Math Education in America: It Doesn't Add Up

Next week, I have my first official college math exam, and to be completely honest, I’m not sure how ready I can be. I know that if I want to study thoroughly, I’m going to have to start early because I’ll have to go through the book’s questions and do all of them, possibly twice, to fully memorize the material. It’s pretty stressful knowing that the only way I’ll be completely prepared is through memorizing tables and formulas; it’s even more nerve-wracking knowing that, if I forget a table or formula, I’m guaranteed to do poorly on the exam.

My anxiety surrounding this exam is just a microcosm of a bigger issue: the sub-par state of mathematics education in the United States.

THE PROBLEM

This isn’t a new issue; the United States has consistently scored low on international rankings of student proficiency, with its top performers below the international average for math proficiency. Where the mean score on the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) was 490 in mathematics, US students scored an average of 470. You might think this doesn’t sound too bad, but the top five highest-scoring regions scored above 500 on the test. Even more interesting is that the US scores have been consistently decreasing since 2009.

Looking at the data, there’s no denying that there is a problem. So what are the causes?

POLICY

As expected, one of the biggest causes of a lack of math proficiency lies within the system itself, and within the policy that runs the system. In previous years, standards for math education have been criticized as too “voluminous, scattered, and repetitive." I’m sure most of us can back up this statement with personal experience; I can remember times in high school when we would, in the words of my teacher, “spend too much time understanding this concept” and then have to rush through the next one on the curriculum.

Another policy problem concerns graduation requirements, which have increased within the past decade. The requirement for math isn’t particularly lofty, but having the requirement encourages a ‘check-the-box-then-forget-it’ method of learning. This leads to a cyclical memorize it, test it, forget it cycle that doesn’t facilitate true learning. Again, I think we have all experienced this. But policy isn’t the only problem in math education.

EDUCATORS AND CULTURE

Educators themselves also pose a problem. This isn’t to say that American teachers are inherently bad at teaching math, but they were typically taught under the same system they now propagate, a system which is obviously flawed. Math educators who only understand math on the memorization level will not be able to inspire deeper understanding in their students. But this isn’t a completely futile situation; given the right materials and training, math educators can have the ability to teach math the right way.

Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t happen. American math textbooks are thousands of pages thick and drily written, covering a plethora of subjects but never exploring them in-depth; they are merely a reflection of the nebulous curriculum for which they are written.

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If you are like most students in the United States, that first day of calculus in high school, you were handed a 1,000-page book, and you sighed as you lamented about having to carry it around. Your calculus teacher asked the classroom full of forlorn faces: “who’s excited for calculus?”

There might have been that one kid who was, but most people weren’t, and a lot of people were already reserved to not doing well, stating, simply, “I’m just not a math person.” The fact that no one bats an eye at that statement is the root of the cultural problem surrounding math education in the US. It’s okay here to just be ‘bad at math.’

So you can see that there are obviously a lot of problems with math education in the United States. So how can we fix the problems?

THE SOLUTION

It’s a lot easier to pick out what’s wrong than to figure out how to solve it. There have been a lot of attempts to reform math education, and education in general, in the US in the past, but most of them have failed. 

The most recent attempt at a total reform on how we teach math is the Common Core reform. An extremely controversial policy, Common Core for mathematics aims to “provide clarity and specificity rather than broad general statements.” It’s proven that where Common Core standards are put into place, students learn more and perform better. However, they must be implemented properly, and this is where the controversy lies. Common Core is an undeniably effective method of teaching, and its core principles can be seen at work in the countries ranking in the top ten on the PISA.

But confused teachers blindsided by a new way of educating, expected to implement standards with little to no training and a background solidly embedded in the antiquated math education methods of the past are guaranteed to fail.

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What do you think? Have you ever felt hindered by our current mathematical education system? Are you opposed to the Common Core way of learning? Do you think that we should strive to score higher on the PISA in years to come?