Math Victory in Seattle!

Tonight, the Seattle School Board, in a 4-3 vote, accomplished what seemed impossible a few years ago:  they voted to adopt a high-quality math curriculum for elementary school, Math in Focus (the American version of Singapore Math).

Thank you to all that contacted school board members and the Seattle Public Schools administration.

Finally, Seattle students will have an opportunity to build a strong foundation in math, one that will allow them to participate in an increasingly technological society.

Finally, Seattle students will be spared  fuzzy, discovery math in which senseless group learning, essays, and excessive calculator use have been the rule.

Finally, the empirical evidence of the superiority of the Singapore Math approach outweighed the nonsense coming out of education schools (like the UW, a strong supporter of the current textbook, Everyday Math).

And we should not forgot the critical four members of the Seattle School Board who had the guts and determination to do the right thing, pushing against the pressure of Seattle district administrators, Ed School ideologues, and often greedy textbook publishers.  The honored school board members are:

Sharon Peaslee
Marty McLaren
Sue Peters
Betty Patu

We must also thank a range of community math advocates, many members of WherestheMath, including Rick Burke,  Linh-Co Nguyen, Joan Sias, Ted Nutting,  Craig Parsley, Damon Ellingston, M. J. McDermott, Kate Martin, Stuart Jenner, Dan Dempsey, Dick Padrick, Paul Hewett, Meg Van Wyk and others.  And Melissa Westbrook of the Seattle Community Forum was  a major supporter.

This is important.  But now we must turn to replacing the very poor middle school curriculum currently used by Seattle Public Schools.