The principle purpose of math education isn't so much the ability to calculate compound interest as it is to think, analyze and solve problems step-by-step (without a computer), whether in numbers or in words. Similarly, the purpose of learning to write cursive isn't so much the ability to write a letter (which is nice) as it is to develop the ability to create a sentence and paragraph without word processing: disciplining the mind to think complete thoughts that can then be expressed. (My guess is that good writers like Matthew Yglesias learned the craft by handwriting not by word processing and only started to use computers to be a quicker but not better writer.)
Thus, computers are the enemy of real, deep learning. There are OECD studies that demonstrate children with early, frequent access and use of computers and the internet perform as badly as children who have no access, with the "sweet spot" being occasional computer use that supplements, not replaces thought. The OECD study suggested that over-use of computers only qualifies children ot be keyboarders competing with data entry people in developing countries.
And the fundamental purpose of history and civics in K-12 education is to establish the foundational myths that hold a society together. Like the use of computers to enhance what has been learned by handwriting and basic arithmetic, nuanced debates about the foundational myths -- including alternate myths -- can only be helpful to society after the basic foundational myth has been established. Simply offering uneducated children a variety of myths leads to chaos and disharmony: exactly the opposite of what a good educational system should produce. Destroying foundational myths is simply nihilistic destruction.
I want to push back a bit and say that this actually was exceptional in many ways. In Texas I learned none of these topics except for Jim Crow. And the way it was taught, Jim Crow completely ended in the 60s and everything has been good since then.
>And this is not a particularly difficult compound interest question. Nobody is trying to trick you or using weird jargon like APR.
A __savings account__ with 10% APY honestly does sound like some sort of trick to me. I thought I was doing pretty well with a 5% compounded-daily account...
Went through this in a visceral way with my kid & school quarantine. He was in 1st grade when school shut down, so early reading. I had this hazy wordcel high-openness type parent instinct that what was important to keep up, in the many months that followed, was a general “learning climate”- talking about history, visiting important places & ecosystems, exposure to cultures, foods & natural processes. Bzzzt wrongo. All those things are good, but specifically what was withdrawn from my kids educational path were some early ed Rs so mundane we barely consider them- readings (phonics), writing (decent mechanical pencil handwriting strength), and rithmatic (fluency in addition & subtraction). I only realized this slowly, as my kids reading level didn’t go up automatically, and he tested behind grade level when in person school fitfully started back up. It was an illuminating experience. While there is a ton of ‘content’ in schools, and social / self discipline / grit skills, by far the biggest part of elementary education is some basic mass brain development hacks that society hit upon a hundred years ago. Giving these to every single small child is a triumph of contemporary life, a triumph the welfare state should proudly and aggressively own as proof of concept, but also something that you can kinda screw up more easily than improve.
As an elementary teacher I’m genuinely surprised how much of school dialog is consumed by peripheral bullshit.
Like if you combine the parts of science and Ss that are pure vocabulary acquisition and reading into ela, the proportion of the school day outside of specials lunch and recess that isn’t dedicated to reading, writing and math is some tiny fraction of a day.
There’s a few experiments, some discussion about regulating our emotions and not losing our shit when stuff is hard and a huge amount of reading. And I’m all for if you have a better way to do that we should do that but it’s not like we’re not trying really hard to get kids proficient in math and reading.
I think American society could definitely benefit from an increase in reading comprehension and a better understanding of concepts like compound interest.
And a certain segment of kids would also benefit from increased emphasis on career and vocational training. Too many come out of public education not really knowing how to do anything in a society that really needs people who know things and have useful skills.
As a result too many young men in particular end up NEET - not in employment education or training. And that leads to declining work force participation rates for these young men. While also making them more susceptible to extreme political ideas.
Of course I realize low workforce participation rates by young men is a complex subject with many different causes that can’t be fixed just by better vocational technical classes. But it could be a start.
