Today the original New Math is old hat, but many folks in the education world are hawking yet another reform. It is known by names like "Connected Math," or "Everyday Math."
. . . today's New Math has powerful allies. Education Secretary Richard Riley and other Clintonites smile on it. Eight of the 10 curriculums recently recommended for nationwide use by an influential Education Department panel teach the New New Math.
Not that all members of the Academy are joining the movement. Within weeks of the Education Department findings, 200 mathematicians and scientists, including four Nobel Prize recipients and two winners of a prestigious math prize, the Fields Medal, published a letter in the Washington Post deploring the reforms.
... programs of the sort picked by the federal panel turn out to be horrifyingly short on basics.
Consider MathLand ... [It] does not teach standard arithmetic operations. No carrying and borrowing at the blackboard here.
MathLand also does away with textbooks--too hierarchical, we suppose. No chance therefore for anything as sane as systematic review.
Next comes Connected Math, another panel favorite. It too skips or glosses over crucial skills. Example: The division of fractions, an immutable prerequisite for algebra, is absent from its middle-school curriculum. In shutting the door to algebra, David Klein of Cal State Northridge points out ...
Everyday Math ensures juvenile dependency to calculators by endorsing their use from kindergarten. Rather than teach long division, the program devotes substantial time to that important area of math study, self-esteem.
And then move on to the main question: Why? The reason for the New New Math, as for many other curriculum reforms, is that teachers, school administrators and their unions are tired of being blamed for statistical declines and poor student performances.
New Mathie and federal panel member Steven Leinwand explains: "It's time to recognize that, for many students, real mathematical power, on the one hand, and facility with multidigit, pencil-and-paper computational algorithms, on the other, are mutually exclusive." Or, as Professor Klein translates: "Underlying their programs is an assumption that minorities and women are too dumb to learn real mathematics."
New Math will take its casualties, especially among the poor, adding to the already mounting costs of the decline in national educational standards.
See the full article .