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.
I’m with you, Mr. Pondiscio.
I’m sympathetic with the plaintiffs concerns, but also afraid of the possibility that court rulings on curriculum might become the norm.
I think school districts and teachers do this to themselves, though. If we were doing a better job in public education of following scientifically based methods of instruction, of creating content rich curricula, etc., things like NCLB, court rulings on curriculum, and other government involvements into our world would be necessary.
In other words, if American students were leaving high school knowing and able to do more than they currently know and are able to do, government wouldn’t have to use the “nuclear button.” It is the shortcomings of public schooling that invites government attention.
Comment by AJGuzzaldo — February 5, 2010 @ 12:36 pm
In my last I said “…other government involvements into our world would be necessary.”
I meant “other government involvements into our world WOULDN’T be necessary.”
Comment by AJGuzzaldo — February 5, 2010 @ 12:54 pm
Dick Lilly’s point about the failure of our education leaders to fulfill their responsiblity to define and articulate the “what to teach” clearly, sequentially and coherently. This articulation problem creates serious downstream classroom issues. Most significantly, it eliminates the opportunity for teachers to verify if their unit and lesson plans and instructional materials are well-aligned with state/district learning objectives.
In a similar vein, the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s success depends not only on the development of a coherent set of well-sequenced content standards, but more importantly on the ability of teachers to verify, at a finely granular level, the degree to which their instructional materials align with them.
The Core Knowledge sequence provides the finest knowledge content scope, i.e. the ‘what to teach’ of any curriculum currently in use by teachers. However, it will be impossible to determine the quality of alignment between the new common core standards and the Core Knowledge sequence unless the common core standards provide a similar well-defined content scope.
If the definition of the common core standards content scope is left to textbook publishers, assessment companies and curriculum developers, their value as a teacher effectiveness and student achievement tool will be minimal, and the curriculum developed from them will be the subject of court battles similar to the one being faught in Seattle.
Comment by Steve Kussmann — February 5, 2010 @ 1:41 pm
The original Seattle decision was made on May 6th 2009.
At the next board meeting, May 20th, Martha McLaren and I announced we were extremely frustrated with the district’s failure to use evidence in decision-making and four year of frustration was motivating us to take them to court.
You can see our 6 minute tag team testimony by following instructions at this link:
http://mathunderground.blogspot.com/2010/02/to-defend-indefensible.html
You can get further information by going to
http://seattlemathgroup.blogspot.com/
where you can download court documents and even the trial transcript.
In interested in a fund raiser T-Shirts
go here to make contact:
http://mathunderground.blogspot.com/2010/02/t-shirt-arbitrary-capricious-in-seattle.html
Comment by Danaher M. Dempsey, Jr. — February 28, 2010 @ 5:49 am