The Music Man

I love the musical, The Music Man, especially the songs—Gary, Indiana, Til There Was You, 76 Trombones. . . And the story has a nice fairytale sort of basis. You remember I am sure the part at the beginning where the anvil salesman says, “But he doesn’t know the territory.” He is talking about “Professor Harold Hill” the boys’ band salesman who goes from town to town selling instruments, uniforms and lessons for a nice price and then skips town before the lessons can be given. Why? Professor Hill knows nothing about music. When he is backed into a corner in River City, he comes up with the “think system” of learning music. And gee, it works for him in a magical fairytale sort of way to give the play a nice happy ending. You know, “and they all lived happily ever after.”

I haven’t seen band teachers in elementary schools using the think method. Or high school music teachers using the think system. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard of any music teacher using the think system. Wonder why? Could it be that it wouldn’t work and that is the reason they don’t use it? You see, music teachers are pretty unique people in the world of American education. They actually have to know something about music. They can’t fake it. You might ask, “Why is that unusual?” Good, I will tell you. Teachers who teach math, especially in elementary schools, don’t need to know math because the curricula used stress discovery instead of teaching. That is good for the teachers because they have very little math knowledge. Math teachers in middle and high school who have some math knowledge but most not a lot, are left to cope with trying to “catch kids up” who didn’t get the foundation they should have from their elementary schools. This is basically a hopeless task.

When you look at the tenth grade CSAP results for math you see that the results are poor to awful. That is, at the last testing point where we can see the culmination of all of the effort to teach math up to tenth grade we see that the schools have failed miserably. That is further confirmed by the high remediation rates for college freshmen in math. Oh, some schools get rated “excellent” on their state accountability reports because they are “graded on the curve” but they have numbers of proficient and advanced that are far less than the NCLB requirement of 100% by 2014. If you extrapolate the trend of math scores you will see that no one apparently takes the NCLB goal seriously. One district I looked at recently would need 95 years at the current rate of “improvement” to get tenth grade proficient and advanced to the 100% level. Is anyone that patient? I am not.

It is obvious that a massive change in how math is taught is required if we are serious about preparing our kids to compete in the global meritocracy. But, gee, that might be hard and educators have no interest in doing that. It might require too much work to really learn math and how to teach it. Perhaps the hardest task of all would be to work to be really competent in math so it could be taught by people who know it, not by people who emulate Professor Hill’s “Think System.”

Another question to ask? If you need to fly to Europe, would you want a pilot who was taught by the “discovery” system and graduated because it was the school's policy to let no one fail? Or would you rather have one taught by a hard-nosed instructor who had years of experience as a pilot and really high expectations? Yes, I agree.

Lest you think this is only a math problem, it isn’t. While the CSAP results look better for reading than they do for math, on their own they are also unacceptable. It is time to realize that the status quo is not working and won’t work, no matter how much taxpayer money is thrown at the problem. We have to face reality and restructure how we teach our kids and it needs to happen now. Otherwise, our kids will be in such a deep hole competitively that they will face bleak futures compared to what they should be able to achieve if reality were able to penetrate the education fiefdom.