Response to Comment

UnknownVariable said...

"This book was written in 1955!" Yet we're still here. Still world leaders in technology, math, physics, etc. One might extrapolate that this book and your posts of similar vein are similar to chicken little exclaiming that the sky is falling... or one could imagine the accomplishments we could have made if real teaching reform took place back then (and now).

I think this comment warrants a response. First of all, I should clarify that I am in no way advocating a "sky is falling" scenario. Regardless of the final conclusion of this debate on NCTM math, life will go on more or less as it always had, for better or worse. I just feel very strongly that it will be better if NCTM math is wiped off the face of our school system and education colleges.

Second and more importantly, it is worth noting that we are still world leaders only to the extent that the U.S. is able to attract talent from elsewhere in the world. It has been a good many years since U.S. undergraduate education has been up to the caliber of undergraduate education elsewhere in the world. It used to be (not that long ago, 20-30 years maybe) that this statement could only be applied to high school education.

However, that sub-standard high school education eventually resulted in a sub-standard college education. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that this sub-standard college education is in turn starting to affect graduate education; it will not be long before my statement applies to graduate education as surely as it applies to high school education.

As just a quick example, look at Georgia State University's math and statistics tenured or tenure-track faculty (I chose GSU only because I knew where I could get my hands on this info quickly, but I am sure this is fairly representative of many U.S. institutions today).

Faculty members whose entire college education was at U.S. institutions...

• Jean Bevis - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Florida, 1965
• Frank Hall - Ph.D. Mathematics, North Carolina State University, 1973
• Joseph Walker - Ph.D. Statistics, University of North Carolina, 1976
• George Davis - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of New Mexico, 1979
• Valerie A. Miller - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of South Carolina, 1985
• Ronald Patterson - Ph.D. Statistics, University of South Carolina, 1985

Faculty members whose college education was in part or in whole at foreign institutions (indicating highest degree earned abroad) ...

• Yu-Sheng Hsu - B.S. Mathematics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 1968
• Draga Vidakovic - B.S. Mathematics, Belgrade University, 1979
• Lifeng Ding - M.S. Applied Mathematics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, 1982
• Guantao Chen - M.S. Mathematics, Huazhong Normal University, Wuhan, China, 1984
• Mihaly Bakonyi - M.S. Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Romania, 1985
• Zhongshan Li - M.S. Mathematics, Beijing Normal University, China, 1986
• Johannes Hattingh - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Johannesburg, 1989
• Andrey Shilnikov - Ph.D. Mathematics, University of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, 1990
• Susmita Datta - B.S. Physics, University of Calcutta, India, 1990?
• Yichuan Zhao - M.S. Applied Mathematics, Peking University, 1991
• Hongyu He - B.S. Mathematics, China, 1992?
• Imre Patyi - M.S. Mathematics, Eotvos University, Budapest, Hungary, 1995
• Alexandra Smirnova - M.S. Mathematics, Ural State University, 1995
• Florian Enescu - B.S. Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Romania, 1996
• Pulak Ghosh - M.S. Statistics, University of Calcutta, 1998
• Jiawei Liu - B.S. Applied Mathematics, Tsinghua University, 1998
• Gengsheng Qin - Ph.D. Statistics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 1999
• Marina Arav - Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Technion, Israel, 2000

In addition to the raw numbers, I urge you to notice the dates of the degrees awarded within each group. US graduate schools are increasingly becoming institutions where the best and brightest PhD graduates of foreign universities teach the best and brightest BS graduates of foreign universities. While certainly not a Chicken Little scenario, it certainly should worry us that the US will not be able to maintain its leadership position under these conditions. We need to be able to grow our own technical talent, and increasingly this is just not the case.