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If it ain’t broke…
by Dave Soulia, for FYIVT.com
For generations, American students were taught math in a straightforward, structured way: learn the rules, master the steps, practice until it sticks. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked. Students learned that two plus two equaled four not just as a memorized phrase, but as a cornerstone of logic — a small piece of order in a world governed by rules.
Somewhere along the way, that confidence was dismantled.
Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating with the Common Core State Standards in the 2010s, American education policymakers sought to “modernize” math instruction. The stated goal was reasonable: help students understand why math works, not just how. But the result has been a system so abstract and bureaucratic that many parents — and even teachers — struggle to follow it. Vermont remains part of that experiment, still aligning its math curriculum with Common Core as of 2024 despite years of flat test scores and growing classroom frustration.
The numbers tell the story.
Falling Behind by Standing Still
Data from international assessments like PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) show a sobering picture. Over the last 20 years, U.S. math scores have stagnated or declined, while countries such as Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Finland remain consistently at the top.
What’s striking is that these top performers didn’t overhaul their systems every decade. They didn’t chase pedagogical fads or politicized reforms. They refined what worked.
Singapore still teaches arithmetic the traditional way: clear structure, cumulative mastery, and rigorous repetition before moving on to abstract concepts. Japan’s “lesson study” approach has teachers collaborating to refine lessons for clarity and logic, not to follow federal rubrics. Finland — often held up as the model of progressive education — doesn’t even rely on standardized testing. Instead, it hires highly trained teachers and gives them freedom to teach fundamentals well.
By contrast, the U.S. has changed math instruction repeatedly in pursuit of silver bullets — New Math, Everyday Math, Common Core, and a revolving door of “reforms” that emphasize process over performance.
The Logic of Confusion
Common Core math, in particular, aimed to promote “number sense” — the idea that students should deeply understand numbers instead of memorizing procedures. It sounds good on paper. In practice, it buried simple arithmetic under layers of over-explanation and jargon.
Instead of teaching:
23
+17
—-
40
Students were told to “decompose numbers” and “make tens”:
23 + 7 = 30; 30 + 10 = 40.
Mathematically sound? Sure. Necessary for a third grader? Not really.
Parents quickly found themselves re-teaching math at home because they couldn’t follow the new methods. The emphasis on “showing your work” in a prescribed way often meant that quick, correct answers earned lower grades than long, convoluted ones. Students who thought efficiently were penalized for not thinking creatively enough.
It’s no surprise that frustration grew. The old system — learn the basics, apply them confidently — had produced decades of competent engineers, scientists, accountants, and builders. The new one produced anxiety, resentment, and confusion.
From Mastery to Methodology
The deeper problem isn’t just the method; it’s the mindset behind it.
For decades, American education theory has been influenced by constructivism — the belief that knowledge isn’t transmitted, but individually “constructed” by each learner. In math, that means the focus shifts from accuracy to process. A wrong answer is tolerated if the reasoning is “valid.”
But math doesn’t bend that way. Two plus two doesn’t equal five because the student “tried their best.” It equals four, period. And every working system of logic, from algebra to engineering, depends on that consistency.
By turning math into a form of personal expression, Common Core and similar reforms blurred the line between understanding math and feeling good about math. The result: students who can talk about how they thought through a problem — but can’t reliably solve one.
The Bureaucratic Trap
Much of this confusion stems from how Common Core was implemented. The standards themselves were developed by committees and testing organizations, not by the nation’s best mathematicians or classroom teachers. Publishers rushed to create “aligned” textbooks and software, often filled with convoluted diagrams and step-by-step “scripts” that teachers were required to follow.
Instead of empowering teachers to teach math well, Common Core standardized mediocrity. The people who were supposed to gain freedom — students and educators — lost it to rigid checklists and testing rubrics.
Meanwhile, test results flatlined, and morale plummeted.
If It Ain’t Broke
The irony is that America once led the world in producing engineers, inventors, and scientists without any of these modern frameworks. The system wasn’t perfect, but it worked. It produced people who could do math, not just talk about how they feel about it.
