Our standing in the world teaching our children the basics of mathematics and the sciences is not very good. The last time I noticed an article on this topic we were somewhere in or around 25th in successfully teaching them these two important topics.
The standings are somewhat misleading since the way each country measures its ability to teach these subjects is different, but one thing is certain — we are having a serious problem successfully teaching these important subjects.
There are three primary possibilities to explain this dismal fact. We can blame our teachers for not being qualified to teach these subjects, or we can blame our students for not being as capable as other students in developed countries, or we can look at how these topics are introduced and taught to our students.
I have been volunteering in our public schools, primarily in fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade mathematics classes for the past five years and without exception I can state that our teachers are very well qualified to teach mathematics. They are not the problem. Again, from personal experience I can state our students are the equal of anywhere else in the world. They are not the problem.
Having eliminated the teachers and the students as the cause of our poor standing there is just one conclusion left to explain why we are where we are and that is the material that is used to teach our students. The one we use in Bensalem in K-6 is the Everyday Mathematics program. It is widely acclaimed and used throughout the United States. It is therefore the one constant to explain our rating.
The publishers disagree with me. As written on their website: “Everyday Mathematics has been the subject of numerous studies, and the data is overwhelmingly positive, and it received the highest rating of any published curriculum reviewed by the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse.”
The website boasts that the data is overwhelmingly positive while the actual results throughout the United States, as indicated by worldwide ratings, are anything but overwhelmingly positive. Bragging that the results are “positive” when we are 25th are mutually exclusive conclusions.
The program has fatal flaws because it does not stress the basics that are needed to progress to higher levels of mathematics. It uses something called “the spiral method” where mathematical topics are touched upon briefly over and over with the assumption that if students don’t understand a topic on their first exposure to it, it is not troubling because the topic will be seen again at a later date so they’ll have another opportunity to grasp it.
What the program calls a “spiral method” I call a chaotic method and the result of the chaotic method is that many students in the sixth grade are still unsure of simple multiplication and therefore struggle mightily with division. If their calculators were taken away from them, too many of them would be close to helpless.
Relying on calculators instead of knowledge is a monumental mistake and goes a long way in explaining why our worldwide standing is so low. Bluntly stated, there is no substitute for mastering the basics.
Everyday Mathematics is also terribly expensive to maintain. Instead of buying text books for each student that might last for four or five years, every year each student gets two math journals and one student reference book. In addition, the journals, on too many pages, do not give the student space to work out the problems.
There is space only for answers and that in itself is a fatal flaw. The teacher needs to see how a student arrived at an answer, not just the numbers in the answer.
This system commits us to an annual cost and waste of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ben Franklin wrote: “A penny saved is a penny earned,” and we need to stop wasting pennies. With our school taxes going up again this year, it is time to eliminate waste. At a budget meeting of the Bensalem school board I begged them to stop using this program. It is time to discontinue its use and get back to basics
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