Good News about American Education?

A group called the Center on Education Policy has actually issued an upbeat report about education in the United States. How? By downplaying test results.

Entitled “Do You Know The Latest Good News About American Education?,” the 48-page report devotes 16 pages to student achievement. Even these accomplishments may be a bit overstated. For example, SAT scores have gone up, as the study points out, but students taking the exam are now required to use calculators on the Math portions of the test. Also, the College Board, which designs the test, added about 100 points to the scores more than a decade ago.

In fact, if you start looking at any “student achievements” locally, the news gets downright depressing. “In 2004, about half of Jersey City’s public school students taking the Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment failed the test’s language arts and math sections,” the Center for Policy Research of New Jersey points out. “Nearly 60 percent of the high schoolers failed the math portion of the High School Proficiency Assessment.”

“In three of Jersey City’s six high schools, more than half of the seniors were unable to pass the HSPA,” the Center reports. “Of those seniors who failed the HSPA, most graduated under the Strategic Review Assessment, a process that has been criticized for its lack of academic rigor.”

Against this backdrop, the notions of some well-placed, influential educators seem curious. For example, there is the research of Edward B. Burger, professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and Michael Starbird, distinguished teaching professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“After we see a pattern on a pine cone, just a few easy steps take us to the discovery of a number pattern that has an organic life of its own and expresses itself in paintings, architecture and music,” they write in Coincidences, Chaos and All That Math Jazz (W. W. Norton).

“In our experience of presenting this material, people respond, ‘I love this stuff. But where’s the math?,’” the authors concede. “What we present may not resemble math because we avoid the cryptic equations, formulas, and graphs that many people have come to know and fear as mathematics.”

“Indeed, those symbols are the memorable icons of an often-forbidding foreign language of mathematical jargon, but it’s not the only language of mathematics, and it does not reside at the center of its subject.”

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