Independent Surveys of WCPSS Teachers Shed Light on What Parents are Seeing (Part 1)

No doubt if you're a parent and your kid is having issues with the Mathematics Vision Project (MVP) course they're taking, you've done a little research or spoken to WCPSS.  They will explain to you how great it is and how teachers and students love it.  You may have even stumbled across a tweet like this one, where teachers fawn all over the program's innovative ways that children's eyes are finally being opened to the discovery of math in ways to which only Archimedes could relate.

Indeed, that might be happening for some use cases.  While WCPSS and MVP have never conceded that this program might not work for some teachers & students, Wake MVP parent does concede that there are some teachers and some students, when paired together, the MVP experience may be math Heaven on Earth.  For the other 80% - 99%, they are either drowning in math chaos Hell, or the teacher is partially supplementing the program to keep results afloat and attention down.

I had heard anecdotes of WCPSS teachers being told to shut up and get on board with this program - or else.  But was there ever a time (especially before MVP was fully locked in) when teachers - you know, the WCPSS employees who will have to live with this program 5 days a week - were given the opportunity to give constructive feedback?  As the MVP train comes off the rails right now before our very eyes, is teacher feedback welcomed to try to salvage what's left of the school year?  My sense (and several birdies) tells me - HECK NO!  Shut up and STAY on board - OR ELSE!

A few weeks ago, I personally and manually went to every WCPSS high school website and some of the larger middle school websites, and gathered over 400 math teacher email addresses.  I sent them a survey and invited them to give feedback.  I identified that this was a parent initiated survey, not from WCPSS.  I promised confidentiality.  As expected, once administration caught wind of this, some teachers were warned or instructed to NOT respond.  As expected, I got responses anyway - 27 in total, plus several emails and phone calls.  As expected, some (9 out of ~400, 2%) were very very - and I mean very - supportive of MVP.

Now, this was not a scientific survey, and response (especially negative) was discouraged.  So we can't really compare raw numbers of supporters versus non-supporters since one of those groups could be punished for responding.  I applaud the bravery of the teachers who dared send in not-so-fawning input about MVP.  Some created new personal emails so as to further protect their identity (and job).  The responses came from 16 different schools.  Here are some of the more interesting graphics for the 27 respondents to the survey:

Again, this is NOT a scientific survey.  It is anecdotal.

Course Distribution

MVP Suited for ALL?

Even though these are suppressed anecdotal responses, I think some of the answer distributions are informative, especially in cases where they are bi-modal.  Ie. large amounts of votes on opposite ends of the spectrum.  I am personally reluctant to ever answer ALL or NONE when asked a question like these, so these results express how passionate these teachers are about their points of view.

1 = Strongly Disagree, 5 = Strongly Agree

MVP Materials Quality

The responses about the quality of the material were interesting.  Again, if you strongly support MVP, the quality of the material is perceived as "Very High Quality", whereas the rest of the input bell-curved between "Very Low Quality" and "Average".

1 = Very Low Quality, 5 = Very High Quality

Constructive Feedback Welcomed

In a somewhat positive result, the constructive feedback chart was NOT bi-modal.  So, first of all, the strong supporters of MVP would have no worries in viewing their feedback as safe to give, so no surprises on the 7 Very Comfortable responses, given the responses above.  However, the fact that the non-supporters of MVP did not all vote on the left side of the chart (Very Uncomfortable) may imply that some dissenting constructive feedback is being allowed, perhaps at the school or PLT levels.

1 = Very Uncomfortable, 5 = Very Comfortable

Now for the Write-in Comments

The survey allowed for write-in comments, and then there were the emails and phone calls.  I broke the comments into ~175 individual standalone thoughts and then categorized them based on my own personal assessment.  That allows us to view varying comments about a similar topic in one section.  Some comments could go into multiple categories, but I tried not to overanalyze. 

