State Policy Calls for New Focus on Basic Math Skills

Four months after telling California schools to change the way they teach reading, the State Board of Education on Thursday did the same with math, calling for more basic skills instruction and less time spent on the kind of nontraditional teaching methods that had earned the state national recognition as well as notoriety.

As with the move to reemphasize phonics in reading instruction, the newly adopted math policy endorses traditional classroom activities that in some education circles have become taboo--memorizing multiplication tables and mastering through repetition such processes as long division.

Those behind the change say the state’s earlier approach--which focused on helping children understand mathematical principles by giving them entertaining problems to puzzle over--did not devote enough time to the practice of routine computations or equations.

Approval of the policy represents “a memorable occasion that returns California to common sense in math education,” said Henry Alder, a UC Davis math professor emeritus who has been a vocal critic of the nontraditional instructional approach that the state had embraced in 1992.

The new policy “puts back . . . the emphasis on basic skills that some people believe is not clear enough” in the state’s 1992 instructional guidelines, said Ruth McKenna, chief deputy to state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin.

“Just as in reading, where you need a blend of basic skills and literature, in math, basic skills, conceptual understanding and problem solving . . . all of those processes need to be in place.”

The policy is in the form of an “advisory” approved by the board after months of sometimes contentious discussions involving a panel of board members, officials of the state Department of Education, math experts and parent activists.

It does not carry the force of law, but it is expected to be influential, especially in the development of a new statewide academic skills test and the selection of materials for teaching math.

Math reformers complained Thursday that the document was a step backward and would lead to old-style lessons in which abstractions discouraged students from learning math.

“I’m worried for our children,” said Judy Anderson, director of a project that helps teachers in San Bernardino, Riverside and eastern Los Angeles counties learn to teach nontraditional math lessons. “I’m worried that we’re not going to have the opportunity to teach in the way that brain research supports.”

Math reformers do not neglect basic skills, she said, but they believe that skills should be taught in the course of solving problems that provide conceptual understanding rather than through separate drills or sets of problems.

Concern about math instruction first surfaced three years ago, when the 1992 scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 13% of the state’s fourth-graders were proficient in math, ranking California above only five states.

The “current mathematics achievement of many students is unacceptably low,” the new policy states. “Comparisons of national and international assessments show that the mathematics performance of California students trails that of students in many other states as well as that of students in other developed nations.”

At the time, the state was in the middle of a decade-long move away from traditional math that was being touted as the best way to ignite interest in mathematics among even the youngest students.

But when the state adopted teaching material using that approach two years ago, some parents and politicians became uncomfortable with what seemed to be a lack of rigor in the guidelines, which promote use of calculators and suggest that mathematical ideas are as important as numbers and that answers are less important than the process of arriving at them.

Like the instructional guidelines on which they were based, the textbooks and teacher guides used group activities and student-centered math discussions to help children discover for themselves math principles and concepts.

Supporters of that approach say that it makes math more enjoyable and meaningful for students and that students learn basic skills in the process.

But parents and some legislators worried that, especially in the hands of teachers who had not been taught to use it, the approach could prevent young students from learning what they needed to succeed in higher grades.

Simultaneously, the parents of some junior and senior high school students began expressing concern that their children’s math curriculum was being watered down as schools did away with discrete courses, such as algebra, geometry and calculus, in favor of teaching all fields of math simultaneously.

Partly in response, Gov. Pete Wilson last year signed state “back to basics” legislation that had won overwhelming bipartisan support in the Legislature. Eastin then appointed a mathematics task force to study the issue.

The policy adopted Thursday promotes that task force’s recommendations but also makes them more pointed, reemphasizing that the content of lessons is as important as the way in which they are taught.

The new policy sets out the essential concepts that all students should master, including fractions, decimals, percentages, calculating areas, means and medians, the Pythagorean theorem and expressing the equation represented by two points on a grid.

In a clear retreat from the state’s previous endorsement of textbooks featuring the nontraditional approach, the new policy invites districts to select from among books that failed to win the board’s backing under the 1992 guidelines.

It also encourages teachers to use a variety of methods--giving old-fashioned chalkboard lectures and sets of practice problems, as well as doing such things as surveying classes about the kind of ice cream they prefer to illustrate a lesson on graphs or weighing the potatoes in a kitchen to learn about averages.

Those are the kinds of entertaining activities that were a hallmark of the nontraditional approach. But the new policy clearly states that “no single instructional strategy is best, or appropriate in all situations.”

A balanced math program, according to the policy, is one that emphasizes basic skills, an understanding of math concepts and the ability to use those concepts to formulate answers to problems.

For example, students should be taught to view multiplication not just as “times tables,” but as repetitive addition, and to think of division as repetitive subtraction.

Students also need to be able to make sense of mathematics, to “know not only how to apply skills, but when to apply them, and why they are being applied.”

Finally, the policy makes it clear that mastering math requires “persistence, effort, practice, support and encouragement” as well as a substantial commitment of classroom time.

Janet Nicholas, one of two members of the state board who helped write the policy, said it was a “small but important first step” that would restore prudence and common sense to the state’s official policy.

But, she said, the long-term challenge will be persuading teachers and curriculum directors in the state’s 1,000 or so school districts to put it into practice.

“I view it as being like a large ship, and we’ve not yet turned the wheel around,” she said, “We’ve only nudged it a little bit.”