By Patricia Ford Loeb
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, February 20, 2003; Page GZ03

A new math curriculum introduced in Montgomery County public elementary and middle schools in the fall is causing widespread concern among teachers, parents and administrators who fear it was introduced too hastily and may actually hinder math instruction by introducing too many concepts too quickly.

The rigorous curriculum, developed over 1 1/2 years at a cost of nearly $1 million, was designed to standardize instruction and align it with Maryland state standards, with an eye toward helping students pass a new statewide test that will be required for high school graduation beginning in 2007.

But it has sparked an unusual level of protest from parents who blame it for their children's math difficulties and teachers who point to various flaws.

At least part of the curriculum's problems, critics agree, stems from a haphazard implementation process. It was introduced systemwide with no pilot testing, before most schools had curriculum textbooks and after what school officials acknowledge was inadequate teacher training.

Indeed, details of the curriculum are still not completely written and teachers are receiving each new unit on the day they are to start teaching it -- sometimes even a few days late, according to teachers and administrators. Corrections are sent as the unit is being taught.

School officials say they rushed to get the new curriculum into schools this year because principals requested it. The county required the new curriculum in grades one and two, countywide, but only 22 schools were required to use it in the upper grades.

"Schools had a choice to stay with old curriculum," said Leah Quinn, the school system's math program supervisor. "A majority of schools have chosen to use the new curriculum, but they don't have textbooks and training. That's the reason it was a school choice. There was no systemwide ability to implement it."

Several principals said they chose the new curriculum because it is closely aligned with state standards, on which students are tested in the spring, and it is an improvement over the old curriculum, which the county used for 27 years. But they say the new curriculum has been a major challenge.

Mary Holly Allison, principal of Germantown Elementary School, said she's helping her staff and parents adjust by treating this year as a learning year.

"There are some problems with logistics, but we're not tearing our hair out," she said. "We're saying this is the first year and we have a community that understands. The parent reports aren't perfect; well, they don't take them so seriously."

But not every school is taking as relaxed an approach.

Jill Howell is a fifth-grade math teacher at Westbrook Elementary School in Bethesda. She thinks most schools should not have had to struggle through the learning curve of this first year.

"We have an untested curriculum, being written as we speak, with no analysis to see if the tests are any good and reports are being sent out to parents who are looking at the data like it means something," Howell said. "Why couldn't it be piloted? It could very well be that this is a decent curriculum and the problem is the implementation, but I can't tell you because I haven't seen all of it. I don't even have units four, five and six for my grade level."

Many other teachers, though, have concerns that go beyond implementation. They see flaws in the curriculum itself. In interviews with more than a dozen teachers, the most common concern was that the curriculum, particularly in the early years, covers too many topics too quickly in an unconventional order and, as a result, may turn students off to math and discourage their desire to learn.

Of particular concern are lengthy unit tests, some as long as 17 pages. Teachers say the questions are poorly worded and confusing, frustrating students and yielding little meaningful information about how much they know.

Many teachers were generally supportive of the curriculum's greater rigor and its emphasis on teaching students a variety of strategies to solve mathematical problems. But in the quest for rigor, the curriculum sometimes overlooks what is developmentally appropriate for younger children and ignores the need for older students to catch up to the new, higher expectations, they said.

None of the teachers expressing these concerns would agree to be quoted by name. All gave the same reason: fear that they or their schools would suffer retribution if they publicly criticized the central administration. But they gave specific examples of what they see as problem areas in the curriculum.

For instance, several teachers pointed out that third-graders are taught area and perimeter before multiplication, and are taught mean, median and mode before division -- a sequence that not only seems illogical but, they say, can hinder students' development of number sense.

The curriculum also introduces ambitious vocabulary at an age when many students are still learning to read. For example, vertex and its plural, vertices, are taught in second grade.

"What they want to do is admirable and exciting," said one third-grade teacher. "But they're not looking at the cognitive level of an 8-year-old."

Teachers in the upper grades, meanwhile, complained that they are required to move so quickly to get through all the curriculum objectives, there's no time to help students who start out the year below grade level.

"We have kids that cannot add whole numbers, and I'm teaching them two-step algebraic equations," said one middle-school teacher. "I'm supposed to somehow have time to teach what they missed and all the new stuff."

Peter Beckjord, an instructional assistant at Newport Mills Middle School in Silver Spring, said he became alarmed when he saw the scores on the first unit tests. "It was horrible," he said of the widespread student failure. "It confirmed to me that something is really wrong here."

Beckjord conducted an unscientific survey in December, inviting teachers, parents and administrators to send him comments about the curriculum anonymously. He received more than 150 responses, virtually all criticizing some aspect of the curriculum.

Quinn, who wrote the curriculum along with a team of math specialists and teachers from the county and consultants from the Council for Basic Education, said the curriculum is based on research and on curricula from successful national and international math programs, such as Singapore Math. She said those programs have shown children can master the material in the curriculum at the age at which it's being presented.

"Change is difficult," Quinn said. "Math has been taught in the same way for a long time, so when there's a change in the way we teach, based on research on student learning, there can be a great degree of diversity of acceptance."

She also said that teachers can address the needs of many different kinds of students -- slow learners, average students and accelerated students -- in a single class by "differentiating" instruction. That is, putting the students in smaller groups and working with them separately.

"This is not just something I believe," she said. "Research shows it's possible, and we have teachers doing it."

Quinn said she thinks there will be less resistance among teachers when they have all received the training that goes with the curriculum. But teachers are not the only ones challenging the soundness of the new curriculum.

Parents are complaining that the curriculum seems to be frustrating to their children and some have taken organized action. Parents from the cluster of elementary and middle schools that feed into Walt Whitman High School had so many concerns that they held a meeting with school officials and complained that their children were being used as guinea pigs for the new curriculum, according to parents and teachers who were there two weeks ago.

A coalition of several parent groups has even called for a return to the old curriculum so school officials can go back to the drawing board to improve math instruction.

Mary Altaner, parent of a third-grader at Stonegate Elementary School in Silver Spring, said she is distressed to see her daughter losing confidence in her math skills.

"At times she'll say, 'I'm stupid; I can't do this,' " Altaner said. "She's getting these concepts I didn't get till high school. It's one thing to introduce it on [the students'] level but they put it in language [students] can't understand. Sometimes the teachers look at it and say, 'We can't understand this.' "

Even the consulting group, Achieve Inc., which advocates more rigorous standards, suggested that Montgomery County might be a little too ambitious in the early grades. Montgomery County paid Achieve $195,000 to evaluate its math and reading curricula and received generally high marks in a report released Feb. 11. Achieve Executive Vice President Matthew Gandal said the company did not look at the unit tests or implementation issues.

The report noted, however, that the math objectives in the early grades "might be unrealistically difficult if viewed as hurdles that need to be met each year."

Achieve suggested some "give in the grade-by-grade indicators," at least until about third grade, to take into account the wide variability in children's development.

School officials say they will take all the feedback into account in revising the curriculum for next year.

"It is very normal that there would be negative feedback, and we will look at it as part of the revision," Quinn said. "It would be very unusual to put it out and have everyone say it's the best thing since sliced bread."

Many teachers and administrators give Quinn high marks for seeking feedback and said they feel confident she'll revise the curriculum where needed.

"It's been difficult, but this is basically good stuff," said Laura Siegelbaum, principal of Beverly Farms Elementary School in Potomac. "Next year it will be a lot better."