Decatur High School’s SAT Scores Slip
Decatur Metro | September 22, 2010Decatur High School’s average score on Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) declined versus last year, according to data released on September 13th.
After DHS’s total score climbed 22 points to 1577 in 2009, the high school registered a 64 point decline in 2010 with a 1513 total score. Decatur High’s statewide ranking also fell accordingly, down from 30th last year to 66th in 2010, according to data provided by the AJC. “Reading” scores declined the most of the three subject areas, down 25 points from last year to a 516. “Math” scores also fell, down 20 points to a 503, while average scores for “Writing” fell 19 points to 494.
A statement by the City Schools of Decatur sent to Decatur Metro this morning acknowledged the school system’s recent declines, but noted that Decatur still placed in the top 25% of Georgia high schools with 100 students or more who took the test. It also highlighted Decatur High’s Reading scores, which are up 5% over the past five years.
However, Superintendent Phyllis Edwards acknowledged there was room for improvement in Math. “There is a five-year downward trend for math in Decatur and we are going to reverse that.”
The statement also noted that Decatur High boasted a 91% participation rate on the 2010 SATs, while “many schools in the top 30 have less than 40% of their students take the SAT”.
Superintendent Edwards stated she was “proud of the direction DHS is taking in encouraging more students to take these tests and gain experience on this type of test-taking. This approach says it is more important to allow students opportunities at test-taking even at the risk of lower overall test scores.” According to the AJC data, 21 more Decatur students took the test in 2010 than in 2009.
The national 2010 SAT average was a 1509.
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I hope they do something about the math program at the high school. Right now it’s a train wreck.
This really scares me. I know that it is incredibly hard to attract good math teachers to public schools. Could someone please vote Garrett Goebel into a math instructor position at DHS? We’ve all seen on this blog how well he understands and explains numbers. His track record with CSD tutoring and other student projects shows that he can teach. Sounds he might have even more positve impact in that role than he would have if he’d been elected as a School Board member.
I wonder how many other high schools have a 91% (or similarly high) participation rate on the SATs.
Our high participation rate seems like it has to be part of the story. Still, I’m shocked to see that we are over 200 points lower than Alpharetta. Regardless of how you feel about standardized testing, that’s a significant gap in performance.
DHS has a diverse student population with significant portion of students on free and reduced price lunches, and those students as a whole tend to score lower on standardized tests than other students. I’m guessing Alpharetta has a more homogenized and more affluent student body.
Scary.
It’s the Board of Education trying to bring our property values down.
My two cents:
We (Parents/Community) should really be looking at the trend rather than focus on this one year before we call out the dogs on the administration or the teachers.
Also – on that note, it would be useful for someone who has some expertise in statistics to evaluate weather the differences in these numbers from their trends or expected values are statistically significant.
Is there a site where these results can be found for years prior to 2008?
That would be really helpful. AJC and DOE websites don’t have all of the information. It would be nice if f DHS could post the senior class size (is that the correct denominator?), # of SAT participants, and, in addition to the median and mean scores, the distribution of scores. It might be that our distribution looks very similar to Alpharetta High School’s except that we have a long, substantial tail on the low end of the distribution which is bringing down the mean score. That’s what you would expect to see if the difference is due to the fact that DHS has a particularly high participation rate.
Unfortunately, it’s hard or at least inconvenient and time consuming to get similar data for other schools for comparison. I’ve looked and DOE and high school websites don’t have that info compiled nicely. I did a rough, quick and dirty analysis using AJC SAT participant numbers and total enrollment on DOE website and came up with a 76% participation rate for Alpharetta HS and 81% for DHS. But I had to use assumptions like that 2009 enrollment was the same as for 2010 and that each of the four classes in high school are of equal size and we know neither assumption is true for DHS. I suspect that both the 76% and 81% are low, especially given that CSD, using the correct data, came up with 91%.
Trends over time are nice although tough to interpret if there’s been a lot of changes in the numerators and denominators in the same time period. I’m most interested in seeing the distribution of scores. A curved distribution with a long thin tail to the left (lower scores) will worry me a lot less than a nice compact bell-shaped curve with 1513 right in the middle of it.
For those who are up to date on SAT scores and college admissions, what will a 1513 get you into these days?
1513 will not get you into UGA.
Really? Because it is too high?
