Conflict Over How To Teach Math Flares in Bay State

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

Massachusetts education officials are calling it simply an effort at clarification. But some educators say the changes being proposed for the state's 5-year-old mathematics framework represent nothing short of a philosophical shift that propels the state into the middle of a national battle over how the subject should be taught.

The nine members of the advisory panel charged with revising the standards are so upset by the changes now being made by the education department that they resigned en masse last week and asked that their names be kept off the final document.

"Because of our concerns about the process and the quality of the document, we chose to disassociate ourselves from it," said Carole E. Greenes, a professor of mathematics education at Boston University...