Education: Flunking Grade in Math

Educators have been fretting for years about the state of math instruction in American public schools. In one attempt to get students on track, Congress in 1965 passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, sending a back-to- basics message that it hoped would improve achievement in math and other subjects. Last week the results of such efforts were totted up in a newly released study titled The Mathematics Report Card — Are We Measuring Up? Its assessment of the performance of U.S. high school students in 1986: “Dismal.”

The study was conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of Princeton, N.J., and based on tests given to 150,000 pupils from 1972 to 1986. Among the findings:

— More than a fourth of 13-year-old middle schoolers cannot handle elementary-school arithmetic.

— Nearly one-third of eleventh-graders say they generally do not understand what the math teacher is talking about.

— Only 6% of 17-year-olds can handle algebra or multistep math problems.

— Scores for blacks and Hispanics, despite modest gains, lag 7% to 11% below those for whites.

The NAEP document notes that the average Japanese high schooler does better at math than the top 5% of Americans taking college-prep courses. It blasts U.S. math instruction as “dominated by paper-and-pencil drills on basic computation” and by rote explanations from teachers too dependent on set- piece texts. Innovative teaching, lab work and special projects “remain disappointingly rare.”

Some testing authorities have tried to put a good face on the results. They emphasize that the lowest-scoring pupils improved somewhat over the 13 years of the study. Says Gregory Anrig, president of Educational Testing Service, of which NAEP is an arm: “The good news is that basics are back and we have raised the bottom.” But they acknowledge that the bottom remains much farther down than it ought to be, the middle has not budged since 1972, and neither has the top.

Moreover, the tests, which range over five achievement levels from simple arithmetic to algebra, are not all that tough. A typical base-level question: Which of these numbers is closest to 30? 20, 28, 34 or 40? A top-level question asks: Suppose you have ten coins and have at least one each of a quarter, a dime, a nickel and a penny. What is the least amount of money you could have? Kids who cannot handle such penny-ante stuff are undoubtedly in deep trouble.

Experts tend to agree on just who and what put them there. Mary Lindquist, professor of math education at Columbus College in Georgia and a co-author of the report, comes down hard on teaching methods. “We have taught kids to be little calculators, but they do not know why they do what they do,” she says, adding, “They don’t know what numbers mean.” James Vasquez, superintendent of San Antonio’s Edgewood school district, where 94% of the pupils are Hispanic, blames substandard preparation for teachers. He points out that Texas, like many other states, certifies elementary teachers who never took much math and may be almost as lost as their pupils.

James Stigler, a University of Chicago behavioral scientist who has studied education in Japan, Taiwan and America, agrees. “In U.S. elementary schools,” he says, “teachers don’t know mathematics. They assign the basic problems but skip word problems because word problems are harder to teach.” Even top educators sometimes struggle with arithmetic. In its preface, the NAEP report states that “fully a third” of 13-year-olds have not mastered basic skills taught in elementary schools, but its own statistic is 26.9% — which is, alas, a lot closer to one-fourth. Thus, it seems, the shakers and makers of testing share some low marks for math right along with the pupils and teachers upon whom their assessment has fallen.