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The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82 percent more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word “multiculturalism” or “diversity,” while only three contain the word “math,” giving it a ratio of almost 16.
Adding Up To Failure
Two years ago I looked at every single book on sale in the education section of the NYU bookstore. There were 3 books on teaching math. Out of dozens.
Of course, given the kind of math textbook an ed school is likely to assign, it may be just as well.
5 comments:
Eduwonkette's guestblogger skoolboy says it more clearly: debunking debunks Greene & Shock's "research".
I decided to take a closer look at UCLA, which offers a Mathematics for Teaching B.S. degree. The preparation for the major requires seven courses in mathematics, and courses in physics, computing, and chemistry or biochemistry. The major itself requires 13 mathematics courses. (UCLA operates on a quarter system.) None of these courses is offered in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences, but I don't think you can say that the school doesn't care about the mathematical preparation of its prospective math teachers.
I'm not arguing that teacher education is uniformly good -- just that Greene & Schock's does not necessarily mean what they think it means.
Maybe that is why so many elementary school teachers do not do a great job of teaching math. My son's 5th grade teacher taught the class that 5/0 = 0. He tried to correct her and she would not listen. I had to go to school to straighten out the problem. And, she was considered the math expert.
I think that their methodology is willfully dishonest. Some courses (like Calculus I) are taken by a substantial percentage of the student body, and many sections are offered every term. Other courses (such as Advanced Mayan) have very small enrollments, and may be offered infrequently. It is misleading, to the point of fraud, to equate the two by counting course descriptions instead of enrollment.
Assuming I've read the article correctly, I disagree.
They're talking about courses on teaching method - right?
They're not looking about "content courses."
That's what I looked at in the NYU bookstore. I wasn't looking at how many English literature courses/math courss/biology courses, etc., a student in the NYU ed school is required to take.
I was looking at courses in the pedagogy of teaching math.
The bookstore had many books devoted to "literacy" and the teaching of literacy, as well as many first-person narratives of white teachers rescuing black and Hispanic children in public schools.
It had 3 books, all told, concerning the teaching of math.
Accrediting organizations also help perpetuate the emphasis on multiculturalism. In several states, law mandates that ed schools receive accreditation from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). NCATE, in turn, requires education programs to meet six standards, one entirely devoted to diversity, but none entirely devoted to ensuring proper math pedagogy.
Elsewhere in the article they do say "math" as opposed to "math pedagogy."
Nevertheless I assumed, perhaps mistakenly, that an article on ed school courses is talking about pedagogy as opposed to subject matter preparation per se.
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