The Math Wars had begun several years later, and this was his next target. On reputation he could only do so much. Very soon other tactics were introduced to the traditionalists side -- tactics no one would expect academics to use on each other.
September 20, 2002
Professor James Milgram
Department of Mathematics
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
Jim
I am replying to you with an open letter. Events of this past week or so have dismayed me and brought me to ask if my views on democracy in America are out of line with those of my peers. Though I feel that people have the legal right to express even extreme forms of dissent, I also believe that there is a slow decrease in our civility to one another, making it much more difficult to bring about consensus and accomplish common goals. In the range between civility and the extremity of legal expression is a gray area where all of us react negatively or positively. I need to ask if many people would react as I have.
The list of demands required the removal of a set of specific curricula
Prior to this statement, some of the group individually related their own personal experiences in the schools. One person was a state legislator, two were school board members, one was a teacher, and two were parents active in the schools. Two had withdrawn their children from the public schools and one had found alternative schooling for a child.
Everyone in the group was very well prepared, articulate, and experienced in governance. In other words, in any
Two days later I received an email from you, 3,000 miles away in a distant state. I believe this is the first written personal communication I have ever received from you. You told me that two from the group wrote that I "communicated 'disdain' for both me and Dick" and asked me to "clarify what was actually said." Very shortly after this I received an email from Dick Askey, about 1,500 miles away also in another state, with more particular questions about mathematics curricula but also asking what was said in this meeting with the commissioner.
Then I received from the commissioner a letter written to the governor
The letter went on to relate their view of events in Maine and to back up their position with arguments that can be found on the "Mathematically Correct" website. Since I was present at the meeting, I think the governor and commissioner sent the letter to me as a courtesy.
Next I would like to ask you, Dick, and others about democracy in America.
Here are my reactions to these events. Having lived about 30 years in Minnesota I know school governance differs greatly from state to state. Maine is a very
These towns must negotiate over property tax, education, and power to obtain education for their youngsters in neighboring tax districts.
Mainers are very able to understand the power of influence and money. I have no doubt after meeting this group that in their own districts they made their case well. Further, I have no doubt that those who made the decisions factored the group's arguments, both the educational argument and the argument about undue influence, into their decision. This decision did not agree with what the group wanted.
Frequently I have been asked for advice on school decisions. Because I am a professor my views are often not mainstream, so that frequently these decisions do not agree with my view. However, I was heard and the people making the decisions worked carefully. So my response was to roll up my sleeves, sit on classroom floors with children, work with teachers in their professional development activities, serve on committees that promoted interest in mathematics education, and seek both private and federal funding to help the children and teachers of my state. My wife and I would never have dreamed of pulling our children out of public school because things were not going our way. Had we opted out of the system, we certainly would not return to attack what hard working citizens had labored to craft.
Am I wrong to feel that others should pitch in when a result is democratically reached, or, at least, not attempt to overturn the process from the outside? Am I wrong to feel that people who find that they cannot stay and live with a decision should not come back to destroy what they left behind? What do other people think about this kind of activity?
Somewhere along the line, the members of the group who visited the commissioner found each other over varying districts and, judging by your email, apparently over varying states all around our country. Some of those in Maine formed a PAC and began working within the bureaucracy, behind closed doors, to alter decisions so carefully worked out by due process in local districts. To the outside world (e.g.
I know that these actions happen all the time, but they still make me feel uncomfortable. Is it all right to feel uncomfortable in the face of demands that appointed officials tell local districts to overturn decisions? Am I wrong to feel uncomfortable about this kind of governance in the US for our locally controlled schools? Am I out of step with my peers?
Am I off base to feel that maybe some sleight of hand has happened here, that democratic processes are not working as they should, that probably I shouldn't have received an email from you because you should not even know about meetings called by Maine state officials?
What do other people think?
Aaron Brown on Newsnight recently said that in a free country like
There is a fundamental assumption here. Human beings, even groups of human beings, have a right to be
Now I would like to answer your two main questions.
First, you want to know what was said in the meeting. Other than the meager details about the meeting given in this letter, I think you should ask the commissioner. Second, do I disdain you?
