May 98 Letter to Ms. Shefeld

Betty Tsang, 1775 Mirabeau, Okemos, MI 48864

Kathy Sheufel May 21, 1998
Chippewa Middle School

Dear Ms. Sheufel,

Thank you for presenting the new math proposals for the Okemos Middle School in the parents meetings. However, I am very disturbed by your statement as the math department head of Chippewa Middle School that the MEAP test scores for schools using CMP programs have improved dramatically. Attached are the seventh grade math MEAP scores obtained easily in the World Wide Web (www.mde.state.mi.us/reports/msr/) for the eight CMP pilot schools in Michigan. For reference, I also include the scores of Kinawa and Chippewa Middle Schools and the state average. From the table, it is clear that the CMP program does not make any dramatic improvement on the MEAP scores.
If our school district is really interested in improving MEAP scores, it is more efficient and less expensive to target the 20% or so of the students who fail the MEAP rather than to subject all the students to an unproven method. For example, simply by shifting the test dates from October to February, as was done this school year, both Kinawa and Chippewa’s MEAP scores jumped by about 15 points, to the mid 80’s.
I assume you got the information from the CMP brochure distributed by Mr. Scates to the school board members and some parents. These results provided by the authors of CMP have not been peer-reviewed or published in refereed journals. In all academic fields, such studies are considered preliminary at best and should not have been used when the program was first considered two years ago to replace a “traditional” math program which had served our students well. Experimental programs evaluated with “unproven” studies should never have been introduced to our children’s education as the only option.
Independent of math approaches adopted by the teachers, the dominant correlation in MEAP scores is parents’ involvement in their children’s education. While this is difficult to measure, it is strongly correlated with economic factors such as the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch listed in the last row in the attached table. If you ever wondered why Kinawa students received more awards in math contests or essay contests, this is the consequence of introducing bad programs such as CMP into the Kinawa Middle school. Parents start teaching their children! Even though children with educated parents benefit, if the trend continues, teachers will become irrelevant. Thus, it is most beneficial to the public school system if the teachers listen to parents’ concerns and give us choice options in the math programs to discourage the trend of home-schooling.

Sincerely yours,

Betty Tsang
Cc: members of Okemos Board of Education, Dan Wertz, Lee Gerard, Deb Chamberlain, Tom Tweedy, Barb Hoevel, Barry Scates, Josh Cody

Seventh grade Math MEAP scores for 8 CMP pilot schools compared to Kinawa and Chippewa. The 8 CMP pilot schools are: Bloomingfield Hills, Portland, Flint (Holmes), Waverly, Shepherd, Sturgis, Transverse City (East Junior High). The State average scores are also included in the last column for reference. The last row (F&R lunch) is the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch.

The scores are % satisfactory

96-97   69.3       73.9        78.8     75.3    2.9      63.4        49.2        50.2       67.9       60.5
95-96   75.9       78.4        90.9     78.8    2.5      76.5        52.6        54.4       70.4       63.1
94-95   78.7                      84.6     68.2    4.9      64.6        37.6        37.7       67.1       61.6
93-94   67.2                      73.2     63.3    3.0      66.3        36.5        39.6       62.9       48.9
92-93   63.8                      72.1     56.7    5.5      52.4        22.2        29.9       46.1       42.3
91-92   70.5                      84.0     44.4    3.1      38.2        19.2        33.2                     36.3

F&R 6% 7% 2% 15% 74% 12% 26% 26% 20% 26%
Lunch