Let me respectively disagree. From my personal experience the best Math teachers are mathematicians and not education specialists with some “fake” subject expertise. I do not say someone needs PhD to teach precalc. But I cannot stand strange ideas of those educational specialists… Those are the ones who came up with Common Core… The best text math books I have seen were created by mathematicians.
Something else not yet mentioned about the report is that most of the students placed into Math 2 (the lowest level course) were intended biology or psychology majors, where math is required but not to the level that math-heavy majors need to take. Page 48 shows the distribution of majors of students in Math 2. Page 47 lists what math courses are required for various majors and the prerequisite sequencing. Note that UCSD considers precalculus level math the “normal entry point” based on the math admission requirement, and calculus the “typical entry point” for those who had access to advanced math in high school. Math 2 is the only below-precalculus course.
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Also, you can see the type of problems the students are struggling with on page 49/50 of the report: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf
I’m very intrigued by your story. Do you recall any creative ways you solved calculus problems without algebra knowledge?
I don’t think your story is typical - generally, students with large middle school gaps (large enough to be exposed on the type of test I linked as sample of above) will fail higher level maths without some unusual creative problem solving talent like you had. (Maybe the hippie school helped? Or not?)
At least one of the writers of Common Core was a mathematician who transitioned into primary math education after the birth of her kids.
It was more than 40 years ago so I don’t remember those details any more, but I do remember that I drew a LOT of pictures. Algebra (at least at the level I needed it) wasn’t so bad to pick up on the fly. I struggled more with basic stuff like fractions!
Something like this? https://youtu.be/S0_qX4VJhMQ
Maybe? I remember drawing pictures for practically every problem and then writing out explanations of how the picture related to the problem…
That is exactly Common Core approach in our local schools, so kids barely able to do real math. They just drawing and drawing and explaining…and can’t solve anything and get credit for trying 
Our high school switched to Mathematics Vision Project shortly before my kids started HS, and it seemed to involve a lot of time with students sitting around tables trying to discuss problems without understanding them, making everyone confused. Fortunately for 11th grade both of my kids got the really good, strict, old fashioned math teacher, and they came out of that with a much better math foundation than I’ll ever have.
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I have not read the whole report (too long for me late on a Wednesday night), but I’ve read a portion and the summary. What I find interesting, is that from the outset it mentions at least 4 factors: COVID Pandemic, grade inflation, removal of standardized testing, and steep increase in LCFF+ school enrollees at UCSD. It discusses the steep increase in students that are significantly underprepared in math, who need math for their major, between 2020 and 2025. And, this thread is littered with discussions about the need to bring SAT/ACT back for admissions, with little discussion of the COVID factor (a few mentions).
When I look at the chart on math 2 enrollment, it steadily climbs year after year from 2020 to 2025. If this is a lack of standardized testing problem, then why are the numbers so much worse in year 5 than in year 1 of no standardized testing?
It makes me wonder instead if the issue could actually be where in their math educational journey these students were when COVID hit in 2020 and they had to do zoom learning for a full year or more in many cases. Could it be that the 2021 cohort who only spent their senior year on zoom were less behind? And 2022, juniors, still had a decent foundation for zoom school? And, then 2023 and beyond where you get to early high school and middle school via zoom, those losses of basic skill building years in real school just compounded so that way more of them could not catch up and the numbers exploded? This seems more plausible to me than the removal of standardized testing in admissions being the cause of more unprepared math students. And if the COVID effects are in fact the driving factor in the meteoric rise in the number of unprepared math students they have (which I suspect they are), then might their current crisis be temporary, and subside once kids who did not have to endure prolonged zoom school (or at least not past some elementary school grade where catch up will have happened) are no longer the pipeline? H.S. Class of 2026 was in 6th grade when COVID hit. How many more classes would they expect before the effect starts to dramatically decline?
A second plausible theory to me is that the increase in LCFF+ students is highly correlated to the increase in unprepared math students, especially given the reality that those students on average were much more harshly impacted by zoom school than more well off students. And, UCSD is uniquely impacted by this in the UC system since they now have the highest number of LCFF+ students of any school in the UC system.
Now, I get that one could argue that bringing testing is a solution to the problem, and maybe it is. But the tenor in this thread was implying that removing testing was the cause of the problem (at least combined with grade inflation) while completely ignoring COVID’s accute impact on the era of students being measured.
