Free Republic

... Kumon was founded in 1954 by Toru Kumon, a Japanese high school math teacher who developed study materials for his own struggling son. He believed that kids needed to have a strong foundation in the basics—phonetic awareness and those memorized multiplication tables, for starters—before they could excel at a more advanced level. The curriculum consists of more than 20 defined skill levels for math and reading. New students take a free placement test, get started at a skill level below their current abilities, and move up in small increments. In order for students to advance, they must achieve a...

Seattle's so-called "Discovery" math curriculum doesn't add up for a King County Superior Court judge, who rejected the style of instruction Thursday and ordered the district to try again. Last May, the School board implemented a district-wide math curriculum called Discovering Math. The curriculum was part of a five-year strategic plan that Superintendent Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson created. But Judge Julie Spector ruled Thursday that the board's decision to use the Discovering series was arbitrary and capricious. She ordered the board to reconsider the matter. "The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient...

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced “algebra for all” policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier. A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek. Among the newer findings: • An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th...

California Math Scores Among The Lowest Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writer October 15, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO -- Thank goodness for Mississippi and Alabama. If not for the two southern states, California students would be at the bottom of the national heap in mathematics, according to the 2009 Nation's Report Card released Wednesday. The abysmal standing, which reflects in part the state's diverse population, hasn't changed much over the years. California consistently has ranked among the lowest-scoring states in the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated assessment of a sampling of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country. On...

About 30 percent of fourth-graders and 23 percent of eight-graders in California tested proficient math tests from the National Assessment of Education Progress, ranking the state near the bottom nationally. Only students in Mississippi, Alabama and Washington, D.C. had lower scores on the tests, commonly referred to as the "nation's report card." (See an interactive graphic on the scores here.) Nationwide, 38 percent of fourth-graders and 33 percent of eighth-graders performed at proficient levels. Scores for English tests will be released in coming weeks. Fewer than 170,000 students in the country were tested per grade in the exams administered last...

Blame the lack of reform on teachers’ unions that are “extraordinarily powerful.” They quote a study of state-level politics that found teachers’ unions to be the single-most-powerful interest group in the entire country throughout the 1990s. This lets unions block reforms, like pay for performance and the firing of incompetents, which are not in the interest of their members. It is ironic that the United Auto Workers union has taken so much heat for contributing to the economic woes of U.S. manufacturing. One might argue teachers’ unions should get a bigger part of the blame simply because they’ve put their...

Maybe we need to wake up. The other day I went to the Web site of Bell Labs, one of the country's premier research outfits. I clicked at random on a research project, Programmable Networks for Tomorrow. The scientists working on the project were Gisli Hjalmstysson, Nikos Anerousis, Pawan Goyal, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Kobus Van der Merwe, and Sneha Kumar Kasera. Clicking again at random, this time on the Information Visualization Research Group, the research team turned out to be John Ellson, Emden Gansner, John Mocenigo, Stephen North, Jeffery Korn, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Bin Wei, Shankar Krishnan, and Suresh...

For many students, bungling more than half the questions on a test would mean an F and all that comes with it — months of remedial work, irksome teachers and, perhaps, a skimpy allowance. But on New York State’s math exam this year, seventh graders who correctly answered just 44 percent of questions were rewarded with a passing grade. What gives? Three years ago, the threshold for passing was 60 percent. In fact, students in every grade this year could slide by with fewer correct answers on the math test than in 2006. In math this year, 86 percent of...

The first math tutoring session with my daughter and her friend Laura had ended. I sat in the dining room, slumped in my chair. "You look sick," my wife said. "I am," I said. My daughter—subjected to the vagaries of Everyday Mathematics, a math program her school had selected and put in effect when she was in the third grade—was having difficulty with key concepts and computations. She was now in 6th grade, and with fractional division, percentages and decimals on the agenda, I wanted to make sure she mastered these things. So, near the beginning of 6th grade, I...

Math students in this high-performing school district used to rush through their Algebra I textbooks only to spend the first few months of Algebra II relearning everything they forgot or failed to grasp the first time. So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it to about half of the 90 concepts typically covered in a high school course in hopes of developing a deeper understanding of key topics. Last year, they began replacing 1,000-plus-page math textbooks with their own custom-designed online curriculum; the lessons are typically written in Westport and then sent to a...

