Where's the Math?
Concerned about the way his kids' district taught mathematics, epidemiologist Christopher Carlson '92 plunged into the race for school board, becoming part of a national arithmetic uprising.

By John B. Saul

Christopher Carlson '92 expected that someday there might be an article about him in Pomona College Magazine, but he thought it would be for his work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

That’s where, in a lab and an office overlooking the city’s Lake Union, he is a genetic epidemiologist hoping that “something I discover in terms of basic research will someday have a benefit for somebody in terms of their healthcare.”

This is not that article. But the reasons for Carlson’s appearance here are prominent in his office. On the shelves above his computer and cluttered desk, photographs show three boys, ages 8, 5 and 2. If Carlson stops working long enough, his computer screen fills with more pictures of his three sons, playing in the snow, in a swimming pool, hugging their mother.

When the oldest entered kindergarten in the Lake Washington School District outside Seattle, Carlson, 37, was unknowingly set on the path to activism.

“One day my son came home from second grade and informed me that he was not good at math. That was the day that my campaign for school board started,” Carlson says.

The boy’s kindergarten teacher had been impressed with his analytical skills, but a first-grade teacher was cautious.

“The teacher warned us that he might not do very well on the district math curriculum,” Carlson says, “because it is biased toward highly verbal children, not kids with more quantitative talents.”

After the warning, Carlson began tracking his son’s math work and grew “increasingly concerned by the overwhelming devotion to word problems at the expense of practice with basic number facts like the addition tables.”

Carlson says that under the district’s math curriculum, children can be capable of expressing the answer to a problem but still have to draw pictures and write about how they arrived at the answer.

“This struck me as absurd, akin to making a child who can read go back and prove that they can sound out each word phonetically,” he says. “The proof of mastery is in doing the math, not in talking about it.”

Not necessarily, according to the school district’s Website explaining its math curriculum, “Connected Mathematics Project,” which says students in the 21st century “need more than definitions and calculation only: they need to learn problem-solving using skills such as planning, reasoning, thinking, evaluating and computing. They will need . . . to communicate how they solved a problem.”

Carlson buys that up to a point.

“The non-traditional curricula are undoubtedly an improvement for some students,” he says, “but we need to bring back enough of the traditional elements for the mathematically gifted students to succeed.”

During this time, when Chris was tracking his son’s math homework, his wife Jenny (Scherer) Carlson ’90 read about a meeting of Washington Learns, a committee of political and education leaders studying ways to revamp the state’s school system with a focus on math and science. You’re going to the meeting, Jenny told her husband.

He did, and that’s where he met the founders of the statewide group Where’s the Math?, which was started by some parents in the Lake Washington district. The organization’s mission is to align “Washington State standards, assessments and curricula to those of top performing nations in the world.”

“If they had not already started Where’s the Math?,” says Carlson, “Jenny was gearing up to do so.”

Instead, he became the family’s school-board candidate.

HE WON THE November 2007 election with almost 55 percent of the vote. He says he couldn’t have done it without Jenny, who majored in government at Pomona.

She insists that Chris gives her too much credit but confesses to doing a heavy edit on his entry in the voters’ pamphlet.

Carlson thinks that a contrast she drew between him and other board members was key to his win: He will have children in the district schools for the next 16 years.

“Yes, lots of people … are up in arms about the math,” he says, “but it was my boys who won the election for me.

“I campaigned on a relatively simple platform where I did not lead with math because I honestly believe that the math problem is a symptom of bigger problems with not consulting parents and a lack of transparency in how the district is run.”

Kevin Teeley, president of the Lake Washington Education Association, says the teachers’ group endorsed Carlson’s opponent and contributed $1,000 to his campaign because he had filled a vacancy on the board “and we were familiar with him because of his many years of volunteer work in the schools and because his late wife was a teacher for many years in the district.”

Teeley lists another reason his group opposed Carlson in the District 2 race: “Chris came to a board meeting with a group concerned about the math curriculum and shouted out at the board from the audience,” Teeley says. >>

Carlson is not surprised by this.

“Hot headed! I lost it!” he says, admitting that the board members (two contributed to his opponent) probably thought, “This guy’s not all balanced.”

“The fact is that when you’re talking about your own kids it’s hard not to be passionate.”

And frustrated. By the time Carlson went to that board meeting, he had had unfruitful meetings with his son’s teacher, the school principal and a district administrator. He had also been before the board on his own.

“I gave my three-minute monologue, then someone else commented on a bus stop that had been removed without warning, and the board returned to the pre-specified agenda. I guess I expected something more.”

The answer for many parents would have been private schools, like those Jenny attended growing up in Claremont and Pomona. But Chris went to public schools in Palo Alto and believes “public education is the basis for equal opportunity.”

FOR THE BOARD meeting this past February, Carlson shows up in a conservative navy blue suit and white shirt and takes his seat at one end of the dais for the board members. Partway through a PowerPoint presentation on math and science standards, he asks, “So our mean grade in science is a B-minus?”

“C-plus,” comes the answer from the presenter and other board members.

“Holy . . .” intones Carlson. “I’m sorry but that distresses me. I want to have kids I can hire.”

Maybe we’re just tough graders, suggests another board member. Maybe, says Carlson.

