Curriculum

According to a New York Sun article on an 11/20/2007, “The state of Texas has dropped a math curriculum that is mandated for use in New York City schools, saying it was leaving public school graduates unprepared for college.”

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Parents were promised change, but what's actually happening? Here's your chance to sound off about your early impressions of math changes.

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A piece in the New York Times relayed a story of a dad who attended a Parent Night at his child’s school. A math teacher talked about the curriculum, put an example on the board and asked if there were any questions. This dad did the unthinkable and raised his hand.

He asked a simple content question based on the equation, what x to the 0 power is. The teacher answered incorrectly and the dad knew it and told him so. The title of the article, Parent-Night Hint: Keep Mouth Shut gives away the author’s opinion of the event.

Stanford professor Jim Milgram, in response to a parent in the Orchard, NJ, area says, “...don’t make the mistake of thinking that curricula like Investigations are harmless. They are extremely dangerous.” He continues to add that “What we’ve seen is that sometimes, though it is very rare, parental pressure has resulted in change. But what we’ve never seen is instant change. Usually, change takes so long that the original students are through the system by the time the curriculum is gone.”

Here’s the full response:

The PreK-8 portion of this core became effective in September of 2005. The first state level administration of the Integrated Algebra Regents Exam will be in June 2008, Geometry will be administered in June 2009, and Algebra 2 and Trigonometry will be administered in June 2010.

During this transitional period and until the last administration of Math B (June 2010), the commencement level portion of both the NYS Mathematics Core Curriculum (Revised March 2005) and Mathematics Resource Guide with Core Curriculum (1999) are in effect.

New York State Mathematics Core Curriculum