WASHINGTON, DC -- Adopting a policy is much easier than implementing a policy. That cold reality of policy making certainly applies to the state’s newly approved math standards.

In adopting a rigorous set of standards that focus on fundamental basic skill-building, the California Board of
Education overcame the opposition of “new, new math” proponents who favored conceptual understanding rather
than insisting that students get the right answer. Although “new, new math” partisans lost the battle over
the content of the standards, they’re trying to win the war by undermining local implementation of the standards.

Delaine Eastin, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, fired the first salvo in this new offensive when she urged a gathering of educators “to ignore the Board’s standards.” After her remarks were reported in the
press, Eastin backed off a bit, but others have not. Take, for example, Ruben Zacarias, Superintendent of the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). In a memo, Zacarias has said that the state Board’s standards will have no effect on LAUSD because LAUSD’s own standards “include and go beyond the state Board’s standards.”

Go beyond? How? According to Zacarias, LAUSD’s math curriculum delivers “a balance of problem solving, basic
skills, and conceptual understanding.” In other words, Zacarias believes that the inclusion of “new, new math”
fuzziness in LAUSD’s standards automatically means that it is better than the state Board’s standards. Zacarias,
therefore, has decided to win the math standards war by controlling the definition of what “go beyond” means.

Zacarias betrays the weakness of his position, however, in his defense of “Mathland,” a “new, new math” program widely used in the LAUSD. Zacarias says that Mathland prepares students “for the 21st Century by providing them with opportunities to analyze and question data and statistics in order to fully participate in our democracy as informed citizens.” Yet, in 1997, LAUSD’s math scores in grades 1-10 ranked in the bottom third and bottom quarter of scores nationally. Further, in a recent statement, six Los Angeles-area math professors sharply criticized Mathland and LAUSD’s math standards saying, “Mathland instructs teachers not to teach the standard methods of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, rather students working in groups are encouraged to invent their own rules of arithmetic. Representative of LAUSD’s standards, ‘Mathland’ should be regarded as a mathematical joke rather than a serious mathematics curriculum.” The professors conclude by saying, “As professors of mathematics at universities in the L.A. area, we suffer the consequences of low standards in LAUSD. We urge the members of the Los Angeles Board of Education to get past their hubris and take seriously the new higher mathematics standards just adopted by the State of California.”

Will LAUSD and other school bureaucracies get past their hubris? Don’t bet on it. Without increased competition in the education marketplace in the form of unlimited charter schools and widespread public-private school choice, bureaucrats like Delaine Eastin and Ruben Zacarias will simply dig in their heels and protect the status quo. As Ronald Reagan once said, “‘Status quo’ is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in.’”

--By Lance Izumi