>> hi. my ma'am -- my name is lily lump. i'm a math teacher at city college and been teaching for 14 years. i believe in the public school system and i appreciate all the work that you do. i have two kids in public school and it's important to me that my kids are in a diverse and a heterogenous learning community. i have done hiring and evaluated teachers at the college level and i have also done it at the middle school level. i'm here to talk about common core and i'm very excited about the rigor but i'm also worried about the detracking issue. big picture, i have done a lot of research and follow the research and totally understand it

supports good results. well, it supports good results when it's implemented thought fully deliberately with attention paid to the needs of all the learners. however, i have concerns that the huge, i just feel like a lot of veteran teachers, seasoned teachers are missing at the middle school level. my daughter is in 7th grade so i have seen it. so unless we have very seasoned and veteran middle school teachers that are capable of understanding the math content, i feel like detracking i guess it would negative impact the student. so basically my question comes down to the district. will

the district invest resources in all our teachers and i feel we can use extra support and class size. i have a hard time teaching a class of 35 students. anyway, thank you very much. hello, my name is david gardener. i'm a math teacher at mission high school in san francisco. i really appreciate all the thought that's gone into the common core sequencing and particularly the thought that this group of individual has done to bring this sequence to this point because as a math teacher at the high school level, i can tell you that one of the things i most abhore is that

moment when i come into classroom and the first thing i hear out of kids mouth is i hate math. that comes from a lot of places, of course. and when i probe deeper i say "have you always hated math? what was the year it stopped?" it's in integration to high school. there is something fundamentally different about the way algebra operates and cognitively the way that students need or the needs that students have in algebra that i think often are difficult to address in a 1 year of class for a 12 or 13-year-old kid. i think that the vertical integration that is being proposed at the middle school and high school level around algebra is going to be really crucial to our

success as math teachers and math learners in the district. i probably don't need to tell people about all the research done in vertical integration in other countries and our own that's shown there is huge success if heterogenous classrooms for students across the learning spectrum at high and low levels of math capabilities. and when it's done properly, i think we have had a lot of opportunities as through complex instruction and other sorts of pd's and will continue to do so and i'm confident this is the right move for our students and classrooms. >> hi. good evening, i'm tooik a shoe. i think we've tried to teach math in a way where students are understanding it. and i think there is probably

a lot of people in this room who were taught that way and still have a visceral fear of mathematics. if i asked you to raise your hand there would be more than half including math teachers. i want to say i had a student come visit me, a chinese student who immigrated from china and was taught very procedurally. when he came to m igs and to my classroom. he resented the fact that i had him explain his reasoning. i said you have to explain to me and justify your answer. he said why? he had no idea. this was in the 10th grade and now he's at berkeley. he says i really appreciate the fact that you pushed me for my understanding because now in berkeley i'm able to understand and able to think through problems that my counter parts aren't able to do. i think that's from the fact that he was pushed to understand what he was doing in math instead of

memorizing a breath of material. it's a deep understanding of mathematics as opposed to a simple procedural of mathematics. we have been through sequence and i think it's time to change it so we produce students and adults who appreciate mathematics and understand why we have to learn it. thank you. >> hi. my name is an lion an instructor at the middle school and also a math teacher and i have taught 8-12 and taught in 8th great and high school. i want to underscore the comments that the content is going to look very different under the common core. the eighth grade math

course will include half the stuff that we used to teach and to push students into algebra before ninth grade will do them a real disservice because it will remove a lot of the foundation they need in math. second, i have been working with a group for developing curriculum for developing curricular units and as we started the bridge for common core in classrooms we've seen students do poorly. the kids with the bad test scores, they are shining because they are able to do the problem solving. i think it's important to keep the genius classes in eighth grade. >> hi, my name is audrey sul leah. i'm a high school math teacher. i teach algebra 2. i would like to comment, i'm

more on commenting on the user approach on the common core and i'm volunteering to do them and i was very reticent and scared to take it on and had a lot of feels about how all this change and i started to get into it and i'm telling you, it is really rich. it has a lot of access points. what i hear a lot of fear from a parent that if tracking goes away that my accelerated and advanced kid is not going to wind up getting the kind of stuff they have gotten before. i have to tell you, what i saw in the unit that i taught at the high school level, it was just full of incredible rigor. it has a lot of access points. you can have kids that are super advanced doing things and allows for differentiation. i myself found it very difficult to do

the whole unit. what i did was break it into all these different levels for kids. i this i that that is something to address or to say to the fears that we are not going to be able to get the kids on an an accelerated pace. i think they will be on an accelerated pace. thank you. >> hi. my name is toe loul. i teach at mission high school, this is my sixth year teaching there. there are a lot of things i can talk about the common core but i want to focus on a personal experience. i'm a product of the sfusd school system. i went to grant on, and mira loma and graduated from the high school. my experience was in the math system that was

