I had never thought of this before, but I'll bet it's true. This dumbed-down arithmetic is not to accomodate the students but the teachers. It's all they can handle. What do you say?
A lot of the younger teachers were miseducated themselves. Many of them have told me they never really drilled on their fact families (or multiplication tables, as we called them in third and fourth grades in the ‘60’s) when they were in elementary school. I actually have had principals (two of them) tell me “You can’t do that. You know children don’t learn that way”. I asked, “How did you and I learn, then?” I didn’t get much of a response.