Delaine Eastin's double-barreled task forces reported back to her last month on how to improve California's dismal showing in the national education sweepstakes, and many parents who think the answer is pretty obvious were encouraged by the recommendations.
"Both task forces concluded that many reading and math programs have shifted too far away from direct skills instruction," said the state's superintendent of public instruction. "Students need basic skills as well as more complex, analytical reading and problem-solving skills." The emphasis is hers.
If you've passed up the opportunity to wade through the state's Mathematics Framework, you may not realize that this is a revolutionary admission. Skills, to the extent they are mentioned at all in the framework, seem to be a necessary evil rather than a necessity.
Even for mathematically gifted students, the frameworkers aver, the emphasis should be on depth and originality "rather than on speed and accuracy."
In place of accuracy, the framework gives great prominence to such nebulous goals as having students "appreciate mathematics in history and society" and ensuring they "have a good personal relationship with mathematics."
I used to be a college math professor in another life, so I suppose it's fair to say I have a good personal relationship with mathematics, but it would never have occurred to me as a practicing mathematician to express it in that peculiar way.
Faced with mounting evidence that their cherished framework was built askew, the educationists are backing away. Now, Eastin said, she will work with the state Board of Education to develop a supplement to the framework "to clarify the role of computational skills." Also, she will ask the board to consider whether it's feasible to adopt supplemental materials in mathematics "to ensure that districts have available the kinds of powerful and balanced materials called for in this task force report."
But to districts that have already erected a curriculum structure based on this shaky framework, Eastin's announcement is not particularly good news. The state's retreat from trendiness leaves them unsupported, and the San Ramon Valley school district is one that finds itself in this uncomfortable state.
In May, the school board accepted a news curriculum guide and textbooks for K-8 mathematics. The guide is unabashedly based on the framework and the so-called "standards" for the teaching of mathematics issued by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Although the district's own task force worked on the document for months, it was adopted with scarcely any public debate or opposition, and there should have been plenty of both. No doubt there are excellent teachers in the district who will manage to help their students learn in spite of the odd theories that underlie this curriculum, and the textbooks written to satisfy state bureaucrats who believe in them, but that's no justification for adopting it.
I can give you only a few examples for illustration.
The most basic and the most wrong idea is that children have to reinvent mathematics in order to understand it. "The student will construct number meanings through real-world experiences and the use of physical materials" in grades K-5.
Adults know better than to try to reinvent the wheel, at least most of the time. But if the theory is that all children are bright enough to recreate much of mankind's intellectual history on their own, the specific expectations are dismayingly low. For grade 1, identified as ages five through eight, the goal is to "recognize numerals to 20; count 20 objects."
By grade 2, the student can be expected to "have a sense of numbers" to 100. In grade 3, it's 10,000 (I don't know what happened to the intervening order of magnitude); grade 4 is 100,000 and by grade 5, by which time some students are 12 years old, they are expected to read and write numbers up to 1,000,000.
This reinvention stuff is slow going, I guess.
In fourth grade, "the student will experience decimals as it relates to base 10" (that's their grammar) and in grade five "explore 2 digit division and multiplication."
The use of calculators is part of the curriculum, too. In first grade, "the student will be exposed to calculators" and in second grade "explore the workings of a calculator" and in grade 3 — finally — "learn the keyboard."
At home these third graders are probably programming the family's VCR while their parents look on helplessly.
In fourth grade, students will "demonstrate knowledge of time and compare future or past time to a set time." If they need to be taught that, how have they been getting to school on time for five years?
A number of people helped write this curriculum, and a lot more had a chance to read it before it came to the board, so didn't anybody notice or care about the writing? "The student will creates and identifies ½, at concrete levels," and "create comparison of greater than, less than, and equal to 100,000 digit numbers."
Effective communication is supposed to be a key part of this new mathematics: "The student will reflect on and clarify his/her thinking either verbally or in writing about mathematical ideas."
I'm all for clarified thinking, but I do wonder how the students can be expected to acquire a skill their elders so signally fail to demonstrate.
San Ramon Valley is not alone, as the state's test results show and Eastin acknowledges. For decades, California has been encouraging exactly this kind of muddy thinking, and washing away the mud will take a long, long time.