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Posted on 10/30/2025 8:23:09 AM PDT by DallasBiff
American students are experiencing a math crisis marked by a decline in scores that began over a decade ago and rapidly accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report shows
Almost 4 in 10 eighth-graders scored below basic in math on the Nation’s Report Card, leading to the lowest scores since the test began in the early 2000s. The gap between high- and low-performing students is higher than ever. Students who saw strong gains in math since the early 2000s — girls, low-income students, Black and Latino students, students with disabilities, and English learners — have seen their stunning progress erased.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
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They’re spelling it wrong, it’s “maff”.
How strange.
Statistics is also very useful in the real world—and not that hard to teach and learn.
This book is a good start:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
Probability is also fun and not that hard to learn—I remember my teacher would make us figure out the probability of various poker hands.
In the late 1970s, women became the majority of public high school teachers. in the 2020s, women make up almost 60% of the public high school teachers.
The decline was in full effect decades ago, when calculators were allowed in the CPA exam.
Math is racist unless you are figuring out how many 8balls are in an ounce!
When I took statistics in college, we were not allowed to use calculators. We had to make a times table chart. Fortunately I learned how to do that in elementary school (Catholic).
After spending some years in the work force, I decided to go back to school. I took some basic math to get my brain focused.
There were high school student graduates who could not add, or even use the calculators on the desks.
The New Math went out decades ago. It was a wave that passed over the country and left. Whatever kids’ problem now is, it isn’t that. I don’t think they’re bothering with set theory and octal.
Teachers in the 70s and 80s told students “You’re not always going to have a calculator on you.” Now it seems, we do. That may be part of the problem.
And now with ChatGPT, it can do your term papers for you.
> NY high schools at the time changed the traditional ALG I &II, Geometry and Trig to Math course I,II,III & IV. <
That was also tried in the district where I taught. They called it “spiral learning”. It was a disaster.
Now, here’s the thing about public education. Every time a new superintendent comes in, he must try something new to justify himself. So he latches on to the latest fad. I saw that happen over and over again.
Now here’s the thing (part 2). “Educational research” is crap. It’s pretty much say whatever you want. So it’s really easy to come up with new fads.
I was a BSEE with a slide rule. Never had to job search in 40 years.
Traditional math teaches that there is only 1 right answer but many wrong answers.
Teachers colleges and academia do not like that paradigm. Thus they look for convoluted exceptions to prove that everything is relative.
The first step is to twist the concept of precision. 1 could be any number between 0.500001 and 1.499999. The next step is to round. So numbers that are close are OK. I knew a 16 year old teen who made self to look older and rounded age to 20.
Academia has turned math into a game with no right answer.
Calculators do not help with procedure. The calculator is not the fault, its the lack of math theory and reasoning causing the problem.
A business owner told me this one about 7 years ago. Two teenagers came to his boat dealership looking for summer work he had advertised. He looked at them and said, “Thannks for coming in, what is 11+17? They looked at him, puzzled. Then one said, “If you give me a calculator I’ll tell you.” He said, “Never mind, and goodbye.”
There is no ‘math crisis’, there is a culture war on anything that smacks of whitey.
That said, Israel Herstein is one of my gods.
My math crisis started 85 years ago...but I overcame it.
“… Goes back much further; back to when “new math” was rolled out in the early 70s...”
BINGO! The ‘new’ math left me bewildered.
From my own life's experience, and I'm 76 now, basic arithmetic has always been very difficult for me because I do not retain carry/borrow in my head long enough to complete a computation. Worse yet, the multiplication table does not stay with me. Throughout grade school and middle school people thought I was some kind of dunce. Even though I always knew procedural rules to solve any given problem, I'd screw up often with just applying the operators to numbers.
They finally put me in a remedial math class in the 7th grade, that being taught by a very old man. After several weeks he recognized my problem and taught me a number of mental crutches. He had me transferred to an algebra class in the second semester; and, I did pretty well in that class even as a late starter.
In high school I took advanced math, physics, and chemistry classes. I won the academic awards for both physics and chemistry. I went on to college to study physics and math; but, changed to Computer Science because software engineering suits me very well and makes my brain happy.
My life's career was designing electronic I/O equipment for computers and then instruments made upon microprocessors, and all of the related software. Digital logic works very well inside my brain as does writing esoteric software.
I would have never "made it" without a calculator.
The schools took on the German education model a century ago. Psychological behavior modification became ascendant of traditional education. This we have schools more like mental hospitals than centers of learning. Experimental psychology is destructive pseudoscience. The results are as intended. Destruction of young minds. Now on steroids from the perverts.
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