Miracle Math.

In "Miracle Math" (features, Fall 2006), Barry Garelick contends that the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) briefly piloted Singapore Math and then abandoned the math curriculum for budgetary reasons. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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MCPS incorporated the greatest strengths of Singapore Math into its revised mathematics curriculum in 2001, and the results have been excellent. The system's new math curriculum is aligned with state, national, and world standards and has led to unprecedented student achievement. (Readers may see the unabridged version of Edwards's letter at www.educationnext.org for more details.)

The article highlights one of Singapore Math's strategies, called "bar modeling," as an ideal way to solve math word problems. MCPS agrees and has incorporated bar modeling into the revised curriculum. The article also notes that the Singapore Math curriculum is sequential in nature and builds on students' prior knowledge. The MCPS revised curriculum uses the same principle and techniques. Concepts of fact families are integral to Singapore Math, and one will find those same concepts in the MCPS math curriculum as well.

What Garelick didn't discuss is how Singapore Math fails to fulfill the needs of American math education. For example, the measurements used in Singapore Math are metric. Therefore, if only Singapore Math textbooks are used, MCPS would have to provide additional materials to teach measurement. Singapore Math has little focus on computation with common fractions, a concept that is needed when solving customary measurement problems. Finally, Singapore Math does not include sufficient material on statistics and probability.

MCPS learned a great deal from its Singapore Math pilot and used its concepts significantly in the revised curriculum. Unfortunately, Garelick didn't demonstrate a mastery of the "math facts" in Montgomery County in his opinion piece, and that is a disservice to the readers of Education Next.

BRIAN EDWARDS

Director

Public Information Office

Montgomery County Public Schools

Barry Garelick replies:

Mr. Edwards's statement that "the system's new math curriculum ... has led to unprecedented student achievement" would make sense only if there were a baseline for comparison. According to [former MCPS parent] John Hoven, "Superintendent Weast terminated the long-standing Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) math testing program that could have provided a basis to judge his success or failure against his predecessors."

MCPS-style "statistics and probability" does not teach the basics of how to make reliable statistical inferences from imprecise data. Singapore Math (SM) does that in high school; MCPS math never does.

The legacy of "bar modeling" from the SM pilot shows up in MCPS now only as a passing mention in teacher's guides. This is not enough to get across the nuances and techniques for students to solve the multistep problems in Singapore Math.

Finally, Mr. Edwards's statement that "Singapore Math has little focus on computation with common fractions" is inaccurate. Singapore Math covers fractions extensively. Here is a problem from the 5th grade text: "3/7 of the apples in a box are red apples. The rest are green apples. There are 24 green apples. How many apples are there altogether?" And here is a question for Mr. Edwards: How many MCPS 5th graders can solve that problem?