Completely agree, Matt. My wife is a very experienced and now retired teacher. She has started volunteering regularly in a really bad elementary school in town that serves a mostly poor, economically disadvantaged population. Most of the kids can't read and write two grade levels below where they actually are. Some are in 4th grade and can't read at all or do really, really basic math (single digit addition). Most of these kids are so behind that they will likely not ever catch up and become literate and numerate citizens. It's really depressing. The most depressing aspect about it all is that the teachers themselves are terrible, for the most part. They don't seem to know how to teach, or how to manage a classroom. Nor do they seem to care. All that to say, the more we can emphasize the importance of actually teaching reading and math skills--and holding teachers accountable to those goals--the better off we'd all be.
Well, Matt is trying to make a point about schools today and their failure to teach the basics. What is his evidence? His BEST evidence? The hard quantitive stuff? The dramatic 82%(!!!!) of folks got this wrong stuff?
It's those math questions. Which ain't good questions in the first place...but that's not even the worst thing about them -- in this context.
They are 2004 data from then-50's people. "Early Baby Boomers." Matt links to a 2012 article. But that articles explains that they were were first used for this purpose in in ANOTHER article by the same lead author, in 2007. Both articles are explicit about it being Baby Boomer data. The second article is even CALLED "Baby Boomers Retirement Security: The Role of Planning, Financial Literacy and Housing Wealth."
This is data about people who graduated from high school in the the late-60's to early-70's -- all quite before Matt was even born.
This data tells us NOTHING about the math performance of schools today. It doesn't even tell us about the math performance of today's 50 year old's. This data is from graduates well before the education standards movement even began (i.e., in the 1980's).
Let me spell this out: Matt is suggesting that before 1973's high school graduates did a poor job of answering poorly written financial literacy questions in 2004, we can tell that schools today do not team the basics of mathematics and numeracy well enough.
I too was troubled by the McGhee and Ray piece, and I basically agree with the points made here. But we have to be clear on what we mean by "the basics" when it comes to reading.
Learning to decipher or "decode" words is a set of basic skills that need to be taught systematically, and too often are not. But learning to comprehend what we read is a totally different ball game. Schools generally do try to teach it directly as a set of skills--e.g., "finding the main idea"--and the theory is that it doesn't matter if kids are acquiring much substantive knowledge (usually they're not, because they're reading books that are easy for them to read, on random topics) as long as they're acquiring the skills. That approach largely explains why so many American teenagers and adults are reading at such low levels today.
The only way to equip kids to understand complex text is to teach them substantive things -- in history, science, etc. -- that will build their academic knowledge and vocabulary. That needs to start in the early grades. And it requires not just teaching kids how to read history books, in some abstract sense, but also ensuring that they're learning some history.
History and science aren't just nice ways to get kids engaged in school. They're vital to turning out people who can understand a book, a newspaper article, or even on on-the-job instruction manual.
So we can't just avoid decisions about what content to teach by focusing on "basic skills." That's kind of what we've been doing for decades, for various reasons, and the results have been disastrous, especially for students who aren't able to pick up academic knowledge and vocabulary outside school.
The only solution, in my view, is to draw a distinction (as I think this piece sort of does) between generally agreed-upon facts and personal opinion. For example, I saw a quote from an 8th-grade US history teacher saying that she needed to teach kids that "the the laws and systems of our country were purposefully developed to elevate white, cis males.” She added, “That is the truth.”
If she was talking about the founders of the country, it's clearly not "the truth" that their goal was to favor people who looked like them. That may have been one result of their actions, but they saw themselves as expanding rights, not limiting them.
It's fine for teachers and students to pass judgment on historical figures and events, but only AFTER they understand the basic story, according to generally agreed upon accounts, and the perspective of those involved. And generally, teachers shouldn't be telling students that any one perspective on historical events is "the truth" as opposed to a matter for debate.
One thing that has always gotten my goat from the DEI industrial complex is the notion they have passed off that in 2019-2020 the country was teaching racial issues and history the same way it was in 1925.
Students were absolutely learning about things like the 3/5 compromise, slavery as the cause of the Civil War, etc.
Heck, I am not young and I was taught these things in school.
The DEI industrial complex in its absolute fraudulence pretends that they are "forcing America to confront difficult history."
