What is MCPS afraid of?

For years, we have idly mused about the bureaucracy in Rockville that runs the Montgomery County Public Schools math program. The curriculum has tried to keep pace with current trends in math teaching, but perhaps as befits a deliberate body, the county has always instituted its own reforms at least five years later than the more progressive private schools have.

For instance, graphing calculators arrived on the private school scene in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. With an endorsement from the College Board, Texas Instruments soon gained a stranglehold on the market. These calculators were nowhere to be seen in MCPS for many years, however. We remember reading in the Montgomery Journal about legendary MCPS teacher Sydelle Silberman’s enterprising acquisition of a classroom’s worth of calculators. At the time, every private school student we tutored in algebra II or above possessed a TI-82 or -83.

MCPS maintains a strange insularity and parochial attitude toward the professional development of its teachers. The teachers are nowhere to be seen at the professional meetings of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), where leading math educators and a few private businesspeople dissect all the latest teaching and technology trends. The county seems to buy textbooks for its classes every ten years. If a book is a dud, as is the case with the Larson algebra II book, teachers are forced for a decade to provide photocopied hand-outs for its students.

The county has, to its credit, tried to make much of the secondary math curriculum meaningful. The Statistics and Math Modeling course is an admirable attempt to make real-word math applications apparent to the students, although there are precious few teachers in the county qualified to teach statistics courses. (Note the glaring mistakes on the SAMM semester A review, mistakes which have yet to be corrected.) The county, however, has a split personality regarding what it values in high school versus what it values in college. Montgomery College Provost Judy Ackerman revealed at a recent Mathematical Association of America meeting that there is separate supervision and apparently not much communication between the department overseeing K-12 math education in the county and the department overseeing college math education. Exhibit A is the math placement test that all entering Montgomery College students must take. This placement test for years did not permit a calculator on any problems; it was easy for a student who had four years of MCPS high school math to be placed in a pre-algebra class in Montgomery College! Even now, Provost Ackerman acknowledges, after years of MCPS stressing more detailed and realistic problem solving in many of its high school classes, all the exercises on the placement test are brief, abstract exercises with no real-world applications.

Perhaps if there was more public access to Montgomery County’s decision making, the county could avoid such bureaucratic problems. Regarding outside educators, however, like tutors, psychologists, and diagnosticians who are hired to help students, the county has maintained largely an insular attitude. We have no quarrel with the teachers themselves, who are too busy to acknowledge every email and phone call from us outsiders. But the office in Rockville takes months to respond in any meaningful way to requests for information, and the county itself has an official policy of prohibiting outsiders from reviewing student work on their tests or exams, although students and parents supposedly are to be allowed access. Strangely, math teachers at almost every county school we have dealt with have in the past permitted us to examine the work of their students, in direct violation of county rules. The one glaring exception has been Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, which has built a force field around itself and will not allow any outsiders to examine anything. Recently, B-CC’s feeder school, Westland Middle School, previously open to examination of its students’ tests, recently said the recent semester exams are ‘locked up’ and inaccessible to even students. (In reality, they are probably in a cardboard box on the top shelf of a closet in the math office at Westland, as they were two years ago.)

Coincident with the county’s increasing bureaucracy and paranoia are two decisions that are creating an increasingly skittish student and parent body. One is the decision several years ago to encourage a huge number of seventh graders to take algebra. Private schools went through this romance about ten to fifteen years ago and created hundreds of anxious students who were rushed toward calculus at a tender age. Mathematical self-esteem faded for these bright students, and most dropped out of the hyper-acceleration or staggered through it, never to take math again. In 2001, a panel discussion regarding this issue was co-sponsored by ISMAW, the independent school math teachers association, and AISGW, the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington. The result was a massive scaling back of seventh grade algebra in private schools. The consensus now in independent schools is that only the rare, truly gifted students should take algebra before eighth grade. (Click here for a more detailed description of the panel discussion; copies of a videotape of the discussion are also available.)

The county also decided, and we think wisely, to downgrade homework effort in how the teachers are to assess the overall performance of their students. All students need to score a B average on their tests and quizzes to earn a B in their classes, and that is a fairer way to assess everyone. To the county’s credit, grade inflation has not been as much of an issue as it has in private schools, and perhaps fewer students will now sign up for honors math classes unless they really enjoy math, and not because it will look good on their transcript, an issue that is addressed in the panel discussion.

We have the following suggestions for the Montgomery County Public Schools:

• Be conservative in recommending students for algebra. Be frank with the students who are unsure of whether they should accelerate in math. The courses will be difficult, and even a C will be a difficult grade to achieve for many students. In our opinion, only a handful of students should ever take algebra in the seventh grade from year to year, and most eighth graders cannot handle a rigorous algebra course.

• Have meaningful alternatives for students who do not accelerate. Currently, the pre-algebra course for eighth grade consists largely of a series of homogeneous worksheets involving low-level thinking and rote arithmetic and algorithms. Those students who do not accelerate in math should have the same science options in ninth grade as those students have who do accelerate. MCPS currently has a one size fits all curriculum, as compared to the relatively tiny Maret School, which offers five different algebra classes.

• Let your students review their work! The notion that the exams are ´inaccessible’ is inexcusable. Tests and exams are supposed to be teaching devices as well as assessment tools. If test security is the issue, perhaps new tests should be written each year.

• Coordinate better across grades levels. When will Montgomery College enter the 1990’s, much less the 21^st century, regarding its math education priorities? Perhaps MCPS can help in this regard.

• Be accessible to your constituency. With email and the internet, it is inexcusable not to provide quick, easy answers to many problems and issues.