The BSD math textbook adoption committee has received over 100 letters from parents, students and community members supporting a textbook that uses direct instruction, and only a couple supporting an investigations-based textbook. After more than a decade of use of an investigations-based math curriculum, the community knows what this type of curriculum is like.
We have seen that the achievement gap between low-income students, students of color and Caucasian students has not been reduced. We have sat down to supplement the math that our kids were supposed to have learned in class and paid tutors to teach our kids the fundamentals that the school curriculum has missed.
The school district has acknowledged the inadequacy of its investigations-based elementary curriculum by adopting Math Expressions, a textbook that teaches traditional algorithms and provides much more adequate practice problems.
The elephant in the room is, Why did the math textbook selection committee even consider a textbook using a methodology that has not worked in Bellevue?
The math textbook adoption committee has met for months, and has presented public meetings on the process they used, but they have never satisfactorily answered this question. The committee may vote on the next textbooks series as soon as March 11.
The degree of interest in this issue is unusual because it is critical to the future of our children, as well as to the future of our school district as a leader in providing top quality college prep education.
Over 130 community members turned out for a math information meeting organized by parents on a night when the Olympics were on TV and multiple schools had competing activities, demonstrating further the importance of this issue to our community. The faith of the community in the leadership of our school district, and in the curriculum department in particular, is on the line.
Is selection of the next textbooks a popularity contest? No one is suggesting that it should be. But the books selected must provide adequate opportunity for students to master standard mathematical terminology and algorithms, to express mathematical concepts precisely and to gain procedural fluency.
They must be accessible to parents, and to students who miss school, in order to facilitate review at home. They must prepare the next generation to compete against people worldwide who have mastered the same standard math algorithms, who speak the language of mathematics fluently and who will work for lower pay.
If we want to keep good paying jobs in our community and our country, our schools must teach authentic algebra and geometry, and the schools must have textbooks that provide the infrastructure for instruction. An investigations-based curriculum will not do this job adequately.
Joy Phelps, Bellevue
