Seattle Schools Community Forum

From Professor Mass' weather blog: "After lots of complaints and the evident failure of Everyday Math, the Seattle School District began a selection process for a replacement, managed by a Math Adoption Committee.  After some deliberation and limited input from the community, they have narrowed the field to three books: Math in Focus - The Singapore Approach  pub. Houghton-Mifflin enVision Math    pub. Pearson Education Go Math!    pub. Houghton-Mifflin Math in Focus is clearly the best of the lot.  enVision Math is far better than Everyday Math, but a step down.  Go Math is the weakest.  Here are a few comments on these books.

You'll have to read it to believe it.  KUOW has fired/let go UW professor Cliff Mass.   If you're not familiar with Professor Mass (he of the perfect radio voice), he did a regular feature on Friday mornings about the upcoming weather in the Puget Sound.  He usually added some kind of science feature to his work and it was usually related to the weather/science.  I actually didn't hear him do this all that much.  He was usually on between 3-5 minutes. But I guess sometimes he talked about fuzzy math.  (He was part of a small group that successfully sued the district over the math curriculum only to later have it reversed on appeal.)  And I guess that made some people (like UW which owns KUOW) mad.  Read about it at his blog and how he matches it to the firing of Principal Floe.  He makes some very strong points about how other "regulars," who are on much longer also provide commentary.  If you like Professor Mass' work on KUO...

Danny Westneat wrote a column about the appeal of the high school math textbook adoption now in King County Superior Court. He is dismissive of it. The comments following the story are more thoughtful than we usually see in the Times.

Some of you may know Cliff Mass as the Atmospheric Sciences Professor at UW who does the forecasts on KUOW. He has also taken a deep interest in the math taught at K-12 (as he is an end user of the students and he had kids in SPS). He has a weather blog but he took time to write a long thread about math. He says a lot of interesting things and has a great quiz which I confess I failed. His point on the quiz, though, is that it shouldn't be difficult for students who just graduated from high school and got into UW. There's a link to the quiz at his blog. Recommended reading.

A brief was filed Monday, Nov. 23, in King County Superior Court appealing a May 6, 2009 Seattle School Board vote to adopt the Discovering Mathematics high school textbook series. The brief contends that the school district acted arbitrarily and capriciously in voting 4 to 3 to adopt a type of textbook associated with a widening achievement gap between minority students and white students, and between low-income students and other students. Seeking to prevent the school district from adopting this series are plaintiffs DaZanne Porter, an African American and mother of a 9th-grade student in Seattle Public Schools; Martha McLaren, retired Seattle math teacher and grandparent of a Seattle Public Schools fourth grader; and Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington. According to the brief filed Monday, Seattle Public Schools began eliminating "traditional" math texts in the 1990s, moving toward an approach called "reform," "disco...

Many of you may be aware of the advocacy work of UW Professor Cliff Mass who has worked tirelessly to try to get the powers that be and the public to understand the effects of discovery math (and, as UW professors are some of the end users of the students of SPS, he does have an interest). It appears that even though the vote has gone through for the math curriculum SPS will be using, he is continuing the fight and put out a bit of a smackdown to the UW School of Education which has been waging its own battle. (And Dan D., if you printed this elsewhere, I may have missed it; my apologies.) Here's a link to the UW School of Education Research page (it has links to the right on Where's the Math). It is headed by Pat Wasley whom I have heard speak several times. Here is her letter to her colleagues on the subject of math education. I have to say I don't agree with many of her views on education so I would tend to side with Professor Mass on this point. Professor Mass ...