(sorry – couldn’t resist)
Will it get you into any four-year accredited college?
It’s looks like it’s on the low end for GSU, North Georgia and Georgia Southern. Might get you into Middle Georgia. My source… http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com
GA Tech.. forget it, of course.
From Agnes Scott’s website, this is for our class of 2013:
Middle 50% range of SAT: 1040-1270 (critical reading and mathematics only)
(This would be out of a 1600 total, not the 2400 total)
So the DHS average score of 1019 for math/reading wouldn’t get a student into Agnes Scott. If the scores are evenly distributed in a perfect bell (which we suspect they aren’t), then half of the DHS students who took the SAT would not get into Agnes Scott. Darn. I really like that school; I toured it with my niece.
*whether
Could we have a few details on why the math program at DHS is a train wreck? And how do you define a train wreck?
“New Math” … it’s why we left the system.
Wasn’t the “new math” in the 1960s? I get so confused by all the jargon. What is being taught now in CSD elementary schools is “Everyday Math”. Some teachers seem to like it; others don’t. I have worked with it a fair bit and it isn’t my preference. But I don’t know if that’s because I was taught so differently.
I would think that a good middle school and high school program could make up for whatever elementary school deficiencies exist, at least for kids without learning disabilities. I know I had a poor preparation in elementary school but a good high school program that seemed to make up for it.
Do others think there’s problems with the CSD math program? If so, at what level? I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion. I did hear some mention of the issue at the CSD strategic planning focus groups.
I am not well versed enough in curricula to explain why it’s a train wreck, but I will say that even in the elementary schools the math program is very weak. I am surprised by how little math my kids have learned compared to how I learned it as a kid. At the high school, instead of Algebra, Geometry, Trig, etc., they now take Math 1, Math 2, and Math 3. There are three tracks, remedial, regular, and advanced. They combine skills from algebra, geometry, etc. and teach them all at the same time. A combination of that with some very mediocre math teachers at the high school does not bode well for students who can’t teach it to themselves.
Unfortunately my oldest has been on the front-end of every experimental change in CSD for the last ten years and has suffered for it. I think the new math program was introduced last year, and even our current math teacher admitted to me that they didn’t know what they were doing last year, but hoped they were working out the kinks this year. Has not been a good ride for my kid!
I also think the namby-pamby “let’s hold their hands and make sure they don’t fail, even if they do” mentality at the high school is not helping!
I hear that kinks still exist and that teacher turnover and new teachers don’t help.
About 10 years ago I met with a Decatur elementary school principal to talk about my child’s placement for the coming year. My only request was that she have a teacher who did not tell me some version of , ‘ We are still working out the kinks on this math curriculum. We are making some changes for next year’. No lie, I’d heard that for the previous 3 years straight.
Didn’t happen. The following year we pulled our kids out of the system. My children became strong math students with regular in class drill and lots of practice through timed tests and plenty of problems for homework. None of those methods were frequently utilized in our Decatur elementary school at the time we left the system. Parents actually campaigned against drill and timed tests . One told me she felt it would stifle her child’s creativity.
Sorry to hear things haven’t changed.
6th grade math teacher at Renfroe said this year that math was all about reading now. It’s all problem-solving and word problems. Too bad for the cohort of students who didn’t get to do phonics in elementary! We have struggling readers who might have done pretty well in math but now can’t do either.
I would not have done well with that approach. I aas a good reader and good at math concepts and procedures but hated the applications. Even now, when faced with having to use something that looks like derivatives from Calculus, my reaction is to assign it to a geek engineer type who likes that type of thing. Everybody needs to learn the basics in the core subjects but I’m afraid we’re asking students to become “users” before they are proficient enough in the basics to do that. I know the theory is that they are learning through doing but I think the kids are actually getting stuck and not learning the basics. Anyway, I thought that children’s minds do well with rote and repetition; it’s adults who often can’t learn unless they are doing at the same time.
I’m also worried about the approach of teaching all of the topics at every grade evel, looping around and around to the same topics over and over again at a more and more sophisticated level. E.g. children see bar and line graphs since kindergarten but don’t plot the y=mx + b equation (or whatever it is) until much later. Again, it sounds great in theory. But what I observe is that each topic is taught over such a short period of time each year that I’m not sure that the material has time to sink into their little ritual-loving, repetition-loving minds. Of course, some kids are thriving on this but I think many are not quite getting it but the class moves on to a new topic before anyone really notices.
