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Math shift is marked by division

Supporters say the retreat from rote exercises is raising scores in Pa. and N.J. Critics fear fundamentals are lost.

Stratford Friends School teacher Debbie Koutsiouroubas works with Jack Benoliel. While "other programs jump to abstract quickly," she said, she tries to give students a picture of math basics. (Charles Fox / Staff)
Stratford Friends School teacher Debbie Koutsiouroubas works with Jack Benoliel. While "other programs jump to abstract quickly," she said, she tries to give students a picture of math basics. (Charles Fox / Staff)Read more

An elementary math program that has won acclaim for producing stellar math scores on state tests and yet continues to take hits as being fuzzy and weak on basic math facts has put down deep roots in the Philadelphia region.

Everyday Mathematics, developed two decades ago by University of Chicago math-education researchers, is in more than 175,000 classrooms nationwide, reaching 2.8 million students, its creators say.

Among those using it are private schools such as Haverford, Baldwin, and Penn Charter; 15 of 22 Montgomery County districts; districts as diverse as Oxford in rural Chester County and Radnor on the Main Line; Haddonfield and Pitman in South Jersey; and the big Philadelphia district.

Its backers say the program is a factor in rising math scores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania by helping children grasp math concepts early and drawing more into high-level courses later.

"Kids latch on to the program. They feel successful, confident," said Terri Salvucci, K-8 math specialist for Philadelphia public schools, where a fourth of elementary schools this year boosted math scores by double digits.

But with each new class of kindergartners, fresh questions arise from parents who learned math the traditional way: rote memorization of times tables and no hint of algebra in elementary school.

Not that a sound recall of math facts is a bad thing. But Everyday Math stresses broad concepts, relevancy to real life, and games over repetitious drills.

Take this scene Monday morning in the Haverford School District:

To get her first graders' attention, teacher Sandra Shipon begins to clap her hands over her head: "2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 . . ."

The children join in, clapping and chanting the even-number progression as they settle into their seats.

The 6- and 7-year-olds at Manoa Elementary School are primed for 70 minutes of math, with a focus on zero, positive and negative numbers, and the concept of infinity.

Stretched around the room is a number line, starting with -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, and counting forward to 180 - marking the last day of school.

"What's the lowest number?" Shipon asks.

"I know! Negative infinity," offers a 6-year-old boy excitedly.

Then the students practice counting forward and backward using work sheets with number lines crossing it.

"OK, do some hops on the number line. Start on 5, count up six hops," the teacher says. Little fingers do the hopping, and most land on 11.

In the course of the math period, students work at their desks, in pairs on the floor, and at the whiteboard. They play one game with math cards, another with dice, working on addition and subtraction, with special attention to the number 10.

Rolling a 6, the 6-year-old is quite pleased with himself, forgetting that this is math. "Oh . . . I'm so good at this," he says.

Everyday Math arrived in Haverford in the early 1990s, about the time the state introduced the PSSAs - the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment. Within a few years, Haverford schools were among the state's top math performers, as were Abington schools, which also had adopted the program.

David Rader, who was chairman of the math department in the Methacton district and had served on the statewide math-assessment panel, recalled that by the late 1990s, seven of the top 10 performers on the fifth-grade PSSA were using Everyday Mathematics. That spurred Methacton, which covers Lower Providence and Worcester Townships, and many other districts to ditch the traditional approach.

Now math head at the all-boys Haverford School, Rader lauds Everyday Math as a good fit with the private school's focus on how boys learn.

"Boys love competition, they love puzzles, and Everyday Math relies heavily on games and puzzles for practice and to teach concepts," Rader said.

Nearby, the all-girls Baldwin School touts how well the program works with girls. Teachers there de-emphasize the competitive element but pick up on Everyday Math's recommendations to use math in practical ways throughout the school day, ask open-ended questions, and encourage creativity and independent thinking.

Key aspects of Everyday Mathematics include:

A focus on math concepts in prekindergarten through sixth grade, including numbers sense, geometry, probability and statistics, estimation, and algebra.

The use of games, puzzles, and everyday situations to capture student attention.

The use of manipulatives such as cubes, sticks, and dice as well as calculators.

A teaching method called "spiraling," in which students are introduced to a concept but not expected to master it in the first go-round.

What draws criticism from traditionalists, including parents and some math teachers, is that students are not pushed to master such things as addition and multiplication tables in a timely, orderly fashion before moving on.

The blogosphere crackled in the spring in Palo Alto, Calif., as that egghead town's school district voted to adopt Everyday Math for its elementary schools.

"The decision by EM to dump many topics on children each day, and hope that by chance some of them will stick to the children's minds in the long run, is contrary to the way mathematics should be learned," wrote one opponent in Stanford University's hometown.

The impetus to change dates to 1990, when the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics called on schools to focus less on computation and more on concepts and problem-solving - recommendations that math educators took to heart.

But complaints that Everyday Math and other so-called reform-math programs were "light" on basics and too reliant on calculators spurred the council three years ago to expand emphasis on basic math skills in the lower grades.

Users of Everyday Math say students get plenty of practice if the program is properly implemented; skeptics say otherwise.

Sue Sarshik, math coordinator for the lower school at Germantown Academy, said she encountered Everyday Math students attending her school's summer program.

"My big complaint is they need to solve a multiplication problem, and they ask, 'Can I draw the box [10 rows counting from 1 to 100]?' They walk around with calculators," Sarshik said.

The surest method of answering many basic math problems is the quick recall of basic math facts, she said.

At Germantown, teachers use Pearson Scott Foresman math texts, described by Sarshik as "a traditional math series." Still, the influence of modern math is there: Kindergartners use blocks, sticks, and chips to help learn how to add, and math is woven every day throughout the curriculum.

Whatever the approach, schools are focused on the same goals: to teach children not just the basics but the complexities of math and to prime them for such courses as Algebra 1, geometry, and statistics in high school.

Three years ago, Stratford Friends School in Newtown Square turned to Making Math Real, a reform approach developed in Berkeley, Calif. Math is taught in four steps, from the concrete to semiconcrete, to semiabstract, to abstract.

"Other programs jump to abstract quickly," said teacher Debbie Koutsiouroubas, while this approach strives "to create a picture" in the students' mind of basic math facts - like the multiples of 7 - before introducing concepts like algebra.

And like Everyday Math teachers, Koutsiouroubas uses real-life scenarios. One day last week, she created a story about four roommates and a United Parcel Service package filled with 16 iPod Shuffles to illustrate a division problem.

Whatever program a school may be using, said Tim Madigan, Stratford Friends head, "it's not just the teacher standing at the chalkboard."

Kristie Newton, assistant professor of math education at Temple University, said the challenge for teachers was to help children see the underlying mathematical concept and not teach "the same old rote-memorization way."

At the same time, students need to use math efficiently, and that means quick recall of basic math functions.

"From my perspective, in a lot of ways, the math wars are over," Newton said. "Students have to have the skills and the understanding both."