This article contains comments for categories: MVP Training and MVP Materials Quality
Future articles: Adoption Adherence, About Students, Equity, Job Security / Fear of Retribution, Teacher Satisfaction / Dissatisfaction with MVP

Category: MVP Training

• The trainers (the authors of the MVP materials) would get defensive anytime we brought up our frustrations with the curriculum. They wouldn't help us problem solve through our frustrations. 
• One teacher questioned the MVP trainers as to what they recommend if we find that a particular lesson or task is just not working in our classroom.  The trainer actually laughed and said that they all work, and she knows that because she helped write them.  She essentially implied that if a lesson did not work, it was because we as the teachers were not implementing them correctly.
• The professional development training for it was a joke! I saw multiple times when the writers couldn’t figure out what a paragraph meant or was asking.
• I am a WCPSS Math 3 teacher, and I attended part of the MVP Math 3 training.  My high school did not implement MVP for Math 3 this year.  By the end of the training, I was so happy we did not.  
• They (MVP trainers) never explained what the purpose of MVP is.
• Half of the time I feel like they are trying to sell me on it. We are given time to work the tasks and act like the students and we all come up with different styles so the leaders can show how we would bring up students based on a variety of work in the classroom, however unless I guided my students they rarely had this variety of methods for me to use as examples.
• Not to mention at the school level we are given very little time to work on this other than weekly PLT considering that we are teaching a course that is basically brand new
• Having also taught MVP Math 1, I will say that the Math 1 materials are much better than the Math 2 materials. The trainings I've been to (both for Math 1 and Math 2) were by no means the best trainings I've ever been to. 
• I wrote an email to one of my superiors about how our PLT was implementing MVP several months ago. I got no response from my superior or my department chair about my email.
• MVP treats us like students in the training. It’s such a waste of time!
• MVP training is useless.
• The MVP representatives came across as being mostly dismissive of our concerns.
• I have been to several trainings, and they were truly eye opening and changed my whole perspective on teaching drastically for the better.  
• Additionally, I would encourage you to push the county to continue training the teachers, finding what they are struggling with and addressing those struggles. It takes time for people to learn new curriculum, and this is only the second year of implementation (which means the Math 2 people are experiencing this for the first time) and Math 1 for the second time, and some Math 3's have not experienced it at all. Thus, we need you guys to support us as we learn how to properly utilize this curriculum as it is designed to be used. 

