<p>How can you blame the Federal government for policies/tests which seem to be mainly implemented by the state of Texas? </p>
<p>The TAKs tests are certainly not nationwide as I know for a fact they aren’t implemented here in NY, NJ, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, California, Hawaii, or most other states unless I’m missing something. </p>
<p>That’s like me blaming the Federal government for the NYS regents exams I took in junior high/high school or the Citywide exams I took as a 4-5th grader which is absurd considering those exams and curriculum to support them are implemented by NY state/city’s education department respectively…not the Federal Department of Education. Not to mention that both of those NY exams predated NCLB by a few decades.</p>
<p>Every state requires the testing now, but only Texas does the TAKs. Other states have their versions of tests or selection. Only public schoolers have to take the tests. In fact, if you sort of think about it, the officials who came up with these dumb ideas, generally have their children in private schools. So they just basically figure that public schoolers are so far beneath them that they just have to set these standards. However, most states were doing just fine and well above these standards. Within the public school realm, there is very little room to move.</p>
<p>It is spreading in a sense to private schools though. We can see how people are ratings obsessed with colleges. People are generally this way with private regular schools. They want to see the matriculation lists and stats at a private school before they enroll their children.</p>
<p>On the one example doesn’t prove anything…I have many examples. I have tried tutoring and gave up. Ok…so I still get calls and feel bad and do still tutor somethings. However, the same problems keep happening over and over again. The public schools spend all those years on calculators. So, when a child is asked to factor a simple polynomial, they actually will be completely puzzled when I try to ask them the factors of a number such as 6. I have found the US public school programs having children memorizing terms such as translations and translocations early on, but won’t bother with teaching them 4+5. Their excuse is that the kids have calculators and no longer need to learn math facts. The same school is STILL doing tessellations in high school geometry. Why does a 2nd grader need to waste their brain on vocabulary while not covering the basics? Fractions accounts for 2 weeks each semester at best through the general maths years. Fractions are actually a major part of upper level maths. If you cannot reduce a simple fraction quickly, you will not be able to do much at the algebra level. </p>
<p>Then it gets more disgusting. Get to high school level, and it is all calculator. These children cannot figure out a max and min without plugging in to the calculators. The teachers cannot explain it. They show the students how to plug it in to the calculators and that is the extent of the math being covered at the higher levels. My daughter has tried to ask how to figure some of the simpler problems in precal without the calculator. The teacher had no idea how. She then told my daughter that she does not need to know how to do any of this by hand these days, just plug it in to the calculator. Needless to say, my older children will not be taking any more of their math at the public school. I have 1 younger child in public school, but I am not going to sit back and assume they are teaching anything, because I already know they are not.</p>
<p>Back to the question posed in the NYT article: does everyone really need to take higher math?</p>
<p>Should the U.S. consider a two tier high school diploma, like some other countries do (e.g., Germany). Maybe secondary school education up to 11th grade is just fine for most people. If a kid wants to be a plumber, then why force him to factor polynomials. He’s losing a year of income by being forced to stay in high school thru grade 12. </p>
<p>Wouldn’t it be better that the non-academically inclined kid graduate with an 11-year diploma than drop out of school entirely and have no credential at all. And taxpayers wouldn’t have to fund education for unmotivated kids who maybe don’t need a 12th year in school.</p>
<p>If you think the testing regime is bad here in the US, you haven’t observed/witnessed some European or Asian societies where central governments set nationwide curricula* for each track, students are tested from a very early age, and those tests are used to determine which track one is assigned/reassigned at each stage.**</p>
<p>Not only are students tested more often in a high-stakes environment, the exams are also implemented, created, administered, and graded by the central government’s education department with no involvement from the regions or local education departments to discourage attempts to influence results in their own students’ favor. </p>
<p>Regarding the use of calculators in math classes, I personally never was allowed to use one until I took pre-calc. </p>
<p>IMHO, introducing calculators before pre-calc is a bad idea if one wants to impart basic math skills. </p>
<ul>
<li>Unlike the common tendency of most US regular public school systems/education departments to teach to the LCD, most foreign countries’ education departments set high teaching/testing standards and are fine with allowing those who can’t keep up to fail/be left back/be assigned to another track. </li>
</ul>
<p>** i.e. K, elementary school(1-5/6), middle school(6/7-9), high school/various vocational schools/apprenticeships, university/community colleges/various advanced vocational institutes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, Germany is one of the few First world countries which decentralizes educational/curricular administration to the states similar to what we have in the US. On the other hand, their high school leaving exams aren’t only standardized across Germany, but across European countries…especially those with Germanic education traditions. A reason why it’s a cinch for Germans on the academic track to apply to Germanic systems like Austria as well as apply to other universities in the EU.</p>
