I was interested in this map that purports to rate the quality of math teaching. It’s from the National Council on Teaching Quality, and at first I thought it explained a phenomenon I’ve noticed.
Minnesota grade schools aren’t doing a good job preparing students with math skills. It’s the #1 obstacle to young people coming into science and math majors, especially biology (if they aren’t strong in math in the first place, they aren’t going to even try physics; everyone wrongly thinks you don’t need math to do biology.) We get students who fail the algebra requirement*, which surprises me every time. What are the schools doing? Back in my day, the high schools had a college prep track which told you that you at least needed pre-calc (trigonometry, etc.) to get into a good college. How do you get through middle school without algebra and geometry?
They have a state-by-state breakdown of their evaluation. I looked at Minnesota’s. It expresses a lot of sentiments I agree with: we should “require districts to adopt and implement high quality math curricula,” but they say we fail on that. We should “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy,” and again they say we don’t, but I don’t have any experience working directly with grade school math programs, so I’m taking their word on it. Then I notice that the way NCTQ assesses schools is with checklists of various aspects of teaching, and it’s all yes/no stuff. What are “high quality math curricula”? It seems to me that there ought to be something a little more quantitative about that.
Then I looked at their evaluation of our universities’ math teacher prep, and we get low marks, but again there’s a lack of specificity. All they score is how many hours of instruction math education students get in 4 areas, and the only evaluations are “does not meet” or “fully meets” their quota for instruction hours. And the variation is wild! On “Numbers & Operations+Algebraic Thinking,” for instance, some of our colleges provide 0 hours of instruction, while others provide 100 hours. I think the assessment is a bit inconsistent, and maybe not aligned with the goals of the specific programs.
I’m not trying to make excuses for the schools. I’ve been looking at their products, the students, for years and have been unsatisfied with their end result.
They declare that “13% of Minnesota programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy” where again, they’re scoring them by this single metric. 26% of our colleges fail by that metric. Also, to get an A, the “program requires at least 135 instructional hours across the five topics and at least 90% of the recommended target hours for each topic,” but there are only four topics listed. I guess someone failed arithmetic, or copy editing.
I had to look at Alabama‘s evaluation. The South in general is scoring very well on math education, so good for them. They get lots of checkmarks in the binary metrics, for instance Alabama does “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy” where Minnesota doesn’t, but now I’m wondering what that means. “16% of Alabama programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy,” but 24% fail.
I think we could all improve the quality of math education, but I didn’t find any of their reports particularly useful, and they seemed almost arbitrary. So I looked up the NCTQ, and discovered that it was the product of a conservative think-tank, and was associated with the US News & World Report, the magazine that publishes scores for colleges every year (I do not like them, even if my university scores well in their assessments). Then I read this review:
Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I respect, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.
And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?
NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.
I should have read that before wasting all that time trying to interpret the data in the report. And now I understand how Texas and Florida did so well in the NCTQ evaluations.
We still have a problem in poor math preparation. I don’t think turning a bunch of conservative ideologues loose on the schools will solve it.
*I should mention that my university invests a lot of effort in remedial instruction to bring students’ math skills up to the level they need to succeed in our majors.
“There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Twain or Disraeli, take your pick.
My brother (recently deceased) worked for HISD back in the 2000 era. There was a grant given to try an experimental maths teaching curriculum. Not just memorization but with an emphasis on “critical thinking”. A more in depth way of explaining math. And it worked! Math score rose sharply. And the students, on their own applied this approach to other classes. Their English classes showed marked improvement also. After a year of marked improvement, (you’ll love this!) the program went away. Because nobody bothered to renew the grant. Houston HISD then became the big school district where the No Child Left Behind Act was developed. Conservatives hated that. Though it now is only a tiny part of DoE, it is a driving force for abolishing the DoE.
Almost didn’t make it into uni because my maths was so poor. Struggled to pass the basic undergrad maths requirements but still made it through my bachelors degree. Then I decided to do an MSc and hit a problem which could only be solved using statistics. I’d actually done quite well in stats but had to go back and do a biostatistics course which was a bit more involved than basic statistics. Then to my horror I discovered that the stats I needed to use were even more complex, (cluster analysis, and principal components). Fortunately by then I was capable of teaching myself from a textbook and reading a few papers where the techniques were applied.
Good teaching makes a huge difference. I was inspired by my 8th grade geometry teacher (my wife-to-be was also in the same class, she was even stronger in math than I am) despite the fact that he was deeply weird, and had mannerisms the administration and PTA disliked. We listened to Ethel Merman occasionally in his class! What made it work was his passion for the math. I don’t think the NCTQ would have approved of him and we would have missed out on some phenomenal teaching.
He lost his job shortly after we left that school. I hope Mr Anderson went on to a happy, successful life afterwards.
Makes me think they invented metrics that would intentionally allow the current education systems of “The South” to get better numbers? I mean, yeah, Texas and Florida scored high on this metric…
…and then produce some of the lowest SAT scores in MATH. https://www.smartick.com/data/the-best-and-worst-state-performance-on-the-sats/ (Acknowledgement – this is 2022 data, the second year of Covid. Numbers may be skewed a bit from other years with more stable academic supports for kids. Also SAT test tasking is voluntary – and high-scoring Wisconsin for example also had lowest rate of test-takers.)
