KINDER'S COMMENTARY: BIG EDUCATION THWARTS CORE CONTENT OF MAIN COURSES

My last effort told of a laughably deficient algebra textbook in use in the Mesa, Ariz., public schools, and Lord only knows where else. This "textbook" contained lots of pictures, assignments on creative writing and some poetry, but almost nothing on equations, formulae, problems to solve etc. The writer whose middle-school daughter was subjected to what might be called this "feel-good" approach to math is Marrianne Moody Jennings, a law professor at Arizona State University. Jennings did some checking and writes of the disastrous effects of this approach in other trend-setting states:

"Interestingly, other states, with California in the lead, have been there and done this. ... The components are identical. California began using the rain-forest math curriculum in 1991.

"They now have their data on their first graduates. Top students at University of California-Davis can't find a math class remedial enough at the university; they are shipped to community colleges to learn 2+2 really does equal 4.

"In Palo Alto, a traditionally high-performing district since the children belong to university employees, computation scores on standardized tests have dropped from the 86th to the 58th percentile. Sixty-three percent of the parents of middle-school children pay outside tutors to get real math for their children. On Sept. 12, the California Board of Education issued an advisory calling for a return to a focus on basic skills. But let's not let a massive failure like this dash our hopes for topping the California record for remedial math in the Cal-State system: 89 percent of the freshmen need it.

"In August, I discovered a review of my favorite math/cookbook by Richard Askey, a professor of mathematics in an endowed chair at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His first comment is that [this textbook] is 812 pages. Most Japanese textbooks (and they are actually called Algebra) are only 200 pages. This would explain why the average standardized test score is 80 in Japan and 52 here. Askey evaluated the book and found information missing, incorrect assumptions and problems that caused his colleagues to laugh. He added, `I would too, except that this is too serious to laugh.'"

Indeed. Do we really want our future engineers, computer scientists and brain surgeons to have been trained in "feel-good" math, with lots of essay writing, political correctness and Maya Angelou poetry, but almost no equations? What pathetic nonsense. This whole, depressing subject, together with much else that passes for wisdom in today's debased world of Big Education, calls to mind the observation of George Orwell: "It must have been an intellectual who said that," Orwell offered. "No ordinary man could possibly have been so stupid."

Back to Jennings: "By the time we [in Arizona] have our four-year results, where California is now, it will be too late for our children. I have no doubt the current math program will be abandoned. Tragically, it will come only after permanent damage is documented."

Concluding with withering but all-too-accurate scorn, she observes: "It's a rule among educrats: Base change on theory and don't go back until there's hard data."

Jennings confirms the experience of far too many parents across America in trying, vainly, to get satisfaction from the lords and masters of Big Education -- even from her neighbors among elected local school board members. They and other school district officials "could not understand why I was so passionate when my daughter had an `A.' I'm just not sure that an `A' in the rigorous subject of raising money through chili cookoffs is what she needs right now."

Missouri is currently establishing the new "assessments" (what you and I would have called tests) for mathematics and other subjects. I reported here months ago that the first draft of the new assessments assumed that students in the early primary grades would use calculators early-on, and that eighth graders would get a "reference sheet", for use in exams, containing formulae for conversion from the English to the metric system. (These approaches were favored overwhelmingly by the teachers involved, and unanimously opposed by the pitifully few parents in on the planning.) We also learned of plans our educrats have to take into account "multicultural diversity" -- differences in socio-economic background, for instance -- in scoring performance on math exams.

The desolation wrought by the high command of the public education establishment continues.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.