Bellevue, Issaquah school districts seek legal advice on texts after court decisions

Pick the wrong textbook, end up in court?

That's what worries area school districts which say a pair of recent state court decisions on high-school math textbooks have them seeking legal advice before they make their choice.

The two decisions appear to be big wins for parents who support traditional math instruction. But educators say the Seattle case, in particular, raises questions about a district's ability to pick its own curriculum materials without fearing legal action.

"The courts ought not to be making decisions about curriculum," said Dave Stolier, senior assistant attorney general for the state of Washington. The state Supreme Court has ruled in previous decisions that "it's not the role of courts to be micromanaging education," he said.

The math wars have heated up in other ways. Earlier this month, Bellevue PTSA organizers scrapped a parent math night, fearing it had been taken over by parents on only one side of the issue — those who want the district to adopt a traditional math approach.

And those parents have now organized their own math night. They say the district is not allowing an open discussion of textbooks.

Both Bellevue and Issaquah school districts are weighing which textbook series to use, starting next school year, for high-school algebra and geometry: Holt Mathematics, a traditional approach, or the Discovering series, which uses investigations to help students understand math concepts.

Both districts have asked their lawyers for advice after Superior Court judges in Thurston and King counties came to different conclusions about how much discretion an educational institution has to choose a curriculum that fits, or reject a curriculum that doesn't.

It's long been established that "in our state, the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum," said Edie Harding, executive director of the State Board of Education.

The Seattle decision was "a surprise, and if I were the Seattle School Board, I would — well, I might take issue with the judge," she added.

The Seattle School District has not yet decided whether to appeal the decision announced Feb. 4 by King County Superior Court Judge Julie A. Spector, who called the district's decision to use the Discovering curriculum "arbitrary" and "capricious." The ruling doesn't order the district to stop using Discovering; it just tells Seattle to review its decision.

In Thurston County, Judge Thomas McPhee sided Feb. 5 with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) in a case brought by Key Curriculum Press, the publisher of Discovering.

The publisher argued that OSPI's decision last year to drop Discovering from the recommended list of math books was "arbitrary and capricious." Stolier, the state assistant attorney general, countered that state Superintendent Randy Dorn used his discretion "in a reasonable manner" when recommending the best textbooks for schools.

In Bellevue, the district's math-adoption committee is nearing the end of a long process to choose Holt or Discovering for high-school math.

Last fall, more than 2,000 students and 30 teachers participated in a project that had some classes using lessons from one series of books and some classes using lessons from the other to learn specific math topics.

The district is now examining "a ton of data," said Kathee Terry, director of curriculum for the district. But a first look shows that neither textbook came out the clear winner, she said.

In some classes, students did better with Holt; in others, with Discovering. Even when classes were evenly matched — similar demographics, similar scores on standardized tests — there was "a lot of variability," she said.

Bellevue's curriculum committee is planning to take a closer look at the data. In the meantime, the PTSA is trying to decide whether to reschedule its math-curriculum night to present the district's findings, then answer parents' questions.

The earlier event was canceled because "for us to sponsor this event, it had to be a balanced, open discussion where all sides were presented fairly, and where anyone could express an opinion or view without fear of being shouted down or treated rudely," said Bellevue PTSA President Janet Suppes in an e-mail.

The parents who want a more traditional approach say they will hold their own math night later this month and have invited the PTSA to participate.

"It looks to me, and many others, that Bellevue is trying to suppress any opposition to Discovering," said Sharon Peaslee, a Bellevue parent and member of the back-to-basics group Where'sTheMath?

Peaslee's group invited Cliff Mass, an atmospheric-sciences professor at the University of Washington and one of the people who sued Seattle over its math-textbook choice, to speak at the PTSA meeting that was later canceled.

Mass said he was planning to talk about how poorly students at the UW do on a standardized math test he gives them at the start of his classes — evidence, he says, that the way math is taught in high schools today does not work.

At the state superintendent's headquarters in Olympia last week, the Seattle case touched off a discussion about "how scary that might be" if OSPI were in the business of mandating curriculum materials, said spokesman Nathan Olson.

That might seem contradictory. OSPI is now endorsing only the Holt textbooks for algebra and geometry. And in the Thurston County lawsuit, OSPI successfully defended that decision.

But Stolier emphasized that OSPI's endorsement of Holt "is just a recommendation and not binding on anybody."

"We don't want to get involved" in curriculum decisions, Olson said. "We trust the local control process. We always have."

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published Feb. 14, 2010, was corrected Feb. 18, 2010. A previous version of this story used an incorrect first name for Dave Stolier, who is a senior assistant attorney general for the state of Washington.