Parents Say Math Course Data Don't Compute

Miller, who has two children in elementary school, said she wants more data from a survey distributed to schools and parents.

It showed mixed results: Most principals, teachers and parents said students enjoyed math during the 2007-08 academic year.

But only a little more than half of the teachers and parents said the program "meets students' mathematics needs"; about three-quarters of the principals surveyed said it does.

"They are gambling our kids' education, and every single year, it's slipping away, and they could be making more progress," Miller said.

Lattin, the School Board vice chairman, disputed that notion. "The other side of the debate says, 'So, you're going to use our kids as guinea pigs?' " he said. "My response is, if the data was showing that the scores were plunging, I'd be the first one to bail out. But that's not what the scores are showing.

"Are we seeing great improvement? No, because there's little room to improve at the elementary level."

The more complicated question, Lattin said, is whether Investigations will help elementary students perform well on state middle school exams.

He said the school community should be more alarmed about performance in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

The results on the middle school math SOL tests show that in the past three years, more students have been passing in each grade.

But that could be because the overall percentage of passing students has been low, and much lower compared with figures at the elementary level.

The percentage of sixth-graders who passed this year rose to 70 percent from 54 percent in 2006; for seventh-graders, that percentage was 54 percent this year, up from 43 percent in 2006. For eighth-graders, 86 percent passed the math exam this year, up from 78 percent in 2006.

"For me, the change in teaching math was intended to bring up the conceptual level at middle school, where we were very poor before and where we still are," Lattin said. "It's way too early to tell whether Investigations is going to change middle school test scores, but our hope is that it's going to bring them up."

In Loudoun, school officials say they are holding off on any decision to expand the Investigations program so they can analyze data about its impact on student achievement.

This school year, Loudoun elementary students will get two units of the Investigations curriculum each quarter. A unit can last up to a week.

The Loudoun math review committee conducted an online survey of parents scheduled to end yesterday, asking them what elements of math teaching, curriculum and assessment they consider most important.