CHICAGO — Your May 15 editorial "New-new math doesn't compute" mentions the Everyday Mathematics curriculum, created by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) and published by Everyday Learning Corp. We would like to clarify certain facts about the program.
The editorial correctly states that 12 out of the 25 top-scoring Chicago-area schools on last year's 3rd grade Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) use the program but dismisses the possibility of a causal connection. In fact, the 1999 ISAT results contain compelling evidence of the effectiveness of Everyday Mathematics.
There are 178 Chicago-area schools using Everyday Mathematics at 3rd grade, and 144 schools use the program at 5th grade. At both grades, Everyday Mathematics schools had mean scores on the ISAT mathematics test significantly higher than their city and suburban peers. Even when controlling for socioeconomic variables, such as percentage of low-income students and per-pupil spending, which tend to be strong predictors of student achievement, schools using Everyday Mathematics outperformed comparable schools. The differences are statistically significant at every socioeconomic level, but the program seems to have the greatest impact on low-income students. Perhaps most noteworthy, math scores at Everyday Mathematics schools were significantly higher even when compared to schools with comparable reading scores.
The impressive ISAT results are not isolated. Four out of the 10 top-scoring school districts on the 1999 Massachusetts state mathematics test are Everyday Mathematics schools, and six of the 10 highest-scoring schools on the math portion of the 1998 Pennsylvania state assessment are users of the program. Individual schools and districts across the country have reported significant, often dramatic gains in test scores after implementing Everyday Mathematics.
We encourage Tribune readers to look at the special report on science and mathematics in the January 2000 issue of Popular Science. The report quotes Lauren Resnick, former president of the American Educational Research Association, as follows: "The National Science Foundation-funded program Everyday Mathematics, which also stresses understanding of concepts, produced a marked change in the performance of Pittsburgh elementary and middle schoolers, with a three- to four-time improvement in grades, especially for African-American students."
The creators of Everyday Mathematics agree emphatically that basic arithmetic skills, including computation, are essential to success in mathematics. Estimation is taught to develop number sense, as well as common sense in approaching problems, but never as a substitute for speed and accuracy. In fact, in a comparison study of mental computation skills, Everyday Mathematics students decisively outperformed students from traditional curricula in tests of mental addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Test scores are not the only measure of the program's effectiveness. Schools report that students who have used Everyday Mathematics leave the elementary grades ready to tackle higher level math courses than students from previous curricula, with substantial growth in the number of students completing algebra before the start of high school.
We urge readers to examine the facts about Everyday Mathematics for themselves, including its outstanding record for improving student achievement. Information is available at www.everydaylearning.com or http://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/ucsmp/.