By Susan Koomar

WESTFALL — Parents barraged Delaware Valley school officials with complaints about a new curriculum called “Investigations in Number, Data and Space,” or Math Investigations, at last week’s school board meeting.

“Options for careers in science and economics are being closed off at the elementary level,” said parent Stacey Beecher Chelak, who took the lead in an hour of commentary on the topic.

She demanded the board and administrators conduct an in-depth review of the controversial curriculum, which omits traditional elements such as long division and memorization of multiplication tables.

Superintendent Candis Finan defended the curriculum change saying students could mimic computation but didn’t understand basic math concepts under the old program.

“We don’t adopt curriculum without doing a lot of research,” said Finan. “We appreciate your concerns about your children and we will get back to you.”

Chelak said the district’s math curriculum has been dumbed down with lessons that leave her children confused or bored and unprepared for the rigors of algebra and other advanced classes. As an example, Chelak cited a lesson designed to help her son indentify a triangle. The trouble is that her son is in fourth grade.

“He did learn that (identifying shapes) in pre-school,” she said.

A recent article in “Education Week” reported that a federal review of the Math Investigations program’s effectiveness was inconclusive. The math program for students in kindergarten through fifth grade is published by Pearson Scott Foresman.

Chelak presented the school board with pages of criticism of the program by math professors and examples of school districts that dropped Math Investigations. Harvard Math Professor Wilfried Schmid said in a 2001 speech that students in the Math Investigations program fall two years behind where they should be by grade five.
Finan said the district’s previous math curriculum featured “lots of lots of computation” but lacked instruction on concepts that form the basis for computation methods.