I have never feared the whole "decolonizing math" or "showing math work is 'worship of the written word' and therefore white supremacy culture'" was going to turn people into Marxist/Leninists. I fear it will turn them into mathematically illiterate boobs.
Good piece, though I think it's an oversight not to mention non-racial areas of political fighting in schools, e.g. trans issues or even COVID policies.
There's also an interesting angle to be covered here that indirectly relates to One Billion Americans. Childcare costs are a major disincentive to have larger families as it is. If people lose faith in the public school system for whatever reason and choose to send their kids to private school, then absent an equivalent government subsidy (e.g. vouchers) that's an increased childcare/educational cost that we should also expect to have a negative effect on birthrates.
In other words: available public education is pro-natalist! And "available" means not just in terms of cost, location, and quality, but broadly ideologically acceptable as well.
Maybe the tradeoff in terms of Critical Race Theory or Drag Queen Story Hour or whatever is worth that cost! But it seems worth thinking about explicitly.
"Let’s say you have 200 dollars in a savings account. The account earns 10 percent interest per year. How much would you have in the account at the end of two years?”
If that's the actual example of the question, I'm not sure I could answer correctly despite one of my degrees being in economics because it fails to mention (1) whether this is simple or compound interest and, (2) if it is compound interest (which is not unreasonable to assume since it mentions the money is in a "savings account") what the frequency of compounding is. I think most savings accounts compound on a monthly basis, in which case the answer is $244.08. If it compounds annually, it's $242.
Their intent is probably to assume that it's annual because that's an easier calculation to make, but who can say? As I noted, I'm only assuming it's compound interest rather than simple in the first place because it's explicitly described as a "savings account," which in every case I'm aware of pay compound interest. (There are other types of investment vehicles like bonds that typically pay simple interest.)
The issue is that once you've put the reader in the position of having to assume we're talking about compound interest based on nothing but the characterization of the savings vehicle, why shouldn't the reader continue on to assume that the interest compounds monthly? I've genuinely never heard of a savings account that only compounded annually. (My statement "most savings accounts" in my original comment is a lawyerly hedge since I can't definitively say *no* savings accounts compound annually.)
To put it another way, if the answer is based on annual compounding ($242), the question presumes the reader is sophisticated enough to understand that savings accounts normally pay compound interest, but then bizarrely presumes that those same readers will also forget/ignore that those same savings accounts normally compound that interest on a monthly basis.
That was my thought. (I don’t have a degree in economics but I am a tax lawyer so I deal with compounding interest and penalty every day. I&P compounds monthly!)
Let's try one more. Let's do a REALLY good one: Should we evaluate schools based on how their students (or graduates) perform when they *leave* school, or should we evaluate them based on their how well they perform some number of years later?
Should we evaluate the reading abilities of recent graduates (and/or dropouts)? Or should we evaluate those who graduated decades ago?
That latter has two problems:
* Older methods and approaches may have long since been replaced.
* Actual learning loss occurs over time as people are more and more removed from their school years.
For example, who know what logarithms are in their 40's? Who remembers the atomic number of Nitrogen? Who remembers the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet? Who remembers the differences between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Right?
(the power you raise 10 to to get that number, like 10-squared, 10-cubed, 10-to-the-1.348th power. 7. abab cdcd efef gg. French Revolution (1789?) vs. Founding of the UN (1950?).)
Matt seems to be basing his whole argument of the failure of schools to teach "basic" skills on the performance of adults long removed from schools.
He seems to think well of the the work done in the one school he actually has current and intimate knowledge of. But he criticizes schools generally based on the performance of adults who are long removed from school -- as though unused skills do not deteriorate over time. That seems epistemologically unsound.
Probably noted somewhere already: Heather McGee wrote "The Sum of Us", not "The Sum of Race."
The principle purpose of math education isn't so much the ability to calculate compound interest as it is to think, analyze and solve problems step-by-step (without a computer), whether in numbers or in words. Similarly, the purpose of learning to write cursive isn't so much the ability to write a letter (which is nice) as it is to develop the ability to create a sentence and paragraph without word processing: disciplining the mind to think complete thoughts that can then be expressed. (My guess is that good writers like Matthew Yglesias learned the craft by handwriting not by word processing and only started to use computers to be a quicker but not better writer.)