Here is my opinion of you. A hundred years from now there will be graduate students working to understand the most recent proof of a theorem of Milgram and wondering who he was and what he was like. I don't hold that view of very many. However, I believe that we, as mathematicians, are not prepared through our craft to assume the role of national leadership in mathematics education. Expertise in one of these fields does not automatically transfer to expertise in the other.
Despite, or perhaps because of, my many years of working hand in hand with mathematics educators in a broad variety of circumstances, I do not feel qualified to call myself an expert in mathematics education, and I don't think you are, either. I am quite concerned that you don't share my qualms in this regard, especially when I directly experience the tactics that you seem to condone and
I am sorry that you, as a leading mathematician and in the same profession as mine, have made me so sad about the state of democracy in America.
Sincerely,
Thomas R. Berger
Carter Professor of Mathematics
Professor Richard Askey, University of Wisconsin
Commissioner Duke Albanese
Governor Angus King
So, what was heard in that meeting? Some research has uncovered an account of those meetings
"... Instead of saying "Give the value for s when r = 6 and justify it", it should have said, "Give *a* value for s when r = 6 and justify it." Others of the considerable collection of essentially isomorphic problems that he used to demonstrate the horrible state of mathematics in the schools I agreed with him more on, having been annoyed by such problems on standardized tests when I was in grade school.
On the other hand, he ridiculed the whole idea of mathematics as a science that uses patterns, and poured scorn on a statement in one of the sets of standards to the effect that students should be allowed to experiment with and justify ideas ("Never knew math was an experimental science, did you? (chuckle, chuckle)"). It caused me to wonder how he managed to do his research without generalizing (i.e., following up on a pattern) or checking to see which version of a statement might work (i.e., experimenting with it.)
The evening session managed to be worse. This session was the centerpiece of the visit -- a presentation directed to the members of "Where's the Math?" (the local branch of Mathematically Correct) and the folks they had invited with an eye to recruiting them. With a sympathetic audience that they really could wow with their academic credentials, he and Klein ratcheted up their sarcasm and very successfully swept away any possibility of disagreement by producing a caricature of any opposing view and lampooning it for laughs.
I was especially impressed by Klein's method of disposing of anyone subscribing to constructivist theories as being a romantic who believed, like Rousseau, that a child's knowledge should be left in freedom to grow on its own, like the trees in the forest. He got a good laugh out of that each time he used it. I was struck by the parallels between his use of the word "Constructivist" and the use of the word "Communist" in my youth.
In fact, that parallel became even more striking at the end, with Milgram and Klein's exhortation to "Where's the Math":
- Go to the legislature and make them get rid of everyone in the OSPI from the Superintendent herself on down who has in any way been involved in the past ten years' work on the state standards and the WASL.
- Get rid of the standards and replace them with a set of acceptable standards. Get rid of any vestige of any "Reform" curricula (they didn't quite say to burn them).
- Make sure that no one in power has been involved in any curriculum development or had anything to do with the National Council of Teacher of Mathematics.
- Make sure that no decision is in any way influenced by any educational research or anything else that might have been said by anyone from a College of Education.
- Install a really good set of textbooks (currently Milgram is favoring ones now being produced in Russia, which are even better than the revered Singapore curriculum
- Be sure to keep all power in the hands of mathematicians and good teachers. It was implicit in the instructions that mathematicians who do not agree are classified as mathematics educators (a rung or two below the night custodian), and teachers who have any sympathy with constructivist notions are not good teachers.
The focus, strikingly, was on destruction, with an almost complete lack of discussion of its follow-up. There were frequent references to the weak mathematical background of American teachers, especially as compared to countries like Hungary and Singapore, but no hint of a suggestion how the newly empowered mathematicians and classroom teachers could deal with that (very real) problem. And most notably, in the entire day's discourse, in all its forms, there was no reference to what might best enable children to learn. He appears to believe that, with a really good textbook based on world-class standards, children will learn mathematics by sitting, rapt, and absorbing everything the teacher and the book tell them.
These are the men you will entrust your children to. Men who believe that Soviet Russia had it all worked out in the 50s.