5 out of 4 people have difficulty with fractions.
Are you sure the report you have cited here isn’t AI-generated? I think the zones they rated high also have the lowest scores upon testing.
FWIW students here in California are mostly allowed to fail at math. We did for several years have a graduation from high school test that required 7th grade math and one half of HS graduates failed it. Instead of rooting out the problem, they stopped requiring this test for your diploma.
I’m in Texas and went through its public education. I daydreamed my way to an A+ in Algebra II Honors and an A in Pre-Cal, and this was with all kid-focused TV shows at the time going out of their way to instill a deep fear of algebra in me. My mom had to spend a lot of effort convincing me I could handle Algebra I.
I’m honestly convinced the education system needs an overhaul, and one of the contributing factors is seeing a lot of people who can’t handle percentages. Once had a childhood friend who was talking about a store offering discounts over 100% and I worked hard to convince him that would be nonsense: They’d be paying you to take the stock off their hands.
“But they used calculators.”
Fortunately, he’s learned since then.
If we continue with the trend of teaching to the standardized test and getting a big number instead of instilling a passion for learning and understanding, I worry what LLMs like ChatGPT are doing to the current generation of students.
The only way I believe this map is if the metric was “How much Jesus did they work into the math curriculum?”.
It seems they do not rate students at all or even teachers. They only rate school policies in these states, matching them to what they think the policies should be. There appears to be no effort to relate policies to outcomes.
Hey, at least one US senator can multiply a number by 10 and get it right…
Maybe there’s a bit of authoritarian wishful thinking in their “calculations:” “Whatever we demand will be done, therefore we can measure schools’ achievements by what we’ve demanded they achieve.”
I taught in Texas, and I watched the administration of my high school go from caring about what the students learned to caring about nothing but high standardized testing scores and high graduation rates.
This led to “teaching to the test” in the core classes. Since I was the Latin teacher, there was no Texas standardized test around which I could be forced to plan my curriculum. Instead, I was sneaky and taught my students critical thinking. I also made connections with their other subjects and showed them how understanding Latin could help them to do better in those other classes. (My students understood where the word “plumber” came from, as well as understanding Shakespeare’s “Caesar” much better than their peers).
Because of that graduation rate requirement, we were allowed to fail very, very few students. My colleague the German teacher used to joke that after we mathematically figured out the grades, we had to scatter “pixie dust” on the lowest ones, so that many Fs became Ds and most Ds became Cs. The students were well aware of this policy, so they didn’t bother to learn even the minimum in most classes. That explains what you are seeing when those students get to college classes.
The cohort of younger teachers didn’t know anything but teaching to the test, so they simply accepted it. We older teachers were getting more and more frustrated, and either quitting or retiring.
The Republicans must be proud of themselves. They have succeeded at dumbing down America.
magistramarla, this is meta, but your comment impresses upon me the thought that Texas itself is about as big as a many a country when you mention you were a Latin teacher in High School there. ;)
I spent a year in Eugene, Oregon, on sabbatical from my Japanese university. My daughter entered a junior high school there. In Japan, she was a so-so math student but in this school she was easily the top student in her year, simply because she’d already studied everything one to two years earlier. Although she struggled in her other classes, she totally kicked butt in math. This was 20 years ago, so that’s one way to compare math education in the US with that in Japan back then.
Now I have Ethel Merman singing “there’s no business like math business” in my head.
Yes, it makes me blue that scarizona is so ‘deep red’
@15 redwood wrote: I spent a year in Eugene, Oregon, on sabbatical from my Japanese university.
I reply: Eugene is one of the most enlightened cities in Oregon. On the redneck side of the cascade mountains; Bend (over) oregon has an average home price of $800,000.00 and few schools that qualify as more than a bad joke. And, they won a lawsuit where SCROTUM lets them, and other cities make homelessness a crime (even though there are no open rentals in Bend). Welcome to the Death Spiral.
And, I just saw this. It will make PZ (and all of us) cry:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06/rajiv-sethi-american-leadership-in-higher-education-is-being-lost-for-good-to-chinas-benefit.html
Rajiv Sethi: American Leadership in Higher Education Is Being Lost for Good, to China’s Benefit
Why you can stick a fork in US higher education excellence.
John Morales @ #14,
LOL! Latin teachers are alive and well in Texas. It is taught at many high schools (public and private) all over the state.
My school was the host of the Junior Classical League state convention one year. My principal was shocked when she found out that we hosted nearly 2000 students and over 200 teachers from around the state for an entire weekend.
When the district wouldn’t fund a bus for me to take my best students to the convention in other years, my husband and I rented a 12 passenger van. He got certified by the district to drive and be the male chaperone. As a military officer, this was counted as his yearly volunteer work on his record! I would pick my 10 best students and we went to a different city each year so that my students could compete on the state level.
Our daughter attended a Health Careers magnet school that had a strong Latin program. She placed on the state level several years, and attended the national convention twice, earning top awards.
However, I would not be surprised to see Abbott squash that lively Latin program in Texas!
“5 out of 4 people have difficulty with fractions.”
That’s because there are only 3 kinds of people in the world, those that can count to three and those that can’t.