Elementary Math Education
Elementary math education has been a long-standing source of frustration for students, teachers and parents in the district. Like a biblical plague of locusts, every decade a new math curriculum appears in our midst, handed down from the state or federal government. The new curriculum is typically focused on improving state or national performance on standardized tests, where US students tend to underperform. These curricula are not optimized for the needs of a large fraction our district’s students.
We need an elementary math program that is stable (free from fads) and tailored to our particular needs. There is no reason why we cannot establish such a program locally. The Three Village district is extraordinarily well endowed with math teaching resources. The school district itself has outstanding specialist math teachers and Stony Brook University has one of the best mathematics departments in the country, with a prominent Mathematics Teacher Education Program. In addition, a local resident, Jim Simons, established Math for America an organization devoted to improving math education in schools, and School Nova, which runs out of Stony Brook University, is a preeminent math enrichment program. It would be difficult to find any region in the country better primed for excellence in math education. What we have lacked so far is the will to embrace these resources in order to create a better system.
The Alliance supports the introduction of an opt-in program for elementary math. The program would use specialist math teachers and would build on the successes of the School Nova program, which teaches an old school math program, essentially how math was taught before the mania for reform began. This program introduces algebra concepts, in a basic form, relatively early. An early introduction to the manipulation of symbols makes the language of math seem more natural to more students and gives them a considerable advantage when they enter middle school. It also makes possible an early introduction to computer languages, a form of applied algebra, which significantly improves the employment prospects of many students.