Credit: Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education
For folks in the literacy world, the bitter fight over California’s math framework sounded eerily familiar. On one side, proponents of the framework argued that students need to learn to love math, see themselves as math people and grapple with math concepts. On the other, traditionalists argued that the framework spends too much time on unproven, poorly researched ideas that fail to equip students with the foundational knowledge they need to learn more complex math.
For good measure, there’s even a popular Stanford professor, Jo Boaler, who’s been tagged as the Lucy Calkins of math and whose research has become a lightning rod for criticism from math researchers and educators nationally. Sounds just like the reading wars and the fight between balanced literacy and phonics, doesn’t it?
For those talking about the new “math wars” and calling…
