The Fulton County School System, which includes Atlanta, is preparing to drop its constructivist approach to math shortly after hiring a superintendent who is basing decisions on research and common sense:
The goal, noted [Superintendent Cindy] Loe, is to return to a teacher directed curriculum instead of the inquiry based model favored in Investigations and [Connected Math], where the teacher serves as the facilitator.
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“While students were certainly challenged with [the new standards], the way of teaching with the discovery or inquiry method was confusing to some students, teachers and parents,” said Loe.
The system also began to see fewer students being accelerated or advanced, and students not working to their full potential, noted Loe. More significantly, high school math teachers began seeing students who lacked basic computation skills and math scores on nationally-normed tests began flat-lining or dropping.
Parents rallied against what they viewed as a “language arts” approach to math, with students being asked to write sentences on why answers were correct, and correct answers counted equally with correct approaches. A black and white subject, they said, was being reduced to shades of gray.
Loe, who will mark two years in her position in April, immediately began making changes to the math curriculum from nearly her first day on the job, mandating a blended approach to math which incorporated integrated math with traditional math.
Two years later, the problems remain and parents remain unhappy said Loe, primarily because the curriculum is not being applied uniformly throughout the system’s schools. The issue came to a head last month with the 2009 ITBS scores which indicated Fulton students were doing progressively worse in math as they move up through the grades.
In coming to the decision to dump Investigations and [Connected Math], Loe and her staff looked at the results of a recent book* which summarized 50,000 studies of student achievement to determine which practices actually correlate to higher achievement. What the study found was direct instruction far exceeded results over inquiry-based learning.
“As we looked at the research, and taking in all the data it makes more sense to move more to the direct instruction,” said Loe.
*Here is the book that the article refers to, which I have not read yet, but seems to be one SCASD directors and administrators ought to be considering as they decide how to move forward with math in the District:
Visible Learning by John Hattie