“What’s interesting is that when we look comparatively, as in mathematics, we are on the top of the pile in the state, hands down,” says Chip Kimball, the school superintendent. “But if you look at what we want for our students, it’s not good enough.”

There’s no disputing Kimball’s assessment of the district’s standing, and when the Carlsons moved to the area in 2001, they chose the community because they wanted high-quality public schools for their growing family

At the board meeting, Carlson jokes that he could sum up what he hopes to do on the board with a bumper sticker that reads, “Better than Bellevue,” referring to the high-performing district adjoining Lake Washington.

But then he asks, “Can we compare how we, as the home turf of Microsoft, compare with the students in Cupertino, the home base of Apple?”

So make that bumper sticker, “Better than Cupertino.” Better yet, make it “Better than Singapore.” In the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, eighth-graders in Singapore ranked first in mathematics; the United States was 15th.

When Carlson’s son came home from school and announced his troubles with math, textbooks from Singapore were purchased along with placemats printed with the addition and subtraction tables.

It took two weeks to conquer addition and subtraction, and then it was on to multiplication.

Such devotion might lead to a one-issue set of blinders, but even WEA leader Teeley concedes that Carlson is not working a particular agenda and that his performance on the board has been fine.

At the end of the day, Carlson says, his work on the board will be “about providing an excellent public education across the board.”

So has he been able to make any progress on math?

Carlson says the other board members and the administration “know what I’m passionate about, and just my candidacy led to the beginnings of change around the district.” Carlson notes that for the first time in six years, the district math curriculum Website has been overhauled to provide more support to parents.

Carlson, who majored in molecular biology at Pomona, has also been appointed to the state board of education advisory panels on science and, of course, math.

“I THINK THERE ARE only two things you need to become an activist: conviction that you are right, and passion to see it through,” he says.

He could have added time. Being on the board makes for a hectic life: Up, showered, breakfasted and at the bus stop by 8:45 a.m., having dropped the older boys off at school. Read newspaper, scientific articles or board paperwork on the bus. Spend eight hours designing experiments and writing grant applications. Bus home by 6:15 p.m., cook dinner, play with kids, put them to bed, spend two hours half-heartedly watching TV with laptop on lap. Bed at 10 p.m.

Repeat. Except twice a month, when Carlson drives straight from work to a five-hour board meeting and twice a month again to a PTA function somewhere in the district. That’s not to mention a couple hours each week preparing for the next board meeting.

“I am just nuts enough to give up any hobbies I might have had,’’ says Carlson, “in order to spend the time required to bring some balance back to math in our district.”

Math Wars
Are the Math Wars headed for a truce? Or at least a compromise?

The National Mathematics Advisory Board’s final report, issued this spring, seems to offer some hope of peace by proposing that the best way to teach children math might be to use techniques from both sides of an argument that has raged for nearly three decades.

On one side are those who say there needs to be more emphasis on memorizing mathematical facts and algorithms—proven ways to solve problems. The other side stresses presenting concepts and letting students find their own way to mathematical discoveries.

But Larry R. Faulkner, chairman of the panel and former president of the University of Texas, told the Washington Post that the panel decided students need to have both automatic recall on math facts and some element of discovery. President Bush created the board in 2006 and charged it with reporting on ways to prepare students for learning algebra, a key indicator of getting into and graduating from college, as well as having financial success afterwards. The panel found that mathematics education “is broken and must be fixed.”

To do that, the panel recommended streamlining math curricula and setting benchmarks by school grades (able to add and subtract whole numbers by the end of third grade, fractions and decimals by the end of the fifth), finding better ways to prepare and keep math teachers and recognizing the “mutually reinforcing benefits of conceptual understanding, procedural fluency and automatic recall of facts.”

That last part would bring together opposing elements in a dispute that started in 1980 when the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a report (refined in 1989) saying kids ought to be presented with problems to be solved before learning basic skills, which could be handled by calculators. Such student-directed learning, the argument went, would result in an understanding of math concepts that would last a lifetime.

Repetition of addition, subtraction and multiplication tables (“drill and kill”) might get a student a passing grade on the next exam but would they remember any of it past two weeks?

Alarmed parents and some mathematicians argued that conceptual understanding of math was impossible without basic skills. Learning the basics meant students came up with right answers, something these advocates thought was missing in “fuzzy math.”

The battles have been fought in many states with California and its dominant role in textbook selections playing a huge role. In 1998 California adopted standards that reversed an earlier emphasis on the conceptual approach.

In Washington, where Chris Carlson (see accompanying article) is enlisted in the Math Wars, the state is drawing up new standards for math instruction. Linda Plattner, who taught math for 12 years in the state, now works as an educational consultant and is advising the state on the new standards.

She sees in them a proper blend of educational approaches.

“The current version of the Washington standards retains the values of conceptual learning while bringing in the meat of math.”

Carlson, meanwhile, says he’s “feeling pretty darn good about the trend toward sanity across the nation.”

He is especially pleased that the national report found that rote knowledge is “beneficial because it frees up working memory for the hard parts of a problem.”

But he still sees plenty to do in the future—especially in improving educational study designs—and intends to stay involved in making math add up for future generations. <