Where’s The Math?

Washington State Math Curricula Selection Veers Off Track Under Terry Bergeson

            The quality of the K-8 math curricula provided to Washington State students will play a critical role in deciding whether our children will be ready to compete for the jobs of the 21st century.  Unfortunately, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) under Dr. Terry Bergeson is now taking actions that will result in the selection of weak and inadequate K-8 math curricula for our state. 

Background

            Faced with poor Math WASL scores, the increasing need for math remediation in State colleges, and complaints from parents and businesses, the Washington State legislature passed a series of bills calling for revised K-12 math standards and curricula.  OSPI hired the Texas-based Dana Center to create the new standards.  Costing nearly 1.5 million dollars, the OSPI/Dana draft standards were so poor that the State Legislature took responsibility away from OSPI and gave it to consulting firm Strategic Teaching, under the direction of the State Board of Education (SBE).  OSPI had other problems, including the establishment of Standards Review Teams that were drawn nearly entirely from supporters of “discovery” or “reform” math programs, and high school standards that were so poor that a draft is still unavailable.  In late April, the SBE released the proposed K-8 math standards, which represented a modest improvement over the vague and inadequate attempt by the Dana Center, but still possessed significant problems, including the continued vague and fuzzy language in many standards and saying nothing about the use calculators in the early grades.

OSPI’s Wrong Turn on Math Curricula Selection

            According to Senate Bill 6534, the next step is curricula selection, with OSPI given the responsibility for choosing math curricula that best align with the new state standards by October 28, 2008. OSPI is again attempting to frustrate the legislature’s intent in number of ways:

(1)            Curricula Guidelines Created in Secret by Non-Math Specialists

Instead of an open process, with wide representation of parents, teachers, mathematicians, and math-impacted industry, OSPI has turned to a secretive process that has excluded individuals with real math backgrounds.  Without any outside input, OSPI created a twenty-two-person committee (Mathematics Instructional Materials Review Advisory Group) to create guidelines for making the curriculum decisions.  No public notice was provided for this meeting, nor was any attempt made to ensure a representative group.  Not one member of this group is a current math teacher, with nearly all of them being curriculum specialists or employees of OSPI.   Few of them have real degrees in math or technical subjects such as engineering.  Indeed, why was a separate handpicked advisory group needed, when one group could have been effective in determining the guidelines and evaluating the texts?

(2)            Curriculum Guideline Designed to Maintain the Status Quo

The draft Curriculum Guidelines provide seven criteria for deciding on math curricula. Only ONE criterion deals with the content of the curricula and their alignment with either the new WA math standards or the suggestions of the recently released National Math Panel report.  Equal weight is given to vague issues such as “equity and access” and “student experience” as the actual content of the books.  Alignment to more rigorous math standards should be the key requirement for the new books, not one of seven-odd considerations.  The guidelines call for evaluating the curricula processes of three states (OR, CT, NC), but strangely none of them are known for strong math standards or curricula and none are among the exemplar states recommended as models for the new, revised standards.

(3)            Curricula Review Group Biased in Favor of Current Math Curricula

Nearly four hundred individuals applied to join the group established by OSPI to recommend curricula (the Instructional Materials Review, IMR) committee.  Of the hundred that were selected only TWO identified members of WherestheMath were selected, even though a dozen WTM members applied.  Why was OSPI so fearful of including a significant representation of WTM members, many of whom have strong math backgrounds?

(4)            A Flawed Curriculum Review Process Established

The IMR group will only be meeting for five days in June, an inadequate length of time for reading and evaluating hundreds of books and thousands of pages.  OSPI then has carte blanche for several months afterwards to come up with the final recommendations.  Why was the IMR group given so little time, insuring a cursory examination of the many texts available?  It appears that the IMR review is only window dressing for a process dominated by OSPI staff.

(5)           Thirty Million Dollars Will Be Wasted This Summer on Poorly Conceived “Professional Development”

Dr. Bergeson is planning on spending thirty million dollars of State funds on “professional development” regarding the new math guidelines, even before the standards and associated commentary are finalized and the curricula are selected.  The potential to waste a large amount of public funds is clear.  If the new standards are clearly written, why is “professional development” needed to explain them?  A review of the proposed materials for this summer course indicates an empty experience that is little more than a propaganda session for OSPI.

            Wheresthemath suggests that a new approach is needed. A panel of true math experts, such as mathematics teachers and technical faculty from state universities, must review the submitted instructional materials to ensure they are mathematically accurate, and are aligned with the Washington Mathematics Content Standards and those used by leading nations and states.  Parents, PTA representatives, and math-intensive industry representatives should also have important and sustained inputs. Increased time must be provided for the consideration and development of the new curricula lists, not the five days of the current plan.  And wasting money on ill-planned professional development that is little more than cheerleading events must stop.

            The OSPI-directed curriculum selection process has all the hallmarks of the biased and non-professional approach used by OSPI in the past math standards review.  Without a change in approach, it is highly probable that the resulting curricula will be poor choices for Washington’s children and that intervention by the State Legislature will again be required.  We cannot not allow OSPI to squander another chance for improved mathematics education in our state.

An argument for increasing rigor in Washington state’s public-education system comes from this factoid: High-school students can graduate with straight A’s but still fall short of college requirements. The culprit is low academic standards, especially in math. State high-school graduation requirements include a math requirement that doesn’t meet the level required by the University of Washington and other state institutions.

Read article in the Seattle Times

This is the same problem that the medical community has been dealing with where researchers are taking consulting money from pharma companies. The peer reviewed journals are now requiring these researchers to disclose these connections because of the potential for bias / conflict of interest in both the research being performed and the outcomes.

We [WA] have a worse problem in the case of state curriculum selections since district curriculum people will be strongly biased in favor of their prior selections regardless of the fact that the standards have changed. Even if they weren’t, their management will be pushing them to get their district curriculum approved as a cost saving measure.

Read article in Education News

Now that Washington state has new Mathematics standards, OPSI will be moving on to textbook selection. For those who don’t know how textbook selection is done, we link to “Judging Books by Their Covers” which appeared as a chapter in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”. In this essay, Richard Feynman relates his experiences reviewing mathematics textbooks for California’s Curriculum Commission. Unfortunately, little has changed since 1964 and states still stage sham textbook reviews. Also interesting are the editors comments at the end:

As a rule, however, state agencies don’t want legitimate evaluations of the textbooks that publishers submit for adoption, because the agencies are allied with the publishers. The adoption proceedings staged by these agencies are not designed to help school districts, to protect students, or to serve the interests of taxpayers. Rather, they are designed to serve the interests of the publishers, to generate approvals and certifications for the publishers’ books, and to help the publishers sell those books to local schools.