Thus, computers are the enemy of real, deep learning. There are OECD studies that demonstrate children with early, frequent access and use of computers and the internet perform as badly as children who have no access, with the "sweet spot" being occasional computer use that supplements, not replaces thought. The OECD study suggested that over-use of computers only qualifies children ot be keyboarders competing with data entry people in developing countries.
And the fundamental purpose of history and civics in K-12 education is to establish the foundational myths that hold a society together. Like the use of computers to enhance what has been learned by handwriting and basic arithmetic, nuanced debates about the foundational myths -- including alternate myths -- can only be helpful to society after the basic foundational myth has been established. Simply offering uneducated children a variety of myths leads to chaos and disharmony: exactly the opposite of what a good educational system should produce. Destroying foundational myths is simply nihilistic destruction.
I want to push back a bit and say that this actually was exceptional in many ways. In Texas I learned none of these topics except for Jim Crow. And the way it was taught, Jim Crow completely ended in the 60s and everything has been good since then.
>And this is not a particularly difficult compound interest question. Nobody is trying to trick you or using weird jargon like APR.
A __savings account__ with 10% APY honestly does sound like some sort of trick to me. I thought I was doing pretty well with a 5% compounded-daily account...
Went through this in a visceral way with my kid & school quarantine. He was in 1st grade when school shut down, so early reading. I had this hazy wordcel high-openness type parent instinct that what was important to keep up, in the many months that followed, was a general “learning climate”- talking about history, visiting important places & ecosystems, exposure to cultures, foods & natural processes. Bzzzt wrongo. All those things are good, but specifically what was withdrawn from my kids educational path were some early ed Rs so mundane we barely consider them- readings (phonics), writing (decent mechanical pencil handwriting strength), and rithmatic (fluency in addition & subtraction). I only realized this slowly, as my kids reading level didn’t go up automatically, and he tested behind grade level when in person school fitfully started back up. It was an illuminating experience. While there is a ton of ‘content’ in schools, and social / self discipline / grit skills, by far the biggest part of elementary education is some basic mass brain development hacks that society hit upon a hundred years ago. Giving these to every single small child is a triumph of contemporary life, a triumph the welfare state should proudly and aggressively own as proof of concept, but also something that you can kinda screw up more easily than improve.
As an elementary teacher I’m genuinely surprised how much of school dialog is consumed by peripheral bullshit.
Like if you combine the parts of science and Ss that are pure vocabulary acquisition and reading into ela, the proportion of the school day outside of specials lunch and recess that isn’t dedicated to reading, writing and math is some tiny fraction of a day.
There’s a few experiments, some discussion about regulating our emotions and not losing our shit when stuff is hard and a huge amount of reading. And I’m all for if you have a better way to do that we should do that but it’s not like we’re not trying really hard to get kids proficient in math and reading.
I think American society could definitely benefit from an increase in reading comprehension and a better understanding of concepts like compound interest.
And a certain segment of kids would also benefit from increased emphasis on career and vocational training. Too many come out of public education not really knowing how to do anything in a society that really needs people who know things and have useful skills.
As a result too many young men in particular end up NEET - not in employment education or training. And that leads to declining work force participation rates for these young men. While also making them more susceptible to extreme political ideas.
Of course I realize low workforce participation rates by young men is a complex subject with many different causes that can’t be fixed just by better vocational technical classes. But it could be a start.
Completely agree, Matt. My wife is a very experienced and now retired teacher. She has started volunteering regularly in a really bad elementary school in town that serves a mostly poor, economically disadvantaged population. Most of the kids can't read and write two grade levels below where they actually are. Some are in 4th grade and can't read at all or do really, really basic math (single digit addition). Most of these kids are so behind that they will likely not ever catch up and become literate and numerate citizens. It's really depressing. The most depressing aspect about it all is that the teachers themselves are terrible, for the most part. They don't seem to know how to teach, or how to manage a classroom. Nor do they seem to care. All that to say, the more we can emphasize the importance of actually teaching reading and math skills--and holding teachers accountable to those goals--the better off we'd all be.
