Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for September 10, 2007 MATH WARS

A new push for the basics

By Paul Hampel
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

The front lines in the country's math wars shifted to St. Louis on Thursday.

Critics of reform math programs used here and nationwide vented before the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, which is meeting this week at Washington University Medical Center.

President George W. Bush convened the panel last year in response to lagging test scores and asked members to find better ways to teach math.

The panel is meeting in 10 cities across the country to hear public comments and will report to the president in February.

Parents dominated the open forum here, lambasting the teaching methods they call "fuzzy math."

Each told a similar story: After basking for years in glowing school reports about their children's math achievements, they got rude awakenings.

Marguerite Bliss told of trying to enroll one of her daughters in a seventh-grade honors math class at Wydown Middle School in Clayton.

"After all, she was getting straight A's in math," Bliss said.

But a math coordinator rejected Bliss' daughter for the course because she had scored only 37 percent on a standardized test.

"The coordinator stated our daughter was not honors material," Bliss said. "I was shocked!"

She told the panel that she felt compelled to pay for algebra tutoring for her daughter.

Patty Polster, a Special School District teacher and the mother of two children in the Pattonville School District, pleaded with the panel to re-evaluate the reform programs.

Her comments were echoed by Elizabeth Gnall, a parent and software developer from New Jersey; J. Martin Rochester, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; and Michelle Pruitt of Columbia, Mo., who has collected hundreds of signatures in a bid to dump new methods of teaching math in schools there.

Pruitt said in an interview that she became motivated after her son asked her what the "dots" meant on a sixth-grade standardized math test.

"I told him that means multiply," said Pruitt, who has a master's degree in ocean physics. "But his classes had never covered that. To me, that was just amazing."

The reform math systems have been developed since the 1980s and are used by millions of students, including those in Hazelwood, Parkway, Brentwood, Edwardsville and many other districts here.

In programs with such names as Investigations and Everyday Math, students are encouraged to solve problems in unconventional ways.

For example, a child adding 958 to 643 would first add the hundreds column, then the tens, then the ones, then add those results.

Critics of such programs have sounded off to the panel on its various stops at universities across the nation, said its chairman, Larry Faulkner.

"There's been a sizeable movement in many communities to counter the new math movement," said Faulkner, dean emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. "We've heard some pretty passionate opinions."

The programs have their supporters, though none addressed the panel on Thursday.

Kathy Anderson, math coordinator of the Ladue School District, said such courses are designed to help children understand how problems are solved, rather than forcing them to do memory exercises.

Ladue introduced Investigations to kindergarten and first-graders last year, with a plan to expand to all elementary grades.

"We use blocks, shapes — lots of materials — that help children find multiple strategies for solving a problem," said Anderson, a math teacher for 27 years. "It gets kids to talk about how they solved the problem, to talk about math, and it develops a deeper understanding of what they're doing."

Anderson said Ladue plans to combine the program with traditional exercises in basic skills.

"I think there needs to be a combination — developing understanding along with drills and practice," she said.

A survey of 743 algebra teachers, which the national panel is releasing today, showed that American students entering Algebra 1 classes lack basic skills as well as motivation to succeed.

The teachers reported that students entered their classes performing poorly to fairly in such key areas as solving word problems, understanding fractions and decimals and using math in real-life situations.

The biggest problems, according to teachers responding to the survey, were working with unmotivated students and a lack of parental participation.

"This is pretty compelling data," said Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, one of 19 members of the panel who arrived in St. Louis on Wednesday. "This survey shows that the students not only lack the skills but also the study habits."

Loveless said the survey did not indicate whether the new math lessons were responsible for the widespread problems.

"There are so many curriculums out there that I don't think it would be fair to draw that conclusion," he said.

He noted, however, that he was not a fan of new math: "I happen to personally believe that many of the new math programs do not provide an adequate foundation."