I've participated in a number of these discussions, and after paying lip service to the usual disclaimers (different kids have different needs, a balance between the different approaches is appropriate, etc.), I tend to side more with the Cliff Mass position, though I think that he takes it too much to an extreme. I also think that the impasse is in part to blame on groups like Where's the Math (which advocates the traditional method) which use overheated rhetoric, try to steamroll the school boards, and now file lawsuits. This is not the kind of issue that should be settled in court.

There are a few broader problems in the math textbook debate. One problem is that school boards tend to jump around a lot, switching books before we've had a chance to evaluate them or even let teachers get used to them. That prevents us from getting a sense of what actually works. Another part of the problem, as Wilber above alluded to, is that some people want to use textbooks to solve problems that have other causes. We have a critical shortage of skilled math teachers in public education, and if the teacher doesn't understand the material very well, we're going to have a bad outcome no matter what textbook is used.

I will close with an anecdote. I was at a presentation with a math instructor--I forget who she was now--who was going through a sample class, showing how there might be several different methods for multiplying numbers. There were several Where's the Math people in the audience, interrupting with angry questions and comments, much like the Tea Partiers at last summer's town hall meetings. That's how contentious this debate is.

This "discovery" curriculum hasn't just infected the public schools - it's also used in many local private elementary schools as well, and I can say from direct experience - unless your kid is a math genius, he or she will rapidly fall behind grade level if this is the primary approach that is used in the classroom.

When confronted on this, these schools will recommend you fork out more money and time to hire a tutor. And what do all the local tutoring agencies teach? Traditional math. It's quite a racket.

For some reason, Seattle schools have this notion that the way math was taught in "the 50's" was an unqualified failure. (Of course, this is the same approach that was used in the 80's when I was in school, but the 50's makes for a much more effective bogeyman among liberals.) The thing is, there isn't a shred of scientific evidence supporting this claim, and there is plenty of evidence to refute it.

It may seem odd to have the courts involved in school curriculum, but given the lack of common sense among the leadership in Seattle schools, if that's what it takes, so be it. Keep up the fight, Cliff!

Your on-target analysis provides a thoughtful perspective on the critical question about the lack of clarity our state standards and local school boards provide teachers about the what they are expected to teach their students. Reseach confirms that teacher effectiveness and the classroom use of coherent, sequential instructional materials well-aligned with state and district content standards are prerequisites to meeting student achievement goals. The absence of these prerequisites is a primary reason for persistent student learning progress issues.

The issue in Seattle is the failure of the district curriculum to clearly articulate clearly and coherently the sequential, 'what to teach' body of knowledge content to teachers. The school board should take the court decision as a positive invitation to step back and address the core issues in this matter.

They first need to redefine the ‘what to teach’ content scope of their curriculum coherently, sequentially and precisely and ensure it aligns at that level of granularity with the state standards. In doing so, they will enable their teachers to actually verify it the ‘taught’ curriculum and materials they are using in the classroom unequivocally ‘mirror’ the district's content and is aligned with the learning expectations covered by end-of-year assessments.

As Mike Riley demonstrated in Bellevue, this process is practical and leads to improved teacher effectiveness and better student achievement. The principles and pactices Mike applied are easily transferable and can be reviewed at alignedbydesign.org.

With the new common core state standards initiative moving to add a new layer of complexity to local curriculum decision making, it is high time that Seattle and other Washington school districts took the initiative to better connect their learning expectations with the instructional materials their teacher use in the classroom. That's an important win-win for everyone, especially the student.

The dilemma exhibited here is compounded by the fact that public education is divided among 295 separate school districts, each one repeating this process over and over and coming up with different answers.

We should seriously investigate the Hawaiian solution -- a single state-wide school district run by full-time professionals, not the thousand or so part-time political amateurs that we elect to all those separate school boards.

It can't make things any worse, and there's a fair chance it could make things better.

