San Francisco schools should offer algebra in eighth grade, said 84 percent of voters in Tuesday's election. It was a stunning rejection of a 10-year-old anti-tracking policy that failed to achieve "equity" in math achievement. The school board had voted last month to restore a middle-school algebra option.
But many students won't be ready for algebra in eighth grade or ninth grade or ever, if they don't learn the fundamentals in elementary school, warns Michael Malione, creator of SaveMath.net, and two colleagues in The Well News.
Students won't learn to memorize the times tables, if teachers follow the advice in California's new math framework, write Malione, David Margulies, a former IBM researcher, and Sugi Sorensen, a systems engineer and math enrichment instructor.
"Automatic recall" of multiplication facts enables students to learn multi-step math procedures, advise the National Mathematics Advisory Panel and the Institute of Education Sciences. The student struggling with 52÷7 doesn't have enough "mental energy" to understand new math ideas.
State standards require third-graders to "know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers,” the three point out. The old framework, which focuses on how to teach the standards, emphasized the importance of learning the times tables. The new framework eliminates the sentence stating third-grade students must memorize multiplication facts.
Memorization is disparaged throughout the framework with phrases such as “unproductive beliefs,” “facts devoid of meaning,” “low cognitive demand,” “arbitrary laws,” “not ‘blind’ memorization of number facts,” “unproductive notions,” etc.
The 2023 framework also changes the meaning of “fluency,” write Malione, Margulies and Sorensen.
In the 2013 framework, "fluent" meant "reasonably fast and accurate," adding that students should be able to use math facts “with enough facility” that it “does not slow down or derail the problem solver as he or she works on more complex problems.”
In 2023, that language is replaced by a warning to “avoid any temptation to conflate fluency and speed.”
"If it takes a minute to calculate 7×9," they ask, "what happens to that student when learning algebra?"