American Math: What Happened?

American primary and secondary students are among the worst performers in mathematics in the developed and rapidly developing world. “Roughly half a million students in 65 nations and educational systems representing 80 percent of the global economy took part in the 2012 edition of PISA, which is coordinated by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. The numbers are even more sobering when compared among only the 34 OECD countries. The United States ranked 26th in math — trailing nations such as the Slovakia, Portugal and Russia.” NBC News, December 3, 2013. 26^th out of 34? It gets much worse when the rest of the world is added in.

This has happened in a universe where American companies cannot find sufficient engineers, mathematicians, scientists and financial specialist to fill these high profile jobs? How do we expect the United States to grow its economy and provide high-paying jobs in a global marketplace where our workers are becoming less competitive every day?! We used to be first in this category, but this seems to have been an accident of having very little damage from WWI and WWII, simply by having modern schools with sufficient money to teach reasonably. When the rest of the world built new classrooms, Europe and vast parts of Asia prioritized math and science… and zoomed past us in quality and numbers.

Here’s the irony. American universities and educational experts absolutely created the best math-teaching methodologies in the world. The problem is that the rest of the world copied and implemented these structures, while the American educational system simply ignored these techniques and conducted business as usual. We were particularly prolific in creating new math teaching systems in the 1980s.

These math excellence programs, invented by U.S. scholars, encouraged “passionate discussions among children so they would come to uncover math’s procedures, properties and proofs for themselves. One day, for example, the young students would derive the formula for finding the area of a rectangle; the next, they would use what they learned to do the same for parallelograms. Taught this new way, math itself seemed transformed. It was not dull misery but challenging, stimulating and even fun.” New York Times Magazine, July 23^rd. The Japanese, among many, embraced the system entirely and rocketed up their math proficiency scores, leaving American kids in the dust.

“It wasn’t the first time that Americans had dreamed up a better way to teach math and then failed to implement it. The same pattern played out in the 1960s, when schools gripped by a post-Sputnik inferiority complex unveiled an ambitious ‘new math,’ only to find, a few years later, that nothing actually changed. In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices.” NY Times Magazine.

Not only are the international standards – many created in the U.S. but not implemented here – more rigorous than our own, not only are students prioritized in these essential skills, but teachers are revered, held in high esteem and paid well. There is no “if you can’t do, then teach” mantra in these successful overseas programs.

With powerful teachers unions sheltering mediocre or even down and dirty terrible teachers, these labor organizations are helping denigrate the image of American teachers, insuring a flow of subpar professionals charged with guaranteeing our future. They are aided by even lower-par elected representatives, undoubtedly themselves products of these inferior American schools, whose commitment is to blind budget-cutting in the name of “get me elected and damned the future of my country” deficit “responsibility.” Yes the same crusaders who fight for military money and more American might to be deployed in losing battles where Americans are simply not wanted… don’t care about our children or our future.

Further, American teaching degrees are often awarded by the lowest-performing colleges in our nation. To make matters much worse, experts in various fields are often excluded from teaching their valuable skillsets because they lack the formulaic “teaching credentials” required by virtually all public school districts, even though they might be qualified to teach at a college level.

“Today the frustrating descent from good intentions to tears is playing out once again, as states across the country carry out the latest wave of math reforms: the Common Core. A new set of academic standards developed to replace states’ individually designed learning goals, the Common Core math standards are like earlier math reforms, only further refined and more ambitious. Whereas previous movements found teachers haphazardly, through organizations like [the 1980s-prolific National Council of Teachers of Mathematics - N.C.T.M.] math-teacher group, the Common Core has a broader reach. A group of governors and education chiefs from 48 states initiated the writing of the standards, for both math and language arts, in 2009. The same year, the Obama administration encouraged the idea, making the adoption of rigorous ‘common standards’ a criterion for receiving a portion of the more than $4 billion in Race to the Top grants. Forty-three states have adopted the standards.

“The opportunity to change the way math is taught, as N.C.T.M. declared in its endorsement of the Common Core standards, is ‘unprecedented.’ And yet, once again, the reforms have arrived without any good system for helping teachers learn to teach them. Responding to a recent survey by Education Week, teachers said they had typically spent fewer than four days in Common Core training, and that included training for the language-arts standards as well as the math.” NY Times Magazine. It isn’t enough to talk about making a better America; we actually have to plan, work hard, and implement a systematic approach to reach our stated vital priorities.

I’m Peter Dekom, and no amount of sloganeering, myth-creation, or SuperPac messaging is going to make this a better country to live in without hard dollar investments and a restructuring of priorities and implementation efforts.