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.

Betsy DeVos (redux)

A word about my attitude regarding Betsy DeVos.

Our schools have been in a state of constant reform for over a century.  John Dewey published "The School and Society" in 1900.  Public education went on steroids with massive IV money infusions in 1957 with the Sputnik scare.  In 1968 the teachers organizations transmogrified from professional associations into trade unions.  And in 1983 the commission empanelled by President Reagan issued their report, "A Nation at Risk."

President Reagan's commission delivered at least two famous phrases:  the "rising tide of mediocrity" phrase and the "act of war" phrase.  I quote,

(a) The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,
and
(2) If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

That was 1983.  Thirty-four years later, the public schools are in much worse condition.  At this point in our historical development, we can fairly say they have collapsed.

This collapse is not an "act of G-d".  It does not arise from drought or flood or earthquake.  There is no actual war or widespread starvation or social disruption.  And there is no mysterious "Invisible Hand" (pace, Adam Smith) that works against us.

Rather, our public schools are the necessary consequence of policies and practices that have been knowingly and intentionally implemented by individuals known to us, mainly the education schools professoriate ("The Ayatollahs of Education") and the leadership of the teachers unions, to whom I refer collectively as "The Education Mafia".  They have massive political power, they have been in charge of our schools for generations, and they are responsible.  It's all on them.

And, they cannot be persuaded.

Friends, there are only two possibilities left to us.  Either the Education Mafia remain in charge, and nothing happens until educational collapse leads to societal collapse, or we prise their death grip off the throat of public education.

The only important thing about Betsy DeVos is that she is not of the Education Mafia.  All the rest of what you read about her, in the NY Times and the Washington Post, is irrelevant shit.

The Educational Circus Act

I once read about an army officer famous among his colleagues for battle plans that went into extraordinary detail.  In a scathing indictment, one fellow officer said, "Yes, he takes into account everything except the disposition of the enemy."  In the same way, the Education Mafia seem to have a lot on their minds, not including the education of children.

In other words, the Education Mafia, like the misguided army officer whose name I have long forgotten, are so consumed with tangential details they have lost the point.

When my son, who is half Asian, was in NYC public schools, not one time was I concerned about whether he was the darkest-skinned child in the class, or the lightest.  I was concerned ONLY that he was safe and that he was getting an education.

Safety and education, nothing else mattered to me.  Yet, I find my concerns nowhere in this NY Times article about the NYC public schools.  And, if it is true, as the article suggests, that many parents are also consumed by tangential issues, then it is no wonder the public schools have collapsed.

In 1954, when the SCOTUS decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, one could argue that integration was the only way to break the back of real institutional racism.  Astonishingly, that was not the argument.

Beginning with the amicus curiae brief by the Justice Dept (sic!), arguing that segregated schools hurt the American effort in The Cold War, the court considered cultural assimilation, states' rights, judicial activism, the psychological effects of segregation, and I don't know what else.  It seems they considered everything, not including the education of children.  And you could see that in the final decision,

"Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does. ...
"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children."

"Upon the colored children."  Why not also upon the White children?  This was the beginning of the magical White child.  It seems that something magical happens to Black children when they sit beside White children.  And integration became a fetish.

Please understand, I am not against integration.  It's just that I care about education more.  Since the 1954 decision, however, rather than taking care of business, rather than grappling with the really difficult issues of teaching children, politicians and education theorists and  school administrators have succumbed to the toxic distraction of racial integration.  I would be all for integration, if the Education Mafia were taking care of business, but they dissipate their time and energy, and large sums of public funds, in this and other issues that have precious little to do with teaching and learning.

And it shows.