Everyday Math: Does It Add Up? Critics Say Basics Not Being Learned

By Copyright 2007 Albuquerque Journal BY ZSOMBOR PETER Journal Staff Writer

Franny Dever knows Everyday Math has its critics.

In 2000, more than 200 mathematicians and scientists, from Nobel laureates to Field Medal winners, took out an advertisement in The Washington Post to decry the program and others like it born of the math reform movement of the late 1980s.

The primary objection: They say the programs emphasize calculators too much and the basics not enough.

One critic contends it could actually cause "significant educational harm."

"It’s very controversial," conceded Dever, Albuquerque Public Schools’ math coordinator.

APS, however, is banking on the programs to help raise its math scores, which, like those across the country, decline through elementary school.

The leaders of all the district’s clusters, the 11 groups into which APS divides its schools, agreed last year to adopt math programs out of the reform movement, Everyday Math included, for elementary schools, Dever said.

The program has its champions. Though Wright Group/McGraw-Hill, the company that publishes Everyday Math, won’t say how many orders it has for the program, school districts from coast to coast swear by it.

Since adopting Everyday Math in 2003, the New York City Education Department has raised its proportion of proficient fourth-grade math students from 21 percent to 34 percent while closing in on the national average of 39 percent.

"I can’t say it’s the only reason for our scores," spokeswoman Maibe Gonzalez said, "but it’s definitely helping."

In California, the state school board gave districts permission last month to start using their state appropriations to buy Everyday Math textbooks.

That vote, however, was at least the program’s second crack at state approval. The board rejected Everyday Math in 2001, said Tom Adams, the state’s curriculum and instruction director.

California State University Northridge math professor David Klein "strongly" advised the state to reject Everyday Math back then.

"The high degree of integration of calculators in the curriculum – - even as devices to teach kindergarten children how to count — defies common sense and could cause significant educational harm," he wrote in a 1999 state-commissioned review of the program.

‘A fatal omission’

Klein is even harder on its approach to teaching standard algorithms, the methods used to solve a math problem.

"Students are never required to use the standard long division algorithm," he wrote. "This in itself is a fatal omission."

According to some mathematicians, the standard algorithm for division lays the foundation for important concepts and skills students will need to learn in high school and college.

Adams said the company behind Everyday Math has since updated its curricula to match California’s standards.

But criticism persists. The Texas board of education rejected the program’s thirdgrade curriculum last month for not meeting the state’s multiplication standards.

"(The multiplication table) was covered, absolutely," said spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe, "it just wasn’t one to 12." Instead, it went up to 10.

Those kinds of details cause critics to blame the program for not being "robust" enough.

Like Klein, they still fault Everyday Math for teaching students multiple techniques for solving the same problem without at least emphasizing the "standard" techniques most adults would recognize.

"The Everyday (Math) pupil is exposed to five different subtraction methods, each of them viewed as suitable for the same task," New York University associate math professor Bastiaan Braams wrote in a 2003 New York Sun op-ed. "The gymnastics employed to avoid simple methods is truly breathtaking."

Too much, too fast

Carl Bonilla, math leader for Madison Middle School, believes the middle school version of the program, Connected Math, throws too many methods and concepts at students at once.

When test time came around for last year’s seventhgraders, he said, they had more trouble than usual figuring out exactly what they were being asked to do.

According to Bonilla, the program asks students to start solving problems before it has laid a solid foundation for the skills they need to solve them. "There has to be a background before you do certain things," he said. While he likes the program as a supplement to the more traditional math programs, he doesn’t believe it holds up on its own. "It’s got too many gaps," he said. Everyday Math, in fact, prides itself on the variety. Dever said it takes account of the fact that all students don’t think — and therefore learn — the same way. But she believes that a mastery of the standard algorithms is still, ultimately, the program’s goal. Critics also give the program a "fuzzy" label for its liberal use of games and handson activities. But playing with triangles, for example, gives students a better understanding of the concepts behind the formulas, Dever said. Too often, she said, math becomes disembodied from the everyday world. "We’re trying to change that," Dever said, "so that math isn’t a mystery." As for the calculator charge, she said, "it’s just one of many tools that they use," not a substitute for understanding the underlying math. It’s too early to tell if the new programs are working for APS. Preliminary results show the handful of schools that have used Everyday Math for at least a few years exceed their demographic-based expectations.

(c) 2007 Albuquerque Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.