Today New York Times carries an article on the failure of America’s public schools to teach math to kids. In schools that are among the most expensive in the world (for taxpayers), only 34 percent of 8th graders are “proficient” in math, and 39 percent of 4th graders. One major theme of the article is to beat the dead horse of the Bush Administration, by pointing out that No Child Left Behind does not seem to be working. The taxpayers are doing their part, paying up to $200,000 per year for each teacher (including pension obligations incurred). The students are doing their part, presumably, by showing up to school every day for 6 hours. If things aren’t working, it can only be due to incompetence on the part of the government at this fairly straightforward task.
Let’s contrast teaching K-8 math with managing health care. Instead of compliant 4th graders who show up to school every day, you have clever providers who will figure out where the gaps are in thousands of pages of federal rules and regulations and use those gaps to extract tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in extra profit. Instead of a fixed subject that has not changed substantially since the death of Brahmagupta in 668 A.D., health care presents a moving target of new procedures, drugs, tests, and fees. In the school system, the interests of the students and taxpayers are aligned. Both groups are better off if math is learned. In the health care system, there is a substantial moral hazard. If improved diabetes and heart disease therapies become available, people may indulge more in super sized meals.
You would think that the evidence of failure of trillions of dollars of tax money spent on math education in the period covered by the article (1996-present) would be a sobering reminder of the limits of government power, but none of the 50+ people commenting in the New York Times made that connection.
More: On my non-profit ideas page, I propose teaching math in the context of doing an engineering project, such as designing and building a bicycle.
Phil, you know this conclusion is weak: ” If things aren’t working, it can only be due to incompetence on the part of the government at this fairly straightforward task.”
A good English teacher, after reading that conclusion, would remark that it’s a bolt-on statement to a paragraph that did nothing to prove the “only” remark.
Spending time in a schoolroom, it takes only a few days to see the problem lies with parents, students, and motivation as much as, if not more than, government.
I agree with your theory of teaching math in the context of projects. A lot of data has shown the effectiveness of that technique.
“The same government that can’t teach math to kids is going to fix health care”
Not quite: the proposed health care legislation is primarily being driven by the federal government, while most schools are primarily controlled locally, either by cities or counties (although CA has an unusual amount of state control, IIRC). Conflating the various levels into “the government” isn’t really accurate.
Dan: The problem is the parents and students? We’re talking about test results from 4th graders. The parents send them off to school for 6 hours per day. The K-4 graders do what they’re told by government employees, no? How are the parents and students failing to do their part?
There is a huge correlation between parental involvement and child school results. Even in the best school districts. Here are my 2 cents about what can be done better.
1. Stop teaching math as facts. 4+4=8, 4×2=8. Strange both have same answers but who know why. Yes drilling is important but after the rules are understood. Problem is that a lot of the tests are for quick time so concepts are not measured. Example 4th grader test can be to do 40 simple additions or subtractions in 60seconds.
2. Make scores public. Shame the kids who get bad grades. In my school we had to go to the teacher desk when called to pick our tests when our names and grades were called. Sucks to be walking back with a bad grade with the whole class thinking “what a moron”.
@philg, I agree with @Dan 100%.
Have you seen how parents motivate their kids at sports? When their 10 year older, out of luck, hits the ball just right, they immediately see him / her as the next big sport celebrity. How about how parents cheer up their kids during the game, that they have to play hard and be strong? How about when parents spend the day with their kids watching them play in the cold or rain? How about staying up late with their kids to watch the game? Or spend the weekend teaching their kids the sport?
Now how many of those parents do the same with their kids homework, and studying habit? What motivation do they offer to their kids? Do they spend the time to check-up on their homework? Or what subject they learned, or didn’t? Or why they got home so late, and who they spent the day / night with? I know a number of high school teachers, past and present, and they all tell me the same story — each year, during 1-on-1 meeting of parents and teachers, not even 25% of the parents bother to show up or check with the school about their kids prograss!
George: The schools have the kids in their possession for 6 hours per day. Even without assigning any homework, it should be possible to teach someone to add and subtract with 6 hours/day of contact time. Home-schooled kids only work 2-4 hours per day and manage to test at grade level or above. You want the parents to check up on who their child spent the night with? We’re talking about 2nd graders here. A school system that costs taxpayers $12,000 to $25,000 per year per student and then says “but we need the parents to do all of the teaching” is not one that I’m enthusiastic about supporting. If it is the parents’ job to teach their kids basic math, why are we paying for school construction, school administrators, school teachers and the associated pensions?
If it is the parents’ job to teach their kids basic math, why are we paying for school construction, school administrators, school teachers and the associated pensions?
Because the otherwise unemployable need to get a job somewhere. Why not the schools?
The solution is really simple if we look at foreign schools and what they are doing with their students. Korea for example has the highest scores in standardized testing. Why? Not because students spend more time in the classroom but they spend more time outside of the classroom. “School” in Korea is from 7AM to 10PM.