very tracked. what it meant it was classes that i was in, they were really racially segregated. the app classes were almost 100 percent asian and white. now not so much. that was when i was a student and now as a teacher in high school i see that repercussions of that kind of tracking. i see students at lower level and they are in the regular classes and not honor levels, they are considered unable and not able to perform at this level of math. what i see with these students, my african american and latino students that they are extremely capable despite the label of honors and not

honors. they have already been labeled and don't try harder. for me the higher track didn't benefit me in college in the end. what they didn't want was speed. they wanted me to think critically and think deeply. i think we should focus on that and not how to accelerate, but the knowledge as opposed to going faster through the curriculum. >> my name is michael brid. i will make my comment brief. i'm lead instructor for bert high school. one concern i wanted to address is that of my colleague lily lion and many parents and many of us

because i care not only about the equity piece but the college ready piece so they are most prepared. the biggest things to point out there is to please listen to what the math community and college community is saying that the emphasis should not be now detracking to many paths to get as much quantity of match to learn and tracks as possible but should be problem solving, reason skills and the quality that is taught and that's what we are hearing in silicone valley. that we look at what is said and american mathematics fallow -- fellow and mathematics college board and mathematics college admission and their concern

about that really should be taking and most of all listen to people like myself and teachers specifically me who dropped out of high school for the very reason, algebra. that the intent should always be providing a rich learning experiences and ensure that all of our students are giving the challenged material to understand the quality of understand; not what is learned. this is a push towards that and understand that algebra and precalculus is a very strong form of study, not just by us teachers but the wider math and college community. >> hi. my name is milan. i'm a tsa in the math department in san francisco and one of the people helping to develop this curriculum and support teachers in implementing it.

but tonight i'm speaking to you as a parent. my son graduated from san francisco public schools. in fact he was in sole lay's class. my son if you remember that graph, he would have been one of the kids on the blue line. he was good at math and he scored well on test and did well in math class. what i want to talk about is the concerns of parents who kids do well in math now and whose kids don't do well in the new system. as my expertise as a math teacher, i'm thrilled about the common core, but knowing my son, it would have been infant stick for him to be in the heterogenous classroom where problem solving was the emphasis and defending once

again the emphasis. i don't think he got as much as he would get under the new system and our charge is to make sure all our students do well. that's it. thanks for your time. >> superintendant carranza. i'm here to speak with open power ship. san francisco has had an opportunity to partner in several different organizations mathematics in common, the core partnership

and others and through these opportunities and particularly over the last 18 months working on our core sequence options, i just want to thank first of all our san francisco colleagues for what that partnership has meant to us in oakland. we feel in some cases we have been able to find common solutions to these problems that we couldn't take on on our own and found local problems that we found so much to have an outside perspective. i'm here to speak on that power and partnership and in particular i won't speak to the details of the proposal you are considering, i want to recognize and appreciate that the principals and underlying goals that we developed together i think really are important to all of us, the equity and access issues, tackling the commitment made to the requirements so your students

don't go to their favorite csu or uc to find out they are not prepared for college material. as the majority of most districts and your students as well. to commit to developing a core sequence of courses so all students can graduate from high school, all students can be ready for whether it's college career or whatever comes next for them. and then specifically to put the mathematics focus on the mathematics that is most important and most used by you, me, by all of us that mathematics in middle school is without a doubt the most important in mathematics. in the last year in this state has been stated over and skipped by design. i think the common core and core sequence

is putting this back in essential mathematics and finally the rigor for all sequence solving problems and finding the fluency necessary so kids can be successful. i think you are tackling the right issues and i want to appreciate the team for providing support and together we have to tackle even bigger challenges moving forward to meet the demands of the common core. >> okay. wow. that was very pleasant public comment. thank goodness. public comment is now closed. so no more, in case the rest isn't good. any comments from the board or the superintendant? yes. emily?

>> i really want to thank the staff for this very thorough presentation. this has been heard for the third time for some but exciting to hear. i want to thank the math teachers for being here tonight and sharing their perspectives and gives me strengths as parents that have questions about homogeneous classrooms and i can say i have heard from math teachers on this issue. my question is when would this start and is there a phase in for students operating under assumptions about what courses they would be taking in high school. what was the status of that planning? >> this would be in operation in middle school certainly starting next year. high schools there would be a

bubble year of students who are currently in algebra 1 and obviously you are not going to ask them to repeat algebra one if they are doing one. that bubble would be there and full implementation in 2012 starting in 2015. >> so i have to say that i have been hearing a lot, i posted the paper on my website and i have heard almost exclusively and quite -- from

