Increasingly Weak Curriculum and Abominable Teaching
Via my
students’ accounts and my own observations, I am lamentably with each passing
day finding the public schools to get worse and worse.
History,
geography, and literature are consistently wretchedly taught:
Students
have no sense of the substance or chronology of past events; most
are lost when looking at either a United States or world map; and
they read very little quality literature, know nothing of English grammar, and
have little experience conducting genuine research or writing challenging
essays. Teachers gather students in groups to produce a report,
often on posters, with little guidance toward quality websites or reading
material; any information that students do find in such exercises
must be processed in the absence of context, because the teacher inevitably has
provided little subject area information for students to evaluate what they are
finding in their sources.
Education
professors are responsible for the knowledge-deficient approach to curriculum
that academic decision-makers and teachers follow in the public schools, and
for the inefficient and ineffective pedagogy that teachers utilize.
And while
education professors are objectionable generally, mathematics education
professors are objectionable specifically:
Many
mathematics education professors write long textbooks and produce overly long
curriculum materials (running 200 to 300 pages) even for students in grades
K-2, at which point the only truly important skills are addition and
subtraction, necessitating only the anticipatory skills of counting forward by
ones, twos, threes, fives, and tens; and backwards from twenty to
one. But for all the inefficient exercises that pad mathematics
education books and curricula, student skills over time atrophy as teachers
turn to calculators as early as fourth grade.
Similarly,
in grades 3 through 6, the teaching of multiplication is maladroit and long
division is a mostly lost art; and teaching of fractions, decimals,
percentages, ratios, proportions, simple probability, charts and graphs
proceeds--- remarkably--- both too slowly and with lack
of thoroughness in producing student understanding.
The
teaching of science is mostly absent in elementary (K-5) schools, even in
schools that claim to be STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) and not much better in middle school.
Then in
high school, what is true also in United States history, world history, and
English, is definitely true in biology, chemistry, and physics: the
main chance that a student has after eleven (11) years in school, is to arrive
in grade 11 with a chance of rising to the academic challenge of an Advanced
Placement course--- and then to benefit only if the teacher is
actually academically skilled enough to handle the level of rigor required in
Advanced Placement.
……………………………………………………………………….
Thus K-12
public education is a mostly vacuous exercise the knowledge and skill
deficiency of which is revealed on state summative assessments such as the
Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) and on the college readiness SATs
and ACTs.
Most
students are totally unprepared for these academically rigorous assessments.
In
Minnesota, the ACT is taken free of charge by all students during the second
semester of the grade 11 year. Only those who are self-starting
readers with broad interests who have learned a great amount on their own,
often inspired by parents with the same traits, are capable realistically of
aspiring to a high score on the ACT.
The ACT is
based on a high scaled score of 36 on four sections: English,
Mathematical Reasoning, Reading, and Science Reasoning.
The
national median score is 19.4.
The
Minnesota state median score is 20.7
When
describing the ACT to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, I
present levels of performance as follows:
Score in
the 31-36
range Superior
Score in
the 28-30
range Excellent
Score in
the 25-27
range Very
Good
Score in
the 21-24
range Good
Score in
the 19-21
range Average
Score in
the 15-18
range Below
Average
Score in
the 10-14
range Far
Below Average
Score
below
10 Disastrous
Many upper
middle-class parents hire private professional ACT tutors (at $75-$150 per
hour) who can help a student already primed for a performance in the middle to
upper 20s strive for a perfect 36 score. At the level of middle or
upper 20s demonstrated on practice tests, further instruction in mathematics
and English can add to skill level, along with suggestions as to test-taking
techniques.
Such ACT
instruction is what I provide to my students in the New Salem Educational
Initiative free of charge.
My
observation over many years is that a student from an economically impoverished
family with few family members who have graduated from a four-year college who
is relying entirely on public school education can anticipate a score of 9 to
13 on the ACT. With additional tutorial training in mathematics and
English, the score might rise to 18. This also includes reviewing
with such students the level of reading expected and format of the Reading and
Science Reasoning portions of the ACT. But both of these tests are
essentially reading tests: The Reading test covers literary, social
scientific, journalistic, and general science reading material; the
Science Reasoning test features the
sort of
reading that one would conduct in biology, chemistry, and physics
courses.
Because a
knowledgeable and pedagogically adroit tutor can provide instruction on all of
the mathematical concepts on the Mathematical Reasoning test, such instruction
can be hugely valuable to the student. And because instruction in
English usage can be similarly specific, covering punctuation, capitalization,
syntax, and proper use of parts of speech, tutorials in English usage can also
help a student greatly increase performance on the English section of the
ACT.
But the
only way to achieve high scores on the Reading and Science Reasoning sections
of the ACT is to have done a great amount of reading across all major subject
areas and on the latter section particularly in science. Having done
such reading at Advanced Placement courses in biology, chemistry, and physics
may be enough to achieve a high score on the Science Reasoning portion of the
ACT. But for the type of vocabulary and comprehension demanded in
the Reading section, only those who read many books on their own are likely to
score in the 25-27, 28-30, or 31-36 ranges--- and may find achieving
even a score of 21-24 difficult.
……………………………………………………………………….
Thus the
reality is that all students in the United States are at a disadvantage in
performing well on college preparatory tests such as the SAT and ACT by
comparison to comparable assessments taken by students in nations with better
public education systems (e.g., Singapore, Taiwan, Finland).
Impoverished
students in the United States relying completely on the public schools are at a
huge disadvantage.
Also at a
disadvantage are students whose families are comprised of parents and other
adults who are not themselves readers or engaged in the pursuit of
knowledge.
……………………………………………………………………….
For me,
this signals the need to ensure that all of my students receive great amounts
of additional instruction in English usage and mathematics.
And I am
now realizing that increasingly I must stress the need to expand vocabulary and
subject area knowledge via individual student reading of books covering many
subjects.
I have
discovered very few self-starting readers among my students.
Most spend
their free time at this temporal juncture in the year 2026 on their smart
phones, especially with the apps TikTok and Instagram.
I already
provide my students with an abundance of subject knowledge in history,
government, geography, English usage, mathematics, literature, and the fine
arts that they do not acquire in the public schools.
Now,
increasingly, I will also fill my students’ time with assigned readings of the
sort that they are not likely to conduct otherwise.
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