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 An
Everyday Effort to Improve Education
by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, August 24, 2004
For more articles like this
visit
https://www.bridges4kids.org.
Karen Budd is
one of those parents that school administrators try to avoid.
To begin with, she understands math, having a bachelor's degree
in the subject, plus some graduate work in engineering, from the
University of Pittsburgh. Every school superintendent who has
ever attended a PTA meeting knows the math-savvy parents are the
worst. They often have complaints about the way teachers are
handling the subject. And the average administrator, having like
me successfully avoided taking any math since high school, knows
he is ill-equipped to defend himself.
Adding to the troublesome nature of Karen Budd is her early and
unhappy experience with Everyday Math, one of the modern
conceptual textbook series favored by many experts in
mathematics education. It is distressing to her that Fairfax
County, where she lives, in the last two years added Everyday
Math to some of its schools.
I sympathize with those who have to answer Budd's letters. I
would not be any better equipped to argue with her than they
are. But I think parents like her are an important part of the
effort to make schools better, and we ought to remember that
they are becoming even more influential as we hand them a whole
new generation of weapons -- the results of all those
achievement tests the state and federal governments are making
the schools give our children.
Take as an example what Budd has done with some new testing data
sitting out there in cyberspace, ready for use. She looked at
two large and important Washington area school districts, Anne
Arundel and Fairfax counties, which are using different
textbooks in their math programs. She says she has found a
remarkable discrepancy in results.
Like all such statistical arguments, this math gap is full of
qualifications and limits and confusing twists, and many
educators insist it does not exist at all, but I want to display
her conclusions as a sign of what other parents might want to
try, and as a warning to administrators that they are going to
have to pay more attention to such comparative figures
themselves, if only for their self protection.
Budd's research project was motivated by what she says happened
to her children when they encountered Everyday Math at a private
school. "At first blush," she said in a letter to a
superintendent who was using the program, "my instincts told me
it was not rigorous enough, nor content rich. However, I decided
at the time to be deferential to the educators and accepted the
program assuming that educators knew more about mathematics
education than I."
"I rue the day that I accepted it without question and that I
did not investigate further. My children's days were to be
filled with counting on a scroll to 1,000,000 and playing games.
Addition and subtraction facts were not emphasized properly.
Fractions in the 5th grade were glossed over. These should have
been major red flags to me as these skills are all very critical
to success in algebra. It should have occurred to me that
whoever wrote this program had a significant deficit in
understanding or remembering advanced mathematics and in knowing
what it takes for children to be successful in advanced
mathematics."
Since then, she said, she has spent many summers helping her
older daughter, Katie, fill the mathematical void left by
Everyday Math. For her daughter, there is a happy ending -- she
heads off this month to Grove City College to major in
mechanical engineering. Budd, however, said she is concerned
about other children whose parents have neither the education
nor the means to tutor or have their children tutored. Budd
pulled her younger daughter Kelsey out of the school that was
using Everyday Math when she was in second grade. Budd said her
mathematical gaps were much less severe and easily filled in by
Fairfax County public schools' more traditional math curriculum
at the time.
When Budd discovered Fairfax County was planning to install
Everyday Math in at least five schools, she decided to take her
concerns to school officials. She looked for examples to
buttress her beliefs. Although she had not lived in Anne
Arundel, she was impressed with the progress it made using Saxon
mathematics, a more traditional textbook series that has been
successful in many schools and decided to compare that to what
progress Fairfax had made with its curriculum. Here is one of
the charts she created on the Anne Arundel experience and
another on the Fairfax results. Three other charts can be found
on the Web at this site under the title "Why Anne Arundel Scores
Went Up").
Four charts appear to show Saxon raising scores substantially in
Anne Arundel. The fifth chart shows what appears to be less
improvement in Fairfax County's lowest performing elementary
schools over four years. They did not use Everyday Math, which
has just been adopted in the county, but they also did not use
Saxon, despite pleas from Budd and other parents that they do
so.
Tim McEwen, president and chief executive officer of Austin,
Tex.-based Harcourt Achieve, which sells the Saxon series, said,
"It is not surprising that Anne Arundel County saw a dramatic
increase in test scores." John Saxon, a former military officer
who created the textbooks, "discovered a way that builds skills
in an incremental manner, with frequent repetition, leading to
an understanding of mathematical concepts and the connections
between them," he said.
April Hattori, vice president for communications at New York
City-based McGraw-Hill Education, publishers of the Everyday
Math series, strongly disagreed with Budd's and McEwen's
analysis. She said the data in the charts is distorted and
misleading and "Everyday Math has achieved significant
documented results in school districts across the country." In
Dallas, for instance, the percentage of students passing the
state math test rose in all elementary schools after Everyday
Math was introduced, she said, with the biggest gain in fourth
grade, from 65 percent passing in 2000 to 75 percent passing in
2001.
When Budd presented her analysis of the data to a meeting of the
Fairfax County Math Curriculum Advisory Council in March, she
got a cool reception. Budd said one young teacher working at a
low-income school said "with pride how the teachers read the
word problems for the kids and even write down for the children
the 'very exciting' thought processes that the children go
through to come up with an answer, not necessarily the right
one." The fact that Everyday Math had previously been used in
Anne Arundel, and was about to be used in Fairfax, to help
low-income children was troubling to Budd, since she thought it
would not work for kids whose parents were not good at math.
Kitty Porterfield, spokeswoman for the Fairfax County public
schools, said the Anne Arundel and Fairfax data used by Budd are
measuring different things, percentile rank in Anne Arundel and
percent scoring at or above the 50th percentile in Fairfax. She
said if Fairfax's data were arranged the same way as Anne
Arundel's, its students would also have shown "an impressive
gain."
Anne Arundel County officials said Everyday Math appears to have
been only a minor part of the math curriculum in its lowest
performing schools. (Hattori said total sales of the program in
the county since 1998 "are about $30.") Anne Arundel spokesman
Jonathan Brice said the county is "guardedly optimistic" about
the success of its math courses and is looking forward to
improving the learning of all students in all subjects.
Budd said that when she displayed at the advisory council
meeting her chart showing the gain in computation skills among
Anne Arundel students using Saxon, the reaction from the
teachers in the room was that that was only computation. "So I
showed the problem solving charts and then, guess what . . . we
heard how testing is not authentic," she said.
"I do this," she said, "because having become so involved with
my own kids and having done exhaustive research, mostly because
I never believed my own instincts, I now feel responsible to
bring these results to light -- for the kids it would benefit
and for the taxpayers who are being squeezed by this county for
pretty average results."
See what I mean? Educators do not like hearing parents talk that
way, but they ought to get used to it. These arguments used to
be just opinions, tossed back and forth like water balloons on a
college weekend. Now, with so much testing going on, and so much
information on the Internet, both parents and teachers have
facts to present, and everyone is going to have to listen more
carefully.
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