A Failing Model

If you pay attention, there are signs all over the place that our current K-12 educational system is failing. Although it’s no fault of most teachers, administrators, and students, the fact remains that too many of our kids are not becoming smarter and stronger after spending time in our public schools.

Witness a story appearing in The Atlantic titled “A Recipe of Idiocracy.” The story focuses on America’s college kids not being able to do math anymore. Rose Horowitch, the article’s author and a staff writer at The Atlantic writes:

“Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900 – and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with ‘logical thinking’ than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.”

“The university’s problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.”

“…[T]he national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader’s math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are not a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.”

America’s youth’s ability to do math is now at a level not seen since 1970. We’ve lost 50 years of problem-solving ability over the past 12.

Of course, the biggest reason traditional K-12 folks use, to explain this demise, is the increased use of social media, cellphones, along with artificial intelligence. Another reason, again attached to technology, is that kids just aren’t engaged in math classes any longer – technology has caused learner complacency.

Another reason traditionalists point to is the disappearance of any type of national accountability for public schools when it comes to performance in math, along with reading and writing. Lack of accountability has led many districts to replace evidence-based teaching practices with strategies designed to make math more engaging.

The pandemic exacerbated the problem.

“…Many districts adopted a ‘no zeros’ policy, forcing teachers to pass students who had little command of the material. One study of public school students across Washington State found that almost none received an F in the spring 2020, while the share of students who receive A’s skyrocketed. Math grades have remained elevated in the years since.”

“…The UC San Diego report notes that more than a quarter of the students who placed into the elementary- and middle-school-level remedial course last year had earned straight A’s in their high-school math classes. Almost all of them had taken advanced math course in high school.”

“Dan Goldhaber, the director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington, told me that he doesn’t know of anyone who denies that young people are much worse at math than they used to be. Instead, most of the arguments for optimism hinge on the idea that students might no longer need foundational math skills, because they could use AI instead – an idea he thinks is absurd.”

“The other academics I spoke with tended to agree. ‘Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?’ Brian Conrad, a Stanford math professor, told me. ‘The premise that foundational ideas don’t need to be learned anymore is a recipe for idiocracy.’”

Traditional K-12 champions will tell you that improvements in teaching, school leadership and management, curriculum, and assessment will fix the math problems, along with struggling reading and writing performance. They are counting that you believe them.

But what if they are wrong. What if we wait another 50 years, allowing the traditionalists to tinker around the edges of our teaching and learning system, only to have our kids become dumber and dumber.

It’s amazing not more people are paying attention to what ABPTL has been advocating for the past three years (and others longer). Here’s hoping something like artificial intelligence is able to save the day, because it doesn’t seem many have an appetite to change our current teaching and learning system for the better.

Til tomorrow. SVB