Adding up to Failure

Students today may know less mathematics than the pupils of any previous generation but they do feel better about it. Unfortunately, it is hard to build a bridge with high self-esteem.

“There are some worrisome trends in the United States with respect to our global share of science, technology, engineering and mathematics expertise,” Robert J. Herbold [pictured], a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said last year. “Our share of this expertise is decreasing significantly, both at the bachelor’s and at the Ph. D. levels.”

Herbold, a former chief operating officer at Microsoft, spoke at a Hillsdale College seminar. In his talk, Herbold pointed out that China produces three times the number of engineers that the U. S. does.

Recent test scores of high school students do not offer much encouragement that this trend will reverse itself. In international comparisons, American high school students ranked 24th out of a 29-country survey compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The OECD results raise a question: What math are students learning? In many high schools the answer is, very little.

“The National Commission on Excellence has recommended that public high schools require three years of mathematics and two of science,” Herbold said at the Hillsdale seminar. “But only 45 percent of high schools meet that standard with respect to math, and only 24 with respect to science.” In turn, one-quarter of all high school students take math instruction from teachers who did not major in the subject in college, according to the National Commission on Math and Science Teaching for the 21st Century.

And even in lower grades, students are getting Math Lite. Federal government analyst Barry Garelick recalls the eye-opening experiences of tutoring math, his college major. “At the time I started tutoring, my daughter was in second grade,” Garelick remembers. “I was concerned that she was not learning her addition and subtraction facts.”

Garelick had reason to be concerned, as the former Senate researcher relates in Education Next, a quarterly journal. Both teacher and text left much to be desired, and learned, Garelick found.

“It used to be that if you missed a concept or method in math, then you were lost for the rest of the year,” one teacher told Garelick. “But the way we do it now, kids have a lot of ways to do things, like adding and subtracting, so that math topics from day to day aren’t dependent on kids mastering a previous lesson.”

She might have added that teachers are not held to the rigorous standards of days gone by either.

Garelick also found the textbook used in his school district (Fairfax, Va.) wanting, to say the least. “The authors of Everyday Math do not believe it is worth the time and effort to develop highly-efficient paper-and-pencil algorithms for all possible whole number, fractions and decimal division problems,” that text’s teacher reference manual reveals. “It is simply counterproductive to invest hours of precious class time on such algorithms.”

“The math payoff is not worth the cost, particularly beause quotients can eb found quickly and accurately with a calculator.”

In the American School Board Journal, James Furner and Mary Lou Duffy of Florida Atlantic University offer up an unusual collection of dos and don’ts for math teachers. “Teaching math only one way without taking into account students’ many ways of learning,” is bad, according to Furner and Duffy, as is “refusing to give low-scoring learners a second chance to learn.”

But exercises in self-esteem building, rather than computational skills get a green light from the two. “Allow students to use manipulatives to explain math concepts,” Furner and Duffy advise, and “Add journal writing and other opportunities for students to express their feelings about math.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.