For the record, I am against bringing testing back for a couple reasons. First, I am generally skeptical that institutions have the ability long term to keep the testing numbers in their proper perspective and use them as a floor (as someone suggested earlier in this thread) rather than a measure of relative excellence where they are reflexively disproportionately drawn to the highest scores. For UCSD’s acute math crisis I could probably temporarily get over that one. But, Second, and most importantly, at this particular moment, I think that bringing test scores runs a significant risk of artificially suppressing the number of Black and Latino students at highly selective schools. I say this because the federal government and certain litigious groups (but mostly I care about the government’s efforts) are closely scrutinizing admissions data exclusively by race, grades and test scores. And, if for any reason, the percentage of black or Latino students happen to go up without the test scores doing the same, that school will immediately be under scrutiny with serious financial risk. Even if, those students that year are exceptional candidates who just do not have the test scores to show it. Adding test scores back at this moment in history highly incentivizes enrolling less of these students in order to mitigate institutional risk.
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Good points. At least in our CA district, there was almost no instruction at all in spring 2020, then zoom school for the entirety of the next school year… so it took a really big bite out of many kids’ education! I can also imagine that zoom school may have affected students in less resourced districts quite differently from students in wealthier districts.
My S (9th grade in 2020) didn’t mind zoom school so much (although he also didn’t learn as much as he could have), but it was a total disaster for my D (6th grade in 2020) and we had to scramble to pull her and place her in a small private school that had at least part-time instruction in person. Grateful that we had the resources to do so.
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I will say teachers are not responsible for common core standards. Teachers in public schools are dictated what curriculum to use and what standards to teach. They are given strict time lines for when that have to teach the material.
I agree that math education needs an over haul. What is being taught and when needs to be carefully planned based on brain development. With so many standards for teachers to cover, many times students do not have time to develop automatically or generalization of skills.
We also need to do a better job at the university level to develop future teachers deep conceptual understanding of the math they will be teaching. Teachers who were good math students because they were procedural learners and could retain the material to get an A or B on a test, may understand the how and not the why. They are not prepared to share the joy of math when you understand the why.
We need to turn education back to to the experts. Math text books written by mathematics PHDs and the scope and sequences developed by educational psychologists who have a deep understanding of human development. Teachers who implement the curriculum given the time to teach to mastery of the skills. Common core standards have done no favors for average students in the area of math. They are being pushed through the curriculum with out regard to mastery.
It has been a recipe for disaster since the beginning.
Mathematicians don’t understand how to reach the kids who are “bad” at math and are tracked into the lowest math sections. Those kids need a different approach.
Yes and no. Depends on teachers. However teaching to lowest common denominator brings bar too low and then you get most of the kids with no mastery since not everyone can afford private tutors. For lower level struggles we need tracking, small classes and a lot of individual attention. When DD could not understand percentage in lower grades the whole family was pulling hair. I tried to explain with several different approaches, my husband, her siblings. Nothing worked. Then I just start to pull one video after another explaining it the same way! After 6th video with extremely heavy accent from India (I could not follow it at all), my daughter had “aha” moment. Tell me what school or curriculum will do it for kids? BTW, DD is very bright. Jut not gifted and talented level bright in math. But she was always extremely hard working one. She completed Calc 1 with an A. She is now Chem major.
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Isn’t it also the case that curriculum changes may “fail” because they appear successful in pilot studies by the designers of the changes (who know the changes and their nuances the best through experience in the pilot studies), but become less successful when pushed out to teachers who themselves are new to the changes and perhaps less enthusiastic about them?
My D who was also in sixth grade was at a small private in CA and they were even 100% zoom school for almost an entire year (March to early Feb), then part time in person the rest of the year. Local public was zoom school the entire time. Friends parents reported they were doing worksheets at best with 2-3 hours of “school” a day. It was a disaster for many.
My wife, who is quite good at math spent so much time evenings and weekends catching D26 up in math. Most folks do not have the privilege of better private school instruction via zoom combined with a parent with the time, energy, and capacity to teach them what they were missing.
It seems to me the logical outcome of that era would be a cohort of students who are particularly unprepared for college math. So the upward trend line in remedial math makes sense to me.
Edit: Was also just remembering that the younger kids at her private school went back to in person sooner(start of fall 2020 semester). I’d suspect that they did not get nearly as far behind.
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Thanks, for some reason I missed that. I wonder, has the Math department spoken to the Bio Sci department?
Yes, part of the problem is the lack of professional development and coaching needed to impliment the curriculum at a high level and get those results. That type of support is expensive and rarely provided. Instead teachers spend a few years learning how to use the curriculum and once they hit their stride, a new curriculum is brought in again.