Well, it wasn’t exactly Howard Beale-level dissatisfaction, but the SCASD Board of Directors (a majority of them anyway) showed that they have their limits when it comes to approving math programs for which there is no discernible evidence of effectiveness. At last night’s meeting, in fact, the District presented evidence which only called into question further the wisdom of continuing with the status quo in math for grades K-8 in SCASD.
The District’s administrators presented three forms of assessment of the Action Plan that has Investigations as its core resource. These assessments were chosen by the architects of the Action Plan and the results in each case were alarming:
- Only 28% of 3rd graders have demonstrated proficiency with adding sums up to 20, the standard for 2nd graders in SCASD, on a computerized test bank
- Half of 5th graders tested below proficient on on the District’s homemade test that is specifically tailored to Investigations
- A nationally-normed test administered to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders (AIMSweb) showed that in many schools most of the students are far below where they should be in conceptual thinking and computational skills
In each case, the District offered excuses for poor performance: the kids lack computer skills, the number of students demonstrating proficiency will be much higher at the end of the year, AIMS web is a confusing test with unrealistic time demands.
Six of the Board members (Bartnik, Fishbaine, McGlaughlin, Pawelczyk, Small, and Stahl) were not having any of this, and rejected the District’s plan to institute a 10-month plan to choose a new curriculum that might very well be the same as the old curriculum, and asked for an accelerated process that would result in a new curriculum being pilot tested in fall 2010 while a lasting solution would be explored by a committee that includes outside experts.
CDT coverage is here.
