To the Editor:
In the January issue of the Courier, you ran an article "District news: possible WASL postponement; making up snow days" where Lake Washington School District (LWSD) president Doug Eglington attributes poor performance on the math portion of the WASL to "inconsistent curriculum in schools throughout the state, student support, parental involvement and other reasons."
I would like to suggest an alternative reason for poor math WASL performance: reform math curricula. Currently, many school districts in this state have adopted reform or constructivist math curricula in an attempt to have students learn "with understanding." LWSD is one of these districts.
Children are asked to solve problems in groups, and are not directly instructed in the most efficient algorithms. Not every child is Pythagoras, so expecting them to discover the efficient algorithms is a recipe for failure. If math is a language of numbers, why are the students trying to discover it? Students learning Spanish, for example, aren't split into groups and asked to figure out on their own what the word pajaro is in English. (Note, it means "bird.")
In wealthier districts such as Lake Washington, Bellevue and Issaquah, frustrated parents are sending their children to private tutors or to tutoring centers such as Kumon. Some are even home schooling in math. It's no wonder that the tutoring business in our state has increased by 340 percent in the last several years.
Proponents of reform math argue that studies and funding by the National Science Foundation verify the success of reform math programs. However, the vast majority of these so-called studies are methodologically flawed, and many are not even peer reviewed. Peer review is important in science, because without peer review, it is not clear whether a study comes from the fiction section or the non-fiction section. As Al Gore pointed out in his recent movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," all of the studies that purport to refute global warming are not peer reviewed, and, not coincidentally, are more often than not funded by the oil companies.
TERC is the company that develops and markets the Investigations curriculum, so it's disturbing that not one of the so-called research papers on the TERC Web site (http://investigations.terc.edu/research/impactstudies.cfm) is peer reviewed, and most are self published by TERC.
We don't trust the oil companies to research climate change, why should we trust TERC to publish the research behind investigations? Why isn't the Investigations research good enough to get through peer review? Education reformers need to wise up, admit that the evidence in favor of reform curricula is weak to non-existent, and stop forcing reform math curricula on our children so that the kids can get back to actually learning and mastering math.
Dr. Chris Carlson
Kirkland
(Editor's note: the writer is a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and parent of a Lakeview Elementary School second grader.)
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