For Too Many American Kids, Math Isn’t Adding Up

Math scores in the US have been so bad for so long that teachers could be forgiven for trying anything to improve them. Unfortunately, many of the strategies they’re using could be making things worse.

It’s a crisis decades in the making. In the early 20th century, education reformers including John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick developed a theory — drawing from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — that came to be known as constructivism. The idea was that learning happens best when students immerse themselves in a problem and find their own solution. By the late 1980s, math standards had embraced “discovery-based learning.”