Rejuvenating the Mathematics Education Profession

An Unsolicited Proposal to NCTM from Steven Rasmussen for a New 10-Year Strategic Direction

2009 will mark the 20th anniversary of the release of NCTM’s Mathematics Content Standards, an ambitious attempt by our professional community to offer strategic vision for mathematics education in U.S. schools.  Ever since their release, NCTM has invested a large portion of its organizational efforts and resources in building support for that vision.  The “standards movement,” begun by NCTM, has taken hold in mathematics and across disciplines.  Most states have ratified NCTM’s vision and incorporated our Standards into standards documents of their own, and curriculum has changed as a result.

At the same time, as one would expect, some, both within the mathematics community and outside of it, have challenged NCTM’s vision and proposed alternatives to its mainstream view.  Over time, NCTM has absorbed some of these ideas, and our Principles and Standards have evolved in response.

In some places and especially in recent years, the challenges to our vision have generated acrimony and have resulted in protracted tussles for authority.  The acrimony has moved from regional venues onto the national stage, and the small number of perpetrators of the acrimony show few signs getting on board with the common vision.  In fact, their strategy seems to be to box us into a political corner and tie up our organization in endless debate.  Few of us find this acrimony productive or of benefit to children.  None of us are energized by revisiting the same arguments time and again in place after place. Some of us, exhausted by the effort, have chosen to depart from our chosen field.

Clearly, keeping our vision alive and our bus rolling down a road paved by the collective professional wisdom and experience of our 100,000 mathematics-educator members and the research conducted by our university colleagues is a strategic necessity.  But it’s time to recognize that we will not achieve unanimity for our vision and it is time to recognize that application of our finite resources to ongoing argument with a small (even if well-connected), self-appointed group of “nay-sayers” may no longer be strategic.

I believe, that dedicating a third decade of energy to this fight will be counter-productive, if not self-destructive.  As an alternative, I would like to propose that NCTM make a radical shift in strategy to champion a new strategic vision for our community: promotion of a 10-Year Plan to Rejuvenate the Mathematics Education Profession.  The plan would focus on:

• Recutiting young people to mathematics education and retaining and supporting them through their critical first three years;
• Renewing our own energy as mathematics education professionals and NCTM members; and
• Rebuilding mathematics programs in broken schools and building new model programs in existing and new schools.
• Making children the beneficiaries of our energy and dedicated work.

Why this Strategy Now?

For a decade we have witnessed the depopulation of our profession.  We have discussed the declining numbers of young people entering the profession and the low retention rates of those that do.  We watch as New York City schools recruit math teachers in California while California districts send recruiters to New York.  Year after year we cite the same statistics: “Half of the math teachers that start teaching in urban schools quit in their first year, and two-thirds quit in the first three.”  But, at same time, we know that populations, whether populations of codfish or populations of math teachers, don’t survive with critically low “birth rates” under conditions of extreme stress.  We know from the mathematics of predator-prey dynamics and population viability analysis that such populations decline—then catastrophically collapse.  Are we facing such a collapse of our profession?  I think so.  If it is not already too late to reverse the decline in our professional stocks, it soon will be.  In the last decade, while we have been forced to bicker with the NCTM Standards “hold-outs,” the future of our profession has hung in the balance, not of this debate, but of a more critical issue—the loss of energy and human resources in our field.  Let’s now turn our attention to the more imminent threat to our work and future.

We may face a future where most children have no math teachers.  And we know whose children will bear the brunt of mathematics education neglect and suffer under societal abuse.

Additionally, as I have talked to NCTM members about the future of our field, I have become convinced that seeing young people take up our work would be among the most satisfying things they we, collectively, as active professionals, could do.  The appeal of rejuvenating our profession, the thrill of seeing new vitality in our professional ranks, would be especially strong among members who are approaching retirement—precisely those who have the most to offer young teachers and who would be prepared to take on the task of mentoring the next generation mof teachers.

Ten Ideas for Action that Could be Central to an NCTM Strategy to Rejuvenate our Profession:

1.    Give voice to new teachers.  Do we understand their perspectives and their needs?  Are we responsive as a community?  Is the memory of our own first years in our classrooms sufficient to understand how to support new teachers in 2007 (the era of accountability, high stakes tests for students and “high-standards”)?  Lets develop professional activities to hear from new teachers at our conferences and in our publications. This won’t happen without proactive work on our part.  New teachers are not typically NCTM members.  They don’t have money or seniority to go to conferences.  They haven’t signed up to speak at NCTM meetings. They don’t know that their ideas and questions are valued.  We need an organizational plan to give them voice.

2.    Build a working model of the population dynamics of our profession on which to test strategies to repopulate our classrooms. (See my related writing: Are We Going the Way of the Codfish? elsewhere on this blog site.)

3.    Commit NCTM to recruiting and supporting 100,000 new mathematics teachers over the next decade.  And then challenge the nation to make good on its desire to improve the education of our children by funding the effort.

4.    Develop national capacity within NCTM and across organizations of members (both schools and universities) for mathematics teacher recruitment and support, either directly or in strategic alliance with specialist organizations like Math for America.

5.    Make all NCTM services free for first three years of teaching service—membership, publications, conferences, professional development.  Raise fees on existing members to finance this initiative, if necessary. I think our existing members would welcome a slightly higher fee for this purpose—I sure would.  But as a person in business, I can make an argument that this is the best way for us to increase our economic strength.

6.    Refocus the work of the organization around recruiting new teachers, and supporting them through mentorship programs that tap the talent, experience and heart of our existing members to support new teachers.

7.    Develop conference strands and publication strategies designed to help young people process the emotional (as well as professional) issues they must grapple with as new teachers—the ups and downs in feelings of efficacy, the constant pressures of preparation and assessment, the weight of guiding student behavior, the challenges of instilling productive dispositions in students.

8.    Develop and champion national strategies to shift resources from communities and schools with abundant resources to communities and schools with insufficient human and economic resources.

9.    Find ways to identify and focus spotlights on those programs and educational strategies that work to make NCTM’s vision real for children.  We can educate children well—if our nation has the will.  (There's no magic in Asia, Asian countries support education.  See my writings on Asia elsewhere on this blog site.)

10.    Advocate in the public arena for increased funding for education, especially mathematics education and mobilize our membership to that end.

I realize that no one elected me to any NCTM Board or appointed me to any NCTM committee, but I’m proud that NCTM has been an organization that has been open to member ideas and has a history of putting willing and ordinary people to work.  I submitted this idea to the NCTM Board of Directors in advance of the last July NCTM Board meeting—the annual Board meeting where big ideas have historically been on the table.  I am ready to help in any way that I can to bring my suggested strategic shift into focus for you, our NCTM membership and leadership, and I am ready to commit to working with everyone to find the “fountain of youth” for our organization.  And I think that I speak for many others in our professional community.

Comments

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