I Admit It. I Was Wrong

I have been convinced for years that the use of the constructivist math curricula (often called NSF First Generation because the NSF sent many millions for their development to ed school professors and researchers) were the biggest problem in low math achievement results among American students. Recent events now cause me to demote the poor curricula problem, while still needing urgent attention, to second place. What has displaced curriculum as the most important problem to solve if we desire to stop spinning our wheels and really improve math achievement among American students?

First, let me describe some interactions with a large local school district over the math achievement problem. Studying the district’s achievement results for grades 3 through 10 on the state achievement tests, shows the scope of the problem. At third grade the majority of students score proficient or better. At tenth grade the majority of students score below proficient. This indicates that on average students progress less than a year in achievement for every year spent in school. In fact the 10th grade proficient or better percentage for 2009 testing for this district was in the low thirty percent range. This correlates well with the high college (both 2-year and 4-year) remediation rates which are in ranges from just under 22% to 52% across the district’s large high schools. The data show clearly that the students from this district are not being adequately prepared in math for the increasingly global competition for well-paying “knowledge jobs.”

Another concerned person and I met twice with the district’s central office staff in charge of curricula and math specialists tasked to support the math teaching process for elementary and middle/high schools. We reached an impasse when we stated that the curricula being used (Everyday Math being the prime example) were the cause of the problem and the central office folk said the curricula had no effect. We were amazed. Since then I have met a couple of more times with central office staff and have been pushing the idea that the math subject knowledge of teachers (especially elementary level) needed to be improved through additional training for the teachers.
Soon after that the “math team” made a presentation to the board of education for the district. One slide they showed compared annual growth rates in achievement among the 30-plus elementary schools in the district versus 6 different curricula being used. Their study concluded that there was no statistically significant difference which supported the assertion of the people in our first meeting telling us that the curriculum made no difference in achievement. Thus, it became time to face that something besides curriculum was masking the deficiency of curricula which is so apparent to those who understand math and what foundational skills must be learned in elementary grades to prepare students for success in middle and high school.

After more research, I have concluded that the poor level of math knowledge among teachers is far and away the biggest contributor to poor math achievement of their students. In retrospect this should have been no surprise to me. I had read Rita Kramer’s “Ed School Follies” which emphasized the fact that education schools focus on process (pedagogy) training to the effective exclusion of teaching subject knowledge with even minimal rigor. David Klein’s “A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century” which also makes the point that education schools are infected with the progressive attitudes emphasizing process, socializing students to be “good (pliable) citizens” and de-emphasizing content. E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his “The Knowledge Deficit” again points out that the ed schools de-emphasize knowledge (content) in favor of constructivist (ex. Whole Language & Everyday Math) approaches which have proven to be scientifically ineffective, a fact he labels as of little importance among ed school faculties who won’t change even in the face of contrary research findings.

While I had read some summary representations of Liping Ma’s research on the subject knowledge of elementary math teachers, I did not read her book describing her research, “Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics,” until recently. She created a comparison study of teachers from China and from the U.S. The Chinese teachers had much less formal education than their American counterparts. The Chinese system for elementary teachers is to take those with a ninth grade education and give them 2 to 3 years of “normal school” training beyond ninth grade to qualify to become teachers. The U.S. participants in her study had from 4 to 6 years beyond their high school graduation.

Yet, in spite of that, U.S. students consistently score significantly lower on international math achievement comparisons. Ma used Deborah Ball’s TELT model (Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study) to assess the math knowledge of each teacher in the study. She found;

• “Even expert [U.S.] teachers, experienced teachers who were mathematically confident, and teachers who actively participated in current mathematics teaching reform did not seem to have a thorough knowledge of the mathematics taught in elementary school.”

• Teachers’ subject knowledge correlated very well with their student’s achievement.

• Number of math courses taken in college did not.

What are we to conclude from this review of the research and the international achievement testing results?

• Seat time in education school classes does not result in adequate subject knowledge for the teachers.

• If we desire to improve math achievement, we must provide subject knowledge training for the existing cadre of teachers. This will need to take the place of the ubiquitous teaching of more pedagogy processes which are already overdone in education schools. Only by teaching subject knowledge can balance be brought to the teachers’ skill sets.

• Starting with elementary teachers is where the most leverage exists. This is because if children don’t get a rigorous foundation in elementary grades they are too far behind to catch up in the middle and high school class work.

“Cultures that are open and willing to change have a huge advantage in the world,” said Jerry Rao, the MphasiS CEO who heads the Indian high-tech trade association. “You have to have a strong culture, but also the openness to adapt and adopt from others. The cultural exclusivists have a real disadvantage. Exclusivity is a dangerous thing. Openness is critical because you start tending to respect people for their talent and abilities. You are dealing with people on the basis of talent—not race or ethnicity—and that changes, subtly over time your whole view of human beings, if you are in this talent-based and performance-based world rather than the background-based world.” From The World is Flat by Tom Friedman.

You may ask what does the quote above have to do with our education problems? Our education fiefdom is the most exclusive of exclusive cultures. It is a world in which “background is king.” That is, people are paid more for degrees, getting a year older and classes, not their performance level. A multitude of researchers have found in study after study that the education school degrees from undergraduate to doctoral level are essentially worthless for the task at hand. The above quote makes the point that the world is becoming more and more a meritocracy where we will be valued for the quality of our output not our backgrounds; degrees, good-old-boy connections, pedigrees, etc.

Our educators’ refusal to change from a background supreme culture to a results supreme culture will continue harming out kids until the public becomes more knowledgeable and motivated to require that it change. For now, it looks as if when that time of realization comes we will likely be in a lower and lower standard of living “death spiral” which will be very difficult to overcome because the root cause was ignored for decades. Reality can be a scary thing but facing it is foundational to transforming performance in a positive way.