As I was leaving the Board meeting during the break that followed the math discussion, Director Dorothea Stahl approached me to let me know that she did not appreciate something I said in this post. She said that I misrepresented a question she asked during the the September 14th Board meeting when I characterized what she said as urging the District administrators to find support for “Investigations”.
I apologize to Ms. Stahl for any such mischaracterization. I may have read too much into her question based on the fact that she was one of the SCASD directors who voted for the purchase of the second edition of “Investigations” for grades K, 3, and 4 last June, when it was approved 6-3.
Here is a transcript of what Ms. Stahl actually said in her question, transcribed from the video, which may be viewed in the online C-NET archive (at time 45:25):
I have a few things written down, um, and since you just mentioned PSSAs, I’ll- I’ll start there. Um, I know that some of our math scores have gotten lower and I also know that we have monitored when we rolled out this new investigative math, we did it at certain schools and then we added it. So, from my understanding currently at least the ninth graders at State High this year, if you went to Easterly you had it your entire elementary career, or at least starting in first grade. So, there would be tenth and eleventh graders that at least had it for quite a few years in elementary, and then by that time their middle school curricular was in that kind of continuum – we’d already switched to that. So I didn’t know if you can take this information and, um, use it as a tool to break down if you see that the kids who haven’t had Investigations for their entire career versus the kids who’ve only had it say for fifth grade because at, um, Boalsburg-Panorama, my ninth grader he only had it for start- fourth, but his fourth grade teacher hadn’t really done a lot of it so really he only had it one year, for fifth grade. So I think that because we have these tools we may want to look closely at, if there are some scores that are going down, can you take it back to either students who had more or less of a different math approach since we have this data, we have this information and we’re a small enough school it’s not too tedious, so that was one thought that I had. And also I noticed that you’re using this Regional Educational Laboratory Program and I didn’t know two things. Does this laboratory program assess the amount of time in a day that we do our math program so that it’s not just the math program but how much time we’re doing so is it as effective as it could be if say we were a district that did a half hour more of math per day? And, at the end of this school year, if the Regional Educational Laboratory Program says that how we’re implementing this curriculum is or is not the successful way, what then? Do we have something where we have in our mind based on what they say and what we see, what- what are our next steps? Because my concern is, I think you’ve done a wonderful job, especially with the web, the resources we have, and the communication element, but it will not be successful if we get to June and we find information that we don’t feel is as effective and this isn’t working as well for our students and we want to go in a different direction, we don’t have another year to then evaluate, so I didn’t know is there something that we’re doing parallel to this that says, “Well, we saw this school district which is in our cohort seems to really be successful in math. They are doing twenty minutes more per day or this is how they’re implementing their program and they’re using Investigations but it’s a smaller version of it and they’re – “? I don’t want to get to June and not have some kind of -
Indeed, at tonight’s meeting Ms. Stahl asked some of the most critical questions about “Investigations” and the “Action Plan”. At one point she stated, “I wonder if we’re doing an awful lot of stuff here to polish a … I’m not going to say something really bad here.” What exactly we’re polishing is open to interpretation, but it might be this.
I should agree with Steve.
When I first came to Board meeting in October for PSSA score discussion, I was frustrated by it. There was discussion about anything but real reasons of falling scores. This time around it seems like there are real people on Board who have kids of their own and want good for them. Few right questions where raised. Not all of them got real answers, but that is start. Few good commented and questions were ignored or “scrambled”. That is unfortunate. I can only hope that Board members are going to keep an eye on math.
I also was surprised to hear from MJ Kitt that during workshops (where teachers getting together and share experience and do some work with curriculum support teachers) some teachers have a-a-a! moments. I might not understand how thing working, but I was under impression: if you are educating children, you know that subject from A to Z.
As for the progress of math education from grade to grade. I guess, I did not pay enough attention to my kids education. But when MJ Kitt said that in first grade emphasis on addition, second-subtraction, in fourth they start multiplication 2*2, I had to stop myself from yelling :”Are you kidding?!”