of Trailblazers for similar units of one of the test programs. The district is awaiting materials and will begin the first of the pilot program trials at the end of this month, said Pavia.

Pavia said the timing of the pilot is excellent since Trailblazers' second edition is out and needs to be purchased by the district. or a different program purchased.

"This has been very thoughtfully done," she said, stressing there is broad representation of teachers within all five elementary schools and in all six levels from K-5.

A few teachers in middle school will also participate in the pilot. "Increasingly, we have been trying to invite them into conversations with us about elementary school math," said Folkemer.

Some teachers involved in the pilot program announced it to parents at the elementary schools' open houses. Folkemer said he is scheduled to give a report on the pilot program, as well as other district initiatives, to the Scarsdale Board of Education on Tuesday, Oct. 9, during the board's regular business meeting at 8 p.m. The board will meet that night at Edgewood School.

Pavia said parents would see different materials coming home in their child's backpack during the year, and that nothing would be sent home for homework that hasn't already been covered in class.

Will pilot program math students be confused? "I don't think so at all," Pavia said. "The methodology is slightly different but that shouldn't make it confusing. If parents have questions, of course they should address them with the teacher," said Pavia, stressing that naturally it will not be "perfect."

Both Pavia and Folkemer said it would not be possible to test out a new math program without actually teaching it to students.

Pavia said teachers have been discussing a change in program for several years. They considered many possible programs and came up with the following four: Everyday Mathematics, a program from the University of Chicago; Think Math!; Scott Foresman"s Investigations; and Singapore Math. The programs all have slightly different approaches and the National Council of Teachers of Math has endorsed the first three.

“Singapore Math is the one that is slightly out of the box. It is very rigorous and is written by the Ministry of Education there. It is structured slightly differently and has many positive aspects,” said Pavia.

Folkemer said that many teachers “really like” Trailblazers, a program felt by many parents to be heavily language-based.

“Any program we use must have a balance of a strong skill base with conceptual and problem-solving elements,” said Folkemer.

“Language is all around us, and mathematics requires language. But to calculate accurately is critical. Algorithms and fact work is just as important,” Pavia said.

Trailblazers functions on a "spiral” method, where a unit of say, fractions, is touched upon, then students move to another topic, and then com around to fractions again.

“Math by its nature is a spiral, but Trailblazers is a very tight spiral. The programs we are looking at are not quite as structured. Whatever program we use, we will modify it to match it with our own curriculum,” said Pavia.

Folkemer said a presidential commission on math teaching led the NCTM to come up with a list of “Curriculum Focal Points”—important math topics for each grade level, pre-K through grade 8. Focal points are areas of emphasis that serve as organizing structures for curriculum design and instruction at and across grade levels.

“When we Trailblazers years ago, we adopted it as our curriculum,” said Folkemer. “Now, we have written our own math curriculum and any program we use will be modified to fit within our curriculum.

So why does the district need to purchase any program if it has written its own curriculum?

Pavia said it would not be a good idea to teach math without a purchased program. “Teachers are generalists. I’ve always had a program, which is critical for consistency among the schools. It is a foundation upon which we will build and teach our own curriculum,” she said.

“I think it is important that Trailblazers is not ‘put down,’” said Pavia “Change is forward movement and we are looking and learning if there is a better way to teach math,” said Pavia.

Scarsdale Inquirer 10-5-2007

Trailblazers kids hit the Middle School

I mentioned in a comment that our first class of Trailblazers kids entered 6th grade this fall.

Our new principal geared up for them by spending much of last year attempting to get rid of the 6th grade accelerated math class altogether. This was justified to furious parents by references to middle school teachers not knowing how to teach Trailblazers kids, needing time for training in the ways of Trailblazers (skinnies, bits, etc.), or some such. I think the idea was to keep all the kids in the same class in 6th grade, then create an accelerated track in 7th.

He didn't manage to make this happen. We still have an accelerated math class in 6th grade, now populated by Trailblazers kids who have come to middle school further behind than kids in previous years.

Students in Susan's district weren't so lucky:

Our little Trailblazer First Wavers hit the middle school [this year], also. The district responded by restructuring the math department to better "align" with the grade schools. Accelerated 6th grade pre-algebra has gone missing. Can't imagine why.

TRAILBLAZERS story

from a ktm regular:

.... my friend was concerned that her son didn't know his times tables and even less (obviously) his division facts by the end of 5th grade. This boy made straight A's in math (2 years of Trailblazers). She asked me if I would work with him and see what was going on. I was going to give him the Saxon Placement test, but I decide just to see what would happen with Mad Minute. Well, he got around 50% of the times tables and he struggled with the 50% that he got right. The division facts were a disaster.

I asked him about fractions and while he told me that he was comfortable with some of the operations, he turned out to be very shaky on pretty much everything to do with fractions and had no knowledge of division of fractions or what a reciprocal was. I didn't even look into adding and subtracting with uncommon denominators since the multiplication and division facts weren't there. How would he quickly get equivalent fractions?

Then, I decided to do a Saxon trick and asked him to write three ways to write a division problem. He looked a little freaked out, but figured out what I was getting at. He did the division box and then a horizontal one. I asked him if he could think of another way to write it and he said no. I wrote a fraction and asked him if he realized that he could divide a fraction. He said no and that he had never seen that before (Thank God Trailblazers covers all of that conceptual knowledge.)

