District plans math changes at all schools

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District has announced a sweeping renovation of its math programs for the coming school year, aiming to boost student performance in response to tough state and federal standards.

Two years ago, the district formed a special math curriculum committee to improve secondary students’ grades and level the achievement gap between Newport-Mesa’s richer and poorer schools. This fall, the redesign will begin in earnest, as each secondary campus will adopt a “pacing plan” and operate off of the same basic curriculum.

Fred Navarro, Newport-Mesa’s director of secondary education, and Karen Kendall, director of English-learner programs, are leading the changes along with the math department chairs at each school.

At present, Navarro said, the committee is creating a curriculum for every school in the district to follow when classes resume in August.

Newport-Mesa’s increased stress on math skills comes at a time when the state and federal government have heightened expectations. For several years in California, algebra has been an eighth-grade requirement. Last year, the No Child Left Behind Act doubled the percentage of students required to pass math on standardized tests.

“The state has given us a tremendous challenge,” Navarro said. “They expect us to have all these students meeting rigorous levels of achievement, and the federal government has increased the expectation?. If we work together, we’re going to have a much better shot of being successful districtwide than if we work at our isolated school sites.”

In the last two years, Newport-Mesa has already pushed to include more secondary students in higher math classes. According to Kendall, the percentage of eighth-graders taking algebra increased 6% over the last year, while ninth-grade enrollment grew by 28%.

This year, in preparation for the fall changes, each campus in Newport-Mesa began giving special tests to determine each student’s level of achievement. The district offers support classes for secondary students who are falling behind.

In addition, since January, the district has enlisted two math teachers ? Candice Richards of TeWinkle Middle School, and Britt Dowdy of JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano ? to visit classrooms and mentor students and teachers. Richards and Dowdy said they hoped to lead training sessions over the summer.

One goal of the changes is to vary the strategies of teaching math. At the school board’s meeting last week, Dowdy and Richards demonstrated how to teach algebra using colored tiles on a board, rather than a textbook.

“It won’t necessarily be ‘solve these 25 problems,’ ” Dowdy said. “It could be deeper than that.”