Educational reform rammed down our throats

I attended the community college math conference today for Washington state.  One of the invited speakers was Amy Getz, from the Charles A Dana Center in Austin, TX.  She talked about Mathways, an educational reform project whose engine is the Dana Center.  The effort is to make a shorter path for community college students from pre-algebra to a terminal level math course.

In the Mathways project, it would begin with a pair of 'co-requisite' (meaning 'must be taken concurrently') courses, one in the humanities and one in the sciences.  The humanities course would focus on study skills and would have students sorting out their career choices and writing their college plans.  The math course would include exploring career choices in math/science as well as the math skills pre-requisite to a college-level course.  In Texas where they plan to implement this, they see this as a 1-semester course.

Students would then progress to one of the following:

   1. a college-level course in quantitative reasoning that would be suitable for a degree not requiring much math or science.  It would allow them to take a basic science class, but that's about all.  Think Early Childhood Education (ECE).

   2.  a college-level course in statistics, also pre-requisite to a basic science class, and appropriate for the lower-level health care workers (nursing, massage therapy, medical assisting) and perhaps some business fields that do a fair bit of market analysis.

   3.  a STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) path leading to calculus.

Currently, about all we offer at the CC level is the third one, anticipating that the more doors that are open, the more opportunities that students will have.  As hopeful as that is, there are a lot of students who wash out of college because of the college-level math requirement, and in some cases the math requirement is a little silly.  ECE folks don't need to factor quadratics.  They DO need to be able to gather some data about their students and talk about their progress.

According to the Dana Center, this sort of change needs to be a universal one.  For some time they have been working with educational groups and others interested in seeing this change, getting buy-in from colleges and universities across Texas and in other states where groups have indicated an interest in the project.  The number of bureaucracies that have to make the decision and implement changes is pretty vast.  At each educational institution there is a board of directors, some form of a curriculum committee, department chairs, instructors, bookstores who will sell new books, and people who work to meet accreditation standards; there are the companies who come to each college and do accreditation evaluations, there are agreements between institutions about what constitutes a college level course and the content they approve, there are agreements between the local community colleges and the universities to which students will transfer about courses and their content.  Ms. Getz said they had the stage all set to make the change to the new Mathways project in Texas, Fall 2014.

Here's the curiouser parts of this:

1.  There's no text yet.  Ms. Getz said that much of this would be online, and that they were on the verge of a publishing agreement with a book publisher, but of course couldn't say anything until that agreement was finished.  But they want to make this massive change in about a year.

2.  That means that NO ONE has done this yet, and there is no research about whether the outcome will be the desired one.  I'm just wondering here about all of those brave new students and all of the money they spend on college; all of the higher educational institutions and/or employers who will have to decide if these students are properly prepared...  But they want to make this massive change in about a year.

3.  The Dana Center representative said that the part they hadn't thought out well yet was the STEM path.  But that's what we HAVE been doing for a long time.  Why is that one so hard?

I agree that we need some changes.  And while I listened to this I thought "Ok, this is in Texas.  When they have it sorted out it will head this way."  (I'm in WA, remember?)  Now that I'm home and thinking about tomorrow's final sessions at the math conference, it's occurred to me that I've heard this all before.

1.  It happened with No Child Left Behind.  That began as America 2000, and was heavily campaigned for and sold to us by the Businessmen's Roundtable.  The current iteration of it is Core Curriculum Standards.  (The New Mathways project admits to being heavily informed by the Core Curriculum project.)  All of these have wonderful names, but the results have been flatly unimpressive.  This is busy-work that eats up people's time and taxpayer dollars.  It's not reform.

2.  There was a major overhaul of healthcare rammed through Congress not too many years ago.  The famous line was "We'll have to pass the bill in order to see what's in it." Uh huh.

3.  This sounds a lot like the 'transitions' course that was implemented when one of my kids got to high school.  Students in this course spent time learning how to be successful in high school.  It was silly to cause all students to take this course, just as silly as not continuing the course throughout more years of high school for those students who needed the extra support.

So, Dana Center.  Why don't you try this out somewhere?  Work the bugs out of it.  Get some research done.  See how effective it is.  Tell us how students like it, how transfer institutions view it, how successful those students are after a few years.  Come back and give us a report then.