Category: MVP Materials Quality

• There are a lot of things that don’t align to standards. What sense does it make that honors and foundations are taught using the same book? 
• Math 3 needs all of the geometry workbooks redone. Those tasks are so confusing teachers can’t follow them. I supplemented for all geometry in that class. Also inverse functions for math 3 needs to be its own stand alone unit and not with piecewise functions at all.
• I find the materials extremely difficult to use with an academic Math 2 class. 
• The materials this curriculum provides are not sufficient for students, particularly academic level students, to adequately learn the material. 
• Teachers are often left to search the internet or use previous (pre-MVP) course materials to find some student success.
• Why did schools have the choice to implement MVP in Math 3 this year if it was not written to be completely aligned, especially in the first year as Math 3 having an EOC test?  From what I understand, around half of WCPSS schools chose to implement.  Mine did not because we were not convinced the materials would be aligned to the EOC, and now I can see that we were right to be concerned about that?
• Parents are oblivious about how bad the math is.
• The curriculum wasn’t vetted in the slightest before the county decided to use it
• I spent three weeks in the summer trying to print and get a grasp on this curriculum to no avail. The math 2 curriculum was not finished, not correct, not completely uploaded and missing so much I could not prepare myself, as a good teacher would. I tried to take the initiative and get a grasp and practice over the summer so I could feel competent and knowledgeable, but my resources were not available. 
• It is my understanding that Honors level and regular level math students are using the same materials. So what is the difference between the 2 classes? 
• About a month before my school got to the quadratics unit WCPSS leaders realized that the MVP quadratics unit did not align with NC Math 1 and quickly wrote their own "mvp style" workbook and got it to us barely in time to teach the unit. Many booklets were not delivered until immediately before we needed to begin teaching it. I
• MVP was built to spiral for a different state and different curriculum. Wake County purchased it as a cure-all and REQUIRED all of their teachers to use it. The organization of unit does not flow and there is CONSTANTLY material in the books that is not in the correct placement for the class. 
• The books are the SAME for honors and regular level classes which makes no sense.
• My biggest problem with the MVP Math 2 curriculum is that most of it doesn't align to the standards we are supposed to be teaching (a lot of the content from the work books covers standards from Math 1 or Math 3- not Math 2).
•  MVP       vs          Glenco or Holt (traditional publisher)
• Daily Objectives                   no                         yes
• Warm Ups                             no                         yes
• Guided Practice                   no                         yes
• Answer Keys                        no                         yes
• Daily Quizzes                       no                         yes
• Alternative Assessments  no                         yes
• Tests                                     no                         yes
• Colored Graphics                no                         yes
• Typos                                    many                    few
• Math Errors                          some                    little to none
• ESL Resources                    no                         yes
• Literacy Resources             no                         yes
• Computer Programming    no                         yes
• SAT/ACT Prep                      no                         yes
• IEP Resources                      no                         yes
• Test Bank to make tests     no                        yes"
• I have to guide them through the materials and create notes to go along with them for the students to get anything out of it.  
• We explored the lessons in Unit 1, which was on piecewise functions and inverses.  It was pointed out by teachers that the MVP lessons did not bring up a discontinuous piecewise function.  At first we were told that the unit was mostly on continuous piecewise functions and that it was based on the NC math standards.   It was later pointed out by a teacher that discontinuous piecewise functions is in the NC Math 3 Standards, in the Math 3 unpacking document, and came up in the released NC Math 3 EOC questions.  At this point we were told that discontinuous piecewise functions is in the "Ready, Set, Go" homework assignment.  We looked, and it was in 3 questions on 1 homework assignment  It is not in any of the lessons.  The questions in the homework assignment are also not reflective of the question on the released EOC (question #14) or the sample questions in the Math 3 unpacking document (under standard NC.M3.F-IF.2).  The MVP representatives came across as being mostly dismissive of our concerns, and responded by basically just saying to make sure you show it to your students then.  It felt like many of us teachers were questioning why they would not change the MVP materials to include all of the aspects of the standards.  Another person from WCPSS who was there said that revisions were still in progress and she was taking notes on the things that we were pointing out in the materials.
• How well aligned is Math 1 and Math 2, given that Math 3 is not?  We only looked at one unit in training, but based on skimming through the other Math 3 materials, there are other pieces of content missing from the MVP materials.
• My question is if the material is so great then even if teachers had a choice they would use this curriculum
• We are not given the tools we are needed to implement this correctly. Could it be good? Maybe but not with the rush/lack of preparation that I feel that we are given to implement it. 
• Additionally, since NC standards do not align with Colorado (where this came from) they have to pick and choose units from the 3 different courses to compile ours, and like I mentioned before, create new materials for WCPSS to match our quadratics standards. If it is supposed to be done exactly as MVP is written, how can we do that when our courses don't even align with theirs?
• I am not convinced that MVP covers everything necessary to be prepared for the NCFE -- thus, the need for supplementary materials, extra time, etc. 
• I taught MVP Math 1 last year and it was wonderful! Everything worked well and students could actually understand the material. This year, I moved to MVP Math 2 and the material is a different story. The Ready Set Go homework is great, but the activities need more assistance.
• I create my own quizzes and tests, occasionally using some of the problems from the MVP test bank.  
• MVP has some very good tasks. I love the conceptual concepts they bring about for the students to apply their knowledge. However, there are gaps in some of the work. It isn’t exactly aligned with Our standards. 
• I understand your concern, but it is unwarranted. The books and material, when understood properly by the instructor and adhered to logically and prepared properly work incredibly well. Don't get me wrong, they are not perfect, but this is also the first year of us using them (math 2).
• They logically and methodically build conceptual and procedural understanding if the teacher prepares and uses time properly. 
• Honestly, since we have had he common core standards, MVP is the best resource I have come across that truly applies the math practice standards along with the math standards.
• Final exam review is a breeze because the material is constantly spiraling through each task, and students are constantly accessing different parts of their memory in order to complete a task.  

By Wait, There's More!

The remaining comments will be shared in upcoming posts in Wake MVP Parent.  Stay tuned!