In yet another installment of “nothing new under the sun,” the Fordham Institute has put out a survey-analysis assessing the controversial Common Core math standards. As the first of its kind, the survey of teachers’ reactions to the overhaul-alignment of American public schools is overdue and ultimately inconclusive. Results show the math standards are mostly working according to primary school teachers on the frontlines, not really working per middle school teachers—and not working at all according to parents on the homefront. Parents’ opinions are based on surveyed teachers’ reports of their interactions with parents.
Problem points crop up as causes for concern—and for twisty, abstract justifications from its authors. First of all, there’s parental angst: “Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of teachers (85 percent) believes that these new approaches are hindering the reinforcement of learning at home because ‘parents don’t understand the way math is being taught.'” And the perennial nature of middle schoolers: “Middle school teachers tend to have a more negative assessment of their students’ math abilities and the broader impact of the standards.”
They’re just grumpier kids and teachers at the middle school level, an expert panel offered to explain the teacher-reported disparity between age groups, at a discussion of the survey results on July 14. Core advocates and educationists discredit doubters and seem to forget the recent history of unpopular math reforms. But who could forget the Math Wars of yore? And who would want to when Tom Lehrer’s novelty song “New Math” is still so delightful?
As a quick survey of mid- and late-twentieth century Math Wars will show, every stab at reform has had roughly the same aims. Common Core math is no different—it’s meant to make problem-solving processes simpler and more uniform and to let students build a grounding in basic “number sense” skills before they’d start to solve rotely. The reforms in the 1960s, when there was purportedly a numeracy crisis in America, and again in the late 1980s and 1990s, when “anti-racist math” was a thing, shared the lofty aim to make the deeper experience of math accessible to a wider audience.
The spark that started today’s Math Wars is the urgency of now to make American schools internationally competitive by whatever means—the model for new new new math finds its roots in Japanese teaching styles. The main opponents of New Math tend to be a loyal troop of disgruntled parents who just want to help junior with his problem sets; math professors who argue the building blocks of basic number sense don’t make a speck of difference in really mastering complex mathematics; and pretty much the whole don’t-tread-on-me bloc.
Although I didn’t witness the last Math Wars, their aftereffects touched my youth when my father, schooled in antebellum mathematics, unhelpfully helped with me my math homework by some “in my day” method. Then, to stifle my griping, “But teacher says…,” he explained the mental math shortcuts ordinary Americans use every day: These same reasonable tricks, “counting by tens” and “tape strategy,” are part of what Common Core math requires kids to learn and demonstrate. “Tape strategy” has you draw a narrow rectangular diagram, although I like to picture a road stretching out ahead, and “counting by tens” is an elementary practice that builds toward computing simple bits of math in one’s head.
Kick a number like 202 to the nearest multiple of ten, remembering the difference for your final answer: 617 minus 202 is not as easy as 617 minus 200, which is obviously 417; just remember to take away the 2 you knocked off on the front end when you’re done, and you get 415. Mentally it takes mere seconds, and explaining it is fairly simple. But that’s just where we hit a wall: Teaching multiple solutions, and letting children choose the one that comes most easily in practice, makes sense—but the more methods on offer, the more rules there are to govern them. Teachers new to these multiple methods stick to the rules, or else risk getting something wrong. And it’s not just teachers.
I asked a young woman at the Fordham Institute talk, who turned out to be a math curriculum designer, if the standards intentionally ingrain intuitive math-problem-solving practices in order to make the kids’ little lives easier. She said no, not exactly: With addition problems, for instance, a third grader would have to draw a certain type of diagram a certain way to “show her work.”
Giving Common Core math the benefit of the doubt, is the education business so deep in its own professional lingoism they can’t articulate the elegant logic of their method at its best? Perhaps it’s an assault on the English language to blame for new math’s PR problem. Every method has a technical title geared toward a remote-sounding goal like “numeral fluency” or “automaticity.” In fact, in a humorless erasure of history, we’re forbidden from calling it “new math.” “I just want to point out something I hope it’s not too controversial,” one of the panelists, a former math teacher and head of a Common Core curriculum development service took a stand. “In terms of communication with parents when we say things like ‘new math,’ then they think, ‘What’s wrong with the old math?'” Whoever coined “new math” in the 1960s was probably a political opponent of federally standardized education, some master of sticky coinages. This one means now exactly what it meant then.
It’s the insulting premise of “teacher-proofing” public schools, and the ensuing hyper-rigidity of aligned curricula, in part that has alienated teachers and powerful unions on the left. And meanwhile the sweeping federal flavor of the program, especially since Obama claimed Common Core for his legacy in the 2013 State of the Union, has freaked out the right. The “polarized political climate” is a convenient excuse for more than a dozen states’ repeal efforts and all but twenty’s refusal to adopt the core-aligned standardized tests that would legitimize the standards—but it’s a cop-out.
The study itself and the panel’s “debrief” of it did not extend to math standards in high schools, where they’ve been least successful. And only primary school teachers’ testimonies and survey responses show the standards’ succeeding in a sphere that test scores can’t capture: in-person experience. A dissentious mind flips back to the rushed, rocky rollout and the uncomfortable reasons many districts implemented the standards in all grade levels at once. Most districts, a Fordham Institute staffer understands, adopted them in elementary and middle school grades simultaneously. A more studied rollout would have progressed in step with the first generation of Common Core students’ advancement through the grades, in order to avoid the confusion of gear-shifting that, according to the Fordham Institute’s survey analysis, might account for middle schoolers’ struggling with the standards. Imperatives from big donors, principally the Gates Foundation, who wanted to see results and funding incentives from the federal government ruled out this more conservative rollout.
This first study of how Common Core math has really fared in practice—how it’s served kids and communities in teachers’ eyes—gets the spin “Teachers Like Common Core Math. Why Don’t Parents?” And yet it offers no particular proof of teachers’ “liking” common core math. By the numbers primary school teachers don’t object to it, and middle school teachers tolerate it while observing their students mostly don’t. All on average report some benefits, some drawbacks, and when it come to teachers’ approving of new math more than parents, it’s the same old story.
Most parents, most people, aren’t all that crazy about sitting down to heaping pile of math problems in the first place. Well-documented long term benefits to parental math help, supported by a Fordham Institute blog post, plus unconditional love and human decency mean they have to. And when a child’s math homework asks for solutions in a Core method the kid’s forgotten since morning math drill and the parents can’t even guess at, fear strikes deep and resentment seethes: Junior, denied adequate homework help, will wind up a bum on the Bowery or, the modern day version, a stoner in the basement. By February, whatever rationales for Common Core aligned math methods sounded so reasonable at family math night last fall seem cruelly ridiculous—especially if it’s the night before the big test on ratios, which used to be called fractions. As the song goes, “But in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer.” Here, in the live version, Lehrer gets a hearty guffaw from the audience, presumably from the moms and dads.
A previous version of this story used the phrase “all districts” in reference to the Fordham staffer’s understanding of implementation and identified a blogpost based on a study as “a study.”
