How the war in Gaza is like the war on math education

The way my side lost the Math Wars is like the way we are losing the "home front" in Israel's fight for survival. The current discussion on the horror in discovering that people we thought should know better but do not know better, is one really important example. Please let me explain.

My side in the Math Wars (we never had a good name for ourselves) was comprised of university math professors, K-12 math teachers, mathematically sophisticated parents, and some people who served in policy positions in state governments (CA and MA). How on Earth did we lose the debate on math education? It's as if lawyers debated tort law with truck drivers, and lost.

The Math Wars began in the early 1990s with fights over textbooks, pedagogy, curricula, and teacher training. We wrote papers and op-eds, we presented to parents and politicians, we debated the Education Mafia. After several years of getting nowhere, I took a step back and wondered what the Hell was going on. We were experts in the field, and no one was listening to us.

In short, the collapse of math education was never a technical problem like the wrong textbooks or ineffective pedagogy---problems that are easily fixable. The one and only problem was the Education Mafia: that corrupt syndicate of the schools of education, the teachers unions, and the professional organizations like "The Dark Side of The Force" (my pet name for the NCTM, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics). 

In other words, it's not that America buys the wrong textbooks, it's that we hired the wrong people. We need astronomers but we hired astrologers.

No education reform is possible without reforming the Education Mafia, and the Education Mafia cannot be reformed. You cannot turn astrologers into astronomers. The only way is to get the Education Mafia out of education. But when I explained this to my comrades, my arguments fell on deaf ears. Understand: they did not refute me, they just did not respond. 

Now I had another mystery on my hands. Look, I may or may not be right, but after years of failure, you would think my comrades would be more receptive to an alternative discussion. That they were not, sheds light on allies who are not allies in Israel's fight for survival.

It turned out that all my comrades but one are on the political Left. To my knowledge, two are commited Marxists, the rest are "Yellow Dog Democrats". And the consequence is enormous.

You see, they are ideologically committed to the political structure of public education as it currently exists. They would never raise a hand against a union, and they want the continued existence of the "DOPE" (the U.S. Dept of Public Education). They want the Education Mafia to do the job of teaching children, but they want to tell the Education Mafia how to do their job. (We were painfully naive.)

In other words, my comrades, wonderful people that they truly are, are right about everything regarding the teaching of mathematics, and they are ideologically incapable of making it happen. The one thing that needed to be done was the one thing they could not do. They wanted to persuade the Education Mafia, not fight it.  We were doomed from the start.

Now consider the political fight for Israel. There is just too much about Israel and its fight for survival that violates Leftist dogma. And you can see how hard it is for our erstwhile allies to see through that.

In math education, everything is clear, and obvious, and present. You can read a textbook, you can walk into a classroom and watch the teacher, you can talk to the students. There is nothing abstract about it. My comrades know when the Education Mafia talk shit about math education. And they still can't see through their ideological blinders.

On the other hand, Israel is far away geographically, linguistically, and culturally. The Muslims are even farther away. It's difficult for any American to really know what's going on in the Middle East. It's ever so much harder for them to know that people like Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Andrew Napolitano, and Owen Jones are talking shit about Israel in Gaza. 

Thanks to the blizzard of propaganda blowing out of the Left, it is impossible to talk facts and logic when discussing Israel. It is more understandable, if not any less disturbing, that people we thought and hoped were our allies cannot see through their ideological blinders.  

We must find a way to help our erstwhile friends and acquaintances see through Leftist ideology to the justice of the Israeli cause. Otherwise Israel, and Jews all over the world, are going to pay a heavy price.

Whatever we have been doing up to now is not it.

Math Wars Redux

 According to this article about math education in the San Francisco public schools, students are falling behind, parents are upset, and the Education Mafia don't give a shit. In other words, in 30+ yrs of the Math Wars, absolutely nothing has changed.

Precisely, the Education Mafia don't care about your concerns. They do care a lot about the GAP in academic achievement between 

• high achieving White and Asian students on the one hand, and 
• low achieving Black and Brown students on the other. 

If the Education Mafia could reduce the Gap by raising achievement, they would gladly do that, but whether achievement rises or falls is a matter of utter indifference to them, just so long as the Gap diminishes.

With a hat tip to the TV series, "Star Trek", I call this overarching commitment to reducing the Gap, "The Prime Directive" of education.

Of course, it is impossible to raise achievement and reduce the Gap. Raising achievement can only increase the Gap. The only possible hope for reducing the Gap is to bleed academics out of the schools. And that, dear friends, is how, after many years, we reached the point in our historical development where students graduate high school unable to add fractions or construct an English sentence.

One remaining question is why was my side, in the Math Wars, singularly ineffective in altering this trajectory of failure. After all, my side was comprise of math professors, teachers, mathematically sophisticated parents, a few hangers-on like myself, and even a couple of people who held important positions in state government. 

We were all painfully naïve.

The central organizing doctrine of our strategy was to keep the Education Mafia in control of the schools. I.e., we wanted the EM to do the job, but we were going to tell them how to do it.

Words fail me.

In my own defense, I can only say that when I joined the fight, late in the 1990's, it had already started with a remarkable group of professors and parents in CA, Mathematically Correct, who were deep into textual criticism. I thought that was the battlefield.

It was only some years into the fight that I began to understand we made a terrible mistake. The problem was never the textbooks. The problem was the people choosing the textbooks.

When I started making this point, I got the same response from my comrades-in-arms as we got from the Education Mafia when we criticized their "sources and methods": Silence.

The ideas of the Education Mafia are intellectually vacuous (just think of Whole Language reading instruction), so they had nothing to gain, and potentially a lot to lose, by engaging with us, so they did not engage. But, why were my own comrades giving me the silent treatment? Eventually, I could not deny evident reality.

All my comrades-in-arms are personally wonderful and professionally accomplished people. And, if not out-and-out socialist (at least two were self-avowed), most 

• lean pretty hard towards the political Left, 
• are deeply committed to the doctrine of centrally planned education, and 
• are highly sympathetic to labor unions. 

Including, inexplicably, the teachers unions and other "professional" organizations like the NCTM, to whom I refer as "The Dark Side of The Force".

In other words, my comrades were politically the same people as the Education Mafia, except they were right about math education. And there's the rub.

The problem of education in general, and math education in particular, was never technical. Education is never going to be solved by 

• the right textbook, or 
• the right curricular structure, or 
• some magic pedagogical bullet. 

The education problem is a political problem. For children to win, the Education Mafia have to lose. But, if the Education Mafia, and the anti-Education Mafia, are cut of the same political cloth, winning was never in the cards.

Personally, I learned a lot in my 20+ yrs in the Math Wars, much of that redounding to the benefit of my son and to the children of some of my friends. So I can't be sorry about that. But, I greatly regret we had no effect on the public schools.

Centuries from now, when future historians start to tell the story of the collapse of the American Experiment, that narrative will begin with the collapse of public education.