How not to pick a curriculum

Today, Seattle's school board is making a hugely important decision: what textbook series will guide high school math education in Seattle for the next several years.

School boards don't make these kinds of decisions often - certainly not more often than the length of a high school education - so today's decision will affect quite literally a whole generation of Seattle students.

Unfortunately, so far the School Board's decision making process has been practically a case study in how not to make an effective curriculum choice.

They started by asking a group of people to review likely choices. Only, they forgot to include anybody with actual qualifications for the task. Instead, they filled the review committee with Seattle school district employees.

The panel is not chaired by a person with a math degree. The panel includes no mathematicians, although at least one mathematician did apply.

The panel includes no community members from technical fields who have practical experience in the type of math skills Washington's technology businesses - Boeing, Microsoft, Zymogenetics - need from the next generation of employees.

Experts - who needs 'em?

Next, they picked an early favorite in the form of the "Discovering Algebra and Geometry" series from Curriculum Press. This is a series that has been ranked as "mathematically unsuitable" by Washington State Board of Education consultants.

The Discovering series attempts to teach pretty much as the name implies: by leading students to "discover" the underlying principles and algorithms of algebra and geometry for themselves.

This reliance on self-discovery leads to many critical weaknesses in the overall development of math skills. The report on these books prepared by the State Board of Education found that, among other flaws, the Discovering series:

• Leaves important math concepts undefined and assumed: you're supposed to figure them out yourself!
• Relies on technology to an extent that leads to a lack of opportunity to develop basic algebraic skills
• Short-changes students opportunity to practice working in logical systems by providing inadequate treatment of the fundamental axioms of geometry.

For reasons best known only to the selection panel, this is the curriculum choice they seem hell-bent on shoving down the throats of the next dozen or so years of Seattle high school students.

Their second choice is the Prentice Hall Algebra and Geometry series, which takes the same approach to teaching mathematics as used by nations with top math scores. It sequences math concepts in a logical and progressive fashion, with basic skills building up to mastery of complex mathematical abilities.

How this series could be the School Board review panel's second choice confounds me. Perhaps the review panel is demonstrating its own dearth of math skill by confusing the relative rankings of the ordinal values "first" and "second". That would certainly explain it.

The School Board will be making the choice today, and as far as anyone can tell, they're still leaning towards the wrong choice. But if they hear from concerned Seattle citizens who don't want their kids to grow up parroting that infamous Barbie doll from the mid 1990s (the one that said "math class is hard!"), perhaps they can be convinced to make the right choice.

Below are the e-mail addresses of the Seattle School Board of Directors. Let them know how you feel, right now, about making sure our kids have the skills they'll need to compete in the 21st century.

Mary Bass: mary (dot) bass (at) seattleschools (dot) org
Sherry Carr: sherry.carr@seattleschools.org
Cheryl Chow: cheryl (dot) chow (at) seattleschools (dot) org
Michael DeBell: michael (dot) debell (at) seattleschools (dot) org
Peter Maier: peter (dot) maier (at) seattleschools (dot) org
Harium Martin-Morris: harium (dot) martin-morris (at) seattleschools (dot) org
Steve Sundquist: steve (dot) sundquist (at) seattleschools (dot) org