The Carnegie Institution is starting a fellowship program to improve the quality of D.C.’s math instruction, which for years has been dismally low.
The fellowship has thrived in New York and now will be added tothe District over the next five years, officials said Monday.
Education and math students at American University will receive specialized training in math instruction and then commit to four years of teaching in the D.C. Public Schools under the partnership between Carnegie and the nonprofit Math for America.
Maxine Singer, president emeritus of Carnegie’s Institution for Science, who is in charge of the effort, said the basic problem is that math teachers nationwide are not proficient in specialties like algebra and geometry.
“This takes particularly talented people and prepares them to teach,” she said. “[The hope is] that instruction will improve.”
The first crop of fellows will be recruited in the fall. Singer said six will start the program in the spring. Then eight more highly trained fellows will be added each year thereafter until 2011. Fellowship participants apply for positions in the same way that other applicants do, so it’s unclear at this time which individual schools will benefit.
Nationally, Math for America has placed fellows in New York City, San Diego and Los Angeles schools.
In each of the school districts, math instruction was lagging, Singer said. But in D.C., math has been a particular struggle, according to test scores. National data from end-of-the-year assessments indicate that about 75 percent of students in the city’s middle and high schools were not proficient in math, based on benchmarks set by the U.S. Department of Education.
“Our program was created as a model, and I believe this model will thrive in the District,” said Irwin Kra, executive director of Math for America. The biggest difference between this program and the more widely known Teach for America is the specific focus on math. Also, fellows will have to commit to four years of teaching as opposed to two for Teach for America participants.
