Prince William County , Virginia votes to keep Investigations

Sad news from PWC, VA. The school board voted to keep Investigations, though that's not how they phrased it. They voted for a "blended approach". Which means Investigations. An excellent summary of the night's events can be found here.

The parents have not given up, however, and school board elections are not far away. There are many disgruntled parents there.

Addendum on document that exposes so-called "success stories" of TERC Investigations

I posted something earlier about Prince William County, Virginia, refuting Pearson's "Evidence of Success" of Investigations. A person in PWC says it better than I did:

"We were told that MI was research proven. Well the research the school board was citing was a document called “Investigations in Number Data and Space: Evidence for Success”. A very diligent parent called every school district in that marketing brochure and most have dropped or are dropping MI. The rest are either heavily funded with large numbers of title 1 schools or very small school districts."

This document is an incredibly important indictment; not only against Investigations but against the marketers selling this snake oil.

A blogger named Black Velvet Bruce Li has been making YouTube videos serving as a documentary of the proceedings of the Prince William County School Board. His latest addresses the above mentioned document.

Pearson's Claims of Success with Investigations are Put to Rest

The parents against "Investigations in Number, Data and Space" in Prince William County, Virginia, have been busy lately. Some of them put together a well written report refuting the "success stories" about Investigations touted by Pearson Publishing. The report has been posted on the Teach Math Right web site, and can be downloaded here.

Towards the end of the report in the section called "Success Stories" there are emails and records of phone conversations with people in the school districts that were touted by Pearson as having success with Investigations. They were fairly candid in their emails--perhaps they didn't know just how public this report was going to be. One of my favorites is this one:


Fairfield City School District, OH - Elementary Curriculum Coordinator:

"I did ask teachers to keep their thoughts to themselves and not express their dislike of the program to the parents. And that actually worked. I told them they could have the parent call me or they could say whatever they wanted about the program when we had our PDs [professional development]. I asked them to do their venting any way but [not] with the parents and the children. Another thing in our favor was that the school that did the pilot was one of our lower achieving schools, but their test scores went up significantly."
[Email of 2/9/09]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!