Parental Equation

Following a classic battle between tradition and modernity, parents and administrators at Chatsworth High School appear to have reached a compromise over the way students are taught math.

As with most Los Angeles Unified School District schools, Chatsworth moved this year to replace its traditional math sequence of algebra I, geometry and algebra II with integrated math, an approach that blends all three strands and presents them in lessons culled from everyday life.

In the effort to make math more attractive to a broader range of students, school officials, it seems, underestimated parents’ powerful feelings for traditional teaching methods.

“This program is designed to attract kids by being user-friendly, but too much is left out and it is far less rigorous than traditional math,” said Diana Dixon-Davis, a parent representative on the school-based Management Council who has led a group of about 10 parents in a fight to keep some traditional math courses.

Donna Wyatt, Chatsworth High’s assistant principal and a former math teacher, disagreed. “The emphasis is on using the skills learned in real-world application, and not doing the drills and moving on to the next chapter,” she said.

After months of such debate, both sides have agreed on a compromise: Next school year, Chatsworth High will offer primarily integrated math classes with a few traditional algebra I classes for students who request them.

Currently, all but three LAUSD high schools in the San Fernando Valley teach either integrated math alone or a combination of both integrated and traditional classes. El Camino Real, Van Nuys and North Hollywood, renowned for their science and math magnet programs, teach only traditional math.

The district is in the third year of a five-year, $15 million-grant from the National Science Foundation to teach integrated math and science classes in elementary and secondary public schools.

About half of the district’s 541 schools already have introduced the classes, with the remainder expected to introduce them within two years.

Advocates argue that integrated math helps students grasp and remember complex, abstract concepts because the ideas are related to real-life situations.

The tempest over integrated math at Chatsworth High began in September when parents learned from math teachers that entering freshmen would not be going into traditional math classes, but instead into integrated math 1, 2 and 3.

“Why eliminate a program that works, for an untried program?” Dixon-Davis said.

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In a series of meetings in the fall, administrators and parents debated the positives and pitfalls of the relatively new teaching technique.

By late March, school officials had agreed to offer algebra I for freshmen entering in the 1998-99 school year, Dixon-Davis said.

Algebra I was not on the course schedule a month later, however, when parents preregistered their children for fall classes, Dixon-Davis said.

“Parents came to us wanting to know what was going on,” she said. “We went to the administration, and they assured us that it was a mistake and would be corrected.”

To ensure the courses would be available to students in the fall, Dixon-Davis, along with Cal State Northridge math professor David Klein, pressed for inclusion of the courses at a LAUSD Instruction, Curriculum and Student Achievement Committee meeting on May 14.

The committee agreed to ensure that both traditional and integrated classes were offered at Chatsworth High as well as at its feeder middle schools, Nobel and Lawrence.

“Integrated math may be OK for people who are sure they may never see math again in their lifetimes,” Klein said. “You have a little bit of geometry one day, graphs the next day and statistics after that. It’s like hors d’oeuvres--it’s fine if you just want a taste.”

Still, Wyatt defended the approach that teaches abstract ideas by way of hands-on experience.

A teacher may have students solve a geometry problem, for instance, by going outside and employing a technique that uses a tape measure and mirror to determine the height of a tree. The activity, Wyatt said, helps students retain more of what they have learned.

An in-house study conducted during the 1996-97 school year showed that Chatsworth students in an integrated math class had an average score of 60.1% on the Stanford standardized math test contrasted with 48.7% for those enrolled in a the traditional algebra class, Wyatt said.

“We believe integrated is a good, positive program,” Wyatt said. “We wouldn’t do anything to hurt kids.”