One high school senior received sustained applause from the crowd of about 120, when he held up a stack of paper and told the Board, “In one day, we collected over 600 signatures protesting the use of the Carnegie Learning Math curriculum.”
Parents, who identified themselves respectively as a software designer, an astrophysicist, a computer programmer, and an electrical engineer, came forward to object to their children being used as guinea pigs with an experimental curriculum.
One parent asked, “The math program was excellent; why are you fixing something that doesn’t need to be fixed?”
A parent, who identified himself as an electrical engineer, said, “The curriculum is dysfunctional. At best, it is one third of a math curriculum. The district is forbidding teachers to teach fundamental math concepts and requiring them to use textbooks – after reviewing them – that are a total failure.”
“Not only were teachers not consulted or included in the adoption of the Carnegie Learning Math system, they are all fearful of losing their jobs if they don’t use it,” claimed one parent.
The most repeated refrain was that they did not agree to allow their children to be used in an experiment.
Although the parents were willing and ready to assist their children in learning the new math, they said the texts made it impossible. They described textbooks that lacked “sufficient detail and samples” from which parents might discern the methodology employed.
According to Carnegie, “The curricula were developed to align to the Common Core Standards for Mathematics.”