I have been very interested in all the comments on AR and AM ( Accelerator Reader and Accelerator Math) since my first post in March. I was very excited to attend the presentation from Renaissance Learning about the incentives that the AR program brought to reading. The school formed a staff and parent committee and got busy applying for grant money that Renaissance Learning helped use find. Sell us the product and help get us the money should have been a key point! After money was "found" and the PTO bought on at over $5,000.00 for the first year, the staff support disappeared . The program fell to a parent committee to hold AR Shopping days for children to spend their points. We started with small toys, pencils, and novelty items hoping to move to larger awards as the points accumulated. As the parent in charge of the purchasing and the volunteer schedule for each shopping day I began to see the kids who read already did well and earned points but the children who were not readers or from homes of readers, they did not have points to spend. They may have earned less than a full point and could not spend what they had earned. Information was not going home about titles of books, reading levels or when and how the children could test. Some teachers made points and tests part of the reading grade when the program had clearly been explained at the start as extra incentive and extra credit. Some teachers allowed children to write reports rather than take the tests and still earn the same points. Suddenly we were all over the place with "The rules' and no staff stepped up to be in charge. It seemed to try to fall to the Media Center but she would not have it. Soon the Am Accelerator Math program showed up with none of the presentation and fan fare that came with the AR. Accelerator Math is supposed to be a way for children to work at their own level to increase math skills. Sounds great until you find that the children at first grade are working problems, getting answers and then transferring the A,B,C answer to a universal scantron form. The actual work sheet where the problems are solved is never seen by the teacher, the children have access to the scanner so they can grade their own work and the grade pops into the teacher's data base. Great till you realize that the grade is based off of scanning not their math work. My son had a very hard time with the hand eye work needed to transfer the answer to the scan tron, if he got off a line he got problems wrong. He got so he believed he could not do the math when in reality he could not scan, which of course was not a skill that had been taught in preparation for this program.
I feel that in elementary levels the process of the math is the key, showing the tick marks, seeing the carry over, drawing the lines of symmetry. It should be more about the process than the correct scan tron answer. This program that was to be extras became his class room grade and the teacher would not work with him to improve the scanning transfer issue. I was spending time in his room to help him learn to use a ruler to line up answers with the scan tron and such, he was not the only child with this problem but parents were not aware. Wrong was wrong. Then there began to be problems actually with the software when it would grade wrong, When I would point this out to staff I was told, oh that means we need to run the Disk Doctor. This would be the only time a correction was made to my son's grade. Meetings with the principle and curriculum staff reassured me that the program was of benefit and an extra but none seemed to see that 30 minutes a day each day at school was too much time to spend on scanning at second grade. My son is now finishing 3rd grade and we are struggling with multiplication. I feel his self esteem in math was injured by the AM program. He is involved with Kumon programs to over come the damage caused by AM and how our staff used the program. I have tried to research this Renaissance Learning but have found no independent testing supporting their claims. I believe it is a dangerous program when not monitored very closely. They sell the product and help you get the money, any school would easily fall into the a trap. The data base is very helpful to the teacher to simply run a report to get a grade and status for a student which would seem that it would open more time to actually teach but that is not how it has worked in my experience. I regret the time my son has been involved in this program and I further regret the money our PTO put into these programs, well over $12,000.00 in the past three years, and that does not include the grant money we received. I went in to the program well educated I thought. I supported it to the community and now have hurt my own child’s math learning in the process. I hope others will proceed slowly with this program. I think it could be good but it needs allot of attention from parents.