Struggles Continue with New Math

According to this article in the AJC, Final exams show teens struggle with new math curriculum:

"Teens fared so poorly with Georgia’s newly accelerated sophomore math curriculum last school year that state officials want to put the lowest performers in an easier course in August that more can pass."

Now that's brilliant. If they can't pass, let's make it easier!

"Only 52 percent of the students who took the End of Course Test for Math II in May passed, the state recently reported. Many students in metro Atlanta schools who took the tests squeaked by with barely passing grades, earning modest average scores of C's and D's for their districts.

The freshman class, meanwhile, fared somewhat better on the Math I End of Course Test, with 64 percent passing."

"Tamela Cosby, an Atlanta Public Schools high school teacher, said only 20 percent of her ninth- and 10th-graders passed the final. They also struggled with the material in class.

“Since the course is a little difficult for the students, it's not enough time to teach to mastery,” Cosby said. “They are not really understanding the material. For a lot of them, it’s the reading comprehension. They are not understanding what is being asked of them. It’s not just two plus two, there are word problems. They are not used to thinking in that aspect.”

So, it looks like the real failure here is in reading comprehension and understanding word problems.

About 80,000 teens statewide failed final exams in Math I and Math II in May."

It seems Ms. Cox got out of Dodge just in time.

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For a little history on the subject, read the article by Shayna Steinfeld posted here last year called, "All About Math".

For a good discussion on the subject, check out Maureen Downey's blog.

So, Shayna was right!

Fulton educators are waffling on the new math. As reported recently in NorthFulton.com, "It’s out with the new and in with the old for 2010 as the Fulton County School System prepares to dump the controversial math curriculum in favor of back-to-the-basics traditional math."

Shayna kindly wrote an article for this blog back in July, called, "All About Math" in which she made an incredibly cogent argument for holding off on the wholesale implementation of the new Georgia math curriculum. Shayna researched the topic diligently and came to the conclusion that, while the curriculum is a good one at it's core, it is very difficult to teach and requires an incredible amount of teacher training. She further noted that although Cobb and Gwinnett chose to layer the new curriculum over the old a piece at a time, DeKalb instead chose to go in "whole hog". Her findings were very interesting and although she shared a copy of her article with each board member and appealed to them as a speaker at a board meeting, the program was implemented - "all in" - anyway.

Now comes Fulton County, reporting, "“While students were certainly challenged with [the new standards], the way of teaching with the discovery or inquiry method was confusing to some students, teachers and parents,” said Loe.

The system also began to see fewer students being accelerated or advanced, and students not working to their full potential, noted Loe. More significantly, high school math teachers began seeing students who lacked basic computation skills and math scores on nationally-normed tests began flat-lining or dropping."

Fulton leaders also tell us, "In coming to the decision to dump Investigations and Connections, Loe and her staff looked at the results of a recent book which summarized 50,000 studies of student achievement to determine which practices actually correlate to higher achievement. What the study found was direct instruction far exceeded results over inquiry-based learning."

This could be bad. Are there math teachers out there or parents who would like to share their experiences with DeKalb's new math? We really need to keep our eyes on the math ball -- even as our administration continues to distract us with all kinds of irrelevant emergencies.

New Math Finally Explained!

SwitchedOnMom in her blog, The More Child, which focuses on giftedness and teaching advanced and AP courses, has this to say to Jay Mathews regarding pushing the math curriculum in high schools:

Jay Mathews, as they say, has some “’splaining ” to do. From his column in today’s Washington Post.

Nobody writing about schools has been a bigger supporter of getting more students into eighth-grade algebra than I have been. I wrote a two-part series for the front page six years ago that pointed out how important it is to be able to handle algebra’s abstractions and unknown quantities before starting high school. I have argued that we should rate middle schools by the percentage of students who complete Algebra I by eighth grade.

Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.

Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has looked at the worst math students, those scoring in the bottom 10th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade test. He discovered that 28.6 percent of them — let me make that clear: nearly three out of every 10 — were enrolled in first-year algebra, geometry or second-year algebra. Almost all were grossly misplaced, probably because of the push to get kids into algebra sooner.

For more on the subject, read her post titled, "Just Say No to Accelerated Math", or the recent post by blogger Frizzle titled, "Algebra and AP - No, not for everyone".