Open letter to the community on the Cave Creek Unified K-8 Math Adoption

Dear CCUSD Community Member,
Apparently without even a presentation or final report (just an action consent item), the administration of Cave Creek Unified tomorrow night will ask the governing board to approve new math textbooks at an initial cost of over $400,000.

Without question these new and unproven materials (GO MATH! for K-5 and Big Ideas for 6-8) are not adequate for our students and the K-8 Math Adoption Committee has failed to perform proper due diligence to ensure that the selection will allow our students to perform at an international level.

The K-8 Math Adoption Committee process was clearly driven by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics, the textbook publishers, and the committee’s desire to meet the coming new state and national standards called the Common Core Standards (also unproven, but a slight improvement over the current standards).  We believe that this process was designed to meet the minimum (the state standards) and to choose a program with resources that meets the needs of teachers but not one that has the rigor and demands mastery to allow our students perform to at a high level.

Instead the committee should have been interviewing college professors, talking to leaders of high performing district and charter schools around the country, and understanding the math standards of countries like Finland and Singapore who excel in international math comparisons.

The problems we find with these selections and process include:

• The committee did not include any outside recourses, save for a district tutor who served on the NCTM.
• The committee did little analysis on how our students perform in math, where they need to improve, and to what level of performance to do we want them achieve. (For example, do we want Algebra in 7th or 8th grade for all?).
• The committee did not include all of the Core Knowledge recommendations for a math textbooks when narrowing down its selection.
• The new adoption selections are not used in any district in Arizona that we can find.  Did the committee even directly talk to other schools and charters who have high performing math achievement to find out programs they use?
• The newness of the adoption selections does not allow for an analysis of schools that have used them.  There are plenty of proven programs that have years of actual classrooms usage behind them.
• Who is to say that the new standards will stick.  The new standards are unproven and they are already experiencing a backlash in some states.  We should not be aiming for state standards, but at higher international ones.
• Picking a math program based on a specific standard could lead to early obsolesce.  If the standards change, will we have to do this again and at what cost to the taxpayers and the students’ performance.
• The committee is not specifying any plan for rolling out the program and at what costs. Will all grades change in the Fall?  How will this abrupt change from Everyday Math which expects a year after year spiral of learning affect our students?  How will we remediate this problem? How will new teachers be trained on the new materials and at what cost? 
• Why are we not considering piloting a sample of these programs to understand how they perform before committing $400,000 and thousands of hours of teacher training?
• The new materials include little to help our higher performing students.  They have plenty resources to help those falling behind (RTI) but little to provide real content to our highly performing and gifted students.

At a recent board meeting, CCUSD Governing Board Member and Arizona School Board Association Treasurer Mark Warren read the following comment:


“We can no longer pride ourselves on our performance in the past nor can we count on state standards to be accurate judges of our future performance…We should be looking nationally and globally to find the standards we should set…If we set our expectations higher than what Arizona thinks is acceptable, we can better equip our students for the future and better prepare them for the world beyond Cave Creek.  We will fly by standards that we currently use in Arizona.”

We could not agree more with Mr. Warren and we implore him and the board members to send the K-8 Math Adoption Committee back to the drawing board to perform the diligence necessary to bring us a program that allows our students to 'fly'.  If Mr. Warren is true to his word he must vote against this adoption.

The programs that the committee has selected are unproven, mediocre, and inadequate for our students for the next 8 to 10 years.  If you have a student in the district and want them to exceed state standards or if you are a community member and want our schools to be the best, you need to make your voice heard at tomorrow's board meeting to oppose this adoption.

Posted at CCUSD Watch where you can comment, and emailed to all governing board members and a variety of community leaders and parents.