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New York City’s teachers union has been a key supporter of the ambitious effort to overhaul the literacy curriculum in elementary school, but it’s been a very different story when it comes to a big math curriculum push.
Schools Chancellor David Banks is mandating almost every city high school adopt the same curriculum for Algebra I – a move that United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew in recent weeks has been publicly criticizing in stark terms.
“We have a mess on our hands,” Mulgrew told Chalkbeat this week. “I’ve been to a lot of high schools, and in every school, they’re telling us the same exact thing: that in the end, the students are going to be harmed.”
Mulgrew’s opposition is a dramatic turn from the union’s literacy support, and comes at a crucial moment for the nascent math curriculum overhaul. After rolling out Illustrative Math — a curriculum that emphasizes open-ended activities and student discussion — to roughly 260 high schools last year, officials expanded it citywide this year, while also mandating roughly 100 middle schools to use one of three pre-approved math curriculums.
The union chief’s pushback could spell trouble for the Education Department, especially at a time of transition. The department is already navigating the turmoil of an abrupt leadership change and chaos in city hall following Mayor Eric Adams’ indictment.
One looming question is how the curriculum shift will impact students’ scores on the Algebra I Regents exam, a state-mandated test at the end of the course that students must pass to move on to higher-level math courses and graduate.
While officials have yet to share citywide results for last year’s Algebra I Regents, some early results are sparking concern.
Josephine Van Ess, superintendent of Queens South High Schools, whose district participated in last year’s Illustrative Math pilot, told parent leaders Algebra I Regents pass rates in her district fell from 59% in 2023 to 45% last year, the New York Post first reported. Van Ess attributed the drop in part to the new curriculum and referenced “a decline across the city” in Algebra I Regents scores.
The test also changed last year, making it difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison with 2023, but educators said the changes weren’t extensive.
Mulgrew said union officials were not involved in planning the math curriculum changes and have been raising concerns for the past year over the curriculum’s lack of remediation for students far behind grade level, unrealistic expectations about how quickly teachers should move through lessons, and misalignment with the Algebra I Regents exam.
Expanding it this year was “doubling down on a bad bet,” Mulgrew said.
Education officials are holding firm. Banks has argued that math results were so underwhelming across the city, and riddled with so many inequities, that he had to try something new and ambitious. Just 48% of Black and Latino city students who took the Algebra I Regents in 2023 passed, compared to 74% of white and 83% of Asian-American students, according to state data.
Big new curriculum efforts often lead to early “implementation dips,” officials have argued.
“We’re playing the long game here,” Banks said at a September press conference.
And many educators support the philosophy behind the new curriculum, which pushes students to discover math concepts on their own rather than relying on teachers to explain rules that students then memorize and practice. Education Department officials emphasized that teachers new to the curriculum are receiving extensive professional development.
Deputy Chancellor Danika Rux, who is overseeing the curriculum overhaul, said addressing the union’s concerns is a “priority for us.” She said officials are meeting with the union to hear their concerns and quickly address them. ”We’re committed to making this work,” she said.
Debates flare over content, rollout of new curriculum
From the outset, the sweeping curriculum changes have drawn clashing responses from educators.
Some of the disputes reflect a long-simmering tension in math education between giving students room to explore and discover ideas on their own, and offering direct instruction with practice and repetition.
“You coming up with what ‘congruent’ means, that will stick with you a lot longer than if somebody’s telling you the definition of ‘congruent,’” Rux told reporters who participated Thursday in a sample Illustrative Math lesson at Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School in the Bronx.
But some educators said it’s simply not realistic to expect students to learn math skills without lots of built-in time for drilling and practice.
“All of the discovery is one thing, but not being able to actually make it ‘sticky’ is really something that I struggled with,” said one Brooklyn math teacher who participated in last year’s Illustrative Math pilot and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “The more [students] practice, the more they retain. But there was very little practice actually provided in the [Illustrative Math] curriculum.”
The Brooklyn teacher said he appreciates aspects of the new curriculum, and has used activities from it for years, but took issue with the city’s rollout of the mandate.
“People were just getting insane burnout,” he said. “All this stuff was coming down from the top. All of it, we were being told you have to do it by this date.”
His experience teaching Illustrative Math last year was so draining that he decided to stop teaching math this year, he said.
Teachers express concerns over fast pace of curriculum
For Mulgrew, the pressure to keep moving through the curriculum prevents teachers from stopping and shoring up lagging foundational skills for struggling students when it’s needed.
“Knowing that the majority of [their] students aren’t getting this, [teachers] can’t back off to do any sort of remediation to try to help them, because [they] have to stay on this pacing calendar,” he said. “This is insane.”
But some educators say continuing to offer challenging activities even while some students need extra support is part of the point.
“The result of focusing all of your attention on what students don’t know and remediating something from previous grades is a lack of equity in the grade-level content that students are allowed to learn,” said Emma Comstock Reid, a Fannie Lou Hamer algebra teacher.
Comstock Reid, who has been using Illustrative Math for years, added that the curriculum does include “adaptation packs” to help support kids behind grade level. Officials added that the curriculum’s open-ended activities allow students at different grade levels to contribute.
Educators have also raised concerns that the curriculum doesn’t align well with the year-end Regents exam. And while the long-term fate of the Regents exams is murky, they play a critical role now in students’ ability to graduate and move on to higher-level math courses.
Education Department officials urged patience with the test scores.
“There is something to be learned” from the Queens district that saw a big drop in Algebra I Regents scores this year, including the need for additional professional development for teachers, said Miatheresa Pate, the city’s interim chief of academics and instruction. “All data is good data.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.