Source of Division

VENTURA â€”  While a debate rages across the state over mathematics instruction, school officials here are taking some heat for pulling out of a program aimed at helping educators better understand math concepts and pass them on to their students.

Earlier this school year, officials in the Ventura Unified School District withdrew from the program in response to complaints from teachers and administrators that it left little time for other educational pursuits.

Known as Project PRIME, the four-year program was developed by UC Santa Barbara and funded by a $2.2-million grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant was awarded jointly to the Ventura district and the Oxnard Elementary School District.

But while Oxnard educators are now pushing into the second year of the project, Ventura officials, deluged by protests over the amount of training required to keep pace with the program, decided in October to pull the plug on PRIME.

“It’s not that we don’t agree that we have a need for this kind of training,� said Pat Chandler, the district’s assistant superintendent for educational services. “But we bit off more than we could chew. It ultimately became a matter of time. We didn’t have enough time in the school year to accomplish that much staff development and keep our programs going in other areas.�

The decision to pull out of the program has angered some teachers and administrators, and left officials scrambling to find other ways to satisfy the district’s math needs.

Moreover, it comes at a time when policymakers in Sacramento are wrestling with fundamental questions of how best to teach math.

Last week, the State Board of Education announced it was leaning toward adopting new standards, a back-to-basics approach that emphasizes traditional computation and rote memorization over problem-solving and real-world applications.

“The state board is attempting to reverse the reform effort we’ve been working on for the past 25 years,� said UCSB mathematics professor Julian Weissglass, who helped develop and oversee the PRIME program.

“They should be thinking of ways to prepare students to be thoughtful adults, to help them use mathematics in ways that are interesting and in a context that helps them solve problems that have meaning to them,� Weissglass added. “That was one of the main goals of PRIME. I think they [Ventura educators] lost a big opportunity and substantial resources. What’s going to happen now is anybody’s guess.�

District officials insist that the vast majority of teachers and principals favored pulling out of the program, and that despite the decision, their math program won’t miss a beat.

The district recently adopted a new math curriculum, considered one of the best available.

And it still has in place the Four Square math leaders, a group of mentor teachers who investigate new ways to teach mathematics and share those innovations with their peers.

“We have a good math program and we have good scores in math, and that’s not just because of PRIME,� said Supt. Joseph Spirito, who made the final decision to withdraw from the program.

“I know there are some people who felt very strongly that we should have stayed tough with it. But I don’t think my educational leaders would ever ask me to bail out of something if they thought it was going to hurt the kids.�

Project PRIME was an effort to build on the district’s mathematics foundation: to upgrade the teaching skills of every educator by promoting an exploration of mathematical concepts while helping teachers conquer their own fears of square roots and algebraic theorems.

Math gurus at UCSB or with the district would pass along lessons to designated teachers at each school. Those teachers would turn around and transfer that knowledge to others at their schools.

For example, teachers were guided through an exercise in which they had to figure out how to cross a series of bridges without crossing any one more than once. The exercise is meant to push educators to think about number patterns in a way in which they can start to see how algebraic equations are formed.

PRIME also attempted to make systemwide changes in mathematics instruction in kindergarten through eighth grade, even bringing parents into the equation. Under the program, officials began a series of family math nights to help parents understand what their children were learning and to talk about their own views of the subject.

PRIME also sought to break down age-old barriers, such as those that hinder mathematics achievement for girls and minority students.

“This grant focused on upgrading the skills of teachers so they could develop a true understanding of how mathematics works,� said Sheri Willebrand, the district’s math specialist. “It helped buy time so teachers could have the freedom to discover new ways of thinking about the information. Personally, I think we were pushing the system and people got uncomfortable with that.�

However, Pierpont Elementary School Principal Lee Warner said opposition to the program was generated almost exclusively by the time commitment required of teachers and administrators to take part in it.

Each teacher was required to devote 132 hours of staff development time to the program--16 to 22 days--over the course of four years.

To meet that requirement, educators at one-third of the schools last year had to spend six of their seven training and staff improvement days learning about PRIME. Warner said that left those schools little time to focus on other, equally important, subject areas.

“There were some justifiable concerns about the time commitment,� said Warner, who was the liaison between the principals and the math program. “It became an issue whereby any staff development time had to be reserved for PRIME. People were concerned that they were not able to give adequate time to other curricular areas.�

But some educators think that PRIME wasn’t given a chance to succeed.

After all, they say, the Oxnard district must comply with the same time requirements, yet educators there have managed to push forward with the program.

And they say that perhaps the concerns generated by teachers and principals could have been resolved if given enough thought.

“I certainly wish we could have tried to address some of these concerns before the plug was pulled,� said Sherry Rosenberg, a veteran teacher at Saticoy Elementary School and a math mentor for the district. “I saw PRIME as being a project of benefit to every single teacher in the district.�

Added Chandler, the assistant superintendent: “In retrospect, we would have preferred to have done some problem-solving before the decision to withdraw from PRIME. But we’re not abandoning the effort to provide support and training to our teachers. It’s just a question now of how we do it.�

Teachers and administrators agree that a solid foundation already is in place.

At Sheridan Way Elementary School in the city’s west end, teachers use a variety of techniques to make math easier to learn. In Kate Palkie’s classroom, her first-graders eagerly gather at her feet as she leads them through the basics.

The youngsters take turns creating equations that add up to 21. She then launches them on a student survey to decide whether they should pack orange juice, apple juice or chocolate milk on an upcoming field trip.

In the process, they learn something about tallying numbers. And they learn how to sort numbers into groups, interpret data and graph the results on paper. And they do all that while having fun.

“I’ve been able to see how these different methods of teaching really make a difference in what students learn,� said Palkie, also a math mentor and member of the district’s Foursquare Group.

“PRIME was just a better opportunity for teachers to learn how to help children learn. It was so much deeper than what we have. It was teachers making changes and change is sometimes difficult.