Childhood and Education #18: Do The Math

We did reading yesterday. Now we do the math. Math is hard. It does not have to be this hard. A large part of the reason math is hard, or boring, is that education studies, especially in math, are worse than you know. It goes beyond the studies failing both math and statistics forever and into what I’d basically call fraud. Various people are at war with math education, and will do what it takes to stop it in its tracks. We must fight back. Education Research Is Worse Than You Know Kelsey Piper lets her title, ‘Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?’ completely downplay the level of utter awfulness she is reporting finding. You know that whole thing where the entire Bay Area school system stopped teaching kids Algebra? That was motivated by criminal levels of fraud. I want Jo Boaler in jail doing hard time for this if it is accurate. Here’s the part before the paywall: Kelsey Piper: Jo Boaler is a professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, with an enormously influential body of work arguing that students learn math faster and more effectively through her “discovery”-based methods. Her work got Algebra removed from middle schools across the Bay Area. It is some of the most incompetently or dishonestly conducted research I have seen in a decade as a journalist. Take one example: A report she gave at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics on the stunning success of her innovative new math curriculum at “Railside” (she did not disclose the name of the real school where the study took place). This was a poor, disadvantaged California school, where, she said, students adopting her curriculum rocketed ahead of students attending schools with traditional curricula. When other researchers looked into her work — combing through every school in California to figure out which one “Railside” might be, so they could look at the performance data that Boaler had declined to share — they found that Boaler had compared the top two quartiles of