Reform Math Must be Destroyed Root and Branch

American Thinker ^ | June 10, 2014 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

The Education Establishment went way too far, and this has presented the country with a unique opportunity for real improvement of the public schools.

As never before, parents across the United States will tell you emphatically that they hate Common Core, and they especially hate Common Core Math.

The Education Establishment will try to maneuver around this revulsion. Compromises will be offered. The same dumb ideas will be repackaged as something new and wonderful. The challenge is to refuse to compromise. Sometimes a good thing, compromise is now the biggest threat to genuine reform.

Our Education Establishment has been selling inferior goods for more than half a century. They know how to bait and switch, and how to lie. Ordinary citizens stand little chance against these cunning maneuvers. So let’s keep it strategically simple. Go for total victory. Reform Math should be discarded, inane root and goofy branch.

By way of background, Reform Math comprises a dozen separate but similar math curricula created in the 1980s. The most hated of these is Everyday Math (Mathland used to be the most hated, but it has been buried, which is what we need in every case.) Here are some of the other titles: College Preparatory Math, Connected Math, Core-Plus Mathematics, Discovering Math, Number Power, Interactive Mathematics, Investigations Math, Trailblazers, Chicago Math.

But why did the experts create so many basically interchangeable programs? The answer is that when a community learned to hate one of them, the experts could say, Okay, you win; let’s try this one. And they bounced the people sideways from one bad program to the next. If you like cynical, you have to love this.

During the 1960s, the Education Establishment watched New Math, in development for a long time, crash and burn in a few years....

[Mears]

Keep up the good work

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