Reflections on Five Years as Director of CBMS
By: David Bressoud @dbressoud
David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and, for a few more days, Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences
In January 2017, Kelly Chapman and I took over from Ron Rosier and Lisa Kolbe at the helm of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. Kelly has since moved on, earning her Master’s in Education and now teaching in the Saint Paul Public School System, replaced by Javon Barnes. At the end of December, Javon and I will pass the leadership on to the next generation. It has been a wonderful learning experience and an opportunity to work with a host of very talented and dedicated people, including the executive directors and presidents of the professional societies in the mathematical societies, but also many others at the forefront of mathematics education at all levels from preK to graduate school and the workforce. This month’s column is a look back on the events of the past five years.
At the start of my tenure, I published “A vision for CBMS” in the June-July 2017 issue of the Notices. It laid out an ambitious agenda for addressing issues of transitions in mathematics education: high school to college, two-year to four-year college, undergraduate to workplace, undergraduate to graduate, and graduate to both academic and non-academic employment. The work would focus on two services: “Research to help us understand our present situation and the true difficulties that must be tackled …” and “Resources and Support for departments that recognize a need for change …”
I believe we have made some progress, but before I describe what has been accomplished, I need to chronicle the immediate issues that faced me as I took over. CBMS, run on a shoestring as it is, had lost the ability to manage its own grants from NSF in 2013. AMS had agreed to run these grants with CBMS as a subcontractor, but this was less than an ideal arrangement. One of my challenges was to restore CBMS as a potential recipient of NSF grants.
But then in February I received a serious shock. The grant request for funding the NSF/CBMS Regional Research Conferences, a proposal that Ron had submitted in his last months, was rejected. Running these conferences, which began in 1969, has provided a third of our annual budget. Fortunately, NSF agreed to a one-year extension of our current grant as I sought to gain permission for CBMS to manage its own grants while at the same time drafting a new proposal that would meet the NSF’s requests to reshape these conferences so that they took advantage of the capabilities of the internet. CBMS oversaw nineteen NSF/CBMS Regional Research Conferences, run under the old arrangement, over the three summers 2017–2019. See https://www.cbmsweb.org/regional-conferences/past-conferences/ for the descriptions.
The changes that that were in the new proposal can be found in “Fifty Years of CBMS Regional Conferences”, published in the January, 2019 Notices. At the same time, thanks to tremendous work by Kelly, we succeeded in re-establishing CBMS as an approved grant recipient. The entire process was exceedingly complex, and it took two full years before all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed. The new requirements for the regional conferences were to go into effect with the summer 2020 conferences. All six of those conferences were held over to summer 2021, one of which was actually held in 2021. The remaining five are now scheduled for 2022, joined by the new awardees for 2022.
The other issue that needed immediate attention when I took over was to update the CBMS website (cbmsweb.org). Again, it was Kelly who accomplished this.
One effect of the changes to the NSF/CBMS Regional Research Conferences was that the lecturers would no longer receive a $5000 honorarium for producing a monograph based on their lectures. Instead, they would receive $3000 for making available extensive online materials that would begin to approximate a full monograph. At the same time, they were encouraged to produce a monograph in the CBMS series with AMS, SIAM, or IMS/ASA for which they would receive royalties from whichever society published it. I alerted all lecturers who within the past five years had promised to submit a monograph and warned them that the offer of the $5000 honorarium would expire at the end of 2019. This produced a flurry of work. A total of 21 monographs came in under the deadline and have since been published: twelve with AMS, eight with SIAM, and one with IMS/ASA. Because of the disruption due to COVID-19, there are no complete manuscripts that have been submitted under the new arrangements, but I know of two lecturers who are working on their monographs.
Danny Goroff and Hal Salzman at the 2017 Research Advisory Group
The other major effort in my first year was the Research Advisory Group that met at the MAA Carriage House on August 26, 2017. Co-sponsored with TPSE, it included representatives from nine of the member societies as well as the Charles A. Dana Center, the American Institute for Research, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, and the Sloan Foundation. The meeting identified three areas for work:
Math in the workplace. What problems are we trying to solve where data would be useful and we don’t already know the answers? How can we educate employers about what the mathematical community believes it is contributing and why it is important? How can we put in place the mechanisms that allow us to work on a long timeline for the continuous improvement of the mathematical preparation of critical constituencies?
