Consultant issues review of Wake’s controversial math curriculum. Here’s what it says.
A consultant is recommending that the Wake County school system continue using a controversial high school math curriculum that some parents say is leaving students behind.
The Wake County school system hired MGT Consulting Group to do a third-party evaluation of the MVP Math Curriculum. The program has sparked complaints from some parents who say that the shift away from traditional learning methods to working in groups to solve problems is hurting students.
As part of a report presented Monday, MGT said MVP is in line with how math is now taught. Hayden Lyons, a consultant with MGT and math specialist, said MVP is teaching students valuable skills such as perseverance and critical thinking.
“The curriculum really does advocate and embrace contemporary understanding of how we learn math,” Lyons told school board members. “While it does that, it does need some support to help teachers.”
The report found issues such as confusion about how much teachers should help students who may be struggling and that students with limited English skills or learning disabilities aren’t getting enough help. MGT says Wake could make changes to improve how MVP is used, including more training for teachers.
Learning math through productive struggle
Since the 2017-18 school year, Wake has used materials from the Utah-based Mathematics Vision Project to teach high school-level math based on Common Core standards. Instead of hearing a lecture and memorizing formulas, the focus has shifted to students working in groups to solve problems while teachers act as facilitators.
MVP uses the concept of “productive struggle,” in which students learn through increasingly challenging problems.
“Productive struggle is very important,” Lyons said. “It builds on their learning.”
Critics say MVP doesn’t teach the materials, resulting in students coming out of the class struggling to understand what they would have mastered from a more traditional math course. They say it has forced families to pay for private tutors to help their children learn the material.
Wake’s passing rate on the state’s Math 1 end-of-course exam is now lower than it was before schools started using MVP. But school officials say that’s more because of how the test has changed and not the new curriculum.
Critics have held school walkouts and protests and spoken at school board meetings. They’ve also launched an aggressive social media campaign to try to get Wake to abandon MVP Math.
The report was panned by those parents, who accused MGT of giving a one-side report to justify Wake continuing to use MVP.
“I think Wake County got what they paid for,” Blain Dillard, a Cary parent leading the opposition, said in an interview Monday. “They wanted a study that came back and endorsed MVP.”
MVP filed a lawsuit against Dillard, prompting him to countersue. They eventually agreed to drop their lawsuits.
The school board voted Aug. 6 to uphold a recommendation from a district review committee to continue using MVP. The district is making changes this school year that it says will improve how the classes are taught.
MVP reviewed the curriculum, surveyed parents, visited classrooms and spoke with students, parents, teachers and administrators. MGT cited positive comments such as how school administrators said if MVP is faithfully taught that the curriculum works well for students.
The report cites students who say they like how learning more than one way to work a problem takes some pressure away and is fun.
But the concerns of critics were echoed in an online parent survey that drew more than 3,100 responses. In the survey, 53% said MVP has frustrated their kids, 55% said their child’s math performance has declined, 57% said the challenge level is too high and 61% said it’s not an improvement over prior curriculum.
“The frustration that parents have with supporting their children was a common theme throughout all the responses,” said Simmie Raiford, MGT’s vice president of Pre-K to 12 education.
Recommendations for improving MVP
MGT made seven recommendations which school administrators said Monday they’ll try to implement.
▪ Provide an informational campaign on the MVP Math Curriculum for both schools and parents;
▪ Deploy MVP teachers who’ve been highly successful to serve as instructional coaches throughout the district;
▪ Continue to build supplementary resources to improve the accessibility of the curriculum for students of all ability levels;
▪ Provide differentiated training for teachers to improve how they implement the curriculum;
▪ Continue to expand the bank of MVP Math practice items and formative assessment items that students can use;
▪ Create more intentional instructional programming for Limited English Proficient students and Students with Disabilities;
▪ Examine the structure of the curriculum and mathematical practices at the K-8 level and make modifications necessary to strengthen students’ foundational math skills.
Dillard said the recommendations are a rebuke of the MVP program. But he said it may take next year’s school board elections, when all nine seats are on the ballot, to get MVP removed. He said he hasn’t decided if he will run for office.
“The recommendations are to do the things that MVP lacks: more practice, more supplementing, more scaffolding, more differentiation,” Dillard said. “All of those are the recommendations to fix what’s going on here.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 3:40 PM with the headline "Consultant issues review of Wake’s controversial math curriculum. Here’s what it says.."
