SEATTLE — State lawmakers say they plan to wait until the end of the session to approve or reject new math standards, giving everyone involved in Washington’s math debate a few weeks to catch their breath.
“We are going to wait and see. That’s the message today,” Rep. Dave Quall, chair of the House Education Committee, said Friday.
Education officials presented their third draft of the new math standards to lawmakers on Friday. Quall, a Mount Vernon Democrat, said they would act by their March 13 adjournment deadline.
They might need that long because they are waiting for another review by an independent consultant, Linda Plattner of Maryland-based firm Strategic Teaching. The firm was hired by the state to assess its math expectations, and Plattner said she expects to turn in her next report by March 10.
“We’re going to rely heavily on Linda Plattner,” Quall said. “Because of her recommendations, they did a third draft.”
Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said Plattner has listened carefully to all sides on the math debate and is making sure the new standards include mechanics — adding and subtracting, for example — as well as real world problem-solving.
“She doesn’t have a dog in the fight. She’s just doing the job that needs to be done,” McAuliffe said Friday.
Quall and McAuliffe said they could not comment on the third draft because they had not read it.
“I would be more than happy if there was great approval from all sides, but I kind of have my doubts that we’re going to get there today,” McAuliffe said. “I believe that it is extremely important that we get this right.”
The Legislature decided last year to transform the way the state teaches math by 2013. Staff at the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction have been crafting the new standards, with help from consultants at the University of Texas.
The state Board of Education has been managing the effort.
The next deadline in the process is this June, when state officials are supposed to recommend a menu of three or four math programs for elementary, middle and high schools. Revision of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, to conform with the new math standards, is next on the agenda.
Senate Democrats have set aside $150,000 in case another review is needed after March 10, McAuliffe said.
Quall said the House has a bill prepared to keep the review process going if the third draft does not meet Plattner’s expectations.
In a Feb. 5 review of the second draft, Plattner wrote that new standards for kindergarten through eighth grade were much improved, but she found serious problems with the high school standards.
The document was not organized in a way that would be helpful to teachers, parents and students, Plattner wrote, and the standards did not illustrate what students should learn in each high school math course, such as algebra and geometry. They also did not identify what a student needed to learn to be ready for college math.
The third draft appeared to fix those shortcomings. It has a new section outlining what standards fit into each of the most common high school math classes, and states what a student needs to be ready to take calculus in college.
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