October 1997
 
 
Dear School Board Chair:
 
The American public is focused as never before on education, and on the need to ensure that no student is left behind in mastering basic and advanced skills, especially in reading and math. As a school board member, you are in the position to develop policies that articulate clearly what students should know and be able to do in your schools. Also, you have the forum to engage your school district leadership and staff, as well as the public in an ongoing dialogue about these expectations.
 
I am writing to make you aware of vital information that you can use to inform your efforts and I am also sharing it with other educational leaders. The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the most thorough international study of math and science education ever conducted, provides important information comparing the performance of a half million students, including 33,000 Americans, at levels corresponding to U.S. grades 4, 8, and 12. We now have the results for the fourth and eighth grades.
 
TIMSS shows that the achievement of our fourth-grade students is quite high: above the international average in both math and science, and in science outperformed only by Korea. However, by eighth grade, our students are not doing as well, particularly in mathematics. Among the 41 nations participating in TIMSS, U.S. eighth graders score above the international average in science, but below the international average in mathematics.
 
Our fourth-grade performance in math and science should give us all renewed hope and excitement about the importance and promise of public education in America. However, our poor performance in mathematics at the eighth grade suggests that we must increase our efforts to improve the teaching and learning of this critical subject in the late elementary and middle school years. Information from TIMSS can inform those efforts. TIMSS thoroughly investigated curricula, teaching methods, and other factors that help explain differences in student achievement and found important differences between the U.S. and high-performing nations. Two key differences the study identified are: our expectations for our students and our teaching methods.
 

• Expectations. The U.S. expects less of its middle school and junior high students compared to high performing nations. In Germany and Japan, virtually all students in grades five through eight move beyond arithmetic to the foundations of algebra and geometry. In the U.S., students generally are not exposed to these more advanced topics prior to high school. As a result, the content taught in U.S. eighth-grade mathematics classrooms is usually at a seventh-grade level compared to the 40 other nations in the TIMSS study.

• Teaching. TIMSS found that U.S. mathematics classes require students to engage in less high-level mathematical thought and solve fewer multistep problems than classes in Germany and Japan. A U.S. mathematics teacher's typical goal is to teach students how to do something, while a Japanese teacher's goal is to help them learn these basics and also understand mathematical concepts. In a typical U.S. classroom, students follow the teacher as he or she leads them through solutions to mathematics problems. In Japan, students are asked to solve problems, present them to the class, and describe how they approached the problem to increase their own understanding.

• examine whether the curriculum in grades five through eight in your district includes significant amounts of algebra, geometry and complex problem-solving;

• ask what percent of students have the opportunity to take algebra or a similarly demanding course in eighth grade, and how that percentage can be increased to near 100 percent;

• ask administrators about instructional practices, such as how often students are asked to solve multistep problems, to explain their solutions to the class, and to answer the question, "Why?"