By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Across the United States, students are learning from half to a full year less math than what they should learn in a normal school year. That is the conclusion of the Northwest Evaluation Association’s MAP Growth test. Another massive study by Illuminate Education’s FastBridge assessments found from two-and-a-half to four-and-a-half months of lost math learning, substantially more loss than in reading. Curriculum Associates compared results in grades 1-5 from over 1000 schools and confirmed from 5 to 9 percent of students were two or more grade levels behind in math.
Education schools appear clueless. In part they blame parents, where one-in-five parents hate math (ed schools call it math anxiety) and cannot be expected to teach their child math they do not understand. And student stress levels are up, but they don’t go away when a student switches topics. And yes, math is harder to teach via the internet than face-to-face. But learning on screens is a problem for all disciplines.
Education schools refuse to accept that teaching different subjects requires different skills on the part of both teachers and students. From upper elementary onward, we find that a good science teacher is not usually a good social studies teacher, and a good reading teacher is often not a good math teacher.
Good science teaching starts with real experiences in the laboratory and field. That becomes the basis for understanding biology, chemistry and physics. An immigrant student who does not speak English can begin to learn science and its vocabulary through those experiences.
Social sciences and literary English require extensive social interaction and are very language dependent. Students learning English progress through stages of reading that should eventually take off as many students in upper elementary become excited by this newfound world of books. That is where Harry Potter books today serve a role similar to the Nancy Drew mysteries of older times. And that take off into the world of reading will find the student with his/her head in a book at home and on weekends independent from class assignments. These are the most difficult disciplines for a foreign student when their native language is not English. But students do not get hooked on math and study math on their own on weekends.
Math is different. I have seen an immigrant student who spoke nearly no English transfer into a high school math class. Math is an incremental subject: you learn to multiply one digit times one digit, then two digits times two digits, etc. When a math teacher fails to adequately introduce the next math lesson, the next day many students will have failed to have completed their homework. The teacher, seeing the blank stares, turns to the board and works through a sample problem. The eyes of involved students follow the teacher’s mind as the problem is worked out, even without a spoken explanation of the steps. And the foreign student who learned that universal math language follows along too despite not understanding a word of English. Math indeed is its own language.
Most parents are not natural math teachers. And the teacher’s example that worked so well in class, where the student was one of many who were following the thought of the teacher working out that math example, is now alone at home facing a screen where the teacher-student “connection” is mostly lost. There are no classmates sitting to either side also attempting to understand. Three major meta-analyses have clearly documented the ineffectiveness of trying to learn onscreen.
We only need to look back at the 1960s and early 1970s to televised education, where all schoolchildren would supposedly watch the best of teachers broadcast nationwide on TVs into every classroom. Education on TV screens was an abysmal failure then. And education on laptops is an abysmal failure now.
Across the United States, parents are recognizing that 90 percent-plus of our students are not independent learners. We must return to real classrooms and real teachers as soon as it is safe to do so.
Meanwhile, the huge and still-growing ed-tech industrial complex is promoting online learning as our future despite widespread knowledge that it is abysmal. We face the possibility, not just in math but in all disciplines, of becoming a third-world country at premium prices.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.