More than 40 local parents attended a town hall-style meeting with Malibu High School Principal Brandon Gallagher on June 6, following his announcement that the calculus D/E class, considered to be the capstone of the school’s accelerated math program for the last 20 years, would be cancelled in its present form beginning with the 2016-2017 school year.
Gallagher explained to parents that the average enrollment for the calculus D/E class taken by accelerated math program seniors was so small, the school could no longer justify the expense of offering it. In the coming academic year, only seven qualified seniors have signed up for it, and future numbers may be even lower because of general decreasing enrollment. In addition, the only two qualified teachers may not be available for the class next year.
Parents say Malibu’s accelerated math program is one of the things that sets the school apart from almost all other public schools, and enables MHS to compete with pricey local private schools like The Brentwood School, Viewpoint and Harvard Westlake for gifted students.
A letter to the Principal signed by Kristen Melnyk, M.D., and John Roesler, M.D., said in part, “Where is the support from the administration for academic rigor in our school? Cancellation of this course represents a failure of the school to support the brightest and most motivated students in the population, and shows a lack of commitment to provide an excellent STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education at MHS.”
The accelerated math program begins in sixth grade with a specific curriculum over seven school years and one summer that finally ends with the capstone college-level calculus D/E course in senior year. By that point, students have already taken two advanced placement (AP) calculus courses.
The fact that this is a seven-year program means that any change or cancellation of the senior-level class affects every student coming up the accelerated math pipeline.
Although not an AP class itself, parents say gifted math students strive to end up in calculus D/E because it’s an achievement in itself, gives them a leg up during college (sometimes even allowing them to place out of certain classes) and also looks good on a college application.
Mindy Peterson, whose daughter recently graduated from MHS and is now attending MIT wrote, “In my daughter Sofi’s calculus D/E class of nine students, seven were accepted early decision or early action to their first-choice schools, which included MIT, Stanford, Brown, U Penn (two students), UCLA engineering and Williams.”
Although Gallagher originally announced that the class would be cancelled altogether, after the outpouring of letters from parents and the town hall meeting, he now hopes to find a nontraditional solution to keep the class going.
According to Peterson’s meeting recap letter, some options were better received than others, and included distance learning or videoconferencing classes, perhaps with Santa Monica College; independent study classes, bringing in a qualified volunteer teacher, or sending students to local community colleges or Pepperdine University.
Gallagher is meeting with Assistant Superintendent Terry Deloria and Secondary Curriculum & Instruction Director Ellen Edeburn, who are in charge of curriculum for the Santa Monica-Malibu School District, to discuss the options.
“Clearly, with all of our concern around the budget, Dr. Gallagher has a concern about this and is looking at ways he can offer alternatives to students who are at the very highest level of math,” Deloria said at the June 2 school board meeting. She mentioned solutions like teleconferencing with Santa Monica College, saying students would be welcome to take classes there, but “distance is a challenge in that situation.”
A group of parents successfully fought off a similar attempt to cancel the class in 2013, and got it reinstated with assurances from the assistant superintendent of the school district that it would continue. Now, three years and a fair amount of turnover among Malibu High School principals and other school district administrators later, the cancellation is back.
The strong math program at MHS has a colorful history that began 20 years ago in 1996 with Louis Leithold, a PhD mathematician and author of “The calculus,” a classic textbook that changed teaching methods around the world. Among his claims to fame, he mentored Jaime Escalante, the L.A. high school teacher whose story was told in the film “Stand and Deliver” (1988).
At age 72, after retiring from Pepperdine University, Leithold began teaching calculus at Malibu High School and drilling his students for the AP calculus exams with considerable success. He assigned hours of homework every night and held training sessions at his own home on weekends before the test. He taught at MHS until his death in 2005.
Leithold’s textbook divides the calculus subjects into parts A-E. The course at MHS that parents are trying to save, calculus D/E, deals with the last two sections of that textbook on multivariable calculus, as well as linear algebra from another textbook.