The Core Knowledge Blog

A judge in Washington State has rejected Seattle’s high school math curriculum and ordered schools to consider alternatives.  A district-wide curriculum called “Discovering Math” was adoped last year.  But two parents and a University of Washington professor went to court  to overturn the School Board’s decision.  Remarkably, they won.  The court ruled “there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable member to approve selection of the Discovering series.”

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer expects the district to appeal the ruling.  Martha McLaren, one of the plaintiffs, issued a statement praising the decision.“

This is a sweet victory for the parents and students of Seattle Public Schools. It announces to Seattle that in this instance, the School District’s practice of ignoring evidence, in favor of preconceived decisions, is arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law. The judge’s finding may, hopefully, be a step towards improving high school math education through replacing confusing textbooks with coherent ones. However, students at all levels, not just in high school, badly need clear, understandable materials. In addition, it is essential that teachers, especially elementary teachers, understand fundamental math much more deeply than is now the norm.

The local website Where’s The Math Bellingham says this means is that school districts are legally accountable to the local community and citizens.

While the district court judge did not rule on the curriculum itself, she made it clear that decisions should be based on evidence and analysis. It’s an expensive lesson for school districts to learn, but an important one they will now have to remember.

Maybe not, says the Seattle Times, which notes the ruling “doesn’t order the district to stop; in fact, there’s nothing in it that bars the district from hanging onto the curriculum after its review.”  Crosscut.com blogger Dick Lilly wonders how school curriculum ended up in court to begin with.   The answer, he says, tells us a lot about the problems of public schools:

Put simply: We don’t know what to teach. The result over the past 40 years has been a weakening of common curriculum to the point where transferring from one school to another — even just within the Seattle School District — almost certainly means a kid will end up in a class studying something entirely different from the class she left. And who transfers the most? Poor kids, so this is a contributor to the achievement gap.

“Mostly, we’ve left decisions about course content to individual schools and even to individual teachers,” Lilly concludes. 

Consider me deeply sympathetic with the plaintiffs concerns about the curriculum.  And equally concerned about the potential for seeing every decision made by a school system brought before a judge.