FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED DEC. 7, 1997
Slightly ahead of a similar process now unfolding in other states, the California state Legislature mandated some time back that its state Board of Education must adopt a list of math standards -- skills of which California schoolchildren must demonstrate mastery at given points in their schooling -- by Jan. 1, 1998.
The California state board adopted its standards for kindergarten through seventh grade on Dec. 1. Educators were not pleased.
No one denies there is a problem. Only one in six California government-school students now enrolls for a second year of algebra. Only one in three completes geometry.
The education establishment years ago concluded the problem was that tedious memorization and other emphasis on "computational skills" was turning kids off. "For the past decade or so," reports education writer Richard Lee Colvin at the Times, "support has been growing among math teachers for stressing the way math is used outside the classroom, or trying to make lessons more concrete by using blocks or folded paper to illustrate concepts, for instance, or enlivening lessons with games."
On Dec. 1, the California state board -- by a 10-0 vote -- threw out this touchy-feely stuff, instead adopting standards that "emphasize correct answers and lots of practice while discouraging the use of calculators."
By the end of third grade, students will now be required to have memorized their multiplication tables from 1 through 10. Long division will once again become standard fare starting in the fourth grade. Seventh graders will have to demonstrate that they can "determine without a calculator" that the square root of 85 lies between 9 and 10. And in every grade, the standards as adopted now call for students to demonstrate the ability to "make precise calculations."
Those whose own school years lie decades in the past may be shocked to learn that long division and memorization of the multiplication tables were ever abandoned, in the first place, or that requiring "precise calculations" and "correct answers" should even be a matter of debate.
Yet our new mandarin class of professional mumbo-jumbo artists are crying havoc at the mere threat of restoring such common sense. The new standards "tip the balance too far in the direction of skills," moans Delaine Eastin, California state Superintendent of Public Instruction.
These folks are wrong. Mathematics is indeed more than boring, mechanical computations. But before the young can rise to the level of those higher concepts, a solid groundwork must be laid.
A similar battle is about to unfold here in Nevada. Dr. James Grant, a 32-year veteran government school teacher from Indiana and now full-time math consultant to the state Department of Education in Carson City, reports he will deliver by Jan. 6 his department's own proposed math standards to Nevada's own Council to Establish Academic Standards.
So: Will Nevada students likely be moving back to old-style mastery of computation, via pencil and paper?
The Nevada state Board of Education has "banned the use of calculators on the high school exit exam; we're trying to get them to change that," replies Dr. Grant.
Uh-oh.
And how about those multiplication tables? By what year should Nevada students be required to have those memorized?
"I don't think in today's day and age we can always get what we want by just giving them more practice problems," replied Dr. Grant, "I don't think it's necessarily going to work, I think it's a waste of time. Give them a reason to use that '9-times-8' in a problem situation and they'll have more success. The ideal is that they all have those facts down by the end of fourth grade, but I also realize there will be some students who have not attained that degree of proficiency."
Although they may not realize it, what really terrifies many of today's educators is having their failures exposed by objective measurement of what skills and facts their students have actually mastered by any fixed date. Behind all the excuses (chronically-obese children "too hungry to learn," the best-funded schools in the world crippled by "inadequate funding"), what these educators forget is that the current system was established on the premise that centrally-planned, uniform government welfare schools could and would educate all our children adequately.
If they cannot, then the whole tax-funded enterprise should be scrapped -- parents should be handed back their money, and encouraged to explore private alternatives.
To get the solid data necessary to make such a decision, other state Boards of Education must do precisely what their counterparts in Sacramento have just done: adopt firm standards, subject to irrefutable quantitative measurement.
And then let the wailing begin.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
-- Samuel Adams