Talk Versus Reality

Last week my son came home and told me that a teacher asked him how to figure out percentage. The question was something like: What percentage is 18 of 156. This wasn't a math teacher. It was a teacher who was monitoring a sixth grade make-up test for Everyday Math. I guess after the test the kids were asking her how to solve it. My son (who happened to be in the room due to his odd schedule) explained it to them. I gave him an incredulous look and he said: "yup". He said that the kids don't like their regular math teacher. They just doodle in class.

Over the last 8 years, I've realized that there are two things happening in math education: talk and reality. The talk is about concepts like discovery and deep understanding. The reality is about basic competence and just getting the job done. In fifth grade, my son's Everyday Math teacher didn't get to 35 percent of the material. This wasn't carefully selected. She just stopped when the school year ended. To her credit, she did work hard to fix the basic mastery problems the kids came with. She had after-school help sessions. When I talked with her, she told me that she was not happy about how the kids got to her class in the first place, but she felt that she couldn't raise the issue. I did. It didn't seem to matter.

[I never did get a good answer to this. The best I can figure is that the school thinks the onus is on the kids and that with EM, mastery will eventually be achieved. If not, it's the student's fault. That's basically what the curriculum head told me. "If a student struggles with math for several years in a row, then you can't blame the curriculum." She also said that she liked Singapore Math, but EM was a better choice for their "mix" of kids. (private school)]

One of the problems is that Everyday Math allows this to happen on purpose. But it's more than that. Teachers and schools know that you can't put off mastery that long, but they don't all get together to fix it. I'm not talking about doing hundreds of long division problems. I'm talking about the real basics. At that school, we had a parent-teacher meeting specifically about Everyday Math. The discussion was at the "talk" level. Most focused on the need for balance and there was a lot of agreement. Almost. I wanted to talk about details, but that wasn't appropriate for the meeting. So what changed? Almost nothing. They ended up dumping EM in sixth grade and went to something that aligned more with the algebra series they used. They still didn't fix the mastery problem. I've mentioned before that even if I could get our schools to use Singapore Math, they would still allow kids to get to fifth grade not knowing their times table.

The following comments are from a recent tri-state meeting of state officials and educators to discuss bad math scores:

" ... the system and not students are to blame for low math scores ..."

"Only 22 percent of high school students achieved proficient math scores ..."

"The teachers put the test together and they're all satisfied that it's a good test..."

"Have we not got our curriculums aligned properly?" [governor]

"Educators are now trying to make sure students are actually being taught what they're being tested on."

"Another goal is to make sure all kids are given a chance to learn higher levels of math."


This has nothing do do with balance, discovery, or deep understanding. It's competence. The best they can do is to blame alignment. It's much more than that, and I'm not optimistic.