How to get math and reading scores back up

Hint: it’s not about phonics or long division

The “nation’s report card” released this week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed a troubling decline in reading and math ability for American students in 4th and 8th grades. It’s cause for much handwringing among administrators and teachers, and plans are already being made to throw much more money at the problem.

Education Week reports that “The federal government has already dedicated $190 billion through ESSER and the American Recovery Plan to help schools address lost student learning during the pandemic. Recent research suggests that’s not nearly enough money, for a long enough time frame. One study published in the journal Education Researcher earlier this month estimated schools will need $500 billion in additional funding—and targeted more specifically to high-need students—to fully recover.”

I have to wonder how this vast amount of money will be spent, and how it should be spent. This is where my perennial question in “The Spirit of Education” comes in.

What do kids need to be learning in order to prepare for the 21^st century?

Of course every citizen needs to know how to read and do basic math, the kind you need in the grocery store and the bank. It’s not a question of what should be taught, but how: pedagogy rather than content.

In most American K-12 classrooms, these skills are still being taught pretty much the same way they were taught to our grandparents.

And herein lies the problem. We can’t solve the decline in basic skills by running harder in place, teaching the same old things the same old ways, just more intensively.

The basic issue is that students’ will to learn has to be ignited. Reading and math skills have to matter to them, and learning has to be stimulating and fun.

So how can math and reading skills be taught in a fun and rewarding 21^st century way?

In a word: gamify.

In our brave new AI world, why don’t we take digital media skills currently being used to produce violent games and turn them into positive worldbuilding games that will demand that students read and do math in order to succeed?

Cracking the testing whip over children’s heads is poor educational policy. Throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem without significantly improving pedagogical methodology is just inane.

My suggestion: enlist current college and graduate students, who still remember how it felt to be in 4^th and 8^th grades, to devise gripping stories, presented in immersive graphic platforms, that require math and reading skills in order to play successfully.

Give elementary and middle schoolers these games, sit back and let them play.

Every parent knows that kids today can figure out how to make digital technology work faster and better than their elders. And that’s what kids will need in the 21^st century most of all: the will to ingeniously solve problems. When it comes to young humans, where there’s a will, there’s always a way.

We can’t go on trying to solve 21^st century education problems with the same strategies our grandparents used. It’s a recipe in futility.