Word: mathes
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...into the Math Wars. With American kids foundering on state math exams and getting clobbered on international tests by their peers in Singapore and Belgium, parents and policymakers have been searching for a culprit. They've found it in the math equivalent of whole language--so-called fuzzy math, an object of parental contempt from coast to coast. Fuzzy math, properly called reform math, is the bastard child of teaching standards introduced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (N.C.T.M) in 1989. Like whole language, it was a sensible approach that got distorted into a parody of itself...
Adding to the math morass was the fact that 49 states (all but Iowa) devised their own math standards, with up to 100 different goals for each grade level. Textbook publishers responded with textbooks that tried to incorporate every goal of every state. "There are some 700-page third-grade math books out there," says N.C.T.M.'s current president Francis (Skip) Fennell, professor of education at Maryland's McDaniel College...
...N.C.T.M. itself has come riding to the rescue. In a notably slim document, it has identified just three essential goals, or "focal points," for each grade from pre-K to eighth, none of them fuzzy, all of them building blocks for higher math. In fourth grade, for instance, the group recommends focusing on the quick recall of multiplication facts, a deep understanding of decimals and the ability to measure and compute the area of rectangles, circles and other shapes. "Our objective," says Fennell, "is to get conversations going at the state level about what really is important." In recent weeks...
...have a solution to the national math problem? We certainly have the correct formula. The question is, Can we apply it? Already the N.C.T.M.'s focal points are being called a back-to-basics movement, another swing of the ideological pendulum rather than a fresh look at what it would take to get more kids to calculus by 12th grade. If the script follows that of the Reading Wars, what comes next will be dreary times-tables recitals in unison, dull new books that fail to inspire understanding, and drill, drill, drill, much like the unhappy scenes in many...
...numbers alone do look like a typical midterm loss for the presidential party: 28 House seats, with 10 races still undecided. Republicans have clung to this math hard in recent days, with even Karl Rove pointing to electoral history to prove that things could have been worse. But Republicans spent most of the year boasting about how the redistricting of the past decade had made them all but bulletproof. Absent those new district lines, says the American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein, "it could easily have been 45 or more." And there are other results that break with past patterns...