I think a lot of the math approach and even content, e.g. looping topics, is set by the State and CSD has to cope. That’s why I think we need to hire extremely talented, experienced, inspiring, engaging math teachers at whatever cost is necessary. This seems like Mission Impossible.
Maureen Downey’s AJC “Get Schooled” blog covered this in depth last July:
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2010/07/29/georgia-math-students-stymied-by-accelerated-pace-and-complex-concepts-expected-in-high-school/
Math I, Math II, etc. aren’t really “New Math”. The correct whipping post is a combination of “Integrated Math” and “Japanese Math”. Traditional K-8 math is basically integrated math. So the “Integrated Math” is really the same “old” math, but doing a little bit of each every year instead of having a year gap between Algebra I and Algebra II.
The other problem is that the change was basically dumped on Georgia educators without realistic expectations, a transition plan, text books, etc. If you take a look at the textbooks, you’ll realize the textbook is really a workbook. It can’t functionally be used as a reference to learn concepts. Most students are hunting and pecking through google and wikipedia to look up explanations of the concepts they are expected to learn.
Instead of just giving educators a clear idea of what concepts need to be taught, in the new curriculum, the DoE has prescribed the manner in which math is to be taught. I.e. “Japanese Math” (http://www.region10ct.org/regiontenmathpages/region10mathsitefaq/whatisjaplesson.html).
The short version of how Japanese Math differs…
According to the TIMSS (Trends in International Math and Science Study), Japan knocks the socks off of Americans in math. According to a book (The Teaching Gap) which details the differences in teaching styles, schools in America spend something like 95% of the time teaching rote processes and procedures, whereas Japanese schools spend only 42% of time practicing procedures. In Japan 44% of time involves lessons where students face “challenging” and “stimulating” problems and have to invent or create their own processes and procedures for solving them.
Sounds great. But it is a sea change for instructors. The initial results of EOCT tests weren’t good. Many educators who are now doing well claim that they are doing so, because they dumped “Japanese Math” and went back to teaching the way they’ve always taught.
The other problem as I see it, is that teaching via the Socratic method and presenting challenging problems for creative problem solving… depends on the skill of the teacher. And it is a short hop, skip and a jump from teaching via the Socratic method… to not teaching at all. The students can’t be expected to re-invent Algebra, Geometry, and Statistics all by themselves. The processes and procedures have got to get taught sometime.
Thanks for the explanation Garrett. I work with college students everyday and many of them have told me their former school districts have already abandoned this new method of teaching math because it is not working. Too bad we are behind the curve like this!
Decatur High composite SAT scores: 1) 2009-2010 1513; 2) 2008-2009 1577; 3) 2007-2008 1555; 4) 2006-2007 1574; 5) 2005-2006 1534. This is based on the Georgia Governor’s Office of Student Achievement numbers.
Has the test changed much in this time period? The participation rate? Because the 2009-2010 scores, if truly comparable to previous years, are converting what was looking like an upward, if uneven, trend, to a pretty flatline trend. We have to hope that the 2009-2010 scores are a fluke or due to something like a big change in participation or test format. Next year will be criticial. If the average score is under 1550 next year, it’s going to be hard to ascribe it to a fluke but will rather indicate that SAT scores have been flatline since 2005
This always leads me to wonder how can most of our kids in Decatur be gifted and then our SAT scores be so mediocre.
Again the distribution of SAT scores might help explain. Or not. Decatur kids are great but only a few of them seem like true brainiacs or world class artists or playwrights or whatever.
How do DHS seniors do in terms of college acceptances? Do they go to top universities (ivy league, duke, tech, etc)?
How does DHS in terms of college acceptances for a majority of the graduating seniors? There will always be a few who get into the elite schools mentioned above. I’m more interested in whether most graduates who want to attend college are able to be accepted to a college that fits their life goals.
I have always been struck by what I’ve seen for college acceptances compared to what I would expect from a district whose children are supposedly 1/4 to 1/3 gifted in elementary and middle school. Yes, a handful of top schools but only a handful. Something does not compute.
Simple answer – money ! By top schools I assume you mean Ivy League and other very selective colleges and universities ( judged by low acceptance rates).
