>But it’s almost like the education establishment doesn’t want to teach math well.
I’d gander a guess that their collective math skills are lacking. You can’t teach what you don’t know.
Yes. Chicken and the egg sort of problem.
Most states require an education degree if you want to teach in a public school. But you can guess the standard course material for adults getting a 4-year degree in education. It’s about designing a lesson plan, classroom management, and lots of political indoctrination.
The idea that an education major might get their college degree after mastering 4th grade mathematics (as an example) is laughable. That’s not what they are there for. But it should be. And so you end up with adults teaching 4th graders how to handle factions or percentages when the teacher never really got a handle on that stuff herself.
They need to rebuild the whole system. Because the teachers have been taught “how to teach” but they don’t actually “know the material”.
I homeschooled my daughter in basic algebra. I was appalled that the teachers edition of the textbook gave the teacher scripts to read out loud for explaining concepts. So the “teacher” doesn’t actually have to know any algebra at all.