Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics (AMS)

Parent Cafe
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<p><a href=“http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>“One study of nine hundred Texas school districts revealed that the large disparities in achievement between black and white students were almost entirely accounted for by socioeconomic status and differences in the measurable qualifications of their teachers.[footnote 1] It is no secret that minority students across the country have less mathematically educated teachers than whites.”</p>

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<p>“Yet in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle.”</p>

<p>That’s appalling.</p>

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<p>Scary article… really scary…</p>

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<p>"“Yet in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle.”</p>

<p>It is hard to believe that. But now they don’t need to know. They teach area to kids by counting the little blocks in a rectangle.</p>

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<p>They can’t teach it if they themselves don’t know it. </p>

<p>And I can totally believe it. The teacher my son had for fifth and sixth grade clearly did not like math; there were only three math periods a week in her classroom, and one of them was used to clean the hamster cage! She had NO idea how to teach math, so she mostly didn’t, especially to my kid. </p>

<p>(And this is when we finally told the school, after having tried to resolve the problem for months, to stop trying to teach our kid math, and to let him go to the library four periods a week so he could do EPGY distance learning instead.)</p>

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<p>In my experience, a lot of elementary school teachers are just as ignorant of basic spelling, grammar, history, etc. as they are of basic math. </p>

<p>I think the underlying problem is that our culture does not value elementary teaching as a career, and instills the idea that it’s not a choice for smart people. There are some very smart and academically sophisticated people with a passion for teaching who pursue it despite the discouragement. And then there are all the folks who view it (correctly, according to this article) as a safe, accessible career that they can pursue without doing any taxing work in college.</p>

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<p>My son is in the schools G/T program, a pull out 4 hour class. I asked why they did not do any math in the program at all, just writing, research etc. The teacher told me the district did not view it as important as writing and research. UGGHHHHHH. </p>

<p>We found an outside math enrichment program taught by Russian born math teachers. Parents themselves fed up of the lame math curriculum in their childrens elementary schools.After the search for the enrichment program, what I learned about top performing school districts near us, the avenues are RIPE with after school math tutoring centers, especially in the heavily Asian communities.No wonder they are high performing.</p>

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<p>But if it’s proposed to require a competency test of these teachers the teachers union will fight it tooth and nail.</p>

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<p>I taught First and Second grades in poverty schools, both urban and rural. For me, there was marked difference in understanding of curriculum directions for improving literacy (excellent) compared to mathematics (not even at the starting gate). </p>

<p>The district changed its early Math curriculum (books, lesson plans, materials, everything) three times in 5 years, and heaven help you if you used anything from the bad old curriculum (last year’s). It was chaotic. </p>

<p>In this article, I saw an example of that but you have to know the code to unscramble the story. A teacher is described as being unwilling to teach any subtraction during the first half of First Grade, and made to sound rather silly about it, too.</p>

<p>I recognize where that comes from: there’s one curriculum out there which departed from the traditional and emphasized Number Sense and Addition alone during the most of First Grade. They said if children could thoroughly understand “part + part = whole” (addition), it would take them just a few lessons at the end of First Grade to turn it inside out and be able to subtract, with deeper understanding.</p>

<p>Well, you know what? It worked. But then the following year, the new curriculum
reverted to the other way (starting both addition and subtraction “fact families to 5”) in September, spending all year to build to Fact Families to l0. </p>

<p>After a while, it got so frustrating to have the program changed and many useful lessons forbidden as inconsistent with the new materials selected by the district. By contrast, the new directions in Literacy (Guided Reading, in particular) built stronger each year and there was genuine progress districtwide.</p>

<p>What I enjoyed about this article was how the author did understand that teachers want to teach better. Note it was not a teacher-bashing article. This research modeled how to internalize mathematical concepts, and find creative ways to communicate them according to the needs of that class or that child, without any ceiling on subject matter. </p>

<p>The question about how well educated in Math are the elementary teachers might depend on how you evaluate their knowledge. I’m sure you know the mathematical term for the principle that dictates this:
the sum of 2 + 5 is equal to the sum of 5 + 2. But how will you teach that to 5/6 year olds? I heard math leaders urge us to drill children pn the NAME of the property (in First Grade) because “math literacy demands language.” I also heard leaders advise faculty to USE WORKSHEETS or FORBID WORKSHEETS. </p>

<p>The program that taught this best to young children had a great lessom where we taught this unforgettably by hanging clothespins on a wire clothes-hanger. First they see the hanger with clothespins lined up on the wire, 5 on one side of the hook, 2 on the other side. The kids count up 7 clothespins in all by stopping at 5 and considering “2 more” to reach 7. Everyone recites, “5 + 2 = 7” a few times. Then the teacher spins around the hanger, and (magic) they see for themselves: 2 + 5 = 7. They are absolutely clear that the sum remains unchanged regardless of the sequence of digits. </p>

<p>So there was a crystal-clear way to teach that property, but it was retired the following year. </p>

<p>Finally her article drops a bombshell that there is cheating in these standardized tests, and I witnessed it several times. I will be so glad if that comes to light. The stakes were very high under NCLB to demonstrate annual improvement in test scores, lest the school go under state review. While some were honest, there was also cheating (by some teachers, not these very young students) responding to that pressure. That was the single greatest disservice to poor students I saw in my career because it masked schoolwide failure. It was nothing obvious, like teachers entering false score totals; it happened in the way various teachers prompted from the front of the room during these tests. Some followed test manual directions precisely while others “encouraged” their students more and got much praise for the high scores resulting. I hope it all comes to light. </p>

<p>Thanks for this article, TokenAdult. Very interesting, indeed.</p>

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<p>Yes, I enjoyed this aspect of the article also. The author showed how to light a candle (how to teach teachers how to teach math better) as well as how to curse the darkness.</p>

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<p>So, parents are out of it completely? Incredible. Parents have not responsibility anymore, let them kids figure out on their own. Teacher has 30+ students in a class with different abilities and talents. Parents are responsible for their kids education, as well as providing food and shelter and clothe, not government. Relying on government will bring you nowhere in life.</p>