2008 August 10 Archive at The Core Knowledge Blog

A fight after school in Florida leaves one middle schooler dead, and and his classmate facing a stark choice: a 10 year sentence for manslaughter or a trial for second-degree murder. The Ledger, a newspaper in Lakeland, Florida, looks at the background of the two boys. This troubling story of uprooted lives, absentee parents, racial tensions, illness and crime is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

The role of the school in this story is limited to a single paragraph in which school officials say “it wasn’t a race thing. It was a kid thing, a pride thing, a turf thing. Fights are common in middle school.” The lives of these two boys are by no means remarkable by the standards of inner city youth. Thus the unasked question in this story: Do schools have a role in preventing events like this from occuring? What is the lesson to be learned here?

A controversial math curriculum in Georgia is being expanded to the state’s high schools. That’s raising the eyebrows and the ire of parents, who notes test scores in the Peachtree State haven’t exactly been lights out in math. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports 38 percent of the state’s eighth-graders failed the state’s new, redesigned math exam, which was based on harder material.

“While parents and teachers expected some students to struggle with the new math, they were shocked by the high failure rates,” the paper notes.

After years of criticism that the state’s math curriculum was too weak, the Georgia Department of Education drastically changed the way students learn the subject. Officials adopted an “integrated” design, which weaves elements of algebra, geometry and statistics into a single math class, rather than teaching each separately. Elementary-school students use more hands-on activities to learn about numbers, geometry, multiplication and division. Middle school students learn some of the algebra previously taught in high school.

A parents group called Georgia Parents for Math wants more emphasis should be placed on math theory and basic concepts. “We have not come up with some foreign math,” Martha Reichrath, deputy superintendent for the state Education Department, tells the AJC. “It is an enriched math. Our students will do better with this math. I do believe we will be the national leader in math.”