Mediocrity Rules

This story repeated across the country, for years, as parents and their children suffered through fuzzy math. NY Times:

“When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division,” Ms. Backman said, “so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, ‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.’

Of course, their concerns are only being given validity now that the abysmal results are so unmistakable that the "best practices experts" at the NCTM have had to endorse back to basics. Even in supposed lighthouse districts children are being tutored after school for math.

Meanwhile, in the same issue, parents who moved from the city to the suburbs for the public schools are dissatisfied and are going private. Of course, now they have to pay private school tuition on top of taxes for public schools.

Mediocrity rules at the public schools. Silly curricula take a liberal arts approach to math primarily to improve the comfort level of math-averse teachers, and only manage to confuse and disappoint children.

Empower parents---they will respect and value good teachers, and their children will value learning. And school choice will empower good teachers as well. In fact, some of the best are earning outside income as math tutors---one way to arrive at merit pay---teaching the math curriculum they are not allowed to teach in school.

Let's not waste the next generation on a dumbed down curriculum.

And if the schools will persist in showing movies to babysit children, at least they could show an instructive one---Apollo 13. Being creative is fine, but at some point you need to know the facts and put them together precisely. No computers, the astronauts had to use a slide rule. Calculation made the difference between bouncing off into space, burning up, or coming home.


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