The majority of these “top schools” give primarily need based aid. There are few ( if any) merit based scholarships available . Many of the families of these “gifted” kids you mention will qualify for little need based aid – and what they do get may well be reduced rate loans rather than grants.
Most private colleges and universities – not just the “top” institutions – cost $45-55,000 per year. Out of state costs at top public institutions (UNC,UVA, UT Austin, Berkeley , etc.) run $35-45,000 per year.
Many students are choosing to take advantage of HOPE and attend a state school rather than a big name private institution. Others are offered merit scholarships at lesser known private colleges or in state tuition/ merit scholarships at neighboring state institutions. ( Alabama and Auburn, for example, both have excellent honors programs with tuition reductions for out of state students. Many of the recipients are from Georgia) .
Why spend $200K just for the brand name ? If you crunch the $ numbers, it does compute.
The lists I’ve seen were about acceptances, e.g. the senior wall at DHS, not where kids chose to go, I believe. But I could be wrong.
I completely agree with economic argument.
Many kids don’t apply to schools they know they will not attend. Nothing worse for kids and parents than being accepted and then turning it down because of the money situation. Right from the start, FAFSA gives a pretty good indication of what financial aid package will look like for a given family.
There are always a few who want the ego trip of seeing how many top name acceptances they can gather, but most who know they will be sticking with HOPE just apply to the state school of their choice and be done with it. Same for those applying for merit scholarships at smaller less well known schools. Applications are long and time consuming and have an application fee – around $50 each.
I my opinion, that wall tells you very little – nothing about family finances, nothing about how many were rejected from a given school, nothing about legacy, diversity, athletic, music, or other non academic stats. Much more info needed to draw any real conclusions about DHS’s experience in the college admission process.
Ok I understand that where seniors decide to go is determined in large part by financial decisions. But what about acceptances?
How do you define “top schools”? There are lots–LOTS AND LOTS–of very high-quality colleges and universities that are not on anybody’s “top school” radar screen, and yet they manage to recruit great students and give them great educations. I don’t know where recent crops of DHS grads have wound up, but I’d expect the list to be kind of light on “top schools” and full of imaginative choices reflecting decisions by students and their parents to seek the best fit rather than the highest prestige.
Like Karass, I’d be most interested to see the distribution curve for SAT scores. As a data point, the average is not illuminating for the reasons previously stated.
By top schools, I certainly don’t mean just Ivy League. And I completely agree that best fit is what counts. I don’t want to make a bigger deal than I should about school acceptances which of course are related to where students decide to apply which includes financial and geographic factors. It’s just that I’ve been struck by how much parent noise there is all through elementary and middle school about gifted students. It lead me to believe that there would be this huge bulge of perfect and near perfect SAT scores.
Didn’t want to place judgement/ value on any school in particular. I just have never seen any data on where DHS seniors a) get accepted, or b) choose to go.
I agree with Karass that you would expect, given the demographic of Decatur and the high proportions of “gifted” students, that DHS seniors would be getting accepted to many competitive universities/ colleges.
So does anyone know?
Karass is right on – we need the participation rates from other places and the distribution. It is likely that as participation rate increases and the tail on the low end gets longer, which drags down the mean. This is esp true if Decatur is trying to get ‘low performing’ students to take the SAT.
The class of 2009 (my son’s class) was smaller than some of DHS classes but also had 5 or 6 kids who were National Merit Scholars (top 5% of SAT scores in US) who had almost perfect scores. With a small high school, a handful of high scores or low scores can make a bigger impact on the average. DHS participation is very high –some kids who have no intent on higher ed take the SAT..
As for the new state imposed math program–it is the worst. The teachers are doing their best but with decreased money from the state it is difficult for them to get staff development–thank you Sonny. Prepare yourself for lower Math SAT scores to come…not just at DHS but statewide.
This is a very good point–in fact I think there were 7 National Merit Scholars in that class.
Interestingg. This is why the annual distribution of scores would be important to compare. This suggests that the high mean scores of 2008 and 2009 might have been driven by a long thin tail to the right of the bell curve. So instead of last year representing a drop in SAT performance, it represents a return to the status quo with the gains of 2008 and 2009 having been unstable and driven by just a few brainiacs. We need to attract more brainiacs to make us look good! Just kidding, of course.
Do kids blame the schools when they don’t do well on standardized tests like the SAT? Or is that the parents’ job?
