Naomi Schaefer Riley

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Opinion

Save kids from ‘fuzzy’ math

We need “new ways to measure how well our kids think, not how well they can fill in a bubble on a test,” President Obama told the nation during his State of the Union last week. To which a clever tweeter responded, “There’s a high correlation between filling in bubbles on a test and knowing the right answer.”

For years now, the education establishment has been down on filling in (the right) bubbles, and the effects of that attitude couldn’t be clearer. Of the 64 ­developed countries that took the Program for International ­Student Assessment (PISA) tests in 2012, the United States scored 36th in math, which lands us ­between Lithuania and the ­Slovak Republic. It’s a good thing we already won the Cold War.

Actually, when you ask experts in the field what’s wrong with math education, you find out that the problem started during the Cold War, with the kind of progressive math that gained popularity in the 1970s.

This stuff seeps in even under supposedly results-focused folks like those in the Bloomberg administration, which adopted a program called Everyday Math for the city’s public schools. Sol Stern, an expert on the city schools, refers to this curriculum as “fuzzy.” Fuzzy, as in, not particularly concerned with getting the right answer. More interested in having student discussions than having teachers offer any kind of direct instruction. And barely concerned at all with having students thoroughly understand the foundations of mathematics.

It certainly hasn’t produced much. Last year, less than a third of New York City’s students in grades 3-8 tested as proficient in math on state exams. We’re doing slightly better than other large cities, but that’s setting the bar low.

To Elizabeth Carson, that raises the question: Why don’t we just do what the other countries are doing?

Carson started off as a parent activist at PS6 on the Upper East Side, then founded the group NYC HOLD, which stands for “Honest Open Logical Decisions” on mathematics education.

The education establishment frowns on anything so simple as adopting the methods of high-performing countries. Led by the major schools of education (which get their money through grants for massive research projects), it insists we spend decades and millions of dollars to evaluate each one.

While Carson understands the impulse to do research on which curricula work, she also says that we shouldn’t have to wait that long.

One curriculum that offers a chance for that is Singapore Math. “Singapore is a small country with no natural resources,” notes Gary Lawrence, the Coleman Fung Chair for Mathematics at Mustard Seed School, an independent school in Hoboken. “They get it that their people are the product they offer the world. So they take all their curriculum very seriously, including math.” (Singapore ranked No. 2 on the international PISA tests.)

Lawrence, who worked on Wall Street before he came to teach math at Mustard Seed, uses a combination of curricula at his school. He always looks for textbooks and curriculum that emphasize “depth and structure,” including Singapore Math, Investigations, SRA Math.

Many of the problems with math curricula begin on the textbook level. Different states have different standards and textbook companies want their products to be used in as many states as possible, so they take a “kitchen sink” approach, putting in every topic under the sun. The results, Lawrence notes, are monsters, like one 7th-grade textbook that runs 800 pages. “If your school year is 200 days, that’s four pages a day and let’s hope no one has any questions about the material.”

The new national Common Core curriculum, which New York and many other states are adopting, should start to change the incentives for these textbook publishers.

Technology should change the landscape, too. Programs like the nonprofit, online Khan Academy can make math teaching more individualized, finding the right way to get each concept across to each student and ensuring that every kid understands one topic before moving to the next.

What many of these new programs do is help students master the foundations of math. No matter what, says Stern, students need a certain “automaticity” or what Lawrence calls “computational fluency.” Critics (generally the ones who like fuzzy math) denounce this as “drill and kill”; in fact, it’s memorization with a view to getting kids ready to tackle more advanced problems.

And it plainly has something to do with, well, actually learning math. At Success Academy in Harlem, a charter school, 82 percent of the kids passed the 2013 state math exams (given to grades 3-8). Stacey Gershkovich, the school’s director of math and science, says that all students must learn certain “math facts,” like the fact that ¼ is equal to .25, without having to calculate it each time. “They should know certain things without hesitating,” she says.

Gershkovich says that the Success Academies want students to “love math,” and they do what they can to foster that — but, at the end of the day, students there understand the importance of filling in the right bubble.