Math Scores Equal Success

Do the math: The Los Angeles Unified School District’s math test scores are rising fast in elementary grades. For example, as many as 52% of Los Angeles third-graders placed at or above the national average in newly released Stanford 9 scores, up from 28% in 1998.

Standardized elementary math programs and better teacher training led to those rises, district officials and education experts said. Efforts to improve reading also contributed to the higher math scores, with students better able to follow instructions and understand concepts.

District elementary schools have moved away from a hodgepodge of more than a dozen math programs, some of which emphasized classroom interaction instead of following formal lesson plans in textbooks. Now only two state-approved math textbooks, stressing fundamental skills, are used for each of the lower grades across the district.

Some elementary schools used to offer math two or three days a week, but now all are required to offer daily lessons of at least an hour.

“Teachers are being trained to do the same thing with the same books,” said Sue Shannon, assistant superintendent for instruction. The district is trying to synchronize its math programs so that every elementary school and every class is on the same lesson at the same time.

Shannon said that such systematization makes teacher training more effective and tracks schools’ progress more closely.

In the last year, the district has trained 360 math coaches to spearhead math reforms at all elementary schools, said Dianna Masters, the district’s director of math instruction. And 40% of all elementary school math teachers have participated in a 120-hour training course conducted by UCLA.

Starting this year, elementary students will take quarterly diagnostic tests so that teachers will know which math skills need more emphasis and which students need extra help. Schools also are required to report, on a quarterly basis, how many teachers have volunteered for training workshops.

However, high school math programs have yet to show the kind of gains achieved in lower grades. Most Los Angeles high school and middle school students still scored below the 35th percentile. (The national average is the 50th percentile.) But district math experts said upper grades will improve as students benefiting from the elementary school programs move up and the district focuses on high school math reform.

Statewide standards adopted two years ago for math instruction are driving the training programs, the selection of textbooks and lesson plans in elementary math classes, said math education experts.

“When California adopted world-class standards, it made a huge difference at the classroom level,” said David Klein, a math education professor at Cal State Northridge. “And when you have good standards, success has very little to do with whether teachers are credentialed or uncredentialed.”

Half of L.A. Unified’s teachers lack full credentials, district figures show.

Klein also said good math instruction can overcome traditional learning barriers such as poverty and language. Stanford 9 test results show that African American and Latino elementary school students made greater gains in math scores--8% and 9.5% respectively--than in any other subject.

“Math is a worldwide monoculture and has nothing to do with skin color or poverty,” Klein said.

In the last four years, the percentage of Los Angeles Unified students who placed at or above the national average on the Stanford 9 math test increased from 31% to 53% in second grade, 25% to 46% in fourth grade and 26% to 42% in fifth grade. Statewide scores will be released next week.

“Just that they’ve sustained this rise over a four-year period is really impressive,” said Gerald Hayward, co-director of the Berkeley-based Policy Analysis for California Education. Even accounting for the emphasis on exam preparation, Hayward said, the Los Angeles increases were significant. “Very few people would have predicted that by 2002 over half the [elementary] kids would be exceeding the national norm” on the Stanford 9 test.

Reading and language arts test scores have improved dramatically in elementary schools as well, and teachers said that helps to improve math performance.

Stanford 9 test results show that the average second-and third-grader--who is most likely to have had two years in the highly structured Open Court reading program--scored above the national average in math.

Karen Robertson, principal at Dena Elementary on the Eastside, said teachers now spend time making sure “children really understand words that the math series are using and understand what it means.”

Fourth-graders at the year-round Dena campus scored on average in the 39th percentile in the recent Stanford 9 tests. In 1998, they scored in the 18th percentile nationally in math.

Among the worst-performing schools in math in 1998 was South Park Elementary in South-Central Los Angeles, which scored in the 15th percentile nationally for math. This year, fourth-grade students at South Park scored in the 48th math percentile.

Of the school’s 1,263 students, 700 learned English as their second language.

Karen Rose, principal at South Park for 10 years, said the Math Land program used there in the past was one of the causes of students’ difficulties with math.

Math Land “was terrible. It was terrible,” she said. “It was disconnected; it wasn’t standards-based. It was a mishmash.”

Education experts said Math Land was analogous to the now abandoned Whole Language approach in language arts in its emphasis on individual discovery and student interaction. Masters said Math Land relied on exercises using objects such as pickup sticks and marbles instead of formal drills.

She recalled one lesson that had students invent their own mathematical formulas and discuss them in class.

The new math programs and their texts consistently build on a few basic skills such as problem solving, estimates and measurements.

High school math scores in L.A. Unified still lag behind the rest of the nation partly because programs are uncoordinated and use various texts, Masters said.

There are fewer qualified teachers in upper-level math than in elementary grades, and the district hasn’t been able to attract enough people to fill its high school math positions, she said. Next year, new professional development seminars will be offered at UCLA for math teachers in the higher grades.

Teacher training workshops can help, said Cal State Northridge’s Klein, but middle and high school math demands such specific knowledge that in-service programs alone will not be enough.

The real solution will be to hire more teachers fully credentialed to teach high school math.

“The nature of mathematics is that it’s the most hierarchical of all human endeavors,” Klein said. “You can’t go to the top until you master the lower levels, and many teachers haven’t even mastered the basics.”

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Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.