Parents tackle Common Core math at Robertson Road Elementary

Grandmother Linda Reyes picked up a stick of 10 snapped-together widgets, broke them apart and dropped the bright yellow bits into the ones box on her subtraction page. “Borrowing” has changed since her day, she said.

“My grandkids come home and they have homework. I didn’t know how to do it,” said Reyes, sitting at a Muffins and Math session at Robertson Road Elementary on Oct. 24. The next drop-in session will be at 8:30 a.m. Nov. 14, an extra made possible by a grant helping to turn around the south Modesto school.

Last week’s session went over second-grade subtraction. It called for regrouping, also known as borrowing, trading or carrying. By any name, it means taking one from the tens column and putting 10 more in the ones column.

The arithmetic never changes, but the way it gets explained does, said Lorena Beltran, who came to better help her fifth-grader and second-grader with their homework.

“We knew the answer. I couldn’t explain how to do it,” Beltran said, adding she likes the new system with its hands-on approach. “Before, the kids used to get the calculator (to do homework). Now, they understand how they got there,” she said.

“I think in the higher grades it will be easier for them,” Beltran said.

Common Core shines a spotlight on early math using that rationale, making sure kids grasp the basics before they hit fractions, ratios and algebra. But the standards and all the angst surrounding them are not served along with the muffins and coffee at Robertson Road, said Principal Christina Dimas.

“We’re not talking about standards. We’re doing math,” she said. Parents learn the latest lingo and the newest methods, like working together for “pair share” time and using the small blocks to show borrowing. Two instructional aides translate for parents and give individual help while math teacher Melissa Bray leads the lesson.

Bray is Robertson Road’s full-time math coach, a rarity for an elementary campus. The school also has a full-time science teacher, a part-time physical education teacher and four weeks of summer school. Its teachers spend an extra hour in the classroom, with added pay, and student performance factors in teacher evaluations under single-school provisions in the Modesto City Schools teachers contract.

All of the above comes thanks to a three-year, $4 million state grant, available only to the bottom 5 percent of schools in California. Robertson Road test scores landed it on the state’s “persistently lowest-achieving schools” in 2010. Since then its scores have risen from second-worst in Modesto to solidly middle of the pack, rising 38 points to 747 in 2013.

The leap meant its poor children – and all its children are poor – significantly outscored both the district and the state, as did its English learners, about 60 percent of the student body.

The challenge now, Dimas said, “is when the grant is over, how do we sustain that?”

The math class for parents is a step in that direction. “They want to learn to help their kids. This is them being able to learn it conceptually,” she said, watching the group tackle the 100s place, piling up 10 bright yellow ten-stacks.

Antoinette Alcorcha, who has children in third and fourth grades, kept the stacks away from her 5-month-old’s busy fingers. “This has been very beneficial for my daughter and my son. If I know it, they know it,” she said.

This story was originally published October 31, 2014 at 2:32 PM with the headline "Parents tackle Common Core math at Robertson Road Elementary."