My involvement in the Lutheran schools was beneficial to the math department at NCCC. In 1999 academic affairs would make a move to offer college courses for credit in area high schools. The department called on me over and over again, since I thoroughly knew what was going on with k-12 math.
In the spring of 2002 there was a public debacle with the Math A/Math B high school math curriculum. Math A was a 1.5-year course that was required for graduation from high school. Formerly students could either pass a 9th grade math regents exam with mastery, or pass a lower-level RCT exam with mastery. By requiring all students to pass the Math A exam, NYS was increasing the standards across the board, or so said the propagandists.
Numerous students could not pass the Math A exam in the middle of 10th grade, so it could be taken again, as many times as required. By the spring of 2002 there was a log jam of students who were on their last chance. 70% of the state failed that exam. A public outcry followed. In the end the state put a huge scale factor, or curve, on the exam. A raw score of about 30% was scaled up to a passing grade of 65. And a significant portion of the exam was multiple choice!
A statewide committee of math educators was formed, and colleague Carolyn Goldberg was asked to be on the committee. She asked me if I was interested, and I declined. By then my wife and I were busy driving our four kids around to various activities. I did offer my advice to Carolyn, and she took me up on that offer numerous times. A handful of my ideas made their way into the NYS high school math curriculum.
The story Carolyn told me was that the large committee started with Kindergarten and worked their way up. By the time they got to high school most of the committee had stepped down, which left Carolyn and a clueless college professor who maintained that geometry proofs is what turn students on to math. My recollection is that Carolyn did the bulk of the work in putting together the whole high school curriculum. How did I help out? As one example, the new SAT exam was just developed, and the initial NYS draft was missing some of the new content, so I wrote what was missing on a piece of scrap paper, and off Carolyn went to Albany that weekend with the missing content. I also told her to make 9th grade math "Integrated Algebra" and not just a random integration of various strands, and so it was.
From 1996 to 2012 I taught 4-8 students per year, which was more than half of each 8th grade class in the school. Both St. John and St. Peter had no admission standards, unlike elite private schools. Their student population was roughly half from the congregation and half from without. In terms of native ability, students formed a pretty good cross section of the population. There were two differences worth mentioning. (1) Special needs students were rare, and could get better services in the public school. (2) Lutheran schools were likely to have students with parents who were more involved with their children's education. So, comparisons with the public schools are difficult.
I had a listing of all my students and what happened to them later, but that list was lost. None the less, over half of my students went to college for a very quantitative STEM curriculum. Most of the STEM students majored in engineering (more than 2/3 of them). Of the whole lot, only one failed to graduate from college in the field in which they started. That surprised even myself. These difficult STEM fields have around 80% attrition, nationwide.
Looking back I am not surprised that my students did well. Why? Everything I taught them significantly amplified how much they learned in 10th-12th grade math, physics and chemistry. And various branches of engineering are applied physics and applied math. Doing this was not as difficult as you may think. It is easy, if you know how.
