Original Vision

Like sandcastles built by the waters edge, I have seen efforts at mathematics reform wash away amid the shifting tides of school personnel changes.

The Heroic Volunteers. In 1993, it sounded reasonable. Pilot a new, experimental, not as yet published, high school mathematics curriculum with a few teachers at a time. Like the unveiling of the sleek Stealth bomber, this new curriculum was unlike anything regular high school math teachers had ever seen much less taught. Designed from the ground up to be completely NCTM standards-based, the Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP) was a five-year $9 million project supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. IMP was the first of what would be a total of thirteen full replacement mathematics curricula funded by the Instructional Materials Division in NSF's Education Directorate. Philadelphia was one of three IMP pilot dissemination sites nationwide.

To learn how to "fly" IMP required that teachers attend flight school. The school consisted of an unprecedented amount of intense professional development: 60 hours per year for four years, team teaching, and on-site mentoring by one of four project directors. Teachers also needed to learn how to use and manage a classroom with graphics calculators for every student, an overhead projector, an overhead graphics calculator, and a bin full of manipulatives from geoboards and unifix cubes to pipe cleaners and dental floss. With the inducement of a reduction in course load and free graduate course credit, a small cadre of nine "heroic volunteers" from five diverse Philadelphia high schools agreed to pilot this new curriculum that turned the usual methods and rhythms of teaching inside out from teacher driven lectures to student centered group inquiry.

Principals: The high school principals were not wildly enthusiastic about the new program. They did not advocate it, but rather allowed it as a pilot in their schools. The principals from the lower achieving schools thought anything was worth a try since their students were not performing well as it was, whereas those from the higher achieving high schools wanted reassurances that student SAT scores would not only not suffer, but improve "by at least 30 points," as one such principal remarked. No one knew how the students would receive the program, nor the reactions of other mathematics teachers in the department.

The Original Implementation Strategy: The IMP curriculum was too new and unproven for the whole math staff in a school to adopt. In addition, the central school district office in Philadelphia had agreed to pay for an extra 1.5 class periods reduction per teacher as part of the implementation model, which would make wholesale adoption inordinately expensive. So it was decided that two teachers per school would pilot the first year in ninth grade. If they were more successful in teaching student mathematics than what had been the case, it was anticipated that their enthusiasm for the new curriculum and pedagogy would spread to their departmental colleagues. The following year another two more teachers would begin piloting the curriculum while the original two IMP teachers progressed to Year 2 training and teach 10th grade IMP classes. This process would theoretically continue until all the teachers were trained in all four year of the IMP curriculum. This incremental process would take many years, but change would eventually occur. This 2x2 implementation scheme is depicted below for a department of twenty teachers.

* 20 Teachers in a Department with No Teacher Attrition
* Each Year, 2 New Teachers Start 4 Years of Professional Development
* Professional Development is Always Available
* Administration is Stable and Supportive

In time, so the thinking went, IMP would also start up in other Philadelphia high schools as word of its success spread. And, indeed, within the next four years IMP spread to nearly 20 Philadelphia high schools. Today IMP is in only a few. What happened?

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