TRUE TO THEIR heritage as mankind's premiere puzzle solvers, mathematicians are bringing to light the puzzling and disturbing paradox that sits at the core of educational reform in Maryland.
What a small but vocal group of math scholars has discovered is that in pursuit of "higher standards," the state's new High School Assessment Test for Algebra has been dumbed down within an inch of its life.
"Parents will be misled into believing that their children have learned algebra on the basis of the child having passed this mistitled test on grade-6 level algebra preparation," University of Maryland math professor Jerome Dancis told The Sun last month. Administering the coup de grace, Dancis concluded that the knowledge required for passing the fledgling test is nothing more than "reading, common sense and simple arithmetic."
While he's absolutely on the mark, Dancis isn't saying anything that horrified public school teachers across Maryland haven't been saying for years. Indeed, he reaches the same conclusion as the college professors who threw up their hands in disgust at the inadequacies of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program in an Abell Foundation report still being withheld from the public by our state superintendent of schools.
Rigorous content is indeed being given short shrift, not only in algebra, but across the board. My subject, history, has been invaded by "Maryland Core Learning Goals" that prescribe a series of vapid, process-oriented exercises that render kids unconscious more quickly than nerve gas.
Then there's namby-pamby foreign language instruction like the "Pacesetter" program that reduces the mastery of another tongue to "Fun with Spanish" and "Ooh, Let's Have an Experience with French." Who among us hasn't been impressed with European high schoolers who, thanks to years of conversation drills and a mastery of grammatical rules, can navigate their way around our country in fluent English. What do our kids do when they hit foreign soil? Probably form a group, make a lovely poster together, and feel just scrumptious about themselves.
How can this be? Why are we dumbing down, even as we profess to be raising standards?
In part, it's because we've become victims of our own rhetorical overkill. Public discourse demands that "no child be left behind." Educrats, drunk with egalitarian passion, promise "success for all students" (as if that ever could be achieved), while the touchy-feely gurus of modern classroom pedagogy chime in that "all children are innately gifted mathematicians." With such infantile bromides clogging the intellectual air, test designers have two choices. They can make educational reformers look like idiots by designing an honest-to-God algebra test that our unskilled products of the MSPAP classroom will fail in droves. Or they can craft a test of "reading, common sense and simple arithmetic" and call it a High School Assessment for Algebra. Thanks to Dancis, we know which option they picked.
We're also in trouble because the bureaucrats have forgotten that mathematics, perhaps more than any other discipline, is buttressed by a progression of nonnegotiable skills that must be flat-out mastered if advanced concepts and processes are to be assimilated. But our educrats are in such a hurry to have Susie and Johnny engage in "critical thinking," they don't care what facts kids actually know. This explains their love affair with the calculators that spit out information with an ease that allows youngsters to stay blissfully ignorant of the fundamentals. One result of this dreadful shortcut, our dissident mathematicians confirm, is a phony test. Real, live algebraic equations have a nasty habit of unmasking the deficiencies the graphing calculator is so adept at disguising.
It was the grasp of numbers that pulled the West out its medieval doldrums and set it on course toward the economic and intellectual prosperity of the Renaissance. Perspective geometry changed art forever and sent Columbus out into a world in which he couldn't get lost. And it was Isaac Newton, speaking in dazzling postulates that welled up from the depths of his own brilliance, who told us that the workings of an entire universe could be expressed in mathematical terms.
Yes, mathematicians have set us straight before. If the parents and taxpayers of Maryland would just listen to them, maybe they could do it again.
A former Fulbright Exchange Teacher to Great Britain, Phil Greenfield teaches history at Annapolis High School. He is also a weekly contributor to The Sun in Anne Arundel and Howard counties.
