MATH-TEACHING ISSUE DEBATED RIVAL APPROACHES PIT CONCEPTS AGAINST FUNDAMENTALS.

Byline: David R. Baker Staff Writer

The math wars erupted Tuesday at the Los Angeles school board as dueling parents, students and professors argued over a proposed shift back to a more traditional way of teaching the subject.

Both sides of the debate - traditionalists and those favoring a reform program called ``integrated math'' - bombarded the board with statistics and expert opinions. And board members, who will vote on the changes next month, showed no clear agreement on how to proceed.

Board member David Tokofsky said that while high school students may benefit from having access to both approaches, elementary school students needed more rigorous training in basic skills.

Integrated math emphasizes understanding the concepts underlying basic math principles while the traditional approach stresses practicing skills through drills and repetition.

``I'm into practicing the fundamentals,'' said Tokofsky, who worried that the district is acting too slowly on the changes. ``Let's go ahead and move on the elementary schools. The kids can't wait.''

But board President Genethia Hayes, who has expressed support for integrated math, said she is loathe to ditch a program that some credit with raising the number of African-American and Latino kids taking college-prep math.

``I am not interested in the politics of exclusion,'' she said.

The proposed changes are designed to keep the district's math program in step with new state guidelines. But those guidelines only spell out what students need to learn, not how they should learn it.

Under the Los Angeles Unified proposal, teachers would still be able to use some of the techniques of integrated math. But they would also have to place a greater emphasis on mastering basic skills.

The fight over how to teach math has raged in school districts across the country, and both sides came well prepared for Tuesday's discussion. The president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics urged the board not to drop integrated programs, which he said could reach more students than could the traditional approach.

``Back to basics is moving backward,'' said Lee V. Stiff, who is also a math education professor at the University of North Carolina, Raleigh. ``If you think back to when you were in school, if you didn't get it the way it was taught, you didn't get it.''

But David Kline, a math professor at California State University, Northridge, argued that integrated programs do a poor job of teaching math fundamentals. He likened integrated math to ``whole language,'' a once popular means of teaching English that has now been rejected by many school districts.

``I hope board members reject the view that inferior, anti-arithmetic programs are needed by minorities,'' Kline said. ``Arithmetic has become a dirty word among the Los Angeles Unified School District's math cadre.''