Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Bellingham schools using substandard math program

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/291/story/907999.html

http://wheresthemathbellingham.blogspot.com/

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for spreading the word, we need all the help we can get.

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  2. Your last curriculum director (an art teacher) is partly to blame. She moved back to Oregon after one year. I've known there was a problem in this district for a few years. For one, large numbers of parents were complaining about their kid's homework or lack of it. Students had to make up and solve their own math problems. No textbooks were ever brought home. The MSP (NCOSP) directing the math and science reform (for this region) is right there at WWU!) Funny, that one should overlook Bellingham until now.

    Stand by for important academic news from North Kitsap. Its going to be interesting, come September.

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  3. Bellingham is indeed a core member of North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

    This means that it receives funding from NSF to push an inquiry approach to learning in MATH as well as science. TERC which produced Investigations runs the MSP network.

    These MSPs around the country have school districts that are essentially getting paid twice for the same educational service:

    -once by taxpayers to provide it to schoolchildren;

    _secondly by NSF to limit how they provide the paid for instruction

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  4. The MSP grant stipulates districts that participate have to use one of DOE's 'exemplary' programs - so teacher instruction remains 'uniform'.

    There are 53 MSP's and the directors are involved usually with the dissemination of the math programs or the AAAS. The partnership between Core Plus, the WASL, and NCOSP runs deep.

    ReplyDelete