Hi, Al --

It sounds like the good news is that your own kids are still young and you still have time to set a good course for them in school.  The even better news is that you are aware that there is a national battle over fuzzy math, and that you therefore are not likely to accept blindly the fabrications and blatherings of the bureaucrats who run school districts.

Here in Illinois, the Illinois Loop collects information on what is happening to education in our state, and through this we try to help people who are fighting for their kids in their local districts.  The infection of fuzzy math and reached pandemic proportions:  We've studied the math programs used in 118 suburban K-8 districts in five collar counties, and we found that progressivist, constructivist products are the math foundation in 77 percent of those districts!

As a result, we get hundreds of messages from parents who are distraught, frustrated, and furious. Since charter schools pretty much are not allowed in the state of Illinois outside of the city of Chicago, this is a pressure cooker, as parents find that moving seldom offers an escape.  What we do see happen is big growth in outside tutoring services such as Kumon, Score, Huntington, Sylvan and so on.

There is much more about fuzzy math on these pages of the Illinois Loop website:

  General fuzzy math:
   http://www.illinoisloop.org/math.html

  TERC and other specific math programs:
   http://www.illinoisloop.org/mathprograms.html

Al, there is something else you need to investigate:  you mentioned that your kids are boys.  Schools that follow the constructivist / child-centered / fuzzy religion tend to be especially dangerous for boys.  Your district's adoption of TERC, one of the worst of the constructivist math programs, should be setting off alarm bells for you.  I strongly encourage you to read about the effect of constructivist programs on boys, and there are many links on this page:  http://www.illinoisloop.org/gender.html

You're doing a service to your community by opening this discussion.  More fundamentally, your own curiosity and open-minded look at what is going on will prove to be immeasurably valuable to your own children.

Best wishes to you! 

I have been actively involved in fighting Everyday Math, Connected Math, and Core Plus Math - all reform math programs - in my community.  I have spent over 2 years researching, contacting math experts nationwide, mathematics college profesors, etc.  I began this when my son and his friends, who were in the first graduating class taking Core Plus, went to college and failed math.  These were honor students all the way to tech school students.   We also found that our students college placement tests at a community college placed them below the average of other surrouding districts - our kids were being prepared to take remedial math in college and they were even failing that.  After an extremely hard and public battle, getting the teachers involved in a math task force that I was also part of, and polling graduates and parents, our district abolished the Core Plus and Connected Math programs in favor of a more traditional math program.  This school year is the first with the new traditional program.  However, the elementary school task force decided to stick with Everyday Math based solely on one study at the What Works Clearinghouse that Jim Milgram, who is on a committee that oversees the Clearinghouse, said was uncontrolled and questionable.  They also cited our elementary school Pennsylvania test scores.

I have found that elementary parents are okay with Everyday Math (EM), while there was a noticeable difference with the parents of middle school and high school kids.  Anyone who says they like EM seems to have children in elementary school - they do not know yet the damage it causes - and won't know until their children are in upper grades or graduate.  The reason for this seems to be that elementary schools - (this seems to be true nationwide) - score well on state tests or at least much better than in later years.  The problem is that many state tests are extremely inferior themselves.  So when an elementary school scores well on an inferior state test (but most parents don't realize they are inferior tests) it gives the school a sense of security and it also falsely convinces parents that their children are learning and doing well.  This falls apart in later years, when the kids find that they do not have the background in algebra concepts, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, etc. that they need to perform well in algebra - and then in everything after algebra, since you need a solid algebra base.  Even when they seem to do well in high school, college math hits them like a ton of bricks.  College math is not reform based, unless you are taking a math course that is designed to just give you the easiest, and dead-end basics to get your math credit out of the way.  If you want to go into a math or science field, they DO NOT use reform based math, and they expect you to know algebra VERY WELL.

  The best advice I have received - from Jim Milgram, an expert on the subject - on avoiding your children being crippled by these inferior math programs is to either send them to a private school where there is no fuzzy math or get them intensive tutoring in traditional math from the start.  Yes, it is expensive, but your child will not be a math/science cripple when they begin college.

