Guest Author: Berkeley Parent Advocate Shares MVP Experiences

Wake parents are partnering with Berkeley parents as well as those from Anacortes, Washington, to learn about their experiences in advocating for math education for their students impacted by MVP.  In this article, Berkeley High School (California) parent advocate and Wake MVP Parent guest author Donna Storey tells the history of BHS's MVP journey.  

Cliff Notes Version

1. Berkeley High School implemented MVP beginning in 2015 hoping to close its long standing achievement gap.   
2. Students frustrated and confused, losing confidence in math.  School system blames children. 
3. School system attempts to hide data, but is eventually required to release data by a California Public Records Act request.
4. D/F grade rates increase, even bolstered by 54% of surveyed students receiving private tutoring.
5. Parents created support websites and tutoring programs.

Main Article

In the fall of 2015, the Berkeley High School math department launched a brand-new Common-Core-aligned curriculum for the class of 2019: Mathematics Vision Project  Many hoped this new approach to teaching math would help close the long-standing achievement gap at the school.

I was serving as the secretary of the Academic Choice Advisory Council, a sort of PTA for Berkeley High’s largest “small learning community.” As early as the fall of 2015, parents were coming to our monthly meetings to express concern that their children were struggling with the new curriculum. With no textbook and little guidance from the teachers, students found homework confusing and frustrating. Students who had once excelled in and loved math lost confidence in their abilities. During information nights, math department representatives shared very little information about the new curriculum, but merely assured parents that everything was on track and this new approach would end up being a great improvement. Many parents and students felt equally confused in the second year of MVP, but most assumed it must be their child’s personal issue.

By the winter of 2018, the class of 2019 was now taking the junior-year MVP class called Math 3. The D/F rate for these students was reportedly at an all-time high. Although my children had both graduated from Berkeley High, I heard stories from parents of juniors that made me very concerned.

I requested the D/F rates from the Berkeley Unified School District by means of the California Public Records Act and received the following information, updated March 7, 2019:

Aggregate D/F Rate for MVP Math Courses at Berkeley High by Semester

Course	2016-17 (S2)	2017-18 (S1)	2017-2018 (S2)	2018-19 (S1)
Math 1	28.4%	25.4%	28%	26.3%
Math 2	25.2%	26.7%	26.9%	23.8%
Math 3	not yet offered	18.1%	20.7%	6%**

A request for more detailed math performance data in the years before MVP was denied by the Berkeley Unified School District, but the “Update on Common Core Mathematics” (item #12.2) presented to the Superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District on March 22, 2017 contained the following data, which confirms that there has been a notable increase in D/F rates since the introduction of MVP in the 2015-2016 school year:

TABLE 1: D/F Rates for all 9^th grade math students semester 1 (Algebra I or Geometry)

Academic Year           All students

2013-2014                15%

2014-2015                17%

TABLE 2: Math 1 D/F rates over 1.5 years (this does not include Advanced Math 1 or Math 1X) [first year of MVP at Berkeley High School]

Term                           All students

Sem 1 15/16                         16.7%

Sem 2 15/16                         19.4%

Teachers and administrators continued to reassure parents all was well and they were handling any issues behind the scenes. Students of means relied on private tutors (54% of the 132 parents who took a community survey reported they’d hired a private tutor). Other concerned parents came together to create support websites and encourage the math department to make videos to explain concepts to students, although teachers did not emphasize the availability of this material. A group of parents started a free Sunday afternoon tutoring program to supplement after-school tutoring by teachers at Berkeley High. The Berkeley Unified School District hired a math coordinator to oversee math instruction in the Universal Ninth Grade program beginning with the class of 2022 to provide students with more support. We are also requesting that the District provide an update to the 2017 report to give the community vital information on student performance.

MVP is now in its fourth year and many students and parents at Berkeley High are still struggling and feel their challenges are not being taken seriously. When a parent group from Wake County, North Carolina reached out to Berkeley High Parent Advocate, the issues they were experiencing with the launch of MVP were sadly familiar: student frustration and confusion, many losing confidence in math; a lack of data on student performance so that the impact of MVP was hidden from the community; and assurances that MVP was a cutting-edge curriculum and any problem was the fault of students.

I hope that students and families in all school districts who are using MVP can connect, share their stories, and work to open a dialogue with MVP and their school districts. MVP is a new curriculum, and no matter how carefully designed, the reality of student experiences must be taken into account in order to best serve our kids. For example, EdReports found that MVP did not meet expectations for differentiated instruction for diverse learners and only partially meets expectations for gathering information about students’ prior knowledge and providing guidance for remediation. We must not take MVP as a perfect program that cannot be changed or challenged, but rather as an experimental approach that will benefit from student feedback and careful monitoring by teachers and administrators. Indeed, one of the unfortunate side-effects of the lack of transparency and dialogue is that teachers and administrators also suffer unnecessary stress when they take a defensive rather than collaborative position in relation to the community.

I sincerely hope we can work together to support math success for all of our students.

**I will be encouraging the community to ask for more information on the dramatic decrease in D/F rates in Math 3. We do know that the Math 3 staff was changed this year, and two teachers known to be especially demanding were reassigned to other courses in 2018-2019.

Donna Storey

Berkeley High Parent Advocate