Boulder is a Stoopid Place

In the war over school math — in which a judge recently ordered Seattle Public Schools to redo its choice of high-school math — Schmitz Park is a redoubt or, it hopes, a beachhead. North Beach is a redoubt for Saxon Math, a traditional program. Both schools have permission to be different. The rest of the district’s elementary schools use Everyday Math, a curriculum influenced by the constructivist or reform methods.

Reform math is known for several things. Instead of showing kids how to solve a problem, which Singapore Math does, reform math has them work in groups to discover ways to solve it. It wants them to explain how they did it, sometimes using a special vocabulary.

Sabrina Kovacs-Storlie, a supplemental math teacher at Schmitz Park, taught reform math for several years. “It is full of words,” she says. “So many words.”

FINALLY someone has stood up to the institutional urge at Seattle Public Schools to adopt constructivist or reform math: Judge Julie Spector of King County Superior Court ruled Thursday that the district’s adoption of the Discovering series of high-school math texts was “arbitrary” and “capricious.”

This is a kind of judicial activism, and as a method of selecting or rejecting math books it makes us uneasy. Normally a judge would defer to the School Board. But the four members on the School Board who voted for the books were deferring as well.

Seattle’s so-called “Discovery” math curriculum doesn’t add up for a King County Superior Court judge, who rejected the style of instruction Thursday and ordered the district to try again.

Last May, the School board implemented a district-wide math curriculum called Discovering Math. The curriculum was part of a five-year strategic plan that Superintendent Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson created.

But Judge Julie Spector ruled Thursday that the board’s decision to use the Discovering series was arbitrary and capricious. She ordered the board to reconsider the matter.

In her ruling, Spector noted that the state’s Board of Education had declared the curriculum “mathematically unsound” and that the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction did not recommend the curriculum.

And she said WASL schools from a similar inquiry-based math at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools showed that test scores declined and dropped significantly for students who were learning English, including a zero percent pass rate at one school.

The Discovery series textbooks started appearing in classrooms across the country in 2007.