Montgomery County schools officials are recommending a complete overhaul of the mathematics curriculum to scale back the number of students who skip grade levels and to align with state standards.
The K-12 Mathematics Work Group will tell the school board on Tuesday that fewer topics should be taught at each grade level and that significantly fewer students should skip grade levels in mathematics.
The curriculum also will redefine what “grade level” means in Montgomery by changing by which grade certain math concepts should be mastered.
For example, almost 50 percent of Montgomery students complete sixth-grade math or higher as fifth-graders; but Maryland’s Common Core State Standards
say many of Montgomery’s sixth-grade topics should be mastered by the fifth grade.
“Moving fast doesn’t necessarily get you better-prepared,” said Nicola Diamond, co-head of the work group.
Schools recommended more than 40 percent of second-graders for above-level math courses this year using a new gifted-and-talented identification tool.
Deputy Superintendent Frieda Lacey said she hoped a focus on in-depth subject mastery would provide more opportunity for minority students.
Lacey said that past efforts to close the school system’s persistent “achievement gap” between black and Hispanic students and their better-performing white and Asian peers led to “overcorrections in some instances.”
“Students [of all races] were placed in some classes and perhaps they shouldn’t have been,” Lacey said.
The modified curriculum’s division of subjects over grade levels is “informed by the work of top-performing countries,” said Betsy Brown, director of curriculum for the school system. “It really puts them at a higher level than a lot of the state standards have been, including in Maryland.”
County Superintendent Jerry Weast has been critical of the current state curriculum and assessments, once joining Board of Education President Patricia O’Neill in calling the Maryland School Assessments “poorly constructed tests of questionable reliability or purpose.”
But school officials believe the new standards are more in step with Montgomery. “It just so happens the Common Core is coming to meet us,” Diamond said.
The school board will make no decisions at Tuesday’s presentation. Some recommendations can be approved without the board, such as the elimination of mass grade-skipping.
Jody Leleck, chief academic officer, said the school system will form an implementation group to put together an action plan and a timeline.
“There are recommendations that are going to have to be reviewed for their fiscal impact,” Leleck said. “You know what our budget’s like, can we do them? And if we do them, what do we give up?”
