FW: What Crisis?

The following commentary makes some excellent points. However, it
completely ignores how the traditional college preparatory mathematics
curriculum was completely demolished by the SMSG new math, resulting in
the current state of mathematics pseudo-education in the U.S.

Bob LeChevalier...

The "traditional college preparatory mathematics curriculum" was
deemed responsible for:

DR
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http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-commentarybracey0910.artsep10,0,1338591.story?coll=hc-headlines-commentary

WHAT CRISIS?

U.S. student progress since World War II has been remarkable, and
America is seen the world over as an education leader

By Gerald W. Bracey

September 10 2006

In his 1990 book "Popular Education and Its Discontents," the education
historian Lawrence A. Cremin observed that the growth of education
after World War II was "nothing short of phenomenal." By 1985, high
school graduation rates had soared from 34 percent to 74 percent, and
the proportion of those with college degrees rose from 6 percent to 19
percent.

"And yet," mused Cremin, this expansion "brought with it a pervasive
sense of failure. The question would have to be `Why?'"

Sixteen years later, it's still the question. My answer is that
America's insecurity about its place in the world has produced a
syndrome that might be termed "The Neurotic Need to Believe the Worst
About Public Schools."

It started shortly after World War II with real anxieties about whether
the nation's schools could produce sufficient manpower to stave off the
communist threat. When the Russians launched Sputnik, the first manmade
satellite, in 1957, people blamed the schools. Shortly after the
launch, Life magazine ran the five-part series "Crisis in Education,"
detailing the terrible state of our schools in comparison to the
Russians'.

Bob LeChevalier...

The traditional college preparatory curriculum was only aimed at the
elite few percent that went to college before WW II, and hence was not
acceptable for bolstering the manpower. Then with Sputnik, it was

hrubin...

Change that to at least 25%. Many did not take it because

Bob LeChevalier...

In 1940, only 49% of the 17 year old population graduated high school.
Only 1.8% of the high school graduates of 1936 graduated with a
Bachelor's degree in 1940.

The 1940 numbers were of course a doubling of the percentages
graduating high school in 1925 (which is about when you, as opposed to
Dom, have claimed that the programs started to decline).

there of the financial problems involved with going to college.

Bob LeChevalier...

That may be true, but since most high school kids did not take a
college prep program, it was aimed only at the limited audience that
it served.

In the 4 years up to 1934 only 30.4% of high school students took
Algebra, 17.1% took Geometry, and 1.3% took Trigonometry.

In 1965, when more than twice as many completed high school, 28.5% of
them took Algebra, 13.9% took Geometry, and 2% took Trigonometry.

In 1982, 68.4% took Algebra, 48.4% took Geometry, 12.2% took
Trigonometry, and 4.3% took calculus, with only 1.4% taking AP
calculus.

In 1992, 79.4% took Algebra, 70.4% took Geometry, 21.1% took
trigonometry and 10.1% took calculus. 5.5% took AP calculus.

After WWII, with the GI Bill providing educational funding and
living allowances, many made up their high school requirements
and attended college, in fact raising standards.

Bob LeChevalier...

More attended college, but I find no evidence that they "made up their
high school requirements". The percentage attending college after the
war, while double the number before the war, was still less than the
percentage that took Geometry. It was not until after 1954 that the
percentage of 18-24 year olds attending college exceeded the 17% that
took Geometry in the class of 1934 (the percentage of 18 year olds who
*started* college jumped up immediately after the war, but actually
fell back after the initial blip for a decade). There is no evidence
that they "raised standards" either, indeed, I suspect that the
returning soldiers taking remedial courses to gain college admittance
probably were held to somewhat lower standards than regular students.

The entrance standards for most colleges were lower than, as well.
Most kids who took math in college (and many took none at all), did
not take calculus. College algebra wasn't a remedial course when most
college students took it.

Then with Sputnik, it was

found that the college-preped weren't particularly competitive either.

Bob LeChevalier...

Since very few took it, it only had to serve a tiny portion of the
spectrum of students. Now "we the people" are paying for EVERYONE to
go to high school, not just the elite.

Dom...

As I wrote below, "about 150 out of 450 students in my class had taken
all four years of this curriculum." This was in the factory city of
Everett, MA. I am sure that the proportion was higher in wealthier
suburbs. Moreover, the high school graduation rates are worse now than
they were in my day; and school attendance was mandatory until age 16,
as it is now..

Bob LeChevalier...

The other 300 didn't, and were probably ill-served by it.

Dom...

Most of the other 300 had taken Algebra I and Algebra II, along with
Accounting and Economics courses.

hrubin...

By that time, the damage had set in. There were not many
honors courses at that time. The educationists had managed
to reduce the high school courses to what at least 80% could
handle, which made them useless.

Bob LeChevalier...

The rest of us want courses that at least 80% can handle. If you want
something better, pay for it yourself.

Back then, in head to head competitions between our best students and
the Russians' best, the Russians almost always won. For all your
doom-and-gloom, the top US students are internationally competitive in
math olympiads and such.

In the pre-Sputnik days, only those kids who attended schools in big
cities or near a research university had the student interest needed
to justify a competitive college prep program. This served at best
half of those kids who might be considered our top 2%, and it wasn't
all that good - ours was a large high school in a better school
district, and they could only fill half of a class each year with
pre-calculus students. Only one school in our high school district
with maybe 10000 hs students offered calculus, and it wasn't up to the
standard for AP calculus.

hrubin...

