NotTheWholeStory

Catherine sent me a link today to an article about the Everyday Math curriculum. A host of well-known mathematicians have given Everyday Math a lot of negative press. A group of mathematics professors led by David Klein at Cal State Northridge wrote an open letter to the Secretary of Education urging the U.S. government to publicly withdraw its 1999 recommendation of Everyday Math (among other new-new math curricula).

I am familiar (very familiar) with Everyday Math, and it has clear weaknesses that we'll discuss at length in time, but I was struck by the following quote in today's article:

Klein said that as a result of whole math programs such as EM, CSUN and other colleges must offer entering freshmen remedial math classes at a level as low as third grade. He said he’s seen, for instance, calculus students who can’t add fractions.

"This is kind of the lost generation, ruined by these liberal-minded policies," Klein said. "The truth of the matter is it’s just a crummy program."

It may be a crummy program -- I have certainly found it hugely frustrating to work with -- but it wouldn't be fair to blame Everyday Math for the existence of vast numbers of calculus students who can't add fractions. The problem has been around a lot longer than Everyday Math has.

I taught at SUNY Binghamton in the early 80s, and we had plenty of calc students who couldn't add fractions. When I was a grad student at Louisiana State University, the remedial math caseload on the mathematics department was so heavy that a whole class of 'instructors' -- essentially the equivalent of high school teachers in schooling and training -- were employed by the math department to teach remedial math classes, and a typical grad student was assigned full responsibility for 2 classes of remedial math every semester. That's more than 60 students per grad student.

And these classes were serving just the students who had been identified as needing remedial math classes; many slipped through the cracks. You bet a lot of the students in LSU's calculus classes couldn't add fractions. Nor is the problem confined to LSU; public universities everywhere, with few exceptions, have large remedial math loads. It's been going on for at least twenty years, long before Everyday Math appeared on the scene.

I don't think there are any simple explanations. But I do think we're floundering, and we need to look to countries with a better track record for guidance.

Furthermore, any math professor can point to plenty of failures in math education within his own experience, but individual failures don't help to explain what we're doing wrong at the policy level. For that, we'll need sound research.

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