I took a little time and showed him some easy long division, but it was difficult because he just didn't have enough math facts learned even for the easy ones. It was a struggle from the time I came through the door so I cut the session much shorter than I had planned.

If this had been a C/D student, I probably wouldn't have been surprised, but remember, this was a top student who did all of his homework (Mom is a checker) and received all A's, according to Mom.

If that's what the "A" student looks like at the end of 5th grade, what does the "C" student look like?

So.... here in Irvington our first wave of Math TRAILBLAZERS kids will be hitting the middle school next fall.

These kids were the guinea pigs.^* Each year that they had TRAILBLAZERS was the first year the teacher was teaching it, because the curriculum was "implemented" (how I loathe that word!) in stages.

The middle school principal tried to get rid of the Phase 4 class, and would have gotten rid of it but for a particularly determined parent who managed to stave off the move. There may have been more than one parent working on this, but one that I know of for certain.

I wasn't involved, though I was lobbing lots of Yahoo op eds from the sidelines, obviously.

Actually, our discovery that there is a teeming horde of enraged K-5 grade parents heading middle school way was a turning point in our own political relationship with the district. I had been thinking, Boy. I'm out on a limb here, writing all this stuff about the district.

Wrong.

Once I realized how widespread -- and how frequently voiced -- the dissatisfaction is in K-5, I stopped worrying.

Not that I was spending a lot of time worrying.


^* Guinea pigs was the expression used by one of their moms.

latest video from Where's the Math

New video from the Where's the Math folks in Washington State. This features a 10 year old girl named Madeline who describes her experience with Investigations and then compares it with her experience with Singapore and Saxon.



link

"These 19 curricular projects have essentially been experiments."

conclusions of the National Research Council:


Executive Summary

Under the auspices of the National Research Council, this committee’s charge was to evaluate the quality of the evaluations of the 13 mathematics curriculum materials supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (an estimated $93 million) and 6 of the commercially generated mathematics curriculum materials (listing in Chapter 2).

The committee was charged to determine whether the currently available data are sufficient for evaluating the effectiveness of these materials and, if these data are not sufficiently robust, the committee was asked to develop recommendations about the design of a subsequent project that could result in the generation of more reliable and valid data for evaluating these materials.
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The following 13 mathematics curricula programs¹ (The K-12 Mathematics Curriculum Center, 2002) were supported by the NSF, and the evaluations of these materials were reviewed by our committee:

Elementary School:

• Everyday Mathematics (EM), Grades K-6 (SRA/McGraw-Hill)

• Investigations in Number, Data and Space, Grades K-6 (Scott Foresman) [ed.: also called "TERC"]
  

• Math Trailblazers, Grades K-6 (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company)

Middle School:

• Connected Mathematics Project (CMP), Grades 6-8 (Prentice Hall)

• Mathematics in Context (MiC), Grades 5-8 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)

• MathScape: Seeing and Thinking Mathematically, Grades 6-8 (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill)

• MathThematics (STEM), Grades 6-8 (McDougal Littell)

• Middle School Mathematics Through Applications Project (MMAP) Pathways to Algebra and Geometry, Grades 6-8 (currently unpublished)

High School:

• Contemporary Mathematics in Context (Core-Plus), Grades 9-12 (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill)

• Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP), Grades 9-12 (Key Curriculum Press)

• MATH Connections: A Secondary Mathematics Core Curriculum, Grades 9-12 (IT’S ABOUT TIME, Inc.)

• Mathematics: Modeling Our World (MMOW/ARISE), Grades 9-12 (W.H. Freeman and Company)

• Systemic Initiative for Montana Mathematics and Science (SIMMS) Integrated Mathematics, Grades 9-12 (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company)

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These 19 curricular projects essentially have been experiments. We owe them a careful reading on their effectiveness. Demands for evaluation may be cast as a sign of failure, but we would rather stress that this examination is a sign of the success of these programs to engage a country in a scholarly debate on the question of curricular effectiveness and the essential underlying question, What is most important for our youth to learn in their studies in mathematics? To summarily blame national decline on a set of curricula whose use has a limited market share lacks credibility. At the same time, to find out if a major investment in an approach is successful and worthwhile is a prime example of responsible policy. In experimentation, success and worthiness are two different measures of experimental value. An experiment can fail and yet be worthy. The experiments that probably should not be run are those in which it is either impossible to determine if the experiment has failed or it is ensured at the start, by design, that the experiment will succeed. The contribution of the committee is intended to help us ascertain these distinctive outcomes.

The charge to the committee was “to assess the quality of studies about the effectiveness of 13 sets of mathematics curriculum materials developed through NSF support and six sets of commercially generated curriculum materials.”

[snip]

In response to our charge, the committee finds that:

The corpus of evaluation studies as a whole across the 19 programs studied does not permit one to determine the effectiveness of individual programs with high degree of certainty, due to the restricted number of studies for any particular curriculum, limitations in the array of methods used, and the uneven quality of the studies.
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source:
On Evaluating Curricular Effectiveness: Judging the Quality of K-12 Mathematics Evaluations (2004)
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