I’ve been looking to do this story for a long time. I didn’t know where it would take place, if ever, or who the actors might be, and as I said, it’s been a long time coming. It just so happens that the good folks of White Mountains Regional High School in New Hampshire have helped me -and all of us- out. I’ll explain the key ingredients as I recount the story, but the short version is, finally, a public high school is taking on many of the issues that have wrecked the study of math for too many kids for too long. This rural school, located just above Franconia Notch in what’s known as NH’s North Country, is paving the way for others to follow suit, a story of potential national significance.
The context is perhaps best explained by stating simply that math is, well, ….. math. When that subject comes up, we know what we are likely to hear. “I’m not someone who did very well in math” or “I’m just not a math person.” Others confess, “I’ve always had math anxiety” or, “I had to take History of Math to get through college.”
We’ve made it ok for people to feel this way long ago, “Well, you really don’t need a lot of math in most jobs” or “you know, most math is really not related to the real world.” Do we notice that in almost every suburban mall we can find “math-nasiums”, those ubiquitous tutoring centers specializing in all levels of math? Are that really that many kids just not able to do math? Or is it something bigger? Check out some of these topics:
A major part of the math conundrum is Algebra I: the single most failed course in American high schools. It’s also the single biggest academic reason behind the huge dropout rate at community colleges. And it’s totally unnecessary. Algebra may be viewed as foundational to “formal” mathematics, but it’s not at all necessary for many important and useful forms of mathematical literacy. Statistics, probability and data analysis, for example, hallmarks of “functional thinking,” often come easily to many who cannot fathom abstract algebraic thinking, yet they remain beyond the reach of students who do not rise in our “traditional” math sequence. What’s ironic and rather maddening is that these are the very skills that business leaders have been asking for going on four decades, to the deaf ears of the education sector.
It’s not only that Algebra has been the bane of so many student’s school experience over time, but we’ve overlooked the larger price we pay for squandering interest in math: limiting access to science, cramping our own STEM workforce pipeline, and relying on other countries to fill that gap. STEM investments in K-12 public education remain consistent and substantial, but continue to show mediocre results because schools like to do more of what they’ve always done. If you’ve been following this topic, you’ll know that every year or two there is some logical outrage from a variety of sectors -such-as this 2011 piece in the NY Times- but nothing has ever changed. The math elite just circle the wagons and wait for it all to subside.
Over this past year as COVID continued to impact schools, and federal money was becoming available, I was struck by the number of districts quickly, rather mindlessly, earmarking funds for yet another off-the-shelf math curriculum, combined with that old stand-by, “math coaching”. These were such wide-spread, knee-jerk responses to flat standardized test scores it amazed me that people weren’t raising their heads up, looking around and noticing, “hey, they’re flat everywhere! And they’ve been flat for years! It’s not just us here.”
Happily, that kind of noticing is just what happened at White Mountains. Veteran math educators, several of them new to the school began to question the wisdom of doing more of the same, living with the notion of too many kids foreclosing on math. What’s cool and really significant, is that neither did they want to overlook the many others who could soar higher in that subject but are limited by an approach that is traditional, but was never really good practice. That is front-line teacher leadership!
I’ve fortunately been privy to this work because ERC has been with the Regional for five years now. We’ve provided leadership and organizational coaching, brought in our Inquiry Tool Kit, and have been collaborating with both school and district leaders, looking at practices and outcomes.
“Doing more for more kids” has been the school’s de facto mission statement since I arrived there to help build an inquiry-based STE(A)M program that could go deeper than watery “PBL.” The ideas behind inquiry work spread, leading to more collaboration, new curricula, and a rising tide of teacher leadership. A generous grant from the Barr Foundation, the school’s second in four years, is a major indicator of the school’s commitment to innovation, the first step of which is a willingness to question the present realities and results of traditional practices. That’s precisely what happened with the math conversation.
