Urban Elementary Schools in California Show Stunning Improvement in SAT-9 Test Scores over Initial Four Year Period of New Math Standards

Summary: The state of California adopted new math standards in 1997, featuring a more focused mathematics curriculum, coherent from one year to the next, with a primary goal of having students fully ready for success in California Algebra I by the end of the seventh grade. The “Key Standards ” approach was implemented in 2000, greatly reducing the number of topics and allowing students to focus on the core curriculum, including a strong pre-algebra component. A set of schools from low income and/or minority districts aggressively adopted and started to implement these new California methods for the 1998-1999 school year. Most of the “early adoption ” group of elementary schools purchased and began using matching textbooks when they first became available for the 1999-2000 school year, and all were using them by the following year. During the same period, including the last year of the Mathland era and the first 4 years of the new curriculum, SAT-9 tests were administered to virtually all grade 2-11 students in the state, providing a unique opportunity to measure grade 2-6 cohort performance improvement from a documented baseline, primarily Mathland, both within the state and against national norms