Barbara Meloche
Principal, Edgewood Elementary School
Okemos MI 48864

Dear Mrs. Meloche

Thank you for sending us the math materials. I was not able to find the information “from the SAT regarding changes in the test” as mentioned in your letter nor did I find any assessments about students’ performance in SAT or other standardized tests you mentioned at the math night presentation. If you have these materials, please mail them to me or ask Eva to bring them home.

Of all the materials you sent me, I found the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to be the most informative. It is interesting to know that Hong Kong students rank 4th in math performance after Singapore, South Korea and Japan while US students rank 28th. As I grew up in Hong Kong and still have my extended family there, I can tell you my personal experience regarding math education in Hong Kong. For one thing, all Hong Kong students in all grades have mathematics textbooks. So are students in Singapore, South Korea and Japan. Last year, I purchased a complete set of Hong Kong textbooks published in 1996 for the 7th, 8th and 9th grades. Thus I know for sure that the Hong Kong textbooks are nothing like the textbooks being adopted by the Okemos Middle Schools. The textbooks are written in English so you or anyone in the Okemos school adminstration are welcome to examine them.

I have a nephew and a niece who are in the same grades as Ylinne and Eva. As both of my daughters go back to Hong Kong nearly every summer, I can compare their math education directly. As you know, Ylinne and Eva are at the top of their classes in math. However, compared to their cousins, even with the younger cousin who scores in the bottom of her class, both Ylinne and Eva’s math skills are inferior in nearly all grades in the elementary school.

You may conclude that my two daughters’ math abilities are naturally lower than their cousins’ and have nothing to do with the math curriculum being taught at the Okemos schools. Last year, when Ylinne was a seventh grade student in Kinawa Middle School, the school decided to implement the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP). As she was confused by the new math curriculum, I started to teach her math using the 7th grade textbooks I bought in Hong Kong. When she went back to Hong Kong last summer, for the first time, she was better than her cousin in mathematics. She could help him in his Algebra homework! This is especially significant since her cousin scored in the top 10% in the standardized test administered by the Hong Kong government to all sixth graders a year ago. Thus our kids can perform better than students in Hong Kong or any other countries, given the right math curriculum instead of embracing any new math teaching concept that comes along.

Another finding of the TIMSS as reported by Prof. William Schmidt of MSU is that the US math curriculum is a mile wide but an inch deep. After listening to the math night presentation, I do not see how this problem is being addressed in the new math curriculum at all. For example, if one compares the units to be taught from first to fifth grade, they basically cover the same topics with small increments every year. By fifth grade, it is not clear to me if the students can multiply without manipulatives such as beans and sticks or charts while students in Hong Kong can “add, subtract, multiply, and divide with decimals” at the end of 4th grade.

Why does Okemos elementary schools abandon textbooks? In the Oct. 15 issue of the Education Week magazine, Tom Loveless, a public policy professor at Harvard University stated: “Texts publicly declare the curriculum. They link home and school, and by providing a calendar for learning, allow parent, teacher, and child to see what has been covered and what lies ahead. The textbook is the closest thing we have to an enforceable learning contract in the American school, and for the last century, no serious academic subject has been taught without one.”

If Okemos schools really treasure parents as “partners in education”, eliminating the textbooks is a step in the wrong direction.

Sincerely yours

Betty Tsang

CC: L. Gerard