Common Car, Common Core: Part 2 – Math Curriculum The United States outspends all other countries on K-12 education, roughly $12,000 per pupil per year. Yet the results are poor, with US students ranking 17th among developed nations. The California government spends roughly half its total budget on education, with comparably poor results. Here in Palos Verdes residents pay Mercedes-level taxes for a Chevy-level public school education. From rough estimates I figure that Palos Verdes residents pay something like $500 million in total state taxes. In return we receive less than $100 million to fund our K-12 schools. PV taxpayers are paying more than their fair share. But it’s not the funding level that concerns me; we should be able to educate our kids on $10,000 each per year. I am concerned about the quality of the education they are receiving. Still, our kids do rather well because of personal drive and intelligence, parental support and expensive tutors, despite the mediocre quality of the delivered education. What can be done to improve the return on investment? I looked briefly at PV schools in the June 17 post on “Rational Education Reform.” That focused mostly on the curriculum. I’ll expand on the math curriculum here, cover ELA in the next post and then teacher quality. US math education has been a shambles since the late 1960s when my daughter was forced to study “New Math”- a response to the Sputnik crisis. Isaac Newton didn’t need new math, he invented math. Generations of American students, including my own, did not need new math. Suddenly my daughter was instructed in sets and groups and Boolean algebra, but she was not required to memorize the multiplication tables. In 1973, Morris Kline published his critical book Why Johnny Cant Add: the Failure of the New Math, and new math was dead. Unfortunately it was too late for my daughter. More unfortunate, still, is the fact that bad ideas in education never seem to die. Before long there was inquiry-based “reform math” in which students are exposed to real-world problems supposedly to help them develop number fluency, reasoning, and problem-solving skills. Conceptual understanding is the primary goal; computational skills and algorithmic fluency are expected to follow later, if at all. Generally, scientists, engineers and mathematicians have supported the traditional approach, while math educators supported reform math. The “math wars” persist to this day. In Palos Verdes we use the “Everyday Math” reform program; it is deficient in many ways. Rather than the traditional linear sequence, it employs a spiral approach that leaves topics before they are mastered and revisits them over the years. Many kids never learn the basics. Then there is the extra time spent learning useless techniques. One third grade student showed me three ways to multiply numbers, only one of which I knew despite 18 years of math training on my way to a PhD in theoretical physics. The traditional algorithm was taught last but the student was required to know all three. What a waste of time and effort! Common Core will make it worse. Here, for example, is the Core way of solving even the simplest problems: Problem: There are 74 dogs in the dog park. Some more dogs show up. Now there are 131 dogs in the park. How many more dogs showed up? My grandkids can do this one in their heads. The precocious one even noticed a flaw in the problem statement: Did any dogs leave the park before the second headcount? But the Common Core requires an eight step approach: 1. Make sense of problem solving and persevere in solving them 2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively 3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others 4. Model with mathematics 74 +__ = 131 or 131 – 74 = __. 5. Use appropriate tools strategically 6. Attend to precision 7. Look for and make use of structure 8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning Only the 4th step is really needed. The rest are useless and confusing, even for parents. This is not math, it is nonsense. As I’ve said before, the only remedy is to return to the traditional, time tested methods of teaching math. The English curriculum is equally poor. I’ll cover that next.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:48:20 +0000
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