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Down for the Count?

The misbegotten curriculum known as Reform Math is a failure that may finally be on the way out.

Nov 6, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 08 • By MELANA ZYLA VICKERS
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It's been a bad autumn for public school leaders in the state of Washington, a battleground in the nation's reemergent math wars. First, a whopping 52 percent of seventh graders and 41 percent of fourth graders failed the statewide math test. That dismal news further energized a new parents' group already lobbying to ditch the state's Reform Math curriculum, which favors estimation and kid-invented solutions to problems and downplays basics like long division and multiplication tables. Worst of all from the point of view of the public education establishment, the original champion of Reform Math--the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics--did an about-face in September and called for a nationwide return to basics.

By the beginning of October, Washington's besieged school administrators were circling the wagons: The state superintendent of public instruction announced she stood by the existing standards. One of their principal architects, math-education expert Virginia Warfield, compared the call for change to book burning. Criticism of the way math is taught in the state is a "smear and sneer campaign," Warfield added in an email newsletter on October 8. And she warned Washingtonians that Stanford mathematician James Milgram, one of the leaders of the return-to-basics movement, is "Rush Limbaugh with a Ph.D."

The fight will move to the legislature in January, when dueling math bills are due to be introduced. But whatever the outcome of that local controversy, its existence is indicative of a renewed struggle over math teaching coast to coast.

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