Intel chairman says US education lacking By SANDRA CHEREB Associated Press Writer May. 12, 2009 RENO, Nev. -- The outgoing chairman of the world's largest computer chip maker says the United States needs to rethink its approach to public education and raise the bar for academic achievement in mathematics and science if it hopes to be competitive in a 21st century world. "We haven't even chosen to compete in this area yet," Craig Barrett, retiring chairman of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp., said Monday. "We're still operating as though we're the only game in town."

Fifty Years of Math 1959 - 2009 (in the USA ) Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help...while he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried. Why do I tell you this? Because...

Watered down by fuzzy math, "whole language" reading and feel-good grading, public school instruction isn't what it used to be. Therein lies a great profitmaking opportunity: Supply the education that schools don't. Kumon, a Japanese firm that has been selling afterschool tutoring in its home country for half a century, broke into the U.S. market in 1983 and finds no shortage of customers here. Kumon now has 1,300 centers and 194,000 students in the U.S., double its enrollment in 2001. That puts it well ahead of its two main competitors, SylvanLearning and Huntington Learning Center. Most Kumon students are between...

The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued. The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly...

WASHINGTON: Americans may like to make fun of girls who are good at math, but this attitude is robbing the country of some of its best talent, resear chers reported on Friday. They found that while girls can be just as talented as boys at mathematics, some are driven from the field because they are teased, ostracized or simply neglected. "The US culture that is discouraging girls is also discouraging boys," Janet Mertz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who led the study said in a statement. "The situation is becoming urgent. The data show that a majority of the top...

Algebra in eighth grade was once reserved for the mathematically gifted student. In 1990, very few eighth graders, about one out of six, were enrolled in an algebra course. As the decade unfolded, leaders began urging schools to increase that number. President Clinton lamented, “Around the world, middle students are learning algebra and geometry. Here at home, just a quarter of all students take algebra before high school.”1 The administration made enrolling all children in an algebra course by eighth grade a national goal. In a handbook offering advice to middle school students on how to plan for college, U.S....

Parents concerned with latest math curriculum Georgia parents were outraged after thousands of students failed statewide math exams in May. Now with the start of a new school year, parents fear for their children as the state expands the new math curriculum to high schools. Fayette County parent Wendy Ashabranner worries how her son will handle this new math when he starts at Fayette County High on Monday. He was among the 38 percent of the state's eighth-graders who failed the state's new, redesigned math exam, which was based on harder material. While parents and teachers expected some students to...

Fast Learners Montgomery County officials say accelerating students in math will better prepare them for college, but a revered teacher says it's time to step on the brakes. By Emily Messner Sunday, August 3, 2008; Page W20 It's the day before final exams start at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, and Eric Walstein is teaching a class he calls "a travesty." It's not that he minds teaching Algebra II, but these students are in Blair's acclaimed math and science magnet program, and traditionally the magnet hasn't bothered with the course -- the kids were smart enough, and their...

I was reading about the math curriculum at the Lexington, MA public schools at the site above. For grades 1-5, it says they will "Continue with Everyday Mathematics (EDM) as our core elementary curriculum. Purchase pilot ancillary materials to address identified program gaps and needs of special populations. Both Singapore Math and Saxon Math, teacher and student materials, will be purchased by the special education department to pilot with various students based on individual needs." I think of Singapore and Saxon math, which are both pretty popular with homeschoolers, as being for kids of normal abilities (not just for the...

My wife and I have 3 children (ages 1, 3, and 5), and we recently purchased a home in Winchester, Massachusetts, because its schools have a good reputation and its students do well on the MCAS . I looked at the "Academics" section of the school district web site and found "Math literature lists" (what happened to textbooks?) for various grades. The 4th grade list at http://mail.winchester.k12.ma.us/~mkerble/mathlists4.doc lists dozens of books, including Count your Way Through Africa Count Your Way Through Arab World and 7 move "Count your Way" books Amazon says the "Count your Way Through Africa" book "uses...