I came out of a rural southern school that had lousy marginal math instructors. My brother (who is today a electrical engineer) was 6 years behind me.
At some point around the 8th grade (he was bucking the system and doing well), had some girl who’d had straight marginal grades for a long time, come to him and ask for help.
He gave her 15 minutes a day of simplified math tutoring...explaining it in a way that made sense. In six ways, her grades changed. At the end of high school, she went onto college, and eventually became a teacher. Somewhere around age 35, she looked him up and admitted his way of looking at math problems and explaining this in a simple way...made the difference.
What we have are crappy math books, and half the math-instructor population just not capable of getting a point across.
We have truly lousy math instruction. I passed my classes but I hated math and I didn’t really “get it” until I took a math course for teachers. The instructor was a master teacher who used a Montessori-based math instruction system.
There is still a lot of simple memorization that makes it easier and faster (times tables, for example), and that shouldn’t be neglected. But I found that the kids really “got it” with her method, including older kids who had been doing badly.
One of the particular problems with black children, however, is that their language skills are often so poor that it’s hard to get the concepts across using any method. Not requiring standard English in the classrooms (or not teaching it in the first place) does not help black children in any subject, including math.
Those crappy math books and teachers are part of the plan.
Just take a look at what the “common core” standards did to math.
Text books, especially math ones, seem to be the proof of the real meaning of Santayana's famous quote.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.Textbooks seem to be changed every few years for no good reason (other than to employ textbook writers) and with no effort to retain what is good and from there improve them. Has math changed in the past hundred years, especially math below the level of graduate school in college? Other than removing some references to gramophones in the story problems the old books will do the job.
If a new way of teaching is found or it is found that teaching multiplication before subtraction is more effective then put that in new books. But it seems like most textbook changes are for educational fads or just changing for the sake of selling schools something new even if less effective.
Saxon math
The only answer.
Sadly at one time they were a gold standard