a standard for other states

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

Peter Schrag: The quick road to math success: Get a bigger whip
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By Peter Schrag - pschrag@sacbee.com

Published in The Sacramento Bee Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Story appeared in METRO section, Page B7
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/1082606.html

There've been lots of complaints that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has neither much
interest in education policy, nor the capacity to deal with it. But his
precipitous plunge into the algebra wars last week and the state Board of
Education's sudden decision to bow to his demand makes you wish that he had less
interest or a lot more capacity.

The leap, in the form of a letter urging the board to require that every
eighth-grader take beginning algebra and the board's overnight agreement to
mandate it within three years is like trying to make a scrawny horse pull a
heavier load with a bigger whip. At best, it won't work; at worst, it will kill
the horse.

The state has for some years had an admirable "goal" that every eighth-grader
take algebra, combined with a set of incentives for districts to get all students
there. The incentives ? essentially penalizing schools by reducing a school's
Academic Proficiency Index for each student who takes only general math ? have
worked. More than half of California's eighth-graders now take either algebra or
geometry.

But Schwarzenegger, goaded by the curriculum hawks in the business community, got
his board to require that it be 100 percent by 2011, even though California has
neither enough qualified teachers nor the other resources to have a chance of
getting there.

The governor's letter was crammed with the education cliches of a generation ?
"We must set our goals higher," "We must prepare our children for a
knowledge-based-economy," we must "maintain our leadership in the global
economy." The letter also included a boilerplate sentence about how this "will
require an intense commitment and increased investment."

Yet even the governor recognized the implausibility of such a statement "when we
are having difficulty meeting our current budget needs." What he didn't recognize
was the utter artificiality of the three-year timetable and the heavy odds of
getting all eighth-graders prepared for algebra at any time. Will he make that
additional investment? It's hard to argue with California's exemplary goal of
having all eighth-graders take algebra; few other states require it ? often to
their considerable advantage in academic achievement test score comparisons.

Notwithstanding the cheerleading by groups such as the Business Roundtable, which
declared that "California's education system was once the standard by which other
states' systems were measured," California's academic performance has always been
a bit flabby.

In any case, California schools are dealing with a very different population. In
the not-so-good old days nobody had heard of English learners and our schools
relegated most minority kids, those they had, to dead-end programs. Maybe the
parents cared; no one else did.

Despite the sharp recent increase in eighth-grade algebra enrollment, the low
scores of the tens of thousands of students who still take general math in eighth
grade and the thousands more who often do worse in algebra in ninth grade suggest
that the new requirement was demanded by people, no doubt including the governor,
innocent of the difficulty of meeting it.

At bottom, the whole algebra fight looks a lot like a combination of posturing
and politics. Triggered by federal bureaucrats who noticed that the general math
test taken by California eighth-graders is based on sixth- and seventh-grade
standards, and fueled by confusion in both the response of the state Department
of Education and among the academic hawks in the business community and
elsewhere, it's reminiscent of nothing so much as the tough-on-crime battles of
the 1980s. Who can be the toughest guy in town?

The kids can't vote, except with their feet in the drop-out rates. Yet unless a
lot more resources are put into math teaching ? not just the thousands of middle
school teachers who'll have to be trained or retrained for algebra, but the many
elementary teachers who have to get the kids ready in the early grades so they'll
be qualified for algebra in middle school ? many more are likely to fail.

Or they'll get something called algebra that isn't ? and a test to go with it.
Or, most likely, the state, realizing the impossibility of the requirement, will
change its mind before the drop-dead date, as has happened in American education
so often in the past.

Some defenders of tough standards are talking about a "Manhattan Project" ?
essentially a well-funded crash program ? to get enough teachers trained and
develop the materials so that students can be prepared to succeed in algebra in
the eighth grade.

They're talking privately about challenging the business community to put their
money where their mouth is, and come up with the multi-millions that would give
the state a chance to do the job.

So far, however, the cheerleaders in the Business Roundtable and California
Business for Education Excellence haven't accompanied their applause for the
governor with any offers of hard cash. If they did, that would be a "standard by
which other states could be measured."

George Sheridan