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Guest View: Why public school math fails

By Aleksey Nudelman

December 10, 2010 — (Page 1 of 4)
A lot has been said about the problems with public schools, and I am not going to list all of them here. Instead, I would like to share my personal experience as an illustration to summarize the reasons for the failure of public schools, and to propose a solution.

My son is in second grade in a California school district described by its administrators as one of the best in the state, but his math curriculum continues to puzzle me. A random set of math topics is presented without emphasis on concept development. For the third year in a row, my son is being taught all aspects of coin counting that can conceivably be considered “fun.” I believe that the purpose of studying math is the development of logical thinking, and that coin-counting is better done by machines.

Recently I had an opportunity to compare public education in Russia and in the United States, and I would like to share my observations. Soviet math education was one of the best in the world. Soviet universities competed for the best high school graduates, and they supported a system of Math Olympiads and math enrichment classes for secondary school students, which allowed universities to attract future college math wizards.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the massive emigration of experienced teachers, lack of funding and the loss of prestige for higher education, the quality of Russian math education has declined. Yet in a Pisa 2006 study on the quality of math education in various countries, 31% more Russian students scored at the highest (sixth) level compared to American students; this is despite the fact that Russian students spend less time in the classroom and per-pupil expenditures in Russian schools are a fraction of what they are in the U.S.

I was recently in Russia interviewing software engineers for a Russian subsidiary of my company. To my great surprise, the majority of candidates were easily able to solve a logical puzzle that had proved difficult for their American counterparts. (The puzzle is a variation of a weighing-steps minimization problem.) I think Russian engineers did better than their American counterparts did because they received a better secondary math education.

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