I’m not suggesting that we should do the same with our students. However, students shouldn’t spend all their time after school playing video games or watching videos on YouTube. Who’s the blame for that? The answer is not Bush.
Everyone: Isn’t it a rather fundamental truth that there is no blanket solution?
You can’t generalize and say its the teachers, or its the parents, or its the students. In some cases very motivated students have a lot of difficulty excelling due to poor public education budgets. In 7th grade I was a ham radio nerd. I got to high school and found an oooold ham radio that used vacuum tubes in the electronics shop. The current teacher knew nothing about it. It turns out that the assistant principal had been an electronics teacher 20 years prior. He was also a ham radio guy. Everyone agreed that based upon my skill level compared to the rest of the class I should be able to repair the radio (dead tubes), test it, check the transmitter wave patterns, etc. The problem was there was no budget to do things like buy vacuum tubes or dummy load antennas. It was sad. I ended up scrounging parts from the community but it took forever and the year ran out before I got to do anything truly cool.
Conversely, I recently taught a bunch of high school freshman to make power points for 8 weeks. It was part of a university anthropology project on virtual museums. This school is in a downtrodden neighborhood and ranks 410 of 470 schools in the state of Wisconsin. 58% of their 10th graders are considered proficient at reading. This is actually pretty good because the district as a whole only has 41% of their 10th graders reading proficiently (Source ). One day after the students were particularly rowdy their full time teacher was crying after class. She sobbed “I don’t know whats wrong here! I’ve been teaching the same way for 25 years and I can’t connect with these kids!” My thought was well..your first problem is that you’ve been teaching the same way for 25 years! The 25 year old student TA didn’t have the same disciplinary issues she did. Nor did I, though I had it easy- these laptops were like magic to most of them. Clearly this is an example of a failure of the government employee.
In my group of kids, many did not do their homework. Most did not stay after school to use the labs to finish their projects. There was precious little dedication even though they seemed to really like their 40 minutes per day of class time. Unfortunately, 10-15 minutes of that time was spent quieting down, booting up and packing up for the next class. So really, 25-30 minutes of actual learning and problem solving and working with power point was going on. That’s not a lot of time at all. Is this a failure of the students? Of their parents for buying drugs instead of laptops and MS Office? Perhaps the government should consider the need for longer more intense study periods?
There are failures or sub optimal performance at all levels. I believe that fundamentally education is not a core value of the average citizen. Entitlement is a stronger value than ever though. Money can only make that problem worse. Finland just mandated free broadband to all of its citizens. The US can barely teach their kids how to make good use of it.
I’ve said this a million times: “I’ve seen public schools and I’ve seen public bathrooms. I don’t want to see public healthcare.”
A good read on the subject of what is wrong with math education is “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart. The pdf is available at http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
A quote from the essay: “Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is [a] nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soulcrushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”
Also, a brief summary of the book version of the essay, from Amazon.com:
“A brilliant research mathematician who has devoted his career to teaching kids reveals math to be creative and beautiful and rejects standard anxiety-producing teaching methods. Witty and accessible, Paul Lockhart’s controversial approach will provoke spirited debate among educators and parents alike and it will alter the way we think about math forever.”
@philg, I’m not defending the teachers, the quality of education or the cost, but I’m trying to point out that parents are the problem too. Parents have a big role in their kids’ education – they have to cheer up their kids at math as much as they do at sports. Teachers those days are taking on additional tasks larger than teaching; they are dealing with broken families and problematic kids even at young age – some 2nd graders come to school and they doze-off. It’s not the teachers fault that those kids are being sent to school without proper care.
At my son’s school, 8th grader now, many kids score an average of C or lower. Few already got detention because they have not done their homework. The school sends notes home and calls – thus, the parents know. And this is at a private school!
Just last week, there was a parents-teachers meeting (not 1-on-1) to discuss graduation and high school planning, less than 40% of the 8th grader parents show up (the same 2 years ago with my daughter)! How much more can a teacher do to “fix” (leave alone teach) those kids if the parents don’t care?
George: It isn’t fair to children or taxpayers to construct or accept a system in which someone gets educated if and only if his or her parents put in a lot of effort. We’re going to condemn a child to a life of poverty and waste $250,000 of taxpayer money warehousing him in school 6 hours/day for 12 years because his parents preferred to watch TV rather than meet with teachers? You have not advanced any compelling argument for why 15,000 hours of school is not sufficient to guarantee that each child is educated to his or her potential. You have simply asserted that 15,000 hours of education is inadequate unless a child’s parents also exert themselves.
Everyone who thinks that the parents are critical to the process… please read http://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised-Updated/dp/1439101655 (The Nurture Assumption, by Harris). The author reviews all of the nature/nurture studies that were done in the 20th Century and concludes that kids do often share some personality characteristics with their parents… because they share some genetics. Otherwise, the kids more or less ignore their parents and try to do things that will help them fit in with their peers. A parent’s main contribution to the kid’s environment is choosing a place to live (because there are different peer groups in different neighborhoods and towns).