So, how bad is THIS argument?
Well, Matt is trying to make a point about schools today and their failure to teach the basics. What is his evidence? His BEST evidence? The hard quantitive stuff? The dramatic 82%(!!!!) of folks got this wrong stuff?
It's those math questions. Which ain't good questions in the first place...but that's not even the worst thing about them -- in this context.
They are 2004 data from then-50's people. "Early Baby Boomers." Matt links to a 2012 article. But that articles explains that they were were first used for this purpose in in ANOTHER article by the same lead author, in 2007. Both articles are explicit about it being Baby Boomer data. The second article is even CALLED "Baby Boomers Retirement Security: The Role of Planning, Financial Literacy and Housing Wealth."
This is data about people who graduated from high school in the the late-60's to early-70's -- all quite before Matt was even born.
This data tells us NOTHING about the math performance of schools today. It doesn't even tell us about the math performance of today's 50 year old's. This data is from graduates well before the education standards movement even began (i.e., in the 1980's).
Let me spell this out: Matt is suggesting that before 1973's high school graduates did a poor job of answering poorly written financial literacy questions in 2004, we can tell that schools today do not team the basics of mathematics and numeracy well enough.
No, Matt. That's not a good argument.
I too was troubled by the McGhee and Ray piece, and I basically agree with the points made here. But we have to be clear on what we mean by "the basics" when it comes to reading.
Learning to decipher or "decode" words is a set of basic skills that need to be taught systematically, and too often are not. But learning to comprehend what we read is a totally different ball game. Schools generally do try to teach it directly as a set of skills--e.g., "finding the main idea"--and the theory is that it doesn't matter if kids are acquiring much substantive knowledge (usually they're not, because they're reading books that are easy for them to read, on random topics) as long as they're acquiring the skills. That approach largely explains why so many American teenagers and adults are reading at such low levels today.
The only way to equip kids to understand complex text is to teach them substantive things -- in history, science, etc. -- that will build their academic knowledge and vocabulary. That needs to start in the early grades. And it requires not just teaching kids how to read history books, in some abstract sense, but also ensuring that they're learning some history.
History and science aren't just nice ways to get kids engaged in school. They're vital to turning out people who can understand a book, a newspaper article, or even on on-the-job instruction manual.
So we can't just avoid decisions about what content to teach by focusing on "basic skills." That's kind of what we've been doing for decades, for various reasons, and the results have been disastrous, especially for students who aren't able to pick up academic knowledge and vocabulary outside school.
The only solution, in my view, is to draw a distinction (as I think this piece sort of does) between generally agreed-upon facts and personal opinion. For example, I saw a quote from an 8th-grade US history teacher saying that she needed to teach kids that "the the laws and systems of our country were purposefully developed to elevate white, cis males.” She added, “That is the truth.”
If she was talking about the founders of the country, it's clearly not "the truth" that their goal was to favor people who looked like them. That may have been one result of their actions, but they saw themselves as expanding rights, not limiting them.
It's fine for teachers and students to pass judgment on historical figures and events, but only AFTER they understand the basic story, according to generally agreed upon accounts, and the perspective of those involved. And generally, teachers shouldn't be telling students that any one perspective on historical events is "the truth" as opposed to a matter for debate.
I've written more about this here (and elsewhere), if anyone is interested: https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/presentism-may-be-stoking-doubts
One thing that has always gotten my goat from the DEI industrial complex is the notion they have passed off that in 2019-2020 the country was teaching racial issues and history the same way it was in 1925.
Students were absolutely learning about things like the 3/5 compromise, slavery as the cause of the Civil War, etc.
Heck, I am not young and I was taught these things in school.
The DEI industrial complex in its absolute fraudulence pretends that they are "forcing America to confront difficult history."
Total nonsense.
