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New York City algebra teachers are worried about the coming school year—nearly all of them will have to use Business maths course criticised It was described as “a complete disaster”.
Last year, teachers in 265 schools piloted an illustrative maths curriculum, which principal David Banks hopes will improve the city’s lagging maths scores.
Illustrative Math revolutionized the way teens learn math. Teachers had to teach the curriculum to a strict schedule. Students worked in groups to solve problems and were asked to “discover” the answers with little guidance. Teachers said gifted students could cope, but younger students who didn’t have the requisite skills became frustrated.
“This is the worst,” one teacher recently wrote in a Facebook group chat shared with The Washington Post.
“Nobody is happy with it. The kids don’t know what’s going on when we use these lessons. Not to mention if you don’t follow the script and use the words in the lesson verbatim, you get a reprimand from the principal’s office.”
A colleague agreed: “It’s a complete disaster.”
Another simply wrote: “Terrible!!!”
The city Department of Education declined to release the scores of students from 265 schools on the June 4 Algebra 1 Regents exam.
A U.S. Department of Energy spokesman said: “We don’t have the results yet.”
But according to insiders, the Department of Education teachers completed the grading of all the exams within a few days. Each school and student received their own scores. This month, New York City must submit the scores to the state government, which will release the citywide and district scores in the fall.
But some of the data leaked to The Washington Post already suggests troubling results.
Students from more than 25 schools across three Bronx school districts, including some that use Illustrative Math, scored an average of 56.5 on the test, down from the Bronx average of 61 last year.
In one Queens school district that uses prescriptive math, all but two of the 25 schools saw Regents test scores decline from last year, an insider told The Washington Post.
A passing score of 65 requires students to answer 35% of the questions correctly.
At Forest Hills High School, 660 students took the test, but only 44 percent passed, documents show.
The school’s average score fell to 62 from 65 last year.
“Being forced to use prescriptive math in Algebra 1 caused my students’ average score to drop from 69 to 64,” one teacher told The Washington Post.
The teacher’s pass rate for English learners (the children who had the most difficulty with math explanatory questions) dropped by nearly 20%.
Among the obstacles to teaching expository mathematics is that teachers must adhere to a strict “progress calendar,” a tightly scripted schedule of classes.
“If my students don’t understand, we have to move on,” the teacher said. “We don’t have time to pull kids aside and help them catch up. They get frustrated.”
Worse, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s instructional guidelines, several skills tested on the Regents exams — rationalizing denominators, unit conversions, polynomials and sequences — are “inadequately covered” in prescriptive math, forcing teachers to squeeze in time to teach those topics.
Bobson Wong, a teacher at Bayside High School in Queens and co-author of “Practical Algebra: A Self-Study Guide,” said the course offers “a lot of interesting problems and activities.”
But Mr Huang, who did not join the pilot, was unhappy with the requirement for a uniform curriculum: “Teachers don’t seem to have much leeway to adjust the curriculum according to students’ needs. Everyone has to teach the same lesson in the same way on the same day.”
Gary Rubenstein is a math teacher at the elite Stuyvesant High School, which is exempt from the Prescriptive Math regulations. He said in his blog The course was “doomed to failure” primarily because it made the mistaken assumption that students already had the basic skills needed to understand equations.
Explanatory math is a key component of NYC Solves, a $34 million, five-year math program at the Department of Energy that includes professional training.
Mayor Adams and Banks announced On June 24, all 420 high schools in New York City — In addition to the six top vocational colleges — must adopt the curriculum this fall.
The DOE initially claimed on its website that Illustrative Math was “endorsed” by EdReports, a respected think tank funded by several philanthropies including the Gates Foundation.
But EdReports disputed the Education Department’s statement. Spokesperson Janna Chan told The Washington Post: “The statement is inaccurate and was not provided or approved by EdReports.” She said the organization does not endorse or recommend any courses.
Chen then contacted the U.S. Department of Energy, but the latter deleted the word “approval” and only said “review.”
The Department of Education also said the curriculum “has been formally reviewed by a committee of New York City educators and math experts,” but a spokesperson did not name the committee members or release the results of the review.
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