Reply to End 2.0 MCPS math curriculum. List complaints about specific problems.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If the "old way" of teaching math was so inferior to the rest of the world, why did the rest of the world want to come to America for higher education in STEM?  Why have we successfully invented so much of the technology in the world, etc.?  Our educational statistics are heavily influenced by demographics, not just the success of our educational system.  We should be careful about emulating some of the systems that are so trendy right now.[/quote]

You're asking, if K-12 math education in the US was so bad, why did people not from the US come to the US for college and graduate school?

Which is kind of like asking, if my child's elementary, middle-school, and high-school orchestras are so bad, why do people not from the US come to the US to play in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra?[/quote]

I'm not that bad at logic (which does need to be restored to the curriculum).  I am presuming that US college students were prepared for college in the US K-12 system.  That is less true now, but the idea that [b]American schools have somehow never successfully taught math before is a joke[/b].  We probably lost our way during the "feel good" 1970s.[/quote]

American schools have never successfully taught math to most people. There were some people, of course, for whom the American K-12 math education system did work.

Here's a good piece to read about the history of US math education: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html

[i]The new math of the ‘60s, the new new math of the ‘80s and today’s Common Core math all stem from the idea that the traditional way of teaching math simply does not work. As a nation, we suffer from an ailment that John Allen Paulos, a Temple University math professor and an author, calls innumeracy — the mathematical equivalent of not being able to read. On national tests, nearly two-thirds of fourth graders and eighth graders are not proficient in math. More than half of fourth graders taking the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress could not accurately read the temperature on a neatly drawn thermometer. (They did not understand that each hash mark represented two degrees rather than one, leading many students to mistake 46 degrees for 43 degrees.) On the same multiple-choice test, three-quarters of fourth graders could not translate a simple word problem about a girl who sold 15 cups of lemonade on Saturday and twice as many on Sunday into the expression “15 + (2×15).” Even in Massachusetts, one of the country’s highest-performing states, math students are more than two years behind their counterparts in Shanghai.

Adulthood does not alleviate our quantitative deficiency. A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy. On a scale of 1 to 5, 29 percent of them scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they could do basic arithmetic but not computations requiring two or more steps. One study that examined medical prescriptions gone awry found that 17 percent of errors were caused by math mistakes on the part of doctors or pharmacists. A survey found that three-quarters of doctors inaccurately estimated the rates of death and major complications associated with common medical procedures, even in their own specialty areas.

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “?,” led them astray.[/i]
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