Stakes High In Choosing Math Class Coeur D’Alene’s New Curriculum May Blend Concepts, Numbers

Doug Burr is a dad. He earns his living helping college students who never mastered basic skills. When he looked closely at proposed changes in how Coeur d’Alene kids are taught math, he thought:

It just doesn’t figure.

The teachers want to dumb things down, ask students to master fewer calculations than they do now.

Betty Cheeley couldn’t disagree more.

“There’s more to mathematics than doing computation fast. There’s more than drill and practice,” the teaching consultant said.

The changes, she said, would help students learn to sort, classify, think problems through.

“That’s not dumbing down.”

Burr and Cheeley serve on the Coeur d’Alene School District’s math curriculum committee. They represent two points of view that surfaced last week, complete with suspicions about stacked decks and conflicts of interest.

A compromise may be in the works.

Without a doubt, the stakes are high - and not just in terms of student preparation for life. The curriculum choice determines how a lot of tax dollars are spent.

“This very easily could be $300,000 to $350,000 in textbooks and materials,” said administrator Hazel Bauman.

Every five to seven years, on a rotating basis, school districts analyze what students are taught in math, science, reading, and other subjects.

Their bottom-line question: What will graduating seniors end up knowing?

Curriculum committees, made up mostly of teachers, spend more than a year listening to experts, looking at materials. In Coeur d’Alene, those committees report to the Curriculum Advisory Council.

The council debates the proposed changes, then makes a recommendation to the school board.

Board members have the final vote.

Bauman, co-chair of the advisory council, wanted the math decision to be made before June. That way, materials could be bought this summer in time for the 1997-98 school year.

The council was going to vote on the math curriculum on Wednesday.

But Bauman delayed that for a month. She wanted to clear the air after hearing that parents on both the council and curriculum committee were worried about lower standards.

She’s asked the curriculum committee to take another look at the proposal.

“I think there needs to be some compromise,” Bauman said. “They may have gone too far in narrowing the focus of what they’re teaching.”

Ann Walker heads the committee. She thinks its teacher members need to explain better what they’re trying to accomplish.

They want kids to understand math well enough to use it in real life situations.

“When I took algebra, we did equations. We solved all kinds of equations, and did a bang-up job,” said Walker, who is principal of Ramsey Elementary.

“But what was the purpose of algebra? I couldn’t have told you at all.”

Simone Kincaid, a parent member of the advisory council, thinks there’s already too much emphasis on concepts at the expense of learning to work with numbers. That’s why math test scores in the district aren’t as high as they should be, she said.

“I want a more balanced approach,” Kincaid said. “Nowhere in this document does it say, ‘The kids will master these items.”’

Kincaid wants specific requirements listed. For example, first-graders would need to add and subtract numbers up to 10, or 12, or 18. She favors the more demanding requirements.

Cheeley objects to that approach. Hard-and-fast rules, she said, ignore the fact that some kids just aren’t ready to learn certain numbers yet.

“The parents just don’t trust the teachers,” she said. “If they really knew how the brain worked, they would.”

It was Kincaid and Barb McFarland, another parent member of the advisory council, who first compared the current curriculum with the proposed one. They were dismayed at what they see as a drop in standards. They pointed it out to Burr.

The parents are pleased that the curriculum committee will take another look at its proposal. But they’re worried about parents being outnumbered.

The curriculum committee started out with about 20 members, one-fourth of whom were nonteachers in keeping with district policy.

But two community representatives dropped out.

That left Burr, a North Idaho College instructor whose kids attend Coeur d’Alene schools; and Cheeley, who has grandchildren in the schools but is a teaching consultant with an insider’s view of education issues.

Bauman has welcomed Burr’s offer to get more parents, and employers, involved in future curriculum committees. It’s hard, she said, to find volunteers willing to attend meetings for a year or two.

“We would be tickled to have more community representatives, so we’d have a sense that we’re teaching what they want us to teach.”

The math committee will meet April 10 to reconsider its proposal. The advisory council will vote on the matter April 30.

, DataTimes MEMO: See related story under the headline: Some parents see conflict of interest