Other countries didn’t catch up because they invented “new math.” They caught up — or passed us — because we started fixing what wasn’t broken.
The difference comes down to philosophy:
- They teach math as math — structured, logical, hierarchical.
- We teach math as therapy — exploratory, subjective, endlessly “reimagined.”
Until American education returns to the basics — mastery before theory, clarity before creativity — we’ll keep churning out students who can’t balance a checkbook but can write a paragraph about why that’s okay.
The Bottom Line
Math isn’t a cultural construct or a political tool. It’s a language for describing reality — one that doesn’t care about ideology, self-esteem, or bureaucratic fashion.
And when a nation loses fluency in that language, it loses something fundamental: its ability to build, to reason, and to trust in the stability of truth itself.
Maybe it’s time to stop reinventing the wheel — and start teaching kids how to count again — at least in Vermont.
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Categories: Commentary, Education
Sir. Thanks for telling is what we really need to know about teaching math. We need to restore the teaching and using of what we oldsters call arithmetic. Now, if you will editorialize about other missing items in our curriculums such as geography, civics, home economics, and so forth. You probably have done more about helping improve our educational process here in Vermont than you might ever know.
Again sir, thanks.
Decompose numbers? Make 10’s? WTF
Common Core was the brainchild of the United Nations. UNESCO and it’s partners, including the NEA, control all education in this country. This includes Transformative Social Emotional Learning, and DEI.
Re: “If It Ain’t Broke” and… it’s time to stop reinventing the wheel.”
Of course it’s time to return to functional basics. But this has nothing to do with Math. Everyone knows this. On the other hand, what’s missing in this analysis is ‘motive’. Why the constant changes?
The answer, of course, is money. It’s always been money – not performance. Educators have become expert in grant writing. The scenario follows the same course every time.
Step one: Identify a need. Create a project in your area of expertise and search for grants that match your project (e.g., via Grants.gov, foundation websites, or databases like Foundation Directory). Develop and refine the concept into a clear, compelling need, typically accomplished with ‘word salad’ rhetoric.
Then Assemble ‘a team’ – i.e., share the wealth. Write the abstract by explaining (i.e., inventing) the issue to be improved, why it matters, create specific goals, list methods and plan of work, describe evaluation measures, present the budget, and, importantly, describe how the project continues post-funding.
And it’s that last caveat that tells the tale. Rarely, if ever, do these projects ever continue in a sustainable fashion… because the institution in which the project is initiated can’t increase funding whether or not the project actually achieves its goals. Achieving goals isn’t the purpose. Bringing in outside funding to supplement the school budget is the purpose. Again, it’s all about the money.
What typically happens (and I’ve witnessed this play out dozens of times), is the initial grant funding ends and, rather than justify the project further to local taxpayers, it’s easier to rinse and repeat the process. Identify another need. Search for available grants. Follow the process until the funding stops. Rinse and repeat.
The results are obvious. Because dysfunction creates the initial need, dysfunction becomes the process and the goal of the exercise. If educators were ever truly successful, they’d work themselves out of a job.
In other words, New Math is a classic protection racket. Educators send thugs into your school to break what ain’t broken. Then they tell you they’ll protect your children from whatever they’ve invented to dumb them down in the first place. And they do this for a percentage of your profits (i.e., property taxes). But they don’t just ‘tell’ you to play the game. They blackmail you. If you don’t pay protection, your children will continue to suffer.
And Lord only knows the imaginative ways legislators, teacher’s unions and administrators can make you and your children suffer. In the final analysis parents conform, taxpayers pay the ever-increasing costs, or victims figure out how to get out of Dodge altogether.
Homeschool….
New math is something that I learned on my own many years before it was taught in schools. I learned it to be able to do math equations in my head without a calculator or paper. The reason it worked for me is because I had a good math foundation through the old fashion method. Then my oldest kids were taught the new math and they were confused. I sat down to help them with it and discovered it was what I had been doing for years. But my oldest kids didn’t have a foundation in standard math methodology. Later, my youngest kids were taught Common Core math and didn’t understand it. I sat down with them and couldn’t make any logical sense for why it was being taught. I just told my youngest kids to do math the old way. They later taught themselves the new math method. New math works well if you have solid education in adding, subtracting, and multiplying.
