Tom Ward’s Math Solution Helps Find the Problem

Tom Ward‘s sensible suggestion for parents concerned about the mathematical education of their children, presented in the first part of his Valley Breeze column from this week, touches upon what may be the most basic of disagreements in education policy…

My advice to young parents who don’t trust the math curriculum is this: Consider what we did. Whether through lessonplanet.com or many other sites, just Google search “arithmetic worksheets,” download the lessons, and get your child to work on learning arithmetic the way you might have learned it. And if a teacher worries to you that it might “confuse” your child, ignore them. It’s your child. Nobody’s brain will explode.

The general question raised by Ward’s advice is this: Are there ways to determine whether someone knows math, separate from knowing that they made it through the individual steps of a government-approved schooling process?

For those who believe there are such ways, something like the Common Core isn’t really necessary; i.e. if we already know where to turn to evaluate mathematics knowledge, we don’t really need a sweeping national initiative to tell us how to do it.

For those who believe there aren’t such ways, Ward’s suggestion is by definition a non-starter, but they have a problem of their own; i.e. starting from an idea that what’s taught in school cannot be evaluated outside of school, or even at a later time within school, how can it be claimed that anything of enduring value is being taught?

The Common Core initiative, where a single group outside of the school system asserts itself as a neutral arbiter of what is important about a field of knowledge like mathematics fails to address any of these sets of fundamental tensions, and thus has found itself with adversaries on multiple fronts.

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