A return to traditional math

Kris Sherman:

Tacoma’s eighth-through-12th-grade algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and calculus students are cracking open new math textbooks worth more than half a million dollars. It’s the fourth math series to be used in the city’s high schools in the last seven years.
“Like everybody else, we’re in a constant quest to find that program that’s going to best work to get kids to standard,” assistant superintendent Michael Power said.

School district officials believe the new curriculum is easier to use, better aligned with local and state standards and gives kids a higher chance at success than previous math program.

“We weren’t getting the growth (in achievement) that we wanted to see,” said secondary math facilitator Patrick Paris. “Our scores at the high school level were relatively flat.”

Administrators realized early this year that the Saxon math program implemented last fall wasn’t working out in the upper grades. They asked a curriculum review team to find a replacement.

The team scrutinized available programs for high school study before settling on the Prentice Hall algebra-geometry-algebra series of texts and Houghton Mifflin pre-calculus and calculus books.

The School Board approved the $530,000 plus tax and shipping purchase Aug. 23.

Saxon math remains in the lower grades, where its back-to-basics approach is credited, in part, with helping raise scores this year.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 2, 2007 12:00 AM
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