Yes, I know there would be outcries about "loss of local control" but at least let's give it a look. There's no other state public service that's so Balkanized -- imagine our transportation system if there were no state DOT and instead those state responsibilities were divided among 295 separately elected districts.

- pepper2000
Thanks for the pointer to Where's the Math.

While I agree with you that angry and disruptive tactics aren't productive, I'm not sure how the position of this group could possibly be labeled "extreme". Their summary of Discovery math, for example, is exactly right:

"The advocates of the new, fuzzy math have practiced their rhetoric well. They speak of higher-order thinking, conceptual understanding and solving problems, but they neglect the systematic mastery of the fundamental building blocks necessary for success in any of these areas. Their focus is on things like calculators, blocks, guesswork, and group activities and they shun things like algorithms and repeated practice. The new programs are shy on fundamentals and they also lack the mathematical depth and rigor that promotes greater achievement."

If anything is "extreme", here, it's the idea that you can learn math without systematic instruction, mastery of basic concepts, and repeated practice.

Discovery Math makes as much sense as Discovery Flight Training, and the results are just as disastrous.

Last spring, various op-eds in the Seattle papers mentioned districts that had used the curriculum called "Discovering Algebra and Geometry." I called the San Diego Unified District to get their perspective. They have over 20 high schools. I talked with people in the central office of math instruction and also high school teachers. The bottom line is San Diego made a huge investment in the Discovering training and after several years, when it was time to review math curriculum, they created a short list of choices. Discovering was not on their short list. One of the teachers said they simply found it was not effective, and decided to go with a more direct approach which was better supported by other materials.

I am a parent in the Highline district, which this spring decided to adopt the Discovering Math. The adoption "process" was really odd. More than anything, it made me realize just how important it is for parents to monitor the approaches a district is using and be quick to obtain supplemental materials or resources, because one size definitely does not fit all.

The comments above about maybe needing a statewide approach, or at least consistency within a district, definitely have merit. At the same time, it is good for students to have a choice of what curriculum to use because while Discovering may be good for some students, I am not convinced it is for everyone.

One of the groups left out of Highline's process was parents. Yes they had a few parent meetings, but these were after the decision was made. Again for some parents these materials would be fine, but for non native English speakers, I think it would be very hard to use.

Sean:

Thanks for your comments. I tend to agree more with Wilbur's approach (the first comment in this thread), which is that after algorithms are mastered, there has to be some discussion of what the deeper meaning of it is. When I read the Where's The Math approach, sometimes it seems that it is nothing other than repeated drill, and I think that takes it too far. Maybe I misundestand their approach a bit, but if I do, then part of the blame must rest with how it is presented. Regarding calculators, for instance, I think that calculators should be introduced later on, but I think that being able to solve complex problems, for which a calculator is needed for some of the steps, is an important skill.

This case wasn't just about math pedagogy; it was also about how the Seattle School Board works and arrives at decisions.

The Board, in their decision-making process, was arbitrary and capricious.

Let's focus on that.

- pepper2000
You and I certainly agree - math fundamentals should be accompanied by conceptual problems in which those skills can be creatively applied. This seems so obvious it's hard to believe there's anything to debate here.

And yet teachers and school tour guides who have drunk the Discovery kool-aid proudly tell me that worksheets, algorithms, and practice are not part of their math curriculum, and I've witnessed firsthand how ineffective this kind of instruction is.

My reading of the Where's the Math crowd is that they aren't seeking to do away with conceptual problems but simply wish to restore math fundamentals to the equation (pardon the pun).

Dick,

Your argument that a common curriculum is beneficial to students doesn't extend to a curriculum based on "mathematically unsound" materials.

Although we can't look at results of Discovering yet, if you look at the effect of its little sister EDM, which has been the common curriculum in SPS for 4 years, you see declining math scores and a widening achievement gap. This is even with the recognition that EDM doesn't teach the "traditional algorithms" required by the state standards, which must be taught separately.

