Changing Schools in Long Beach
(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Fall 1996)
back to "Of Penguins and
Problem Solving"
Why do schools need new standards?
In the early 1980s, before the nation's governors, the White House, and
a parcel of researchers, policymakers, and corporate CEOs began to talk
about higher standards, mathematics teachers were already having the discussion.
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics brought researchers and
classroom teachers together to puzzle over ways to improve math education.
Here's why they were concerned:
Across the United States, the math curriculum was losing its focus.
Like the old standards in Long Beach, the math curriculum in America's schools
was mostly lists of separate skills without much emphasis on how they fit
together. Teachers depended on a few nationally published textbooks to teach
skills individually through drill and practice. This created a certain kind
of uniformity--a national set of standards, some would say. But a textbook
could never do what Sandi Machit is doing in her sixth-grade math classes.
A curriculum that depends heavily on textbooks can take students so far
and no further.
As a result, while American students did well in basic arithmetic up through
elementary school, they began to fall behind students from other countries
by middle school because the American curriculum was just too simple and
unchallenging. One international expert on the teaching of mathematics put
it this way: "The United States prolongs childhood" when it comes
to teaching math.
Students needed much more sophisticated mathematical skills.
"Statistical quality control" is a phrase that was hardly in the
vernacular before the 1980s. Yet, it has come to represent a sort of "standard"
in the workplace. More and more workers need to be able to solve on-the-job
problems using advanced math skills. So it makes sense that schools need
to teach some higher level math to all students, not just the small percentage
at the top. The challenge was to set out "new basics" in math
that would incorporate essential skills but also teach students to combine
those skills to solve problems in real-life situations.
New technologies were helping to redefine the math curriculum.
Calculators and computers make it possible to move beyond the limits of
a textbook and the printed page. Innovative computer software can challenge
even the youngest students to gain a deeper understanding of math by putting
the important fundamentals of math to work solving problems.
Realizing it was time for action, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
moved ahead to develop new standards for teaching math. The new standards
were introduced in 1989 to wide acclaim, just as states were beginning
to create tougher curriculum standards of their own in math and other subjects.
California was among the first to weave the NCTM standards into its own
state curriculum guidelines.
Within a few years, other efforts to improve math education also began across
the country. Classroom teachers got more involved in the process, and so
did business and industry, which had a strong interest in the skills young
adults brought to the workplace. Organizations like the National Science
Foundation and the Council for Basic Education produced further guidelines
to help schools that wanted to improve their math curriculum.
(The standards "movement" did not stop with mathematics. Similar
efforts began in science, language arts, and social studies.)
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