I have never feared the whole "decolonizing math" or "showing math work is 'worship of the written word' and therefore white supremacy culture'" was going to turn people into Marxist/Leninists. I fear it will turn them into mathematically illiterate boobs.
Good piece, though I think it's an oversight not to mention non-racial areas of political fighting in schools, e.g. trans issues or even COVID policies.
There's also an interesting angle to be covered here that indirectly relates to One Billion Americans. Childcare costs are a major disincentive to have larger families as it is. If people lose faith in the public school system for whatever reason and choose to send their kids to private school, then absent an equivalent government subsidy (e.g. vouchers) that's an increased childcare/educational cost that we should also expect to have a negative effect on birthrates.
In other words: available public education is pro-natalist! And "available" means not just in terms of cost, location, and quality, but broadly ideologically acceptable as well.
Maybe the tradeoff in terms of Critical Race Theory or Drag Queen Story Hour or whatever is worth that cost! But it seems worth thinking about explicitly.
And no, this is not a hypothetical.
I was disappointed by the lack of clever or snarky subtitle for this article
"Let’s say you have 200 dollars in a savings account. The account earns 10 percent interest per year. How much would you have in the account at the end of two years?”
If that's the actual example of the question, I'm not sure I could answer correctly despite one of my degrees being in economics because it fails to mention (1) whether this is simple or compound interest and, (2) if it is compound interest (which is not unreasonable to assume since it mentions the money is in a "savings account") what the frequency of compounding is. I think most savings accounts compound on a monthly basis, in which case the answer is $244.08. If it compounds annually, it's $242.
If they didn’t mention it wouldn’t you assume annually?
Their intent is probably to assume that it's annual because that's an easier calculation to make, but who can say? As I noted, I'm only assuming it's compound interest rather than simple in the first place because it's explicitly described as a "savings account," which in every case I'm aware of pay compound interest. (There are other types of investment vehicles like bonds that typically pay simple interest.)
The issue is that once you've put the reader in the position of having to assume we're talking about compound interest based on nothing but the characterization of the savings vehicle, why shouldn't the reader continue on to assume that the interest compounds monthly? I've genuinely never heard of a savings account that only compounded annually. (My statement "most savings accounts" in my original comment is a lawyerly hedge since I can't definitively say *no* savings accounts compound annually.)
To put it another way, if the answer is based on annual compounding ($242), the question presumes the reader is sophisticated enough to understand that savings accounts normally pay compound interest, but then bizarrely presumes that those same readers will also forget/ignore that those same savings accounts normally compound that interest on a monthly basis.
Um…if it’s 10% and they are asking you to calculate it in your head….what they want is pretty obvious.
(1) I don't see where they said to calculate it in your head.
(2) It's a poorly written question in any event if the audience is expected to make two contrary assumptions to get to the "correct" result.
(1) It’s implied by the use of 2 years and 10%.
That was my thought. (I don’t have a degree in economics but I am a tax lawyer so I deal with compounding interest and penalty every day. I&P compounds monthly!)
Let's try one more. Let's do a REALLY good one: Should we evaluate schools based on how their students (or graduates) perform when they *leave* school, or should we evaluate them based on their how well they perform some number of years later?
Should we evaluate the reading abilities of recent graduates (and/or dropouts)? Or should we evaluate those who graduated decades ago?
That latter has two problems:
* Older methods and approaches may have long since been replaced.
* Actual learning loss occurs over time as people are more and more removed from their school years.
For example, who know what logarithms are in their 40's? Who remembers the atomic number of Nitrogen? Who remembers the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet? Who remembers the differences between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Right?
(the power you raise 10 to to get that number, like 10-squared, 10-cubed, 10-to-the-1.348th power. 7. abab cdcd efef gg. French Revolution (1789?) vs. Founding of the UN (1950?).)
Matt seems to be basing his whole argument of the failure of schools to teach "basic" skills on the performance of adults long removed from schools.
He seems to think well of the the work done in the one school he actually has current and intimate knowledge of. But he criticizes schools generally based on the performance of adults who are long removed from school -- as though unused skills do not deteriorate over time. That seems epistemologically unsound.