Parents outraged over a relatively new math program in Prince William County plan to ask the school board tonight to scrap the Math Investigations curriculum.
Nine hundred fifty parents signed an online petition to remove the curriculum after a year and a half of use on the system’s youngest students.
The program is designed to teach students in kindergarten through third grade problem-solving skills to cope with the more complicated questions waiting in higher grades. Superintendent Steven Walts said the program was a response to complex questions baffling sixth-graders on Virginia Standards of Learning assessments, 60 percent of whom failed in 2006.
But parents say the programs focus too much on elementary topics and do not help students build essential skills for multiplication and division, and insist the lessons are frustrating their children.
“It breaks my heart to see my children now struggling with math and telling us they can’t do it and they don’t like it any more,” wrote Alexis Miller, a parent who has helped organize outrage over the program.
But Walts said the program is essential to improving students’ performance and already is showing results in subjects such as geometry.
“Math Investigations was born out of a national cause of concern for the improvement of mathematics,” Walts said in a presentation to the board in December.
While the school system points to surveys that show more than 80 percent of parents surveyed were pleased with math instruction last year, parents say those figures don’t jibe with the outcry they experience.
“I think people really gave it a fair shake, but parents feel like somebody has been sold a bill of goods,” Miller told The Examiner. “Getting almost 1,000 signatures in three weeks with almost no effort shows how angry people are.”
But math director Carol Knight said the demands on students have required teachers to replace multiplication tables of the past with new exercises.
“It’s not like teaching math was a couple years ago,” she said. “They’re not taught by memorizing tables, they’re taught by using the numbers and developing the numberrelationships over a number of years.”