This NH-bred change narrative began with a pre-COVID set of discussions about possible ways to spark more interest in math and science among students entering at ninth grade. One of the school’s dedicated collaborative planning rooms became a regular site for the intersection of veteran staff and new-to-WMRHS teachers. I was fortunate to be present for some of those discussions. That conversation, and the potent mix of perspectives and experiences, identified many aspects of the traditional curriculum that were not engaging for many students. The team of math and science teachers concluded that a framework of application, relevance, and interaction would serve students better in both the short and long terms. The teams advanced a proposal to design an inquiry-based, integrated Math/Science (MS) curriculum which was accepted by school and district administration and which is now in full swing at the school. A central idea of that MS strand is viewing math not as an isolated set of concepts foreign to other subjects, but math as a helpful and interesting tool of science.
A key arrival at The Regional was veteran math educator Shane MacElhiney, one of a core group that has played a leading role in this story. Having been one of the central conversants in the high school’s move to an integrated Math/Science sequence, MacElhiney began to include more reflection on math results in team meetings he was asked to facilitate. Among others, the team included versatile Erica Hicks, and Jeannine LaBounty, an experienced math educator who also serves as a dynamic Teacher Leader, supporting faculty in developing inquiry strategies and reflecting on practice.
Shane MacElhiney
Slowly but surely the team’s collaborative conversations focused on performance data, including paying attention to their own experiences in teaching certain skills and concepts as well as what students had to say about the learning and the material. The team began to track concepts and activities that engaged students at a deeper level and which had greater relevance in career development of all kinds, outlining a list of changes that seemed to make good sense going forward. Several teachers also participated in the NH Spreadsheet Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by ERC and What If Math which helped teachers think more broadly about functional thinking and cross-disciplinary activities to engage students. Concurrently, viewing math as a helpful tool of science logically pointed the teachers towards statistics and spreadsheets, concepts and tools used by most adults in a majority of work and domestic circumstances.
Art Bardige
Another of the conversants was Art Bardige, a founder of What If Math in Cambridge, MA, who visited the school in 2019 and struck up friendships. Bardige, who might be called in many schools an “outside expert”, has at various times been an entrepreneur, designer, teacher, filmmaker, curriculum coordinator, university trustee, and for the past 40 years, a digital learning developer. He shared his philosophy with the math staff, the school administration, and with me:
“Much of the traditional math that we teach is obsolete. There is no serious reason for our kids to learn it. On the other hand, the math used in business, science and industry in the 21st century, is largely spreadsheet math, with functions as the primary math element and thus functional thinking—model building—as the essential method of problem solving. Recapturing the time spent today in classrooms on paper algorithm practice, we can open the way to focus on the future, preparing students to be problem solvers and to use functional thinking as an essential quantitative part of that process.”
The school’s math stuff was on to the same idea, including Susan Zielinski who arrived in 2020, attracted by the school’s dynamism and collaborative fuel. Zielinski is another mid-career math teacher with a variety of experiences and lots of intellectual energy. With these members, conversation about where and why math goes off track became more regular and focused. To my eye, these are folks who deeply understand curriculum and student learning, and are neither wedded to old ideas nor intimidated by tough questions about the math itself. They’re also people who understood the variables: the intricacies and politics of college admissions, standardized test scores, parents’ hopes for their children, and the reluctance of policy makers to change things that are familiar and recognizable.
Susan Zielinski who joined
the Math faculty in 2020
Needless to say this story couldn’t have taken place without the involvement and attention of school principal Jacob Hess, who listened carefully, probed the data and the new approaches, and enlisted the support of Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Dr. Steve Nilhas. One of the dilemmas the team, and Hess, encountered was what to do about the old “geometry sandwich”, referring to the ossified
curriculum gauntlet math students must enter and endure, Algebra IGeometryAlgebra II. Such a smart yet potentially risky move against unexplored tradition needed vetting, which MacElhiney and LaBounty took on, engaging school leadership.