I only ask because when I didn’t blaze any trails on my SAT, I don’t ever recall thinking “Damn, if only the school system had better prepared me!”. I only recall thinking “God I am terrible at timed, standardized testing.”
Another thought: A 64 point drop in SAT scores is hard to explain by any means. A statistical fluke is unlikely–154 students participated, that’s not a tiny enough sample to explain that much variability. But it also doesn’t seem quite plausible that the drop indicates an instructional issue of some sort. I would expect a more gradual drop over a few years.
So what is the explanation? Did some change affect that class that didn’t affect previous classes? Could it be that the particular cohort of students with the SAT drop differed in important characteristics from the previous two cohorts? I definitely have seen differences between my two children’s cohorts. One gets compliments from teachers at each grade level they reach–evidently an easy cohort overall. The other is known for having a particularly high proportion of “challenges”.
Or did participation go way up last year? I thought it was already high but maybe not.
You know, our tentire group of students taking this test is not terribly large. I truly think that we may be overreacting to this change. It looks like the numbers go up and down.
I do think that the High School offers challenging classes, but there are also some classes where students aren’t paying attention and sleeping through class. I think some students are slipping through the cracks.
Comparing scores at DHS to Alpharetta High School or any other North Fulton School just doesn’t make sense. To begin with, AHS is DOUBLE the size of Decatur and is in no way similar demographically. Our scores are in line with other metro area schools such as Lakeside, Grady, and Druid Hills that have populations more similar to ours. Also, as a previous poster mentioned, when you have a small number of students taking the test, 5 or 6 students can significantly change the average. Finally, although we do have a large gifted population, DHS is still a Title I school with a significant number of students who live below the poverty line. Many of those students are being encouraged to take the SAT (hence, the 91 %) but may not have the support at home to do well on that kind of test.
If you think the math scores are low now, just wait until Dollar General opens up.
Think about it: We’ll have a whole generation of kids thinking that everything in a “dollar” store is a dollar, only to find out upon entering that prices vary. Eventually the youngsters will equate a dollar equaling some random figure (ie Dollar = $3.29). If there are story problems on the tests then our students will really be up the proverbial creek (regardless of new or old math instruction). Not saying it has to be this way, but it could…
You are funny, Robbie. I rarely read these education threads but you made this one worthwhile.
What’s interesting to note in the context of all this discussion is the number of colleges nationwide that are de-emphasizing SAT scores in their admissions processes. Research shows that:
1. SAT scores correlate directly with socio-economic status.
2. The SAT does not test mastery of any high school curriculum.
3. The SAT is eminently coachable; highest scores are achieved by students whose schools/parents/private prep classes teach them specifically how to excel on the test.
4. The best predictors of college success continue to be high school grades, class rank, and strength of schedule.
Agnes Scott went test-optional this year. http://www.agnesscott.edu/news/newsDetails.aspx?Channel=%2FChannels%2FAdmissions%2FAdmissions+Content&WorkflowItemID=fa80a450-aff2-49c1-9675-0da2c0724e67
Did not know that. Good to know. The most worrisome part of this thread actually is the comments that CSD’s math programs need a lot of improvement. There’s a lot we can’t control easily–family challenges, the economy that has everyone working harder and longer and with more stress and less time for children, the students themselves who are their own unique generation with their own strengths and weaknesses, etc. But hopefully CSD can address its math programs. It may take paying DHS and RMS math teachers more competitively and very actively recruiting the best of the best. It’s a rare individual who has the both the excellent grasp of mathematics plus the set of skills to teach it well to a wide range of abilities among students, engaging those who don’t enjoy math and inspiring those who do. I have definitely seen some CSD math teachers who fit that bill; maybe we just need more of them. And then we have to retain them by not making them crazy and keeping CSD a pleasant place to teach.
Mookie: everything you said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Criticism
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/
If we must look at the SAT scores, then what we should be focusing on, is the participation rate. From the AJC (http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-2010-sat-scores-612927.html?RecordID=120&PageID=3&cpipage=1)
Year, # tested, Comp. Score:
2010, 154, 1513
2009, 131, 1577
2008, 146, 1555
Without knowing the actual participation rate or proportion of students classified as economically disadvantaged… it is hard to do more than guess. But it would be a reasonable guess that more kids are taking the test. And that as we increase participation scores will decline.