I never thought about the politicizing of the math buffoonery. It makes sense to me that the powers behind it are earnestly and effectively dumbing down the younger masses. And I believe there is an agenda behind it. Time will tell if I suppose erroneously.
If a child learns math at home from older siblings or parents, then goes to school and has trouble learning “new” math, this child can then qualify for special help and the school gets to hire another para-educator. I may be wrong now, but I don’t think so.
I hadn’t thought about that reasoning, ie. the need to hire more para-educators, but you are right (IMHO). When I was subbing at the local grade school and encountered the Common Core I was at a total loss. I wasn’t able to help the students, so I felt pretty stupid.
There are a lot of other issues with education today that we have to pay more and more property taxes for. I know someone that graduated from HS and is not able to read, as well as limited writing skills. I was informed “oh, they can’t hold a student back because it would make the school look bad”! So, look at the results.
Thank you, Gail.
Some kids are adept at learning. Some kids are not. And then some don’t want to learn. The procedure is, if they aren’t adept then just pass them on to the next grade. Just because some struggle doesn’t mean they can’t learn, but the process of educating isn’t setup to care for them through adaptation. As for those who refuse to learn, they shouldn’t be in school wasting taxpayers’ dollars.
I recommend those interested the best practices in the teaching of mathematics go to the website of the National Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and review their standards. Very reasonable time proven methodology. What this retired educator sees is politics overwhelming instruction. Instructional time is precious, don’t waste it !
Lesson 1 – Debt is not an asset.
Lesson 2 – They lied about Lesson 1
Class dismissed
With all due respect, Melissa, everything is relative.
Debt can be, and is as often as not, an Asset; both for the lenders (our banking system is based on this premise), and for the borrowers, who gain access to the additional capital (i.e., to money) they otherwise would not have access to.
Don’t confuse the economic tools we use to transact business with poor judgment. People can make poor decisions when they invest borrowed money, as they can when they invest their personal savings. On one hand, they’re borrowing from a lender (e.g., a bank, or a relative). On the other hand, they’re borrowing from themselves.
Again: While “The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
Not only are there no free lunches… there is no guaranty that everyone will make reasonable decisions with or without borrowed capital.
Re: “Lesson 2 – They lied about Lesson 1”
Not so. We’re lying to ourselves for the most part. The problem is that we’re being denied the opportunity to make voluntary exchanges by those who think they’re smarter than we are. In the final analysis, we all know this. New Math is a ruse. It’s just that most of us haven’t figured out how to extricate ourselves from the totalitarian governmental snake-oil vendors forcing us to buy their New Math.
Sure, all financial things are relative in a symbiotic, dualistic, covertly parasitic way.
If there were canons of ethics being followed, principles of acting in good faith were still applied, we would not be in a global liquidity crisis.
Riddle me this: after 2008, the CDOs, collateralized debt obligations were to be discouraged, highly regulated and scrutinized. What happened? They changed the term to CLOs – collateralized loan obligations and started the whole scam all over again. The sub-prime lending went into the auto industry instead of mortgages. Yet, the mortgages are still bundled and collateralizing high risk debts via private equity firms – aka shadow banking, zombie corporations and LLCs. Now, word is that insurance companies and retirement pensions are all tied into those equity funds and fund managers are freaking out – redemption requests on the rise. Gee, I wonder why?
Conspiracies to commit fraud all across the markets – to the tune of trillions of dollars this time. Any idea what the total deriviate market stands at currently? How about actual numbers of depreciation utilized by the top tech giants to inflate their valuations? No honor among thieves.
So, stop teaching new math. Old math worked fine. Kids should finish school with basic math principles. Not some esoteric idea from someone’s thesis — simple arithmetic.
Which is worse, a Monarch / King, or a Democracy?
We were supposed to be a Constitutional Republic, the Monarch would simply ignore that, but a Democracy would create statutes to maneuver around it!