Jaime Escalante at the calculus blackboard
In a previous Founders Broadsheet we addressed the question of why so many US students were never properly taught how to read, crippling their lifelong academic and intellectual development. An even larger number of US high school graduates– perhaps more than 95 percent — never receive an adequate mathematics education during their kindergarten-through-12th (K-12) grade years. This makes it virtually impossible for them to successfully complete a college science major.
US secondary school math scores have not only not been improving in recent years, they’ve been measurably declining. The reason for this decline is not really a mystery to any knowledgeable mathematician who has investigated this problem ever since the shock to US education when the Soviet Union beat the US into space with Sputnik. The reforms proposed — the New Math and Common Core, to name the two best known to the public — shared a common flaw. They just weren’t taking US students far enough and deep enough into the mathematical knowledge needed to understand modern science. For this, a solid foundation in calculus and statistics is desirable and necessary.
In the case of the New Math, the emphasis was placed on students discovering theorems on their own. This time-consuming pedagogy greatly limited how much math that students were able to learn by the time they graduated. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) itself, unfortunately, promoted this self-defeating pedagogy. An extensive critique of NCTM policies may be found in the web pages of Ralph Raimi.
In the case of Common Core, the math curriculum milestones for each grade level were defined downward, supposedly to make them achievable for the middle tier of students headed for community colleges or non-competitive four-year colleges — and their not-so-well-educated math teachers. An extensive critique of Common Core’s math failings may be found in the writings of R. James Milgram, for example here and here.
University science professors were not consulted, and their recommendations for successful pursuit of science majors were ignored.
High school graduates in Singapore and other East Asian and European high-achievement elementary and secondary school math programs have two- to three-years more math under their belts than US high school graduates. This is an achievement that can’t be matched by delaying serious math instruction to the high school years and then providing Advanced Placement (AP) calculus courses. The mathematics acceleration has to be built into the entire K-12 mathematics curriculum.
Secondly, prospective teachers of mathematics need to be trained at the college level by mathematicians at the PhD level, not teachers with doctor-of-education degrees. If the K-12 teachers haven’t studied mathematics rigorously in college, how are they going to be able to teach their students effectively in accelerated math programs?
A high-school graduation requirement of calculus and statistics shouldn’t be thought of as something just for students thinking of preparing for science majors. Both mathematical domains are increasingly required for research in the humanities and social sciences. Furthermore, the understanding of modern science — which means its underlying mathematics — is an essential aspect of a citizen’s education. Many of the follies of government environmental policy would be unlikely to survive if the voting population better understood the flawed science behind these policies.
There is also a national defense aspect to the matter. China under President Xi Jinping is seeking to turn mathematics into a strategic weapon against the free nations of the West. One symptom of this may be seen in the article “China’s brightest children are being recruited to develop AI ‘killer bots’.”
And there is also a US corporate aspect. One of the reasons that Amazon is reportedly seeking to multiply its corporate headquarters is the scarcity of math-and-technology skilled personnel in their present Seattle headquarters, where they must compete with Microsoft for the same skilled personnel.
Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet (“Pacific allies sign major free trade pact without US”)
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