Modern mathematics instruction

Schoolkids in Newton, a Boston suburb, aren’t measuring up in math tests, writes Tom Mountain in the Newton Tab. Thirty-two percent of sixth-graders are in the “warning” or “needs improvement” category in the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, and school officials are flummoxed:

The school department offered no tangible explanation for these declining scores other than to admit that they have no explanation, as articulated by Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Carolyn Wyatt (salary $106,804), “[The results] have decreased, incrementally, each year and continue to puzzle us.” She went on to admit that this downward trend is peculiar to Newton and “is not being seen statewide.” Again, she offered no explanation, but she did assure the School Committee that her assistant, Math Coordinator Mary Eich (salary $101,399), is currently investigating the problem.

But according to Mountain, it turns out that between 1999 and 2001, Newton adopted an “anti-racist multicultural math” curriculum:

In 2001 [Superintendent Jeffrey] Young, Mrs. Wyatt and an assortment of other well-paid school administrators, defined the new number-one priority for teaching mathematics, as documented in the curriculum benchmarks, “Respect for Human Differences--students will live out the system wide core of ‘Respect for Human Differences’ by demonstrating anti-racist/anti-bias behaviors.”

It continues, “Students will: Consistently analyze their experiences and the curriculum for bias and discrimination; Take effective anti-bias action when bias or discrimination is identified; Work with people of different backgrounds and tell how the experience affected them; Demonstrate how their membership in different groups has advantages and disadvantages that affect how they see the world and the way they are perceived by others . . .” It goes on and on.

“Nowhere among the first priorities for the math curriculum guidelines is the actual teaching of math,” Mountain observes. “That’s a distant second.” It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out why Newton’s kids are falling behind.

Post lifted from Taranto

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 07:56 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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Comments:

Posted by john rackell on January 14, 2005, 10:38 PM | #

Carolyn Wyatt (salary $106,804) has hit on the correct strategy for ensuring the success of her offspring.

For instance, rather than paying thousands on private tutors and SAT prep classes smartening up her own kid to get that coveted spot at an ivy-league college, a strategy of diminishing returns since every other parent is doing the same thing, she can earn thousands of dollars dumbing down her child’s intellectual competition. In effect, she’s increasing her own children’s fitness and getting paid to boot. Very sweet! in a Machiavellian sort of way.

Theodore Dalrymple makes this sort of point often in his writing. Britain’s Middle Class has an enormous stake on the upside in Britain’s social breakdown.

Posted by John S Bolton on January 15, 2005, 10:03 AM | #

Our scholars and officials have put a fictitious antiracism in the place where loyalty to civilization should be; what damnation is upon them! But if they believe that mathematics is racist for having one right answer, and not a different answer as a student is of a different race, is that not the racial polylogism of Rosenberg, Tirala and the fascist ideologists who apologized for mass murder as the ideal? If the government schools bow down before such ideology as the ultimate and the avantegarde, what sort of signpost to the future is that, and how many pennies may we without outrage give over to the government schools, which establish such and such state religion?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 15, 2005, 04:01 PM | #

The Tarantoad being a white-race replacement fanatic who passionately favors massive population transfer of non-whites into the U.S. in order to drive whites into minority status, one supposes he must think the proper approach to solving insanity like that described in the log entry is to continue to push the process by which whites in this country are to become a minority within the next three decades.

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