Put Up or Shut Up, Maybe

"These organizations are only organizations that survive because people pay money to those organizations."

If you have never heard about NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) or its sister organization NCSM (National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics) that’s likely because these organizations aren’t interested at all in improving the lives of non-paying non-members. Stay with me. It is important to make this clear from the outset. Typically, you or your school becomes interested in the support provided to members of these organizations and then ponies up the dough to be among their number ($99 per person per year for NCTM’s basic membership and $85 per person per year for NCSM’s)—they do not become interested in you or your projects, unless you or your projects are likely to help them bring in more money via conference fees ($300 per basic member for NCTM’s national conferences), professional development programs (e.g., $618,850 per year [PDF] in 2023 for members in Fulton County, Georgia), corporate sponsorships, or federal funding. In a very real way, the organizations function like private country clubs for teachers and teacher-leaders, with their own “unique point of view” about education, their own internally distributed ‘research’ and information, and their own goals and incentives, not accountable for student outcomes nor even a passing familiarity with real academic research in education.

I have been to NCTM’s national conference several times and presented at one, always under the ‘cover’ of the education publisher who sent me to ‘learn’ (what insiders are talking about) and to direct traffic to the company’s assigned place on the convention hall’s exhibit floor—happily the first time and only when mandated thereafter. So I’m aware that participants, who are accountable for outcomes and derive benefits from their memberships in NCTM or NCSM, will naturally project onto those organizations their own interests and intentions. Ultimately, though, neither NCTM nor NCSM has the authority—or the credibility, really—to speak on issues of student instruction, because they have no skin in the game. They have simply squatted on the intellectual turf adjacent to schooling, using borrowed teacher money and borrowed teacher credibility as their own, and they have set themselves (since 1920 for NCTM) to the task of sequestering this turf away from intellectual reality so they can charge admission. If people stopped funding their tenancy, their ‘message’ would have no listeners and would not find new ones. Virtually every one of the humanities would find something preposterous in it to excise. Sizeable chunks of the message would remain just fine, but those would be free to everyone, as important knowledge should be.

These organizations are only organizations that survive because people pay money to those organizations. They pay money to go to their conferences, or they pay money to buy their books, or to buy into their professional development, and if people were not paying money, these organizations would not exist at all. And that’s different from the What Works Clearinghouse that has tried to put out research-based recommendations for the teaching of math and reading and so on. That has been funded by the federal government in the past and brought together groups of researchers there.

But I think there’s something that feels a little bit wrong to me about this payment thing. No wonder they’re always putting out new stuff—because they want people to pay, and to come to the conference, and hear the latest thing, and the stuff that they’ve been putting out there—dare I say it—they’ve been selling it, and a lot of people have been sold on these theories or these practices.

That’s Sarah Powell, a professor and brave advocate for better math instruction in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin and associate director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, reacting to a recent NCSM “position statement” attacking the ‘science of math’ movement—fast on the heels of the consequential science of reading movement (hence the reference, by Powell, to Emily Hanford’s award-winning podcast Sold a Story, which, while not creating the science of reading movement, certainly gave it wings).

Powell’s insights are important. Clearly, the NCSM and NCTM are not set up with incentives to improve math instruction. We give them this credibility without their needing to earn it. They are incentivized to get members, separate them from their money, and sell them ideas that keep them coming back (and paying more). So it is truly irrelevant what their “position” is when it comes to the science of math instruction. Their credibility does not extend beyond the country club gates—where the students and their parents are. Groups like NCSM that purport to represent teachers and leaders do not, as a consequence, also represent the interests of students, just because they’re in the same building part of the day.

It is ultimately the pairing of undelegated authority with deafening and blame-avoiding debate silence from these organizations that is most frustrating—something akin to a motte-and-bailey strategy, where influence is exercised in the public area (the bailey), but when accountability comes, they can retreat to the motte. And perhaps their incentive structure explains some of that. Would simply naming explicit instruction as an instructional preference—even for the very good reason that said preference has decades of multidisciplinary research demonstrating its positive effects on student academic outcomes—collapse the mystery and complexity needed in the story to keep people coming back for more ‘support’ and paying for it? Would acceptance of explicit instruction shift accountability for outcomes more onto the education publishers and themselves, and off of teachers (maybe you should pay for more professional development) and students (maybe you should have more grit or growth mindset)?

If you’re not measuring it, then you’re not held accountable. There’s these little things out there that they’re saying and that they’re doing that is really trying to take some of the accountability piece off of them and off of the practices that they have been suggesting over the last few decades are helpful, because I think we’re seeing that those are not helpful strategies and helpful practices . . .

If you’re not going to focus on math outcomes, what are you going to focus on? If you’re not going to focus on efficacy, what are you going to focus on? If you’re not going to look at quantitative data, what are you going to do? . . . It would be really nice, instead of having this criticism paper, why don’t you put together a position statement of: here’s what we would suggest to do, and then here’s the research that supports that? I would love to see that. But I don’t think it’s going to come, because I think it would be really hard to put that paper together.