When it comes to math, maybe the kids aren’t the problem

The way we are teaching, testing, and requiring mathematics is damaging our society with potentially fatal results. That’s a strong statement, I know, but to get a sense of why, take a moment to think of something that you would find hard or maybe impossible to do — executing 30 pullups, playing a violin concerto, walking a tightrope over an abyss, feeding a snake, solving a complex polynomial equation. 

Now suppose our society decrees that to graduate from high school, you must be able to do that thing or be branded a failure and not earn a diploma. How are you feeling about yourself and your prospects?

Imagine trying your hardest to learn the skills, but the textbooks, online resources and sometimes even teachers confuse you, and on top of that, some exams are so badly designed they are virtually impossible to pass. 

The 2022 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed only 36% of fourth graders and 26% of eighth graders were considered proficient in mathematics. The national average for high school math proficiency is just 38%.

Why are so many young people not achieving math proficiency? Consider how we define “proficiency.” 

For example, the Common Core math standards state that, among other things, high school students should “Recognize that sequences are functions, sometimes defined recursively, whose domain is a subset of the integers. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is defined recursively by f (0) = f (1) = 1, f (n+1) = f (n) + f (n-1) for n ≥ 1.” And that’s just one example of many.

Suppose your child came to you with that as homework each night, possibly in tears. Now imagine that your child has special needs and deals with dyscalculia, ADD or other challenges.  

One of my sons struggles with ADD and is trying to complete an online financial algebra course offered by his school district to fulfill his mandatory “math pathway” for graduation. To help him succeed, a certified math and science tutor and I have worked with him every day through some very poorly designed online lessons provided by his district. 

We also helped him try to solve problems during a unit exam, but together, we achieved only a score of 32% on the exam. A certified math teacher, and a former statistics instructor with a Ph.D., failed a high school financial algebra exam. Why? Because the lessons were deeply flawed, the exam items were ambiguously worded, there were too many problems for the allotted time and the rules prohibited the use of resources like a financial calculator that one might enlist in real life. 

All that is not an excuse, and this column is not some reflexive “anti-testing” rant. It is, unfortunately, the truth. That leaves us asking, “If we failed the exam, how will most students, or their parents, possibly succeed?”

If you make children and their parents feel like failures, it is predictable that some are eventually going to give up on school and on themselves. Once that happens, they are far more likely to turn to behaviors that are harmful, self-destructive, and, tragically, sometimes fatal. And when significant portions of our population share those feelings, it inevitably harms our society as a whole. It is nothing less than educational and social malpractice to create unrealistic and unnecessary demands for children and then fail to provide them with the best resources to help them succeed.   

A good start would be to insist that policymakers, superintendents, school boards and school principals throughout our state attempt to learn each subject in math through the same texts or online resources students are required to use. I don’t mean just skimming a text or taking the word of someone else, I mean really digging in and trying to learn the material and take the tests firsthand. I doubt most people would accept the challenge and I am certain even fewer would pass the exams. 

That is not because the administrators and teachers aren’t smart, good people — it is because the materials and exams are so poorly designed, and the requirements are so profoundly detached from daily life. But if that is so, which the evidence suggests it is, why are we inflicting such things on our children and with what impacts?