It was the dumbing down which did this. And offering
calculus was not the problem; it was conceptual algebra and
theorem-proof geometry which was. A cookbook calculus
course makes it harder to learn the concepts, not easier.

The math education for the top 2% is at least as good now as it was
then. The education for the next 60% is likewise better, because it

hrubin...

It may be available, but too many do not take it. And the

Bob LeChevalier...

More take it nowadays than took it in the 1930s.

old college preparatory program was within the reach of at
least 25%, and possibly much more.

Bob LeChevalier...

As you say "It may have been available, but too many did not take it".
When only 17.1% of the high school students took geometry, who were
less than half of all kids, that means that fewer than 10% of all kids
took a college prep math program even up to the level of geometry. A
really tiny percentage took 4 years of math.

The education for the next 60% is likewise better, because it

is aimed at preparing 60% for college instead of 5%. The education

hrubin...

Reducing college to the point where 60% can take it has not
done any good. It has been at the expense of reducing the

Bob LeChevalier...

It has for the 60%. They are the majority, and they pay the bulk of
taxes.

content to the point where the students are weak; unfortunately,
most colleges seem unwilling to consider that the students are
weak not because they could not learn the course the first time,
but because it was not taught, or was poorly taught, the first
time. This would involve insulting the high school teachers
and elementary school teachers.

The education

for the rest is more *ambitious*, though arguably not "better". These
are kids that would never have taken *any* high school level math
because before WW II they wouldn't have gone to high school.

hrubin...

So what? Teaching them how to solve linear and quadratic

Bob LeChevalier...

This is something to brag about? Why should we be creating gluts?

Dom...

This indicates the success of the traditional curriculum, before it was
demolished by the SMSG new math, and flies in the face of your baseless
claims.

equations which have been formulated does little, if any,
good. But reducing the algebra course for those who could

Bob LeChevalier...

That is why I said it was arguably not "better". Practical consumer
math would be more useful to most kids, introducing some simple
probability and algebra concepts as needed. We could use more kids
who can plan a budget, shop for the best medical insurance when there
are a zillion plans around with different deductibles and copayments,
figure simple and compound interest, know how much money they will be
throwing away in rent as opposed to saving to purchase a house.

But such a course won't raise our international test scores, so it
won't happen.

understand better does much harm.

Later events reinstated the anxiety. In 1977, the College Board
released its analysis explaining why the national average SAT score had
fallen for 14 consecutive years. The board ascribed most of the decline
to the changing composition of the test-takers: more minorities, more
women, more students from low-income families, more students with
mediocre high school records. It also observed that events such as
urban riots, Vietnam and Watergate had provided a "decade of
distraction" from academic affairs. The media and the public had a
different interpretation: High schools had failed.

April 1983 saw the arrival of the paper Sputnik, "A Nation at Risk."
Although the report was a golden treasury of selected, spun, distorted
and nonexistent statistics, it focused attention on education at least
as brightly as the actual Sputnik had. And although the report was
optimistic that public schools could accomplish the task at hand, many
people saw it as cause for severe hand-wringing, even hopelessness.

Today, the erroneous belief that public schools perform poorly leads
some to think that there is no need to check facts. Thomas Friedman in
"The World Is Flat" stakes a claim that Romanian schools are superior
to American schools on an unverified statement from a single student
that what he studied in science in the fourth grade in Romania he
studied again in the seventh grade in America. Had Friedman checked
this contention against data from the 1995, 1999 and 2003
administrations of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study, he would have seen that on all three occasions, the United
States outscored Romania substantially in math and greatly in science.

The media contribute to the syndrome by ignoring positive results. In
2003, an international reading study showed that only three of 35
nations outscored the United States significantly in reading.

Nationally, 30 percent of American students attend schools with less
than 25 percent poverty; they outscored the highest nation. The 28
percent of American students who attend schools with 25 to 50 percent
poverty scored at a level that, had they constituted a nation, would
have ranked fourth. Four newspapers reported the study with bylined
stories.

In 2006, a study from the National Center for Education Statistics
found that if you control for demographic differences, public schools
perform as well as or better than private schools. The private schools,
though, have many fewer poor kids, special education kids, and English
language learners. Only a few newspapers carried the story the day
after it was released by the U.S. Department of Education.

Oddly enough, educators from nations that score high on tests
frequently wish to inspect our schools. They see the United States as a
creative, innovative nation and they think the schools have something
to do with it. Newsweek pundit Fareed Zakaria observed that although
Singapore students ace tests, 10 or 20 years later it's the American
students who are world beaters: "Singapore has few truly top-ranked
scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or
academics," he wrote. America, however, has scads.

The Singapore Minister of Education told Zakaria that the tests his
students do so well on do not measure the American kids' traits of
"creativity, ambition or the willingness to question the conventional
wisdom." And a Singaporean father who had returned from the United
States said that "in the American schools, when my son would speak up,
he was applauded and encouraged. In Singapore, he's seen as pushy and
weird."

U.S. creativity and innovation have led the World Economic Forum to
rank it the most globally competitive nation among the 117 the forum
evaluated. Alas, such initiatives as the test-obsessed No Child Left
Behind law threaten that creativity. As Robert Sternberg, dean of the
school of arts and sciences at Tufts University, put it, our "massive"
use of standardized tests "is one of the most effective vehicles this
country has created for suppressing creativity."

It is quite possible that No Child Left Behind puts our global
competitiveness and our national security at risk.

Bracey is an independent researcher in Alexandria, Va. His most recent
book is "Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting
Statistically Snookered" (Heinemann, 2006). This was adapted from a
longer essay in the July/August issue of Stanford magazine.