parents who are opposed from this change. i'm not under any elusion that this is a small number of people. but i do think that we need some better messaging to our families who are really really concerned. this subset of families who see their kids as high achievers and see their kids as needing accelerated course in school and see this as taking way something from their kids. i'm just sort of wondering what you would say to those families who basically see this as my kid is already in an eighth grade honors class and they say they are bored because the teacher can barely differentiate and how is my kid going to be

challenged under this new system? what would you say to that? >> when we are working with groups, among the parents that you are describing. for us, this may not be for you, but for us when we have that time, the most compelling argument we have is we structure a rich math test for everybody to do. we have people do math that redefines what counts as math and shows them to put down in words the logic behind the algorithms they learned in the past is hard. they recognize afterwards. oh, my god! what's being asked of my child is much harder than what's been asked of them previously. so to think that we need to accelerate passed that ability to explain loses some muster. that is part of our charge.

we know that as we move forward in our community engagement is to do that as much as we can. it's to allow people to experience that redefinition of what is rigor. so. that's our best part. >> i guess i just want to say to the superintendant that somebody observed to me as part of this whole debate that we are coming up against this argument a lot not just in this particular math proposal but in discussion about middle school and detracking in general in middle school and i do feel like some of the distrust in the anxiety of parents in reaction to our effort is because parents, their first experience was sort of like differentiation is gate in elementary school which is essentially really

not anything. we say that it's something special but it really isn't anything or sometimes you get an extra test or extra worksheet. so i think that we have a bigger problem in this district in regaining trust for parents of high achievers so that to show them that rigor doesn't necessarily mean tracking. that rigor can mean a lot of different things and how we have defined it in this district is a disservice. i want to commend you because the way you have put forward this proposal has been really thoughtful and the paper is very well written, it's very clear, it's accessible to somebody that wants to learn more about what are our reasons for doing this. i think you have done this right but i think we need to do this right more times before we

can build that trust in the community. i'm convinced. i think you are making a good case but i haven't seen that good case translate to parents that have come to me . >> thank you for your comments. we totally realize that being right isn't the best way to communicate. what i would say that probably the biggest reason why we feel so confident that this is not only going to be successful for our students but lift the level of rigor for our students. i hope that we can show the tape of the public speakers this evening, our math teachers who have been involved in writing lessons that are involved in designing the instructional mapping of the common core and the

commitment that we've heard not only from san francisco's math teacher but also from teachers across the bay who say we are altogether and working truly collaboratively on an issue of curriculum. that's really important. one of the things that i would say to parent, i had this conversation with a parent at safe way who said, aren't you the superintendant? what was i going to say? no, it's my twin brother. [ laughter ] what i try to explain to parents is we have to get away from looking at math as content and start looking eight from what it is as an instructional trend. the analogy is when students learn how to read, they don't learn the letter a in kindergarten and the letter b in first

grade. they learn together. this builds from grade to grade. as students master the content they get more content and they are able to decipher bigger and better words and able to put sentences together. what we are asking them to do with math content is the same thing. we are asking them to learn algebra from the very first experience in school in kindergarten and adding layers of complexity so when they get to the 10th grade they have mastered algebra as a content area, not algebra as a class. which is a very different paradigm for folks to understand. we are absolutely very sensitive to the fact that we are going to be communicating to parents about what was the common core and what this means and we have a very big road ahead of us and we believe it's the right thing to do. our

superintendant had an opportunity to talk to some middle school math teachers who are in the sixth grade this year. they have gotten away from the tracking. it's been very politically difficult in the middle school and they are sharing that students in their classes have really struggled this year to get the content. but as they have assessed student formedably in their math classes this year in the sixth grade, all the students even the usually students are struggling at a higher level. this is changing for the school which will remain unnamed. where others are saying we can get students who are not performing to actually

perform. it's a challenging question but we are up for the challenge. >> i want to add my thanks to all the math teachers who came. it's really powerful to hear from you and you speak really well for your topic and to have you here at 9:30 after you taught a whole day. thank you. >> wow, so much love in the room. commissioner haney? >> so my first question is where on earth did the curriculum department get a picture of me as an eighth grader? [ laughter ] i was absolutely one of those kids who not only didn't like math but struggled in school and other areas because of my experiences in math. i think often through math we begin to understand how school see's us and if school is telling us

we should know something when we don't feel like we are prepared to be there and don't understand the content being self confidence us we begin to think that something is wrong with us and school is not going to be successful. hearing from math teachers here, it made me feel like maybe i should give math a second chance. they talk about understanding and about problem solving and thinking about how it gets us to have the depth to apply it to all sorts of different situations ann will it -- analytical and you are able to move on into other fields and you are going to need that knowledge of math. one thing i was going ask and i appreciate the focus on equity and when we talk about math you have to be upfront with the conversation around equity. what i