Barriers and accelerators. What are the goals for our students? How do we define success? How do we measure success? What trusted resources are available for recognizing barriers and accelerators? How can we make these resources more widely available?
The role of the CBMS societies. How can the CBMS societies best meet emerging problems? How do we strengthen the improvement infrastructure of our profession? What are the timely problems that we face that require activating this infrastructure? How do we surface them quickly enough? What are the information needs of the profession to support hypothesis generation and creative R&D work? How do we nurture and feed this improvement infrastructure? How do we support it? How do we review and improve it? How do we identify the problems and practices that are worthy of solution? What information and data structures do we need?
The full report of the meeting can be found at https://www.cbmsweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RAG-Report.pdf. While there was no explicit follow-up to this meeting, these concerns have been reflected in the interest group meetings that were launched virtually in 2021.
In 2018 attention shifted to a Forum that would bring together state leadership teams of six to eight individuals representing state-level policy leaders in mathematics education for K-12, two-year college, and public university systems to work on issues of the transition from high school to college mathematics. Working with the Dana Center, we spent the spring and summer clarifying the intent and scope of the gathering, exploring funding options, and getting the word out through our member societies and other professional organizations. In fall 2018 we put out a call for applications to participate. Thirty-two states applied from which we chose twenty-three that we could accommodate.
The 2019 Forum on Preparing Students for the Future
The first Forum, Preparing Students for the Future, was held in May 2019 with funding from Achieve, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Charles A. Dana Center, the National Science Foundation, Pearson, the Teagle Foundation, and Texas Instruments. It focused on three areas:
Responding to the changing role of mathematics in the economy. The avalanche of data across all fields is spurring exciting and important work in mathematics. The transition years of grades 11–14 are critical for building the foundations for a workforce that can meet the evolving needs of the new economy.
Ensuring college readiness today and tomorrow. High school and college mathematics educators are working collaboratively on this issue, recognizing the need for college-ready students, but also student-ready colleges. CBMS societies acknowledge the need for a broader understanding of how mathematics is and will be used, encompassing modeling, statistics, and data science. They also understand the need for active learning approaches that promote problem solving abilities and higher order thinking.
Articulating the mathematical pathways that will serve all students. Changes in demographics, economic demands, and the mathematical sciences themselves are forcing reconsideration of the pathways into and through college-level mathematics. It is necessary to evaluate whether the course structures now in place still serve their intended purpose and to understand the alternatives that are available.
The state leadership teams were charged with returning home with a mission to form a larger state-based working group that over the following 18 months would identify their state’s most pressing problems around the transition from high school to college mathematics and begin to formulate policy recommendations. During this period, a team from the Dana Center maintained regular contact, fostering ties between state teams facing similar problems and monitoring their progress.
The intent was to bring these leadership teams back together in October 2020, which obviously was impossible because of the shutdown due to the pandemic. In its place, we ran a series of three online afternoon gatherings around the theme Supporting State Efforts for Mathematics Alignment, with ample opportunities for sharing progress and issues faced, many of which now revolved around dealing with the pandemic.
It was originally envisioned that by the time of the second forum there would be sufficient momentum among the state teams that direct involvement by CBMS would no longer be needed. But because of the complications and delays created by the pandemic and the inability to physically come together, it was decided to continue this work to a third Forum, now scheduled for May 2022 when it is sincerely hoped it will be possible to hold such a large gathering of approximately 200 people.
The third Forum is entitled Struggles, Surprises, Setbacks, and Successes: Lessons Learned to Help Us Move Forward. It will include opportunities to share experiences from the past three years. We will be hearing from the Gates Foundation on their work on messaging to encourage public acceptance of reform efforts, especially around equity issues. There also will be examples of incorporation of data science into the mathematics curriculum across multiple grade levels and preparation of students for the workforce. Registration for this Forum will open in December.
