The Chronicle newsroom has been publishing an ongoing deep dive series on the remarkable Chehalis School District effort called the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI).
When 100% of Chehalis School District’s graduates are admitted to college three years running, it is important to understand how that is happening. Chehalis is aiming beyond high school graduation to college and career preparedness for every student and to judge the district’s success on how many of those graduates earn a credential past high school.
The reason: More than 70% of family wage jobs in today’s economy require a credential beyond high school.
One of the most impressive aspects of the SAI is how much effort is being focused on doing more to improve student math skills. Across the board in education nationally, math skills for students are low. Instead of ignoring that problem, Chehalis administrators, teachers and staff are shining a light on it and exerting extra effort toward helping students do better.
This series has convinced us that the math teachers in Chehalis are doing heroic work and that there is a part all of us outside of education have to play in helping children have brighter futures.
Why does math matter so much? The world’s economy continues to be more competitive and technical. Math competence is necessary beyond obvious math and science careers. At Centralia College, all credential programs that are one year or longer have a prescribed math class. Career and technical education (CTE) students are told “not doing math in your job is not an option.” The college has math classes specifically tailored to diesel and welding, nursing and other medical fields, electronics and information technology.
A construction worker must do math in measuring heights and distance. A worker digging a ditch must calculate width, height and volume per shovel. The supervisor of the ditch contract must use math in calculating the project time, the trucking needed, the use of the equipment and labor. Commercial drivers must keep log books and calculate load weights per axle. Braun Northwest reports that you have to know fractions to work there. Many family wage careers today require math competence. Yet, student math competence is not where it needs to be for young people in our area and across the nation to maximize their career potential.
What is needed to change this picture?
The easy answer is to look at math teachers, but when we looked deeper at the Chehalis effort, we learned we all need to look in the mirror.
Chehalis school board member J. Vander Stoep told The Chronicle state math testing results showed high school students at W.F. West scored in the top 18% of all school districts in the state and No. 1 among districts where half or more of the students came from lower income families. If Chehalis is No. 1 in the state among comparable schools, isn’t that good enough?
“Even being No. 1 in the state today still means that way too many of our students are not where they need to be in math competence to give them wide future career opportunities,” Vander Stoep said. “The data and the reports from experts who watch instruction here prove that the quality of high school instruction at W.F. West is excellent and that math learning across the district K-8 is also above average. The math teachers are doing amazing work. Anybody who points to math instruction here as the reason too many kids are underperforming in math is pointing in the wrong direction. Yes, the district has more to do, but so do parents and all of us in the community.”
Parents and the community need to reflect back to our children that math competence is key to career success across a wide variety of fields. Chehalis educators explain we all need to work to develop a “math mindset.” The old idea that “some people have a math brain and some people don’t” is scientifically false, and that false belief holds generations of kids down from achieving their potential. Telling a child “you don’t have a math brain” is telling them they can’t succeed. A “math brain” is developed in the same way “a reading brain” is developed — through repetition, effort, trial and error.
This newspaper has focused on the effort in Chehalis because it is exceptional in public education. We also see this SAI as having real potential value for children and school districts beyond Chehalis. We hope that the Chehalis successes continue, including in math, and that these successful models developed as part of the SAI can be applied by other school districts to help young people in our area and across the state.
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Chad Taylor is the publisher and owner of CT Publishing, parent company of The Chronicle, The Reflector and Nisqually Valley News. He can be reached at ctaylor@chronline.com.
