Where Has All the Knowledge Gone?

The Movement to Keep Americans at the Bottom of the Class in Math

By Jo Boaler

Barack Obama recently claimed in a speech to the National Education Association that “the most valuable skill” anybody can sell is knowledge, but that schools are failing children—particularly when it comes to math and science. Students in the United States score lower on math and science tests in the 12th grade than those in almost any other developed country in the world. But there is a reason for the sorry state of math education that is not due to schools or teachers, but to the dangerous suppression of research knowledge about ways to teach math well.

There is a movement at work across America that smothers research knowledge, gives misleading data to parents, and substantially undermines our ability to improve American children’s mathematical understanding.

I came into contact with this anti-knowledge movement a number of years ago, when I was a professor of mathematics education at Stanford University. The setting was a local school that had changed the math approach it used for years with poor results, to one that engaged students more actively in their math learning. The newer approach was not particularly controversial—students were still learning formal rules and methods, but instead of just practicing them, they were given complex problems to solve that involved using and applying the methods they were learning. The school’s results started to improve and more students were choosing math when the school became a target...