Lost in Translation

By Samantha Stainburn

Thomas Dooley, a fast-talking, 47-year-old retired firefighter in Queens, New York, believes public education has helped make America great. "If you were smart, you could move ahead," he explains. "If you worked hard, you could move ahead. You were given an opportunity."

New York City's public schools, he says, did just that for his two college-age sons. After attending their local elementary school, one earned a spot at the city's prestigious math magnet, Stuyvesant High, and is now studying engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, one of the country's best engineering schools. Last year, Dooley's young daughter thrived in a gifted math program at the same elementary school her brothers attended, multiplying mixed fractions and doing basic algebra in 3rd grade.

This year, however, the school overhauled its math curriculum. The new program, Everyday Mathematics, is used for kids at all levels and employs few of the traditional methods Dooley's daughter is used to. Instead of teaching standard ways to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and long division and then drilling students with worksheets, teachers present several options for solving problems and encourage kids to use those that make sense to them. Rather than spend weeks or a single class on one subject, lessons bounce around, covering several areas in an hour. Computation is practiced by playing games, and students must continually explain why they're solving problems in...