Below is a comment posted to this article. The poster is a current School Board Member in a prominent New Jersey School District.
The SOMSD can spends thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars on expensive audits/reports and professional development and spend months looking at data trying to align existing curricula to NJ's standards, etc., or they can face up to the fact that it is the math program itself that is the cause of their state test scores and troubling achievement gaps. The Everyday Math program just does not work for many, many kids unless there is a huge amount of outside tutoring to fill the gaps. In my opinion, the kids in the top 5% of cognitive ability or so will probably be fine with the program. But average kids and kids "at risk", especially those with learning disabilities or ELL, will really suffer with this reform math program and they will be behind the eight ball with regard to their mathematical skills for too long.
For years, parent organizations have formed all across the country trying to rid this program (or others like it, such as TERC Investigations and Connected Math) from their school district. I formed one myself just 30 miles away, in the Bridgewater-Raritan district, then I ran for the BOE and helped to convince our new administration to evaluate the math program. They did evaluate it and found it was not working. We dumped it and adopted Harcourt's HSP Math last year and it is working well. Everyday Math does not provide enough practice on the foundational skills required for higher level math. It spends too much time on teaching silly algorithms, while "spiraling", or jumping from topic to topic without having kids attain mastery first. Everyday Math is not a balanced program. All the money in the world paying for professional development and data analysis will not fix the problem. One other problem is that teachers are afraid to speak out against a program for fear of retribution, so it's difficult to get an accurate gauge on what teachers think of the program. We gave an anonymous parent and teacher surveys which were very revealing.
I told my success story to the blogger of Parents for Quality Math Education:
Bridgewater-Raritan District BOE Votes 9-0 to Drop Everyday Math and Adopt Harcourt HSP Math 2009:
Complete Bridgewater-Raritan Math Program Evaluation:
Bridgewater-Raritan Math Program Evaluation PowerPoint:
Jill Gladstone
1981 graduate of the SOMSD
Co-founder, US and NJ Coalition for World Class Math,
1981 graduate of the SOMSD
Co-founder, US and NJ Coalition for World Class Math,
http://njworldclassmath.webs.com/ and http://www.usworldclassmath.org/
*I am a BRRSD BOE member and am expressing my thoughts as an individual. I do not represent my BOE as I have no authority to do so
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