<p>If the testing were for placing kids on tracks, that would make sense. But in this case, it is a bare minimum standard type testing. And then the schools end up ONLY teaching topics, because they need the highest scores possible within those tests.</p>
<p>You can view released copies of those tests online.</p>
<p>I think it is good to read about other education systems, and even history of education, and see what works. And what works for one child might not work for the next. My daughter used Singapore Math, while my next child is using an American program (with Singapore methods being implements). My older children for the high school maths used …one used Jacobs and Foeresters and the other used Life of Fred. They are both very different in how they learn. </p>
<p>I like Singapore’s discipline. I think sometimes they overwork their kids. I like Swedens methods, but I think they do not have enough discipline. Plus, they are a homogenous society for the most part, so much will work for them that will never work here. Oh…and none of the countries at the top waste education money on football or other sports. Sports have to be maintained outside of the schools, and outside of the education budget.</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with telling kids that they need to work to get to where they want to be. Instead, our schools tell kids that it does not matter how hard you work, everyone is equal and we all should end up in the same place, and they try very hard to make sure that every single student is at the same place at the end of their years in K12.</p>
<p>Math isn’t hard enough. Students that do UK A-level, HK A-level, and CAPE math learn and do proofs. They learn it before doing calculus in those subjects. US students don’t do proofs until after calculus.</p>
<p>That certainly wasn’t the case in the NYC public school system in the '90s. My neighbors and I had to do proofs for algebra/geometry by 9-10th grade at the latest along with logic tables. While I attended a STEM-centered public magnet, my neighbors attended the local public zoned high school.</p>
<p>The NCTM standards changed quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s and that’s when I think that proofs got tossed out the window. If you look at the typical college math curriculum today, I think that you’ll find that there is very little done with proofs in Calc 1-3 outside of theory-oriented honors courses or courses specifically offered as theory-based. Even these courses may be designed to be taken after taking a regular non-theory course.</p>
<p>Proofs are typically seen by computer science majors in their discrete math or similar.</p>
<p>I didn’t take Geometry in school (studied on my own) but our high-school calculus course was proof-based but that was back in the stone-ages.</p>
<p>The part about “US students don’t do proofs until after calculus” is correct. Take a look at any of the current crop of typical university calculus books and you’ll see this. BTW, the percentage doing proofs after calculus is probably pretty low as students outside of STEM usually don’t take anything more than Calc 1, 2.</p>
<p>In D’s high-school, there are four or five tracks in math from remedial through accelerated. Only the top track is proof-based. </p>
<p>What they’ve found, though, when they started letting kids advance in math at their own pace is that a fair number of kids could go much faster than they had given credit for. Ten years ago when S was in junior high, the top level was doing algebra on a track to finish Calc B/C as seniors. That’s the track D (sophomore) is on, but almost a full class of 8th graders are being bused to the high school for accelerated algebra II/Trig. In our system that means that they’re a full three years above grade level. They’l be done with Calc B/C by sophomore year and the school is having to completely revamp its advanced math curriculum.</p>
<p>That suggests to me that a more rigorous math curriculum for the lower tracks makes sense, too. Kids often rise to the occasion. If we stop telling them that “math is hard” and start teaching math (rather than arithmetic) earlier, I think a lot of people would be surprised at the results. </p>
<p>BTW, one of my pet peeves is how math and arithmetic are confounded in our school district. S was quite good at arithmetic and sucks at math. D is the opposite. (That being said she missed two easy questions on the PSAT because she added wrong. <em>pounds head on desk</em>)</p>
<p>I think part of it has to do with the attitude towards math many students have, which is actually in a sense supported by our education system. People like to think “I’m bad at math, but that’s okay because it’s all useless anyway.” I especially see this attitude among girls, when I tell them that I am a physics major, they usually say something along the lines of “oh I’m so bad at math” and giggle. I really think this attitude is a cop out. People all learn and different ways and have different strengths and weaknesses. You will only have success if you are persistent and put in the effort. This is not encouraged in the US education system, math ability is seen as static; you either are good at math or you aren’t. I completely disagree with this assumption. Part of learning is finding out how you think and what approach is good for you. Math has enough abstraction that there are many ways to think about the same idea. This skill is very valuable in life. You may not ever have to solve a quadratic equation, but it may be good to know algebra for problems that involve estimating order of magnitude or scaling relations.</p>
<p>The percentage of current 7th graders who met the state math standard in 6th grade is 40% in our rural school district. You read this figure correctly. A whopping 60% did not meet the standard.</p>
<p>But they were passed into middle school and these kids will be lucky if they can pass Algebra 2 by senior year – a graduation requirement.</p>