At Dunbar, new views on math help raise scores

Michael Potts is a math evangelist.

On a Tuesday afternoon, he and fellow seventh-grade teacher Jason Tyree stand near the stairwell at Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School holding what are essentially math problems on sticks.

Students crowd around, some furrowing brows, others hollering answers. One short-haired boy nails Potts’ question about the concept of “range,” then struts off in a celebratory chicken dance.

Potts and Tyree are helping students learn mathematics, but they are not math teachers. Potts teaches English and Tyree teaches literature, a separate subject. In addition to giving the kids math drills in the hallways, they both incorporate math in their classrooms.

Potts and Tyree are just one small part of an ongoing schoolwide math push. For three years, the school received an “accredited with warning” status from the state, because not enough students passed a new Standards of Learning test in math, first rolled out in spring 2006.

Principal Brian Wray and his staff decided they needed to change the way math is taught at Dunbar, emphasizing math comprehension and vocabulary, and bringing math into every aspect of Dunbar, including all seven periods of the school day. Instead of just a being a puzzle for the math department, improving math scores became everyone’s goal.

Then, this year, Dunbar received full accreditation in all subject areas, including math. It was also the only middle school in Lynchburg this year to make adequate yearly progress, the federal standardized testing benchmark.

“At the end of the day, we just want kids to learn,” Potts said. “Since this was the thing we needed, we were all like, ‘Alright! Let’s do it!’”

Dunbar’s story is about a school that united in the face a challenge, but it’s also about the big changes one test can mandate. Across the state, middle schools struggled for the past few years to adapt to the same math test that dragged down scores at Dunbar. Two weeks ago, the state of Virginia released the official accreditation results for schools across the state, based on scores on the Standards of Learning tests. Ninety-six percent of middle schools are now fully accredited, as opposed to 69 percent two years ago.

The first year the state debuted the new math SOL, just more than half of Dunbar students were able to pass the test, and the school was labeled “Accredited with Warning,” a designation it also received for the next two years, despite steady increases in the percent of students passing the test each year.

Jamaika Marshall, an eighth-grade student, remembers her surprise as a sixth-grader, when her math SOL turned out to be much harder than the test she’d taken the previous year in elementary school.

“I said, ‘O.K, I need to study,’” recalled Marshall, who hopes to use business-related math skills someday to open a dance studio or become a fashion designer.

Now, Marshall refers to her latest math SOL score as “reallyhigh.” She gives a lot of credit to a program called “Word of the Day” implemented at Dunbar in the middle of the last school year.

Teachers and administrators at Dunbar figured out that a major problem for students was understanding the vocabulary used on the test. So they took each math term the students were likely to face on the test and turned it into a word of the day. Each period of the day, teachers required students to do a quick exercise with that word, like writing the word, drawing a picture, or explaining the word to a partner.

“They have dedication that makes you excited — it makes you want to strive more,” Marshall said. “Each year they do something new to make everything easier.”

Front and center in the fight to “make everything easier” is the Dunbar math department. Teachers there also pushed to emphasize vocabulary and get kids to explain or demonstrate how to do problems, in their own words or using hand-held manipulatives.

When Wray announced that students’ scores would qualify the school for full accreditation last spring, many people said that some of the math teachers had tears running down their faces.

For retired assistant principal William Austin, who attended Dunbar as a student in the 1960s, then spent decades in the school as a teacher, coach and administrator, the victory also had special meaning.

“There is a lot of pride that’s in this school — not just now, but going back to when it was a junior high, when it was a high school — there’s a lot of people who feel like they have a stake.” Austin said. “You get kind of tired of the negative thing, so when you do something very positive, you want to celebrate.”