 For more information on just some of the info I have gathered, please see our website http://www.reform-qcsd.com/

Also, see http://www.claytonmathmatters.com/ - a site in St. Louis, MO, where there are comments from professors.

The debate over the Math Wars is well into its second decade in California, which adopted a curriculum framework in '94 that was even fuzzier than the 1989 "Standards" released by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). My son was in the First Grade when the now defunct Mathland, not the worst but was for a time the dominant fuzzy elementary curriculum, had it's first release. The schools here were already enthusiastic Whole Language adherents, and Mathland brought in Whole Math. As a result we had to pull our son out of our local public school and enroll him in the local parochial school, our only alternative.

Mathland may no longer be with us, but the Wright Group, Mathland's final home, is the publisher of Everyday Math.

The original parent-with-pitchforks group was Honest Open Logical Debate (HOLD) in Palo Alto, California, and they started the ball rolling, with Mathematically Correct closely following. MC's web pages have a wealth of information regarding math curriculum, good and bad, including Everyday Math:

www.mathematicallycorrect.com 

One of the successes of the push against new-new or fuzzy math were content standards, free of pedagogic bias, that stated what the math content should be for elementary grades, up to 8th grade Algebra I, and a review process for curricula before they could be purchased normally with state provided funds. Everyday Math was approved at the most recent adoption, but it was a special California edition and the specific differences between it and what is being sold elsewhere is not clear.

Everyday Math has made its way into New York City, and a parent's group has taken up a fight against it:
www.nychold.com

Their info about Everyday Math is concentrated at

http://www.nychold.com/em.html

good luck!

Hello.

I am the founder of http://www.vormath.info/ and the author of the petition you reference.

I would strongly suggest reading the following 3 part article, written by Barry Garelick, "It Works For Me". I have links to all of the article parts at my website: http://vormath.info/WordPress1/?p=145. The article can also be found at EDUCATIONNEWS.ORG

http://ednews.org/articles/19316/1/It-Works-for-Me--An-Exploration-of-Traditional-Math-Part-1/Page1.html

Traditional math was not "rote memorization". Many mathematicians, and others who have careers based upon mathematics, will attest to having gone into math because it was not rote memorization. It was a building of fundamentals, in a logical sequence, requiring mastery for successful progression. Characteristics that are lacking in the materials and methodology espoused by reform math programs such as TERC Investigations in Number, Data, & Space as well as Everyday Mathematics. Reform math is not the holy grail to "critical thinking" as claimed by its proponents. I ask you, how can one critically think without understanding and mastering the fundamentals?

I have the teaching materials and student materials for TERC 2nd edition and I would be happy to have you peruse the material. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and after seeing TERC 2nd edition (yes, the one suppose to be improved) side by side with material that is "beyond" NCTM 1989, 2000 reforms (such as Houghton Mifflin), it is my opinion that as a taxpayer and as a parent, TERC and its cousins (Everyday Math, Trailblazers, etc...) should go the way of Mathland. And that is, become extinct. A waste of hard earned tax dollars. Got Textbook? No, reform math is king of sheets, workbooks, and manipulatives. Oh, and of course, any drawing material.

Dwight Eisenhower - a top rated private institute of learning in Bergen County, does not use reform mathematics. At $20,000 per year per child, if TERC or Everyday Math was the icing on the cake of math education, you would think for that money Dwight Einsenhower would be in the hands of each of its students.

As for Everyday Math, you may wish to read this summary chart, http://www.nychold.com/chart-tx-era.pdf, There was also two recent letters to the editor in the NY Daily News, both anti-Everyday Math.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Gnall

Founder http://www.vormath.info/, in association with NYCHOLD (www.nychold.com)

Parent, afterschooling with Singapore Mathematics and utilizing KUMON for distributed, focused, mastered practice of the fundamentals of mathematics.

I recently published 2008 TERC Math vs. 2008 National Math Panel Recommendations.  Please visit wgquirk.com.

Bill Quirk 

I recently published 2008 TERC Math vs. 2008 National Math Panel Recommendations.  Please visit wgquirk.com.

Bill Quirk