Interesting - thanks for posting it. I read the entire article as well as the first follow up. They make some valid points. I also have no doubt that Professor Wu's assessment is correct for a subset of the schools in this country as well as for a subset of elementary teachers. However, many of his observations have not been my experience or my children's experiences over different decades. Many of the textbooks are definitely lacking. However, in our school district, the math textbook is not the only source of the math curriculum or math assessments. The distirct office develops curriculum and assesments to use with the textbooks and the gt classes in particular have utilized curriculum developed by well-known gt education experts. For example, the way of teaching fractions over several years that Professor Wu recommends is the way that I learned fraction at my school and the way that my three children have been taught in their school. That is one of the reasons that the elementary curriculum spirals because the ideas are presented with increasing complexity over the years. His criticism regarding the misfocus on "variable" rather than "symbol" in algebra was interesting. I do believe that one of the reasons why elementary schools started teaching "elementary algebra" was to emphasize/develop the symbolic aspect. That is why in first grade, the curriculum introduces 7 + ? = 9.
Based on our limited samples, I must also disagree with his thinking that university mathematics is not sufficient to provide capable elementary math teachers. All the competent math teachers that my children have had over the years were trained in higher mathematics and it appeared to me that was the reason why they taught elementary math so well. The incompetent teachers were ones who did not have the advance math background. Again, obviously Professor Wu had a large sample of his own students from his training camps with which to draw conclusions so surely there is some validity to his conclusions. However, I do posit that his sample may not have been entirely representative.
