Why Teaching Math for Test Results Is Not Enough
Over the last year, New York City has had a fascinating discussion about teaching math. In particular, NYC Department of Education has started to implement a program called NYC Solves, a parallel program to the lauded NYC Reads initiative. NYC Solves hopes to narrow the math achievement gap through a uniform curriculum for the nation’s largest public school system. On the one hand, a common language with a narrow funnel for support and training feels comprehensive given the vast array of challenges facing our schools. On the other, most vocal math teachers decry diminishing professional autonomy, citing scripted lessons and our schools’ checklist culture.
But while we’re so focused on debates about curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, we’re missing on two important discussions. The first is about culture, and specifically the norms we’re living in that inform how we’re thinking about schooling. The second is about notions of “outcomes,” and how we’ve had a hard time decoupling achievement scores with academic learning.
To the first, few people blink when another person says “I’m not a math person.” Typically, the person saying it means that they felt left behind along their educational journey. To an extent, that has merit. Even with the progress made to improve math education, schools still serve as a filter for the maths and math-nots. We still cast too many children as capable or incapable of mathematical learning at multiple levels. I’ve heard countless people tell me either “I wish I had someone like you teach me this math because I would have gotten it” or “it took me until I was an adult to get why math mattered.” Both groups have said “I’m not a math person” when someone else asks. That speaks to culture.
Some might argue that this feels like an individual problem. After all, a significant number of people have come out of our schools fully competent in a wide variety of maths. Our schools have made math more widely available than ever before. Yet, one only needs to look at how we understand “individual” to see the issue. It’s not that personalization doesn’t matter. It’s that our society strives to individualize problems because it relieves people of our collective responsibility to teach children well. The fact that people have meme-ified “I’m a math person” as a get-out-of-math pass is perilous especially because we have no such parallel for reading.
Looping back to the city context, NYC Reads is a vastly popular program for several reasons. For one, Mayor Eric Adams used his personal struggles with dyslexia to help the narrative fly. Secondly, the science of reading narrative hit a peak wave across the country at around the same time. Third, the United States, despite its anti-intellectual strain, has pegged illiteracy as a scourge to be condemned. Saying “I’m not a reading person” would look wild for someone to say, even if it’s the top lawmaker in the land.
We’ve rarely seen this multi-lever energy in the country, even at the start of the Cold War. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 earmarked funds to promote math, science, and foreign language across schools. A Nation at Risk, the (in)famous commissioned report of 1983, also pushed forth rigor in the content areas amidst so-called mediocrity. Despite these movements in policy, cultural disconnects remain. Innumeracy, never mind dyscalculia, don’t register in the public consciousness as the former.
This also leads me to the second portion, namely why we’re doing math anyways. Since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, we’ve seen a ramp-up of standardized testing and other neoliberal solutions for our education system’s ills. Now, after almost a quarter-century, we’ve seen some relief of those solutions, but the smell remains. (Sidenote: Maybe shutting down dozens of public schools at the same time across multiple cities wasn’t a great idea!) If policymakers predicate the teaching of math simply for achievement scores (state tests, NAEP, etc.), then we’ve lost the plot. While standardized tests may provide evidence of a flashpoint in learning, it also creates an equivocation of sorts.
Too often, we believe doing well on a standardized test is equivalent to giving students an education.
In too many of our minds, our brightest students are those who’ve calculated their way up to the top, leaving the vast majority of “others” behind. Yet, when I talk to people about what it means to get an education, it’s not about scores. It’s about the breadth of tools a person has to navigate an ever-complicated world. Math as a set of approaches to modeling, making sense of, and building the world around them feels more aligned to people’s aspirations. If “outcomes” strictly means doing well on a standardized test (which is not the only way to assess someone), then we’ve truncated all imagination and possibility.
So, in thinking about NYC Solves, I respect those who feel like we have to do something. There’s also robust debate about whether Illustrative Math truncates or expands on teacher autonomy. However, whether we go with scripted lessons, unified curricula, and similar assessments, we have a big culture issue. Deficit thinking persists not just in NYC, but across American culture. Some vocal dissenters want us to go “back to basics,” to the detriment of our intellectual capacity and the futures we hope to build.
From there, discussing authentic professionalism and student learning becomes infinitely easier. That’s not something NYC can solve alone, but it’s something NYC can solve and start finding some common denominators.
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