Battle Over Math in New Jersey Drives Off a New Schools Chief
Dr. Brooks, a superintendent on Long Island, is the latest casualty in the math wars, felled by parents who complain that their children have failed to learn basic skills in one of the top-performing school districts in New Jersey. After consulting math professors and hiring private tutors, the parents flooded the Internet — and the local newspaper, The Ridgewood News — with concerns about what is known as reform math, collecting more than 175 signatures on a petition calling for an overhaul of math instruction in six of the district’s nine schools.
These schools — four elementary schools and the district’s only two middle schools — use reform math, an approach that typically allows students to explore their own solutions to problems, writing and drawing pictures, and to use tools like the calculator while they learn mathematical methods and skills. Reform math grew out of an effort to instill in students a deeper understanding of what they are doing rather than memorizing facts and repeating answers.
But parents like Linda Moran, a former math teacher, say the approach has left their children lacking. Mrs. Moran said she became upset last year when one daughter, 10 at the time, had no idea how much she was owed after shoveling snow for an hour and 15 minutes, at $7.50 per hour, and the other, at 13, asked for a calculator option on her cellphone to figure out restaurant tips.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 4:28 PM
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