Thoughts on the ACT National Curriculum Survey

ACT just released a report about aligning postsecondary expectations with high school standards that is pretty interesting. It seems that what high school teachers think is important isn't what college professors think is important. That shouldn't be a surprise. But what may be a surprise is that college professors think much of what is in state standards is too much - they would prefer a more focussed curriculum. I would definitely agree in the field of mathematics - we've always said that the curriculum is a mile-wide and a foot deep, but the obvious question then is "What do we take out?"

The following table is taken from the report which measures median ratings of skills by different strands in mathematics on a five point scale (1 = not important; 5 = very important). "HS" is high school and "PS" is post-secondary.

Strand	MS	HS	PS
Basic Operations and Applications	4.53	4.03	4.15
Expressions, Equations, and Inequalities	2.80	3.70	2.95
Graphical Representations	2.86	3.79	2.71
Properties of Plane Figures	3.78	3.91	2.61
Measurement	3.98	3.69	2.48
Functions	1.84	3.51	2.33
Numbers: Concepts and Properties	2.44	3.06	2.20
Probability, Statistics, and Data Analysis	3.22	2.95	1.76

I've sorted them by post-secondary preference. But there isn't a noticeable difference between the ranks of high school teachers and college professors. However, there is a large difference in the relative importance of the strands. The high school teachers rank all strands as important - between ranks of 2.95 and 4.03. College professors rank them from 1.76 to 4.15.

So what does all this mean? Colleges want high schools focusing more on "basic skills" and much less on statistics and data analysis. A second report with "Action Steps for Policymakers" makes the recommendation "align the high school curriculum with postsecondary expectations." This makes me a little weary. Should we assume that colleges have the best interests of all our students in mind? Less than half of the students we see in high school will ever finish college - should our overriding goal in the high schools be to prepare kids for college? And even if so, do we have to yield to what colleges think is important? Are college professors absolutely sure that the mathematics that they are teaching their students the most useful in their careers and lives that they are preparing their students for?

The appendix to the report lists the importance (again on the scale from 1 to 5) of different topics and skills. College teachers rank:

working with complex numbers (2.20) more important than finding the mean, median, and mode (1.91)

working with parametric equations (1.82) just as important as computing the probability of a simple event (1.73)

performing addition, subtraction, and multiplication of polynomials (4.36) more important than working with percents (4.17)

I realize that these examples show my own preferences of some skills over others. But as overall importance to the workforce, and, well, life, I think that college professors may be the ones that have it wrong. It might be more important for ACT to stay away from trying to change public policy until they realize that math professors aren't the only ones that use mathematics in their work. For instance, economics professors weren't asked about the relative importance of mathematical topics, although the whole subject rests upon mathematics. Surely they, as well as the sociology and physics professors, would like to have their voices heard as to what mathematics their students need to have when they enter classrooms. Basing what mathematics students should know after leaving high school on mathematics professors surely isn't in societies best interest.

And what about the kids that don't plan on going to college? Who should determine what they are going to learn in high school?