Please attend the next Board of Ed Meeting March 26th
The website for parents in the Plainview - Old Bethpage school district who are concerned about the TERC Investigations Math curriculum and its impact on our children

News12 Long Island and Newsday Photographer join dozens of parents
at the March 12th Board of Ed meeting!!

News12 had us as a featured story: "Out with the new and in with the old".

Monday, March 12, 2007 Board of Ed Meeting and News 12 Broadcast
Mixed Message?

 

Dozens of people again turned out to speak to our concerns that the Investigations math program is not meeting the needs of our children. This time the Board of Ed was listening. As was News 12, who videotaped portions of the meeting and interviewed parent Gary Bettan and Superintendent Dr. Brooks prior to the meeting starting. However, while Mr. Bettan eloquently spoke the lack of math in the math curriculum, Dr. Brooks took several giant steps away from progress by maintaining loyalty to the Investigations math curriculum, promoting its innocence until proven guilty despite the desperate pleas of more than 800 petition signers who are clearly saying these controversial reform methods aren’t working for their children. Apparently abysmal test scores and heartfelt parent testimony at BOE meetings are not enough evidence to blame Investigations for our troubles. Newsday sent a photographer who snapped photos of speakers and rapt audience members to accompany an upcoming article. 

The meeting was held in the Mattlin Board Room, standing room only, with many additional listeners in the outer seating area.  BOE reported that they met with building principals to discuss math, and meetings with the Math Committee, PTA leadership and PCT (teacher’s union) leadership are in the works.  The Math Committee will not be meeting in March but their report was moved up from May and will be presented at the Monday, April 23 BOE meeting. Although not an agenda item, interested parties spoke out at Public Participation which began earlier than the usual order at 8:15 and was proposed to continue for 45 minutes with a 3 minute limit imposed on speakers to accommodate the Board’s needs to address regular Agenda items.  Everyone who wanted to speak was allowed to speak and the limit was not strictly enforced. 

Speakers do not believe that Investigations provides a proper background for higher level math learning and cited a report that reform math programs like Connected Math, currently used in our middle schools, will not adequately prepare students for the possibility of studying calculus in high school. Elementary math’s emphasis on artwork and drawing items such as sweaters on shelves to solve a simple division problem rather than using numerical and symbolic forms of division and its ramifications on higher level problems that drawing can not solve was discussed. One parent explained the delay his second grade child had in answering 4+7. Rather than having the fluency of this basic math fact, the child had been taught a roundabout method to add 4+7 by first determining how to get to 10, figure out that 7 + 3 = 10 and then subtracting 3 from 4 to get 1 and adding the 1 to the 10 to get the final answer of 11. This description, complete with pauses to represent thinking, was met with laughter from the audience. Dr. Brooks’ constructivist ideology which promotes learning by discovery rather than teaching facts was under direct fire as the basis of why Investigations doesn’t work, that is, the belief that you can’t learn what you aren’t taught. Parents complained that their children were used as guinea pigs in an educational experiment and several spoke of monies paid to tutors. The continued usage of Investigations in our schools was likened to the war in Iraq and a parallel was drawn to the President’s unpopular decision to maintain troops and the district’s position to maintain Investigations. The Board was implored to explore other more traditional options for math. Parents of children not yet school age spoke of their concerns for their children’s future math education. 

School principals, PTA representatives, Morty Rosenfeld, PCT President and Roberta Silver, district Math Chairperson were present.  Superintendent Dr. Brooks and Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Mrs. Hodrinsky remained silent during the public speaking time, with inquiries fielded by BOE President Jon Mosenson who also mentioned that he checks the petition and reads the comments regularly.

Maintaining our involvement is crucial in making our voices heard more than ever. We are receiving mixed messages from the school board and the superintendent. You can write a letter, send an e-mail, or call Dr. Brooks, Mrs. Hodrinsky, Ms. Silver, your school principal or any board member. Click here for a directory. Plan on attending the March 26 BOE meeting where we will address the  inconsistencies.

We will continue to inform you about the progress of our group. Please address e-mail inquiries to nofuzzymath@yahoo.com and learn more at the following sites:

 

legacy.pobmath.com       www.nychold.com          www.nychold.com/myths-050504.html

www.mathematicallycorrect.com

MARK YOUR CALENDAR:
The Math Committee report will be presented at the
Monday, April 23 BOE meeting

Mathematically Sane or Mathematically Correct?

Our school district has recently been promoting the Mathematically Sane website to parents who have expressed concern about our math program and the petition to remove Investigations from our curriculum. The website claims to have no affiliation to any organization, either for-profit or non-profit.  However, in the interest of full disclosure parents should be aware that the site was created by W. Gary Martin, an education professor at Auburn University with deep ties to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). He served as the Project Director for the NCTM PSSM, the Year 2000 rewrite of the original 1989 NCTM Standards. Professor Martin also has ties to National Science Foundation (NSF ) grants from the same division within the NSF that is responsible for the funding of TERC Investigations and the rest of the highly controversial NCTM Standards-based reform math programs.

Why the secrecy and charade of hiding these important affiliations?

Also noteworthy is the fact that Professor Martin launched Mathematically Sane specifically to counteract the web-site Mathematically Correct, which unlike his one man web site, was the work of a true non-partisan grassroots effort of many concerned citizens in the mid and late 1990's to raise awareness that the NCTM Standards-based reform math programs in were “dumbing down” the curriculum and deteriorating the math knowledge of students in California schools.

If you choose to look at Mathematically Sane, please also take the time to review as well the resources provided on web sites which are authentic non-partisan efforts to improve mathematics education such as our Plainview Old-Bethpage site, and two national Web sites NYC HOLD and Mathematically Correct, organizations which have no ties or vested interests in the NCTM or NSF awards that support reform math.  After all, what good is knowing how to divide if you can’t actually get to the answer?

 legacy.pobmath.com | www.nychold.com | www.mathematicallycorrect.com

This page is brought to you by the POB Math Posse. A group of concerned parents in the Plainview-Old Bethpage School District. For more information about this website please contact info@pobmath.com