America’s 15-year-olds ranked 25th in among nations in the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on the 2009
PISA test of international student achievement. That ranking,
however, is being kind. The score for the average American high
school freshmen was 117 points behind the average for their peers
in Shanghai and 75 points behind 15-year-olds in Singapore, the
top-rated nation outside of China in math.
Sadly, this isn’t surprising.
Thirty-six percent of high school seniors in 11 states scored Below
Basic in math on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational
Progress, the nation’s exam of student achievement; one out of
every three students couldn’t answer such questions as
“Which
of the following expressions is NOT equivalent to (a +
b) (x + y) ?” or perform Boolean
Algebra. One out of every four
eighth-graders in the entire country is mathematically
illiterate.
If you wonder why American companies spend billions to buy
H1-B visas for foreign talent, why India is now the leading
outsourcing destination, or why the percentage of U.S. doctorates
in engineering awarded to foreign students has increased from 47
percent to 57 percent between 1989 and 2009, the blame lies largely
with the woeful math proficiency of American students. Far too many
kids, no matter their racial or economic background, are flunking
math in an age in which strong math and science skills are critical
in even high-paying blue-collar jobs.
The low quality of math
instruction in the nation’s public schools, a decades-long battle
over how math should be taught, and the general belief among
educators that math is only important for some to learn are partly
to blame for this problem. The biggest culprit of all lies with the
leading symptom of the nation’s educational crisis: Illiteracy. The
inability to read becomes even more problematic for students in
higher-level math work, which includes word problems and the
ability to think through abstract concepts, as well as handle basic
computations and spatial concepts.
Prompting the angst this time
around are the latest PISA scores released this past November; the
results came a month after Harvard University released a
report that showed that just six percent of American
8th-graders would have performed math at advanced levels of
proficiency on PISA and the Trends in International Math and
Science Study. The woeful performances have once again sparked the
battle between the nation’s school reform movement and defenders of
traditional public education — as well as given birth to a string
of
inane articles
over whether Chinese mothers (both in America and overseas) and
their kids are more driven than their native American
counterparts.
But the data — along with
news released this week by the U.S. Department of Education
that two
out of every five American high school seniors scored Below
Basic on the science portion of NAEP— is a sobering reminder that
the nation’s education problems are deeper than
debates over “Tiger Moms.”
Foreign-born scientists account
for over 40 percent of all science and technology staffers on
university campuses — the leading centers for training future
physicists and engineers — double the percentage three decades
ago, according to
the National Science Foundation. Foreign-born engineers and
scientists also account for a quarter of all college-educated
employees in the tech field (based on 2003 data, the last period
available). Half of all of America’s foreign-born scientists and
engineers are from India, China, the Philippines, South Korea and
Taiwan, nations that are now major competitors with the United
States in the global economy.
This dependence on foreign
scientists — an example of sorts of comparative advantage — has
proven to be beneficial to the world (including America) in terms
of stemming wars and in bolstering global economic growth that
stems poverty. But it is also a problem for America at a time when
its national debt and high corporate tax rates hinder its
competitive advantage.
Math is a critical element in
even high-skilled blue-collar jobs; welders, for example, need
trigonometry skills for sophisticated metal work. Young men and
women with strong math skills will likely end up in jobs that have
average annual salaries of $70,600 (or greater than the nation’s
median household income of $51,425). More importantly, math plays a
critical role in understanding abstract concepts that often come up
in business and economics. A student with a working understanding
of, say, algebra, will also be able to understand why the Laffer
Curve matters in discussions about tax cuts.
As with so much of America’s
education crisis, the problem lies with teaching and curriculum.
The highly skilled math students who could become teachers aren’t
likely to join a profession in which performance-based pay is
eschewed for degree- and seniority-based compensation; with prized
skills, they earn more and gain greater job satisfaction in the
tech sector. This leaves the nation’s classrooms to be staffed by
aspiring teachers who are not as likely to have strong competency
in math and even less likely to be well trained to do so. Two out
of 63 university school of education elementary math programs
surveyed by the National Council of Teacher Quality met or exceeded
standards for training math teachers; just 13 percent of 77
education schools surveyed by NCTQ two years ago had high quality
math programs.
The fact that many teachers and
principals think of math as something that only some kids can learn
— even though the rigors of reading instruction are just as
difficult to master — also hampers efforts at math instruction.
Kindergarten teachers, for example, ignore the need to show kids
that numbers represents quantities. As a result, kids fall behind
early and often. As teaching guru Steve Peha points out in a
recent piece on reforming math instruction, teachers seem to
think that “reading… is an aptitude” while
“math is an attitude.”
Decades of battles over how math
should be taught in school has also exacerbated the problem. During
the 1960s, states embraced New Math — which emphasized introducing
kids to abstract concepts such as set theory (or collection of
objects) — forgetting that kids must first learn basic
computations in order to achieve mastery. Since then, math
traditionalists and more experimental teachers have battled over
whether to move away from traditional arithmetic to such novel
ideas as using real-life examples (like using marshmallows in
instruction) in math instruction. Not even the effort to enact
Common Core State
Standards (and replace the wide array of math standards that
exist across all 50 states with one nationalized curriculum) has
fully avoided the math wars.
Even today, school districts use
math textbooks and curricula of dubious quality. Only one out of 63
elementary math programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of
Education has been rated as having “potentially positive” effects
on student achievement; even that rating is based on just one study
that met the agency’s stringent research
standards.
But solving the nation’s math
problem may require tackling the leading symptom of the nation’s
education crisis: Low levels of literacy and reading
comprehension. The very skills involved in
reading (including understanding abstract concepts) are also
involved in more-complex mathematics including word problems and
algebra. Poor readers tend to do poorly in math. But America’s
public schools are struggling
as mightily in teaching kids reading as they are in arithmetic. One
out of every three American fourth-graders read Below Basic
proficiency on the 2009 NAEP.
As with reading, it will be up to parents, relatives and
other adults to start their own math classes and teach kids
multiplication and algebra themselves. And
ask some tough questions of their schools about what they are
being taught.
