Are our math educators really this clueless?

The National Mathematics Advisory Panel releases its findings on math education in the US today – the result of a 2-year evaluation of our K-12 educational system. An article in the Washington Post talks about the results of the study.

Well, sort of. In fact the article says very little, but that may not be the writer’s fault. After all, when key conclusions of the study include gems like this, you don’t have much to work with:

The group also weighed in on the long-running math wars, pitting traditionalists, who favor a focus on memorization and drilling, against those who argue it’s better to emphasize concepts and allow students to make connections on their own. Students need to know math facts and have automatic recall, Faulkner said, but they also need “some element of discovery.”

“I think this panel has gradually evolved to the view that most members believe that most effective teachers draw from both philosophies at different times,” he said.

A bold, decisive, insightful statement? Not so much. If this wishy-washy sort of placation passes for analysis and criticism in the Academy, then we should have just saved the money.

New Math vs. Ancient Issues. But it’s really worse than that. I remember the introduction of “New Math” as a kid in the late 60′s. It was designed to replace the stodgy old “memorization and drilling” math with an enlightened approach of teaching the principles and concepts. There was controversy at the time, with traditionalists claiming that the old system wasn’t particularly broken, and that only through repetition could confidence, speed and understanding be built up. That was certainly true in my case – hearing the principles and concepts did little for my understanding, but working through a bunch of problems crystallized the approach, and eventually I saw the patterns of the principles that underlay the rote.

But the real point is that this controversy is 40 freaking years old. Given all the self-proclaimed prowess of the education mafia, shouldn’t we have a better answer by now? Shouldn’t we know, based on quantitative studies, which sort of approaches work with which sorts of subjects and which sorts of students? After 40 years of experimentation and experience, I would have hoped for a better answer than, “well they both kinda work.”

Focusing the Curriculum: Is it Optimization of Resources, or Just Surrender? Back to the WaPo article. That was pretty much the entirety of the recommendations, though the panel also mentioned a need to focus on essential skills. That’s great, but considering the blowback that NCLB is already getting for focusing on the 3 R’s, trimming the curriculum down further is unlikely to make educators happy. Not to mention that with modern educational theories and tools, one would hope that we were teaching more effectively, so that we could expand the curriculum, not shrink it.

Read in its entirety, the article serves as call for homeschooling, since it pretty much undermines any confidence you may have had in the competence and comprehension of the nation’s leading educators. And of course no article or study on education would be complete without dredging up the usual demons:

“If we pay attention to the recommendations . . . we’re going to see some very successful results,” said Deputy Education Secretary Raymond Simon. “We have a culture to change in this country. A culture that for too long has assumed that certain children wouldn’t do well in math and science. We’ve assumed that girls wouldn’t do well in math, and that children of color, poor kids, kids whose parents didn’t do well when they were in school. This report will go a long way toward changing those attitudes.”

Brilliant. I guess our Deputy Education Secretary missed the news reports saying that the number of women in science and engineering passed the number of men 8 years ago. He also forgot to explain how this pernicious prejudice relates to our current inability to educate white males. He’s also either very naive or very cynical in telling us that this report will change anything. We were well aware of minority/women’s issues when I was an undergraduate more than 25 years ago. Claiming that this report will miraculously change attitudes where policies, social pressures, and educating the last 3 generations under enlightened teachers have all failed is wishful thinking at best.

An Aside. I sat in a seminar at a local university recently, where they were lamenting the decline in engineering enrollments, and saying that their great hope was in attracting more women and minorities to the field. That’s great, but I was appalled that they showed no concern at all for the demographic they were losing. When you’re failing to pull in the white males who used to form the core demographic of the profession, you should consider that maybe, just maybe, the system isn’t only failing women and minorities. And maybe, just maybe, you should plug the leaks in your core demographic before you abandon them and start courting other demographics to replace them.