Education Matters US

This past spring the National Math Panel met in Aurora, IL. One of the speakers was Kevin Killion, Director of the Illinois Loop. For those of you who have never head of this group, they are a group of parents, teachers, and school board members who provide informational resources about what curriculum is used in schools, what curricula works or doesn’t work, along with many other useful resources for parents and teachers. Although, the school district information is Illinois specific, the information provided is useful for parents, educators, and legislators across the country. I have excerpted part of Kevin’s remarks to the Math panel below.

Too often, the words “standards-based” are wielded as a weapon. Calling one category of math programs “standards-based” is a ploy to tarnish other programs as somehow rudderless and adrift.

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Another weapon is to blame lousy math performance on intractable, dusty old methods. Schools are urged to “embrace change” and teachers are exhorted to be “agents of change.”
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In Chicago, some 290 schools use progressivist, constructivist math programs in early grades. On the flip side, we have been able to identify only 5 — count ’em — 5 conventional CPS schools that use practice-and-mastery math programs, plus another 5 schools that are charters offering Saxon Math.
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But even that only hints at the severity of the problem. On the North Shore, or in Lake County, it’s almost impossible to find any schools with anything but constructivist math. And across the area, we identified only 6 — 6! — districts — out of 118 — that make use of those math programs most recommended by practice-and-mastery reformers, such as Singapore Math or Saxon Math. So much for the argument that parents in the suburbs already have the schools they want!

Here’s a twist: We’ve all heard of the “dance of the lemons.” Well, there is also the “Dance of the Math Lemons” performed by districts unhappy with their math programs. Example: District 39 in Wilmette dumps Math Trailblazers and picks up Everyday Math, even while District 109 in Deerfield drops Everyday Math to take a chance on Math Trailblazers. Like Lois Lane who couldn’t see the truth staring her in the face, these districts stick with constructivist math and merely substitute one program for another.

We’re sure not seeing any “agents for change” there! These districts are firmly mired down with a philosophy they refuse to abandon.

As you can see from Kevin’s research, public schools have a philosophical bent against traditional math methods of practice and mastery. This philosophical bent is allowed to continue because these schools are a government sanctioned monopoly and thus do not have to worry about true competition.

If the public schools truly believe that their Everyday Math programs are the best, then why are they so afraid of competition? Why do public schools fight against charter schools and voucher programs so hard if they believe their methods are better at educating children? The fact is their agenda is not about the children’s education, but about themselves. The teacher unions and a great number of the education bureaucracy leadership know that competition will end their taxpayer paid perks forcing them to actually produce tangible results to earn the trust of parents.

If you need to see how programs like Everyday Math actually teach watch the videos below.

My oldest child was taught Everyday Math in their public school. I gave the school the benefit of the doubt to start with. But, after second grade I knew it was not working. My wife and I were supplementing and doing drills with them. We tried a private school for third grade and then started homeschooling in fourth grade. We now use Saxon Math and the skills for my child have improved, but there is much unlearning of the everyday math methods that we still must do even after 3 years.

For those of you who say I am overreacting because I don’t understand math well enough, you are mistaken. I have a B.S. in Mathematics with a concentration in Computer Science. I know math and what it takes to learn it. I was lucky to have some really great math teachers who pushed me to learn. Their work paid off because I learned cutting corners in math only leads to mistakes.

The problems shown here in Illinois are happening across the country. This is why a dad wrote a math book in Michigan; why a teen got a job to pay for private school in South Carolina; why top scoring math student taught himself in New York; and one of the reasons home schooling is growing so rapidly across the country.

There are many more examples than the ones I mentioned here. These stories and the many like them demonstrate how much we as a country have allowed the government and it’s established monopolies to control and direct our lives. We have allowed the erosion of our very freedoms by trusting bureaucrats to do what is best in the education of our children. We parents, teachers and politicians must stop abdicating our responsibility to the next generation and stop this usurping of our authority and rights by a government monopoly. It is time to end the madness and demand a system that give parents the flexibility they need to choose the school their child attends. It is time to empower parents instead of the bureaucracy.