“we’ve sort of lowered our standards in a lot of respects.”

Today’s Carolina Journal interview delivers cringe-worthy facts about the state of math education in this country. In an interview with Duke University professor of public policy and economics, Jacob Vigdor, CJ Radio’s Mitch Kokai delves into the problem of, and ramifications of, treating all kids the same in terms of the math curriculum. The one-size-fits-all approach is a failure, of course.

Kokai: First of all, you have spent a lot of time looking at the data, and Americans do fare poorly compared to these other countries on math scores. Is this something we should worry about?

Vigdor: It is. If you look around the country and you look around the world, people who have strong math skills are more productive workers. There is a lot of work for them to do. Even if you look at the immigration policy debate these days, a lot of the people that we’re trying to bring into this country — if you see, you know, the CEOs who are lining up behind changes to immigration policy, they want workers who are skilled at some of these more mathematically intensive tasks. And the United States just can’t produce enough of those workers.

So what should we do? Here’s what Professor Vigdor has to say.

Vigdor: The way to slice the Gordian knot, so to speak, is to just treat students differently. And, you know, where that gets you into trouble is that what we’re talking about doing is tracking. We’re talking about having differentiated curriculum. We’re talking about taking our best students and giving them something different than what we’re giving the average student.

The problem that you run into with that kind of strategy is that there are a lot of voices within the education establishment that say, “Well, you know, we really want to be treating all the students the same. And we want to treat every child like they’re a superstar,” even though, well, you know, the test score data show the truth, which is that some kids arrive in kindergarten just readier for more advanced work than others.

But if we can actually differentiate the curriculum, that gives us the opportunity to have courses that are very rigorous and really challenging for the high-achieving students while still giving, you know, your average, your moderately performing students the opportunity to do work that’s at their level and really helps them get where they need to be.