With all due respect to Mr. Lily -- whom I know from my own years in local journalism to be a skilled and careful reporter -- the principles of what is disingenuously labeled “journalistic objectivity” demand omission of the pivotal factor in the math-wars equation and in most other public education controversies as well.

The omitted factor is, of course, the collective laziness of public school teachers -- their overwhelming desire to make their sinecures as effortless as possible and therefore as close as any physically present employee might ever come to the proverbial no-show job.

Indeed the outrageous manner in which the teachers' unions use their overpowering wealth and influence to coddle the lazy and protect the incompetent is undoubtedly -- at least in today's world -- the primary source of the disreputability that undeservedly besmirches the entire labor movement.

(Perhaps, to distinguish real workers from teachers, I should refer to workers' unions as the “real” labor movement, in which -- yes -- I proudly disclose near-lifetime membership. Indeed I had a union card long before the teachers co-opted the union label for themselves -- long before they stopped shrieking in hysterical protest every time some reporter wrote “teachers' union” rather than “professional association.”)

Meanwhile the quality of U.S. public schools has been an issue for heated, often furious debate ever since Sputnik I demonstrated the superiority of the classical European mode of education, this in the autumn of 1957, when – more disclosure – I was but a 17-year-old high-school senior.

That the same debate has raged since then – essentially unchanged save for the teachers' deliberately obfuscatory issuance of a new vocabulary of buzzwords every fall – is a tribute to the ultimate truth of Barnum's Axiom and its corollary of “step right up.”

Nor will anything change for the better until we recognize that the largest single barrier to effective public-school teaching is the fact the education major required of all teachers is the greatest dunce-coddler and idler-magnet on any given college campus.

But so it has been since long before the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics demonstrated the superiority of European kulturniy over U.S. nyekulturniy by launching Earth's first space satellite.

As to the effective teaching of mathematics, what we need in our classrooms are trained mathematicians -- not dimwitted pedagogues protected by professional dissemblers schooled in verbal legerdemain.

What a load of crap from lorenbliss. I've had kids in Seattle Public Schools for more years than I can remember (only 3 more to go!) and he describes maybe one or two of the scores of teachers I've come in contact with. Get a grip; find a good counsellor.

"trained mathematicians" - I remember in high school one of my science teachers had training above the others, but he was , for most students, not as effective a teacher as ones who still had subject expertise but not as much "training."

Teaching is just plain hard. I am sorry for the experiences of the previous commenter Lorenbliss.

Ditto what R on Beacon Hill says: "What a load of crap from lorenbliss." In my experience as a Seattle Public Schools parent, the math teachers were more hamstrung by the stupid, idiotic, touchie-feelie Discovery curriculum than they were by any union contract.

As for the efficacy of "trained mathematicians," bullshit. I mean Bull. Shit! If you can teach, you can get a kid to learn. If you can't teach, no amount of academic expertise in any other subject matter is going to get that subject matter across to a whole lot of kids.

Judge Spector is my hero. SPS needs to sack the "senior academic officers," or whatever their damn title is, who foisted this abomination on us, and get back to drill, baby, drill.

My daughter ACED Discovery math in ninth and tenth grades, but she was just cruising on what she had learned at Kumon, where in addition to repetitive rote memorization, she learned WHY we do certain operations in a certain order.

We BEGGED the tenth grade teacher to give my daughter additional drills. We knew how she learned. The teacher said the curriculum wouldn't permit it. The school was forcing her to do Central Staff's bidding. Once my daughter got into Running Start, sure enough, she couldn't test into college level math at NSCC, and had to take three bonehead math courses before she could take the college level course, which she passed comfortably, and now is reasonably math literate.

The Discovery math taught her NOTHING. Anyone who blames that on the teachers and their bargaining agent is just plain ignorant.

Ivan - well said. Discovery Math has NOTHING to recommend it beyond the brokeback ideologues continue to do it. The facts say it's a disaster. Thank God for 'over-heated' groups like Where's the Math that will go to the mat for our kids.