Prince George's battle with algebra doubts

Jay Matthews:

Don Horrigan, former priest turned public school educator, thought Prince George's County was a splendid district for an experiment beginning in 1991, requiring all ninth-graders to take Algebra I and all 10th-graders to take geometry. The superintendent and school board were for it. Parents seemed excited.

But when Prince George's became one of seven districts nationwide to pilot the College Board's Equity 2000 program, many teachers in the district thought it was too much. Sure, they said, students could learn algebra and geometry eventually, but why so soon? They thought 42 percent of Prince George's ninth-graders were taking remedial arithmetic because they weren't ready for anything more.

"It is unwise to push a child -- especially a slower-paced learner -- who is not ready," a Prince George's high school math department chair told researchers Carolyn DeMeyer Harris and Jessica L. Turner. "I believe that when we push them we make them feel like failures when in actuality it was merely a timing issue."

According to Harris and Turner, who worked for the Alexandria-based Human Resources Research Organization and wrote a report on Equity 2000, one Prince George's teacher told a supervisor that the program was another loser. "We're like little pigs at the trough waiting for you to throw more slop at us, and then we wait for it to go away," the teacher said.

In my new book about Equity 2000, "The War Against Dummy Math," I devote a chapter to the battle in Prince George's. It explores clashing attitudes toward acceleration that are still with us and how very long it takes for student achievement to catch up with expectations.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 13, 2012 4:03 AM
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