PUBLIC COMMENT TO NATIONAL MATH PANEL

Sept 6-7, 2007, St. Louis

By

J. Martin Rochester

University of Missouri-St. Louis

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the work of the National
Math Panel and the issues at stake in this project. I am a professor at
the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I should note that I am a
political scientist, not a mathematician, but nonetheless I am someone
who has spent over 30 years as a professional educator, and also as a
parent, observing one failure after another in K-12 education, as every
so-called "progressive" fad presented as a magic bullet has only added
to our shooting ourselves in the feet. I have written about this in my
book *Class Warfare* as well as in *Education Week*, *Phi Delta Kappan*,
and other publications.

Fuzzy math (or integrated math, or whatever you want to call Everyday
Math, Core-Plus and the other reform math curricula now dominant in
K-12) has been driven by the same constructivist paradigm and same
dumbing-down, populist impulses that gave us the now discredited
"whole-language" pedagogy in English. That is, in place of the old maxim
"no pain, no gain," we now have the new maxim in K-12, "if it ain't fun,
it can't be done." Under the guise of "critical thinking" and
"problem-solving," which are ubiquitous buzzwords in every discipline in
today's schools, fuzzy math is trying to make math more "interesting,"
i.e., enjoyable and entertaining and accessible to the masses, to the
bottom, to the lowest common denominator. The new math deemphasizes and
devalues direct instruction, drill and practice, basic computation
skills, and getting it right -- getting precise, correct answers. Forget
rigor -- the key concern here is to alleviate boredom and drudgery for
mathphobes and those who suffer from math anxiety. Never mind we are
inflicting this stuff on mathphobes and mathphiles alike, doing a
disservice to both. And never mind Isaac Newton's admonition that "there
is no royal road to geometry," meaning no easy path, although some
reformers seem to have found it.

Most of the math professors I have spoken to at my university are
appalled at the lack of basic computation skills students now bring to
campus from K-12. Not surprisingly, parents are having to enroll their
kids increasingly in Kumon math tutoring courses to compensate for the
failure of our schools to provide a solid foundation. In my own school
district of Clayton, one of the richest and best in the state of
Missouri, dozens of parents, including the president of the school board
(a Harvard MBA), have resorted to Kumon math for their kids ever since
fuzzy math was introduced into the district.

As a college professor, I can tell you that our K-16 education system in
America is becoming dysfunctional as we are turning the precollegiate
and collegiate levels upside down. K-12 teachers pretentiously aspire to
teach "critical thinking" in kindergarten, even though little Johnny
cannot even find the potty by himself, while we in higher ed are left to
clean up the mess, having to do more and more remediation -- in English
having to teach grammar and where to put the comma, in history having to
teach basic historical facts such as who Lenin was (that's Vladimir, not
John), and \-- yes -- in math having to teach what 2 plus 2 is.

There is an Emperors Clothes quality to the claims made by the math
reformers. I respectfully urge you to examine these claims more
carefully, since they are cut out of the same cloth as all the other
failed K-12 reforms of the recent past. Thank you.

J. Martin Rochester, Ph.D.

Curators' Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science

University of Missouri- St. Louis