Mathematical Skills Are Easily Mastered by Students of Competent Teachers--- But Not by Students of Minneapolis Public Schools Teachers Ruined by Mathematics Education Professors

Before reading again or anew the nebulous banter prevailing in Erin Golden’s “State’s Math Decline Spurs New Solutions” (Star Tribune, October 13, 2019), consider the following:

Instructed by a competent teacher, students master mathematics with alacrity.  There is not that much math to learn.  The essential pre-K12 sequence moves through concepts pertinent to addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, tables, charts, and graphs, proceeding then to algebra I, geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus.  Students of a competent teacher easily master the fundamental sequence (addition through graphs) and also have little difficulty with algebra I and geometry.  Concepts in the remaining algebra II through calculus sequence are more abstract and require heightened critical pondering but if proceeding on a strong foundation are eminently manageable.

The problem that our preK 12 students have in succeeding in mathematics is that they are taught by too many incompetent teachers produced in our departments, colleges, and schools of education.  Understand these observations first as a wide-ranging problem, then as the more specific dilemma of note: 

Education professors are objectionable generally and mathematics education professors are objectionable specifically.

The education professor first appeared on our college and university campuses as teachers colleges (including the enormously influential Teachers College, Columbia University) replaced normal schools in the opening decades of the 20^th century.  Finding themselves surrounded by masters of specific disciplines (e.g., mathematics, English literature, physics, history, economics, music), education professors had to make a professional place for themselves.  Over the course of succeeding decades, education professors appropriated the name “progressive,” applying the term to an array of approaches variously asserted to be “child-centered” and to be productive of some social good;  the unifying element in the various doctrines purported to be “progressive” was a creed vowing that systematically acquired knowledge and skill sets are not important, because those can always be looked up.  Instead, curriculum should be driven by student and teacher interest.

Many decades ensued in which local communities, African Americans migrating northward, and immigrants seeking a substantive education resisted the anti-knowledge doctrine of education professors.  But such a creed was in sync with the Zeitgeist of the 1960s and from the 1970s forward has been dominant in the approaches of teachers trained in departments, colleges, and schools of education.

Education professors are the least regarded by colleagues on any college or university campus.  Mathematics education professors are particularly offensive.  Not astute at higher mathematics themselves, they pretend to be grand philosophers urging PreK-5 students toward “metacognition” and such hyperbolic sophistry, asserting that calculation is a low-level skill that should be superseded by transcendent conceptualization, group projects, and use of manipulatives.  All of this is to make mathematics education professors feel themselves to be profound intellectuals;  meanwhile, preK-12 students fail to master addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, graphs, tables, and charts---  and thus to lack the foundation necessary to proceed to the algebra through calculus sequence.

Now go back to or proceed for the first time to Golden’s article.  You’ll find the same usage of jargon and touting of approaches, now appearing with more high-tech references, that have emanated from the education professorial contingent since the 1920s and took hold from the 1970s forward.  The problem with preK-12 education generally and mathematics education specifically is that the teachers entering our classrooms from college and university training programs never believed in the Minnesota State Academic Standards or the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) meant to assess reading, science, and mathematics skills in the manner of the best education systems of the world (those of East Asia and Finland).  Our teachers of mathematics persisted with inefficient and misguided approaches conveyed to them by mathematics education professors, with predictably deleterious results.

Minnesota Education Commissioner Mary Cathryn Ricker has deep ties to teacher training programs and to Education Minnesota and local affiliates, with a particularly firm professional connection to the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT).  She can always be counted on to create a confusion of verbiage drawing attention away from knowledge and skill mastery toward more illusory and less measurable results than those effectively tested by objective state and national assessments.

Understanding the insidious ideology of education professors and their acolytes, including Ricker and most of those quoted by Golden, is essential to understanding why we get such wretched academic results year after year and why these results will continue to inflict grave harm on our precious young people until we get around to logical impartation of those knowledge and skill sets that students will need for college and university matriculation, for a multitude of careers, for life.