I have observed a couple of disconcerting trends in my teaching career. Since I started teaching in 2003, students are struggling more, particularly with math and critical thinking, and students’ anxiety levels are skyrocketing.
Many high school teachers blame middle schools for their students’ lack of preparedness. Middle school teachers, in turn, blame elementary school teachers. Elementary teachers blame state standards that are not developmentally appropriate, which appears to be the source of the problem. Students are taught concepts before they are developmentally ready. Because they do not really understand the concepts, they are unable to apply them in a holistic way, and they learn scripts and procedures for getting the right answers. They need constant reminders and refreshers, lest they forget the procedures, and the procedures are useless as building blocks for the concepts that will follow. So they learn a new set of scripts and procedures the next year, and the year after that, and so on. By the time they get to high school, the concepts are so complex that they are unable to remember all of the necessary scripts and procedures, and their education begins to collapse like a house of cards.
An example of this is in the teaching of fractions. Children can understand the concept of fractions at a very young age, but according to Math Skills: What to Expect at Different Ages, they are not really developmentally ready to understand mathematical operations with fractions until fourth of fifth grade at the earliest, and even then only comparing fractions and decimals and placing them on a number line. Children become developmentally ready to learn mathematical operations with fractions, such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing them, in middle school. However, the Massachusetts Mathematics Curriculum Framework (2017) specifies that Number & Operations—Fractions be taught in grades 3–5. When I ask 11th and 12th graders in my high school physics classes about fractions, they all respond that they were taught fractions in third grade, and that they have struggled with them ever since. Without a solid understanding of fractions, they were never able to understand ratios and proportions, and without a solid understanding of ratios and proportions, many of then are unable to understand algebra.
The problem, at least in Massachusetts, dates to the 1990s, when education reforms turned the skills possessed by the average student at each grade level into requirements for that grade. This meant that half of the students in any grade were suddenly expected to work beyond their developmental abilities. If we assume that a “required” skill means that 95% of students need to master it, the slower half of the students need to work one or two standard deviations—i.e., 1–2 grade levels—beyond their abilities.
This situation creates several problems. Because the required skills are assessed by the state on high-stakes tests, teachers need to teach students to get the right answers on these tests. Students pick up on their teachers’ need to have their students score well, and those who are unable to do so develop anxiety and low self-esteem over letting their teachers down because they are not good enough. As students need to apply more complex skills without having mastered the building blocks, their self-esteem and self-confidence plummet, and they become more and more anxious.
For students academically in the upper 50%, who are developmentally ready to learn the concepts assigned to their grade level, the skills are still taught in a low-level procedural way (because that’s the only way the lower 50% will be able to get the right answers on the high-stakes tests, and there is not enough time to teach every topic both ways). In earlier grades, higher-achieving students are often able to figure out the concepts well enough on their own to master them and be able to build on them successfully. However, the concepts become more and more complex, and many students eventually reach a plateau beyond which they are unable to reach mastery, and need to begin relying on procedures. By the time this happens, these students’ self-identities are thoroughly wrapped up in the idea that they are able to understand concepts easily (which they think of as being “smart”), and when they are suddenly unable to do so, it shakes their self-identity to the core. Some students develop tremendous anxiety over the possibility that they misjudged themselves all along.
Meanwhile, colleges and high schools have become much more competitive. With the Common Application, students are applying to 10–20 colleges where they were previously applying to 3–5. With so many more applicants, top colleges have acceptance rates below 10%, and students applying to these schools become obsessed with their GPA and class rank. This obsession exacerbates the anxiety students are already developing about their self-image. Throw in fears about crushing student debt and inability to find a job after college, and it’s little wonder that so many students are struggling with their mental health.
As with so many other problems in education, the problem can only truly be solved for the next generation of students, and even then only if education policymakers are willing to make adjustments to frameworks to make them more developmentally appropriate. For the students who are already in middle and high school, about all we have to offer is to help them understand that their insecurities are largely the result of how they have been taught, that they are actually no worse off than their peers, and that historically, each generation manages to develop societal coping mechanisms to deal with its issues.
