Curriculum Controversy, are we 'Suing Math Because it's Hard'?

In case you haven't heard, earlier this year there was a lawsuit filed against the Seattle Public Schools over their decision to implement a new math curriculum. This new curriculum, Discovery Math, was a departure from traditional direct-instruction techniques and instead focused on group work, discussions and case studies as part of an overall inquiry-based approach. This type of curriculum has been implemented with great success in some areas (see Measuring reform practices in science and mathematics classrooms, Sawada et.al.) but the results apparently weren't up to snuff here.

I won't go into detail (you can Google 'Seattle math lawsuit' and find all the details) but the long and short of it is that it flopped worse than Art Garfunkel's solo career. This upset some folks, understandably, and they decided to file a lawsuit against the school district. And they won.

There are some very legitimate reasons why people were upset, for example the Washington State Board of Education reviewed the curriculum and found it to be 'unsound', however the final decision was left to the district. On the other hand, according to Antioch University education faculty member Darlene York, inquiry-based curriculum have been implemented with fantastic success in other large cities in America. In one example the new curriculum raised test scores amongst minority students by over 10% in one year. So, what went wrong in Seattle? Lack of training and support for teachers implementing a new style? Lack of patience with a new learning process (maybe things would have improved over time)? Or are we simply, as one online commenter put it, "suing math because it's hard?"

This entire hullabaloo brings to my mind some questions, and I'm curious what folks think. I have heard some suggest that it's less-than-rational to have the courts making decisions about curriculum but one of the plaintiffs' key arguments was that the new curriculum put minority students at a specific disadvantage. Was the legal intervention truly necessary to avoid something that would have had negative effects on minority students, or is this a case of people simply suing something that they didn't like? Is it wise to be taking the decision making power out of the hands of professional educators? And the question of precedent has also been raised; is this decision going to pave the way for future parents to simply file lawsuits any time they feel their children aren't getting the education they deserve?

Clearly there are larger questions of equity and teaching practice at play here that we can't begin to answer in a blog posting, but at the end of the day these are the situations that face teachers in today's world; those of us considering careers in education would be wise to join the discussion.