Proving once again that children’s interests are the last thing they care about, New York state’s educrats are pushing to make math instruction less effective.
State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa & Co. are moving to recommend that teachers stop giving timed math quizzes lest they overstress students.
That’s right, quizzes make some kids anxious, so they must go for all students — no matter what the benefits.
Rosa plainly doesn’t care that Empire State kids are still doing math below pre-pandemic levels and lost ground on the latest “gold standard” national exams.
Worse, the proficiency gap is widening for the lowest-performing students, especially minority ones.
As SUNY-Albany prof Benjamin Solomon rightly says, the reason kids “have math anxiety isn’t because they’re taking the test — it’s because they’re bad at math”; that is, the “anxiety” is a “symptom” of they’ve “gotten poor instruction in math.”
He’s one of 200 math academics who signed a letter calling on Rosa to rescind the rotten math guidance.
Back in 2021, the Biden Education Department published a teachers guide that recommended regular timed activities to help kids build their command of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Timed activities help improve cognition and memory, the way playing “pepper” in baseball improves bat control, hand-eye coordination and quickness.
It’s that kind of brain “muscle memory” training that charter schools engage in to great success.
Though charters enroll just 15% of all city public-school students, roughly half of the 100 top-performing schools on state math tests are charters.
Yet SED won’t ever suggest any guidance that adopts those excellent schools’ “best practices” — as the Pataki-era charter law prescribes.
This new math guidance is just another step on the road toward Rosa & Co.’s obvious goal of killing all state proficiency exams.
New York needs a rebellion against the educrats who are working to destroy education.