This week SCASD sent home its “Elementary Fact Practice Parent Handbook”, which is a booklet containing advice for parents who want to help their kids with learning math “facts”, like “9 + 7 = 16″ and “8 x 4 = 32″. It’s put together well, with descriptions of games that will be helpful for mastering facts and pointers to worksheets and websites.
The handbook also contains a listing of the “SCASD Fact Fluency Expectations” by grade level, which were revised as part of the “Action Plan”. At Board meetings in the spring and then again in December of last year SCASD administrators told the Directors that the expectations for computation and fact fluency are “comparable” to those found in the Massachusetts and California state standards, but are they?
Here is a comparison of the SCASD fact fluency expectations along with what is expected in California and Massachusetts (MA is two documents here and here) for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers:
Kindergarten
SCASD: “Introduction of Addition and Subtraction Combinations through 10″
California: “Use concrete objects to determine the answers to addition and subtraction problems (for two numbers that are each less than 10)”
Massachusetts: “Use objects and drawings to model and solve related addition and subtraction problems to ten”
1st Grade
SCASD: “Mastery of Addition and Subtraction Combinations through 10; Introduction of Addition and Subtraction through 20″
California: “Know the addition facts (sums to 20) and the corresponding subtraction facts and commit them to memory”
2nd Grade
SCASD: “Mastery of Addition and Subtraction Combinations through 20; Introduction of Multiplication Facts through 5 x 5″
California: “Know the multiplication tables of 2s, 5s, and 10s (to “times 10”) and commit them to memory”
Massachusetts: “Know addition facts (addends to ten) and related subtraction facts”
3rd Grade
SCASD: “Mastery of Multiplication Facts through 5 x 9; Introduction of Multiplication Facts through 9 x 9″
California: “Memorize to automaticity the multiplication table for numbers between 1 and 10; Use the inverse relationship of multiplication and division to compute and check results”
Massachusetts: “Know multiplication facts through 10 × 10 and related division facts”
4th Grade
SCASD: “Mastery of Multiplication Facts through 12 x 12; Introduction of Division Facts through 81 ÷ 9″
5th Grade
SCASD: “Mastery of Multiplication/Division Facts through 12 x 12″
We could split hairs about the meaning of “comparable” or that SCASD expects mastery of multiplication to 12 x 12 rather than 10 x 10, but the bottom line here is that students in SCASD are not expected to have mastered their whole number facts until 5th grade, two full years after kids in CA or MA. But why even compare ourselves to CA or MA in the first place? Because it is well known that Pennsylvania’s standards are vague and inadequate with respect to their attention to computation and math facts. PA’s standards have received “D” grades from the Fordham Foundation and the US Chamber of Commerce (and a negative review from the American Federation of Teachers), while the more rigorous and clear standards in CA and MA are rated “A” by those same organizations.
We’ll compare the computational standards (including use of the U.S. algorithms and fractions) in a future post.
If you look at the curriculum SCASD had before Investigations was adopted, you can see that back then the expectations for our students were much, much higher. I remember my daughter learning decimals in third grade.