Math, and the sum of all school standards

The new state math standards for students in kindergarten through eighth grade are an improvement over the old ones, and ought to allow weak math programs to be strengthened district by district.

That was the intention in 2007, when the Legislature ordered the state Board of Education to revise the standards. Too many students failed the math section of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. Teachers complained that the math standards were unclear, and parents said the curriculum was not rigorous enough. It lacked focus. There had to be more emphasis on basic skills, including long division. The standards require that students learn more than 30 math concepts during their time in school, but had not given adequate attention to basic skills.

Under the old standards, teachers were required to touch on nine math concepts in a single year, which sometimes made it difficult for students to learn any of them well.

The new standards create three or four core areas — such as addition and subtraction, fractions and geometry — students have to master at each grade level. In some cases, the concepts will be introduced sooner as well as in greater depth.

There is still disagreement over whether the new standards are high enough, or clear enough. Much of the pressure to raise standards comes from Where's the Math, the King County group that has attacked calculator-dependent "fuzzy math" and promoted a more-traditional way of teaching numeracy.

The new standards allow such an approach, but leave the decisions to each school district.

For elementary and middle school, the next steps are new curricula and textbooks, and alignment of the WASL so that it uses the new standards as its measuring stick. The high-school standards aren't out yet.

In group decision-making, there is always a tendency to fudge the details in order to reach agreement. It's an unwelcome tendency when the final product is an educational standard for an entire state. Teachers need clarity, and so do our students. Participants should keep that in mind when writing the standards for high school.