Thinking as a principal, Hess concluded, “ I wanted to move away from the ‘geometry sandwich’ for three main reasons. First, it’s boring and stale, and has been that way since I was a student. Second, when you look at the big picture, it has only seemed to serve the purpose of sorting ‘smart kids’ from ‘the other kids’, a sorting that starts long before high school and which I’m not sure is helpful. The data are fully convincing that that approach does not serve a majority of our students well. Finally, and probably the biggest factor for me, is that the issues coming out of our discussions, and the ideas for a new, integrated Math 1-2-3, seem to check all of the boxes for ways to improve math education for all students. The right skills, the right topics, the right pedagogy to have our students ready for whatever they choose next.” Added Nilhas, “having a class that devotes so much time to such a narrow part of the math experience in particular, but also the overall learning experience, takes away from the kind of learning that is better for a far greater range of students, including our math high-performers.”
Principal Jacob Hess
Following a host of internal critical reviews and reflection, plans proceeded to bring the idea to the school board’s curriculum review sub-committee. In that meeting, with the aid of a well-conceived PowerPoint and presentation strategy, the team put forward that the primary goal of the new Math 1-2-3 was to elevate the applicable skills and content (raw data analysis, statistics, spreadsheets, basic functions, everyday proportional thinking, extending out to data-based journalism and media studies) while keeping only the minimum amount of the traditional yet largely inapplicable content. That content persists, said MacElhiney and Nilhas in the deliberations, because it’s a vestige of the SAT’s. What the team understood correctly is that the SATs have been one of our classic sorting instruments, one which persists in testing for a number of likely-to-never-be-seen items, yet whose influence is increasingly on the wane across the nation, as college admissions are roiled by decreasing enrollment.
Spreadsheets will be an important area of focus in the new approach as has been pointed out. In their discussions with Nilhas and the curriculum committee, the team pointed out their agreement with What If Math that spreadsheets change the name of the game. They are the tools students will use in the workplace so they should begin practice and familiarity in school. And spreadsheets are not just computational tools, but are powerful visualization and data science tools, employing functions and functional thinking to build and work with models essential to all STEM projects.
In the dialogue, the school/district team added, “we believe students will be more engaged, be more likely to stick with math, see science as a more inviting domain, and be far more ready for business, domestic and higher education setting with their spreadsheet skills. In reviewing their position with the PowerPoint, MacElhiney posed, “we’ll be able to look students in the eye and say what they are learning is relevant and applicable. And that they don’t have to see school as something they’re not good at because math and science are kind of closed off to them, and those represent a large chunk of what high school is. Plus, we fully expect, and data will support us, that high-achievers in math, and science, will fly even higher.”
The team’s presentation met with success and moved on toward inclusion in the district’s Program of Studies. It was a quiet yet energizing victory for the math team, the school, and especially, for the students. LaBounty comments, “Moving forward, we’ll continue to encourage students who are looking to progress to the traditional end-of-high school math class --Calculus.” In the school’s recent history, she shared, Calculus classes have had increasingly low enrollment. She went on, “The new pathway will offer more student choice, and rigorous skills and content will be at the heart of it. That’s likely to increase the number of students who feel confident enough to dig into Calculus.” There’s a rare, math win-win.
Teacher Leader Jeannine LaBounty with a student
I like the folks at White Mountains for a lot of reasons, but in this case one really stands out. They could have been like many schools, content to allow cadres of incoming students pass through four years of low-engagement and low expectations in math. Instead they’ve built new and engaging learning activities, integrated Math/Science, created a dynamic Humanities sequence, and now paved the way for the new Math 1-2-3 sequence. They knew it would take a lot of work, including the politics of public engagement, sharing their insider knowledge in understandable ways, and addressing the complications of changing something truly significant in a school, something that almost never happens.
The Spartan community of White Mountains worked hard to make important changes in math and have embarked on an exciting journey, one that will undoubtedly pay off for the students in both the short and long runs. Let’s hope other schools take notice and embark on something better for young people, the learning mission, and the study of math.
Larry Myatt,
Co-Founder, ERC