I am not a statistician. But I believe if we really wanted to enable apples to apples comparisons, we would need to consider make comparisons of SAT performance base the percentage of students scoring in the top quartile broken out separately for economically disadvantaged and not economically disadvantaged students.
Personally, I’d really like to see Male, Female, Black, and White each broken out similarly by Economically Disadvantaged and Not Economically Disadvantaged. I think we would find that our affluent students finish in the top 10%. The real question is how well do we do educating our least affluent students?
All that said… The SAT is still relevant. Colleges love it, because it is nationally normed, standardized, and most importantly… they don’t pay for it. College rankings in the popular press depend on average SAT scores. And while talk about cut-off scores for admissions is strongly discouraged, that doesn’t diminish the extent to which college admissions depend on SAT scores.
If a “how to beat the test” is the easiest way to push scores up… Then perhaps we need to evaluate whether or not this is a game which wish to be playing? If yes, then by all means we should provide “how to beat the test” instruction. Otherwise, we might be better off focusing on things like:
– graduation rate
– grade retention rate
[Continuing Education]
– number of students applying to college or technical school
– number accepted
– students needing remediation
– students receiving advanced course placement or credit
– number of students continuing from 1st to 2nd year of college
[Jobs]
– former students employed within 12-24 months
– former students on welfare within 12-24 months
And breaking those data points out by demographic groupings to see how well we are serving different groups of students.
Don’t forget that whether or not students want to take the SAT or it’s required by their college of choice, they are still required to submit standardized test scores for graduate programs. So if an MD or a PhD or law degree is in their future, they will still need test scores. So the conversation is still relevant.
Great points, Mookie.
Perhaps a better way to use standardized scores to assess DHS academic rigor and curriculum for top students would be to look at AP and SAT II subject scores. These do test mastery of advanced level course curriculum. I have never seen these scores published for DHS (or any high school).
Too many explanations. Show me higher SAT scores and statewide rankings.
CSD, I pay very high taxes and expect more for my money!
I’m with Mair. Let’s see some results. Nothing but chaos for the last five years – let’s please just get back to plain old teaching and quit mucking around with the next great “thing.”
I agree too. Tired of excuses. Get the scores and rankings up. Isn’t there some goal to be “one of the 10 best systems in the country?” Looks like a long way to go.
Well, no one will be getting grades anymore at CSD so parents, particularly less educated parents, will have no idea whatsoever how their children are actually doing in school. As a result, I would not expect any improvement in the near future.
Actually we got a report card full of conventional grades but an explanatory flyer explaining the 1-7 scoring system. Plus a chart showing how the final 1-7 grade can be converted to conventional percentages for the college application purposes. Very confusing. I think it’s because the Parent Portal software is not user friendly for teachers and hasn’t been uniformly updated for all of them. So right now, grades are truly a Tower of Babel. When one sees an 85%, one doesn’t know if it’s a conventional average of 85% which predicts that the final score will probably be around a B if the child continues to perform at the same level. Or if it’s really a 5 in the 1-7 system that marks progress, not an average, so it means that the child has mastered 5/7 of the material so far but still might reach 7/7 by the end of the course, if I’m understanding the new system correctly. And then that 5 got converted to a 85% because the software doesn’t know that it’s not the end of the course yet.
Sigh. I’m not saying there isn’t value in the new system of measuring performance but I hope it’s worth all this confusion. Just like there’s value to having a common alphabet, there’s a value to using a grading system that is well-understood and easy to use.
Hmmm, I am currently participitaing in CSD 101 (to learn more about the schools), so hopefully I’ll get some questions answered there. I am a bit confused about the post that said “As for the new state imposed math program–it is the worst”. For some reason I thought that because the schools are charter schools the state can no longer impose programs.
On another thought about the CSD101 course, I got back home last night and the first thing I said to my husband was “I hope there are no issues with math at these CSD schools, because at least 4 times in the 2 hour session one of the organizer/educator type people made a joke about the awfulness of math etc, and when that kind of thing is just ingrained in the psyche of people across the system you are really at risk of impacting the whole math experience in CSD. ” Oh dear.
Students in system charters still have to pass CRCT exams and end of course exams so CSD has to teach the state curriculum to some degree to prepare the kids for the tests they have to pass.