How to End the Math Wars

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From TIME.com, Sunday, November 19, 2006. See
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1561144,00.html
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How to End the Math Wars

We have a new formula for teaching kids. Don't let ideology ruin it this time

By Claudia Wallis

American education is every bit as polarized,
red and blue, as American politics. On the
crimson, conservative end of the spectrum are
those who adhere to the back-to-basics credo:
Kids, practice those spelling words and times
tables, sit still and listen to the teacher;
school isn't meant to be fun--hard work builds
character. On the opposite, indigo extreme are
the currently unfashionable "progressives," who
believe that learning should be like
breathing--natural and relaxed, that school
should take its cues from a child's interests. As
in politics, good sense lies toward the center,
but the pendulum keeps sweeping sharply from
right to left and back again. And the kids end up
whiplashed.

Since the Reading Wars of the '90s, the U.S. has
largely gone red. Remember the Reading Wars? In
the '80s, educators embraced "whole language" as
the key to teaching kids to love reading. Instead
of using "See Dick and Jane run" primers,
grade-school teachers taught reading with
authentic kid lit: storybooks by respected
authors, like Eric Carle (Polar Bear, Polar
Bear). They encouraged 5- and 6-year-olds to
write with "inventive spelling." It was fun.
Teachers felt creative. The founders of whole
language never intended it to displace the
teaching of phonics or proper spelling, but
that's what happened in many places. The result
was a generation of kids who couldn't spell,
including a high percentage who had to be turned
over to special-ed instructors to learn how to
read. That eventually ushered in the current
joyless back-to-phonics movement, with its
endless hours of reading-skill drills. Welcome
back, Dick and Jane.

Now we're into the Math Wars. With American kids
foundering on state math exams and getting
clobbered on international tests by their peers
in Singapore and Belgium, parents and
policymakers have been searching for a culprit.
They've found it in the math equivalent of whole
language--so-called fuzzy math, an object of
parental contempt from coast to coast. Fuzzy
math, properly called reform math, is the bastard
child of teaching standards introduced by the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
(N.C.T.M) in 1989. Like whole language, it was a
sensible approach that got distorted into a
parody of itself. The reform standards, for
instance, called for teaching the uses of a
calculator and estimation, but some educators
took that as a license to stop drilling the
multiplication tables, skip past long division
and give lots of partial credit for wrong
answers. "Some of the textbooks and materials
were absolutely hideous," says R. James Milgram,
a professor of mathematics at Stanford.

Adding to the math morass was the fact that 49
states (all but Iowa) devised their own math
standards, with up to 100 different goals for
each grade level. Textbook publishers responded
with textbooks that tried to incorporate every
goal of every state. "There are some 700-page
third-grade math books out there," says
N.C.T.M.'s current president Francis (Skip)
Fennell, professor of education at Maryland's
McDaniel College.

Now the N.C.T.M. itself has come riding to the
rescue. In a notably slim document, it has
identified just three essential goals, or "focal
points," for each grade from pre-K to eighth,
none of them fuzzy, all of them building blocks
for higher math. In fourth grade, for instance,
the group recommends focusing on the quick recall
of multiplication facts, a deep understanding of
decimals and the ability to measure and compute
the area of rectangles, circles and other shapes.
"Our objective," says Fennell, "is to get
conversations going at the state level about what
really is important." In recent weeks, that's
begun to happen. Florida and Utah and half a
dozen other states are talking about revising
their math standards to match the pared-down
approach. That pleases academic mathematicians
like Milgram, who notes that this kind of
instruction is what works in math-proficient
nations like Singapore.

So do we have a solution to the national math
problem? We certainly have the correct formula.
The question is, Can we apply it? Already the
N.C.T.M.'s focal points are being called a
back-to-basics movement, another swing of the
ideological pendulum rather than a fresh look at
what it would take to get more kids to calculus
by 12th grade. If the script follows that of the
Reading Wars, what comes next will be dreary
times-tables recitals in unison, dull new books
that fail to inspire understanding, and drill,
drill, drill, much like the unhappy scenes in
many of today's "Reading First" classrooms. And
that would be just another kind of math
fiasco--of the red variety. Kids will learn their
times tables for sure, but they'll also learn to
hate math.
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--
Jerry P. Becker
Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction
Southern Illinois University
625 Wham Drive
Mail Code 4610
Carbondale, IL  62901-4610
Phone:  (618) 453-4241  [O]
             (618) 457-8903  [H]
Fax:      (618) 453-4244
E-mail:   jbecker@...