Members of the Governor's Council on Common Core Review dived into the topic of mathematics at a day-long hearing Wednesday at the Capitol.
The hearing was the second in a series being held this spring on the strengths and weaknesses of the state's education standards.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson appointed the 16-member council of educators, parents and business people -- who are from across the state and led by Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin -- to evaluate and recommend possible changes in the state's math and English/language arts standards.
Those Common Core State Standards were adopted by the Arkansas Board of Education in 2010 and by most other states about that same time as the basis for curriculum, instruction and government-required student testing in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms.
The adoption of the math standards was a mistake, said Ze'ev Wurman, a former senior adviser to the U.S. Department of Education during President George W. Bush's administration and a presenter to the council.
"Common Core standards are mediocre, experimental and not based on any international benchmark," Wurman of California read from his prepared remarks.
Students in high-achieving nations complete courses equivalent to Algebra I and geometry by the end of eighth grade, he said. The Common Core standards, in contrast, have largely pushed Algebra I out of the eighth grade and into the high school grades.
That, coupled with what he said are "poor man's geometry and Algebra II" standards, reduces the chances that students will take calculus in high school or will be prepared for science, technology, engineering and math majors in college.
Wurman was particularly critical of the emphasis the standards place on understanding math concepts to the detriment of problem-solving or "procedural fluency" with numbers and operations.
"Arkansas should draft its own standards," drawing on what Wurman said were the excellent standards previously used by Massachusetts or California.
Those states -- like Arkansas -- adopted the Common Core standards in hopes of attaining federal multimillion-dollar Race to the Top grants. The grants didn't specifically require adoption of the Common Core State Standards but did award points to states that had standards that prepared students for college and careers.
Wurman also recommended that the state withdraw from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, which is a consortium of states that has developed math and English exams based on the standards. He said the state should select a different test-maker -- one that isn't required to relinquish individual student data to the federal government.
The question about whether individual student data are transmitted to the federal government through the PARCC coalition has been in dispute for several years. Wurman said PARCC's contract for federal funding obligates it to work with the federal agency to make student-level data that result from the testing system available on an ongoing basis for research "subject to applicable privacy laws."
Debbie Jones, assistant commissioner for learning services at the Arkansas Department of Education, said the state does not provide personally identifiable data on students to the federal government. She provided the PARCC data-privacy policy, which states that the student data are owned by the states or their state education agencies.
"These data shall not be used for commercial purposes, nor shall PARCC or PARCC contractors share personally identifiable information with the federal government, unless legally required to do so by subpoena or court order," the policy states.
Linda Griffith, a math professor at the University of Central Arkansas and the president of the Arkansas Council of Mathematics, told the council Wednesday that the math standards are written in a precise mathematical language that is not well understood by the general public.
Her role in the past few years has been to work with the Arkansas Department of Education to develop training programs for teachers on the math standards.
While she said her overarching interest is supporting whatever standards are selected for the state, she predicted that any standards thoughtfully prepared by the state would look "a whole lot more" like the Common Core standards than Arkansas' previous math and English frameworks. Those frameworks were the standards developed years ago by committees of Arkansas teachers.
One of the largest positives of the current standards and new testing, Griffith said, is that testing can be done at each grade on the skills that are the most important for that grade level.
The previous Arkansas Benchmark Exams gave equal attention to each of the five strands of math education-- numbers and operations, geometry, algebra, measurement and data -- even though it might not be as important in the third grade to learn and test about probability as it is to learn and test numbers and operations, she said.
Griffith called for a balance between teaching an understanding of math concepts and teaching math processes.
Thomas Coy, the state Department of Education's math specialist, was a member of the writing team that supported the lead writer of the math standards and was a member of the rapid-response feedback group that helped guide the changes made to the original draft standards.
He told the council that 94 percent of the math content contained in Arkansas' former frameworks is addressed in the new standards, although not always at the same grade or in the same course.
"I love the standards," Coy said as part of a 31/2-hour panel presentation and discussion, "not because they necessarily introduce new content -- we are still teaching many of the things we've always taught -- but they've introduced the eight standards for mathematical practice. That makes the mathematics come alive in our classrooms."
Some of those practice standards call for teachers and students to make sense of problems and persevere in solving them, reason abstractly and use appropriate tools strategically.
"I like how the content shows definite progressions from one grade to the next with a strong emphasis on number sense at grades kindergarten through five, ratio and proportion in grades six through eight and an in-depth study of functions at grades nine through 12," he said.
Griffin said no one wants to return to Arkansas' previous standards, but he pressed the panelists for specifics on how to improve the current standards and their implementation.
"What do we need to do to compete with the rest of the world?" he asked.
Several of the council members expressed their concerns about math requirements and how to better help parents help their children with the math homework.
Luke Van De Walle, a council member and chief academic officer for the KIPP Delta Charter Schools, told Wurman that many Arkansas educators think the standards are too rigorous, and questioned the likelihood of developing the more challenging standards as suggested by Wurman. Wurman said that the Common Core standards are filled with a lot of stuff but it is the wrong stuff.
Jeanne Gartman, a Sheridan School District math teacher and a council member, told the panel that students are not prepared for the next level of math and "it's getting worse. I'm told that Common Core State Standards will help, but I'm not seeing it."
In addition to the day-long panel presentations at the Capitol, the council is holding public forums, or a "listening tour," at multiple locations in the state. One of the tour stops is set for 5 to 7 p.m. today at the El Dorado Conference Center at SouthArk Community College, 300 S. West Ave.
The forum will be live-streamed on the lieutenant governor's Google+ page: http://tinyurl.com/lfo6go4.
Metro on 04/30/2015