Math Facts and Fictional Outcomes – River Forest ‘Investigates’
- The E3 Group
- 21 minutes ago
- 4 min read
It was economist Ronald H. Coase who said:
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”
An elementary math curriculum River Forest school officials believed would fix a problem with systemic racism undeniably widened the achievement gap, and somehow the district’s consultant concluded “the best guess is the effects [curriculum] were positive”.
Context is crucial. Beginning around 2015, Ralph Martire and other district leaders promoted major changes to curricula and instructional practices intended to benefit “black and brown” students. The district adopted more student-led instructional practices, de-tracked elementary math instruction, and dropped the traditional “teacher-to-student” methods that had previously earned blue ribbons.
Under the new pedagogy students would “help teach other students until all mastered the lesson” said Martire. At the time, curriculum chief Alison Hawley explained the philosophy this way:
“We want to make sure kids that go to this school are having one experience, and kids that go to this one are having a different one. We don’t want that, because it leads to uneven outcomes”.
Yet, achievement gaps widened over the next decade. According to Illinois State Board of Education data, now low-income students in River Forest trail non-low-income students in math proficiency by 58 percentage points, while Black students trail White students by 31 points.
The district discontinued separate math instruction for different ability levels and used ambiguous language and fear to do so. It went as far as banning elementary teachers from their usual classroom math-facts lessons on account of hurt feelings. You can’t make this stuff up.
Fake fairness was expensive and the education became inhospitable to the very people these “experts” said they were going to help.
Back to papering over bad math.
In 2013, Mathematica Policy Research led a large, randomized study across 12 districts and 100 schools titled:
That fourth curriculum was Investigations and one conclusion was:
“the student’s percentile rank would be 9 to 12 points higher if the school used Math Expressions or Saxon, instead of Investigations” page 60 of the full Mathmatica report.
River Forest replaced the Math Expressions curriculum with Investigations. The former uses a traditional “teacher to student” pathway for learning while the later uses a constructivist “between-students “or student-led pathway.
District communications at the time chided critics and avoided discussion of the existing Mathematica findings. Meanwhile, teachers were adapting to the debunked Lucy Calkins Units of Study literacy curriculum. Everything was changing.
Now it is April 21, 2026.
Consultant Duncan Chaplin presented a district-commissioned math curriculum evaluation to the board where an early “Summary of Findings” stated:
“Evidence not definitive but does suggest that both curricula helped” with both referring to curricula used in elementary and middle schools (Timestamp 44:10).
He acknowledged the decline in math performance between 2016 and 2019 in River Forest (blue) while the 108 other IL districts (red) held steady (chart below). Yet the underlying report repeatedly cautions the finding are “uncertain”, “not causal”, “indirect”, and “not statistically significant”.
The inability to perform more routine and reliable analysis stems from discontinuity in measures of school quality. First, Chaplin had to develop a scheme for predicting scale scores before 2022 based on ISBE proficiency bins, instead of using actual longitudinal student score data. Second, ISBE changed from ISAT to PARCC to IAR over the period in question and then lowered cut scores and reduced proficiency bins from 5 to 4 in 2025. Illinois politicians do not make school accountability easy and neither has district 90.
Further, the report contains a remarkable contradiction. When the analysis focuses only on grades 3 to 5, the grades using Investigations, its impact on math learning becomes slightly negative. Said a different way, only by assuming downstream or “carryover” effects in 6th to 8th grade could the positive “Summary of Finding” result. The broader public framing was more charitable than the underlying evidence would support.
He had tortured the data into giving “best guesses” and was left spit-balling on covid using the chart below. He said scores “didn’t fall as far” (2019 to 2021) compared to the others, but others had not experienced a stepwise math decline years before remote teaching.
The pattern matters.
He kept it positive for school officials saying River Forest had “recovered even more than comparison districts” after covid, another message not supported by the data.
Other districts experienced a sharp drop followed by recovery of about 50%. River Forest experienced a more gradual stepwise decline beginning around Martire’s implementation of the district’s new instructional approach. The difference between 2019 and 2021 in River Forest, the same covid impact, was not much different than lost math proficiency in any previous year.
Further, students in River Forest did not bounce back the way other districts did. Instead, the chart shows an incremental rise after a low point.
Covid had a measurable but much less important impact on learning compared to poor curriculum and instructional practices meant to equalize student outcome.
One unavoidable question remains.
Mathematica itself produced one of the most rigorous studies ever conducted on the Investigations curriculum. It found the Investigations curriculum underperformed the curriculum River Forest was already using.
How did a longtime Mathematica researcher evaluating that curriculum never engage with his own organization’s earlier findings?
Until recently, Chaplin spent two decades at Mathematica Policy Research working on program evaluation and school effectiveness research. The history makes this omission difficult to ignore.
To Chaplin’s credit, his last point may be the strongest argument for having engaged his services at all. River Forest now possesses a decade-long longitudinal dataset that allows the district’s instructional direction to be independently evaluated over time.
It is a savvy move by some board members anticipating that Illinois politicians are unlikely to reverse their practice of limiting accountability for school quality.
The harder question is whether district leadership is genuinely willing to follow where the evidence leads. School officials declined to comment.
Okay Last question….should publicly elected bodies be able to hire consultants? You be the judge.
Fake fairness did more than put River Forest in a fiscal pinch – it is HERE if you missed it.
It is E3, where equity still means fairness.
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