Math Curriculum Is Missing Foundational Skills
Teaching Math Resources
The "Nation's Report Card" shows that student test scores in elementary school math and reading have plunged to levels not seen in decades. Columbia University professor told the Wall Street Journal, "I don't think we can expect to see these nine-year-olds catch up by the time they leave high school." Quite a troubling statement.
Helping the very young catch up should be a collective effort. After all, what is the goal of education? Yes, we want our kids to pursue higher education, but even more importantly, we want them to be strong critical thinkers and life-long learners with skills that will get them through good and bad times. We need them to have skills beyond a college diploma, which has been losing its competitive earning edge over the years.
Yet first, we need to prepare them to be successful in high-school. And high-school, while it may seem far away to every kindergarten parent, comes in a blink of an eye.
Our students greatly struggle in high school. As a nation, we are so proud to have 85% graduation rate. That’s still letting 2.5 million kids fail to graduate. Hardly a figure to be proud of.
Why kids struggle in high school seems to be so puzzling to educational policy makers…. who love to proclaim evidence based research curriculum.
The educational policy dictates what teachers will focus on in the classroom to meet “expectations of the Standards”. Both teachers and students are graded on how well these standards are mastered on the end-of-the-year state exam.
At the beginning of the year, teachers are given “game changing”, “high-quality” instructional standards that promise radical change to get students college and career ready.
As a teacher and parent, who worked with students from Pre-K through high-school, I know that this re-imagined and re-designed curriculum is severely lacking the main skills that make our students ready for life and higher education.
Look at Common Core State Standards as presented by Achieve the Core. Review the standards of mathematics from Kindergarten through 8th grade and notice geometry, the foundation of high-school mathematics, marked as optional topic all through elementary and middle school. Of course, students struggle with heavy geometry content. It is absent from the curriculum until high-school. One water-down chapter, at the end of the year, isn’t enough and it doesn’t count.
Essentially all mathematical underpinnings or shape analysis, reasoning with shapes and their attributes, data representation and interpretation, geometric measures, classifying and sorting is either an optional afterthought or left out.
Patterns, which should be taught from Pre-Kindergarten are an optional possibility in 4th grade. 6th grade leaves geometry, statistical variability and distribution to an afterthought.
Basically, even in the best of times, the mathematical standards that are focus of K-8 are not preparing students for success in high-school. This is how we end up failing millions of youth in high-school and even students who graduate are not prepared to pursue high paying fields, such as engineering, computer science, law, or medicine.