In the spring of 2020 we had to scramble to convert the in-person Council meeting to an online gathering. By the time of the December meeting we had a much better idea of the benefits of connecting online. Recognizing that everyone was figuring out how to convert in-person meetings to virtual, we arranged for opportunities for both member societies and the mathematics institutes to share what had been tried and learned about offering virtual and hybrid meetings. A summary of the results is in Appendix D of the Agenda for the May 2021 meeting. The full set of responses is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N5stw1CBgseO0ju5qQZyBEIYvZMNjqjGTwpytbcAtuo/edit?usp=sharing
We also took advantage of Zoom to hold meetings with the leadership of each of our member societies to learn of their concerns and priorities. One common priority was the need to create a joint statement on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Tim Hendrix, Abbe Herzig, and Dave Kung created a preliminary version of such a statement for the May meeting. Representatives of the CBMS societies have continued to meet to refine this document, which I hope to see approved at the CBMS meeting on December 3.
In addition, our member societies identified three issues for ongoing virtual discussion:
Dealing with the effects of the COVID-19 shutdowns,
Developing the school to workforce pipeline, and
Establishing the role of Data Science in the mathematics curriculum.
Several virtual meetings have been held to discuss these issues. There will be reports at this December meeting with an opportunity to think about next steps.
Finally, I need to mention the CBMS quinquennial survey of departments in the mathematical sciences. Although these carry the CBMS label, my role has been merely advisory. Almost all of the work has been admirably handled by Ellen Kirkman, Rikki Blair, and Tom Barr. Tom runs the NSF grant that pays for this survey work, Rikki focuses on the two-year college portion of the survey, and Ellen is the lead. In the summer of 2020 we decided to postpone the survey that was scheduled for that fall, first because fall 2020 would be so atypical and second because we knew that chairs would be overwhelmed handling all of the changes and disruptions. Compliance would undoubtedly be very low. We decide to send out a very short survey to assess the effects of the pandemic.
The full report of the findings of the 2020 survey are at http://www.ams.org/profession/data/cbms-survey/cbms2020. A summary of the findings is in my Launchings article CBMS survey of Responses to Covid. Information on the 2021 survey can be found in the November 2021 Launchings: The 2021 CBMS Survey of Departments in the Mathematical Sciences.
Going forward, there is the immediate challenge of the third national Forum on the transition from high school to college mathematics to be held this coming May. In addition, serious thought will need to be given to determining how this work can be carried forward. States have benefited enormously from the opportunities CBMS has provided to share their struggles, surprises, setbacks, and successes. There should be a permanent mechanism for continuing this work. At the same time, it is necessary to extend this resource to most if not all state systems. The work to date has been time and labor intensive, spearheaded by people such as Lindsay Fitzpatrick at the Dana Center. Continuing and expanding it will required intentionality and resources.
I am disappointed that the Research Advisory Group, envisioned as a means of identifying and facilitating the collection of data and information needed to improve mathematics education, has not gone further. Some of this is being done at the state level. It would be good to find means of coordinating it nationally.
And I am greatly encouraged by the example of the small, targeted virtual meetings that were held this past year around issues of importance to subsets of our members. CBMS Council meetings have always been wonderful opportunities for society representatives to gather, build connections, and share concerns. But two one-day meetings a year is not sufficient to actually accomplish very much. The virtual meetings hold out the promise of on-going dialog around issues of shared interest. I believe that they can contribute a great deal of value to our members.
I owe a tremendous debt to the many people with whom I have worked, especially the three CBMS Chairs during my tenure: Brit Kirwan who did so much to help me come up to speed; Diane Briars whose energy, contacts, and breadth of knowledge across the spectrum of issues in mathematics education have been essential in moving this organization forward; and Dave Levermore who provided the insights into how to take advantage of online meetings to broaden the ability of CBMS to meet the needs of our members. I owe a great debt to Uri Treisman and his team at the Dana Center. Uri is a fount of important, workable ideas for advancing mathematics education, and his team has been essential in bringing the CBMS Forums to fruition.
Through all of my five years, Charlie Steinhorn as Secretary-Treasurer has been a constant source of support and good ideas. I have also been supported by the many other people who have served on the Executive Committee, especially Joan Ferrini-Mundy, the current Chair-Elect, but also the members-at-large: Shelly Jones, Michael Steele, Edray Goins, Deanna Haunsperger, Christine Thomas, John Staley, and Kristin Lauter.
I leave this position with some regret. I have learned a lot, and the work has been very fulfilling.
Download the list of all past Launchings columns, dating back to 2005, with links to each column.