Well, we're constantly adding to our knowledge and revising what we thought we knew, so maybe we should just stop teaching until we know everything that can be known, sometime after the year infinity.
Or, given the numbers of teachers needed to teach math in K-graduate school, if we limit the pool of teachers to those who can grok calculus, then we'll run out of people who can do things like engineering and research. No time for developing new energy sources or mapping genomes, because 2nd graders need to understand how to borrow and carry.
Whether teachers are easily taken in by fad curricula is not the point, because they're not the decision makers. They're not always even made by educators.
Come on...don't get snarky.
I'm trying very hard to have an honest discussion here.
In private schools, a subset of the teachers serve on curriculum committees. For example, my son's kindergarten teacher was the primary decision maker concerning curricular materials at his school. They used Everyday Mathematics. I wrote to her about its deficiencies (including its treatment of place value), and she admitted to me that she didn't understand my letter, and then said, "But we're going to stick with it." It's the same at the private school my other kids attend. And public school boards often get members who are or were teachers. Around here, when they run for election, they tout their classroom experience as an important qualification.
I agree that high school (not middle school) teachers know more about their subjects (noted in other messages). But there are two points here:
1. The foundation is laid in the lower grades, and that's not happening properly right now. There's abundant evidence showing that teachers lack mathematical knowledge.
They can't teach it properly if they don't understand it.2. The writer in the OP's link used the word "profession" several times. As I've noted, a professional is a person who solves his or her own problems whenever possible. Learning about fractions on the web is an easily available option that doesn't seem to be happening.
A large majority on this board would probably agree that math education is a huge problem in American schools. The textbooks are a big part of the problem.
But so are the teachers. There's abundant evidence showing that they lack knowledge as a group (e.g. Liping Ma, Prof. Wu from UCB,
this paper, many others ). We can't fix this problem until we admit that it exists.
