I agree with the comments that education "ain't what it used to be". The government has stepped in to decide what to teach and when to teach it. Not a good thing. They claim it's in reaction to us falling behind the other industrialized nations but their solution is not addressing the root cause.
I experienced this first hand in the early 90's when my oldest daughter was about to enter high school. I was VERY active in schools AND at the School Board level, attending every meeting and voicing my opinions. When the State of Michigan started their MEAP testing, the school district decided they were going to implement an "Integrated Math" program at the HS level. I got a set of the books they were going to use, studied the curriculum and was VERY vocal in my opinion that it would not work and would produce kids who were lousy at math. The old way of teaching math (Freshman: algebra, Sophomore: geometry, Junior: trig, Senior:calculus) was out the window. The new method jumped all over the place, Math Lite I called it. Little big of algebra, little bit of geometry, etc. at each level of "integration". There was no building upon previous concepts or in-depth examination of a subject matter. It was all about trying to align to how the MEAP was going to test the kids.
Sure enough, the first group of kids who went through "Integrated Math" needed tutoring in the summer. My daughter was extremely frustrated because the teachers never had enough time to focus on a topic before jumping to a new topic. All 3 of my daughters went through it and despite all graduating at the top of their respective classes, none of them are very good at Math and had no interest in pursuing any college degree that required Math (like Engineering).
From what I understand, the district finally scrapped the program but not before the harm was done and thousands of kids were forced to go through it.
I fought other ideas over the years that had no chance of helping the kids do better in life (OBE or Outcome Based Education comes to mind).
What we need is the Districts to return to the three RRRs in early years and return to traditional curriculums in the High Schools that gave tracks to both College bound students and technical skilled students.
Get the State ( and Fed) out of telling teachers what to teach, quit worrying about whether kids have the latest computers (IMO, there should be no computer based instruction until HS). Get rid of the graphing calculators and teach the kids the basics and then teach them how to think.
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