November 15, 2006--The New-New Math

Since New Math didn’t work, it’s time for New-New Math. Concern that kids in the U.S. continue to lag in math achievement, barely 51 percent of 10th graders were tested to be proficient and, worse, that students all around the globe are surpassing our children in math skills has again prompted a debate about what to do.

When we discovered a math gap two decades ago, we asked the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) to come up with new standards, new frameworks, new approaches, and new tests. Thus was born the New Math. Well, it appears that that hasn’t worked out very well, so what are we doing this time? We're going back to the Council to give them a second chance to get it right! Or wrong.

I can barely contain my sputtering. Why, why would we turn to those very same folks who brought about this disaster? Why would you ask those who got you lost to get you back on the right path?

Let me do a little CSI work to see how we got into this mess and suggest what might be a sane way to get out of it.

The problem is summed up in an experience recently recounted by a parent in NYC who went to her 6th grader’s school to ask why, though her daughter was a A-plus student, she didn’t know how to do long division. The mother was told that’s because “We don’t teach long division; it stifles creativity.” (See NY Times story linked below.)

So much of recent educational theory centers on encouraging school children to be creative. This is based on the Rousseauian notion that children are inherently “noble,” that that nobility is impeached by institutions, including schools; and thus what schools should do should foster the release of a child’s inner “knowledge” and spirit.

Following this Romantic ideal, the New Math of the 1980s and 90s had students exploring and “discovering” their own solutions to problems. Getting things right was deemphasized in favor of students constructing their own problem-solving strategies. In fact, the very notion of “rightness” was called into question.

But there is a problem with this—the very foundation of this sort of Progressive Education, exemplified by the Old-New Math, rests on an unproven hypothesis. In fact, it may very well be worse than that--a false hypothesis.

So where does that leave us? Back to the future. Back to a version of the Basics, with the NCTM again in the lead. Forget creativity, now they want kids to acquire “quick recall” of multiplication and division and also how to calculate, remember this, the area of two-dimensional shapes. You know, “Width times height equals the area of a rectangle.”

I have a better idea—fire the NCTM altogether and take a look at how they teach math in Singapore. I’m quite serious—they’ve got it figured out there. And though you can get ten lashes with a whip for chewing gum in public, kids in Singapore are beating the socks off our kids in math.