Last year, I publicly praised our local, elected school board in Oak Harbor for controversially rejecting a proposed “reform” math program that the school district had proposed for grades 8-12. This year, the school board again deserves public praise for its final adoption of Holt Mathematics as the newly adopted math program for teaching algebra and geometry in grades 8-12 in Oak Harbor public schools.
As one school board member recently stated, “It appears to me that staff is now beginning to understand that we the board and the community want a balanced program.”
Unlike Holt Math, “reform” oriented math programs tend to decrease emphasis on direct instruction of facts and algorithms and tend to value achieving a numerically correct result as secondary to the process of obtaining that answer. The 2006 National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP) concluded that research showed “conceptual understanding, computational and procedural fluency, and problem solving skills are equally important and mutually reinforce each other.”
Holt Math is consistent with NMAP precepts and, coincidentally, was also OSPI’s final recommendation for high school math as of May 2009. There is no requirement for local school boards to follow OSPI’s curricular recommendations.
Problematically, in Oak Harbor and still in use are “TERC: Investigations in Numbers, Data and Space” (grades K-5) and CMP, “The Connected Math Project (grades 6-8). Both are well known “reform” math curricula from adoptions that occurred in 2001. Both were originally scheduled to be reviewed and updated during the 2007-2008 school year, but the school district left them in place.
Next year, TERC and CMP need to be purged from the Oak Harbor School District and replaced with mathematically sound programs consistent with NMAP guidelines. I urge other parents and community members to continue to follow this issue and be vocal about getting “reform” math out of our schools. Again, my thanks to the school board for adopting Holt Mathematics.
William Burnett
Oak Harbor
