Our Math Deficit Doesn’t Add Up

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Here’s a story you’ve probably heard before: General Plastics Manufacturing of Tacoma, Washington, needs factory workers to make foam products. So they give all their applicants a math test that asks them to convert inches to feet, calculate the density of a block of foam, and a few other things:

Basic middle school math, right?

But what troubles General Plastics executive Eric Hahn is that although the company considers only prospective workers who have a high school education, only one in 10 who take the test pass. And that’s not just bad luck at a single factory or in a single industry.

Hahn, vice president of organizational development, said that the poor scores on his company’s math test have been evident for the past six years. He also sits on an aerospace workforce training committee and said that most other Washington state suppliers in his industry have been seeing the same problem.

OK, now look at the chart on the right. It shows results from the NAEP math test—a national assessment that’s generally considered highly reliable—for 17-year-olds. And basically, it shows nothing. If you take a look at the 25th and 50th percentiles, which is where most factory workers come from, scores have been pretty flat for the past two decades. If anything, they’re up slightly.

So how do we square this with Eric Hahn’s contention that General Plastics has had trouble over the past few years finding qualified workers? I can think of a few possibilities:

  1. Hahn is just wrong. He remembers the past as rosier than it was.
  2. Jobs at General Plastics require higher skills than in the past, but they’re refusing to pay any more than they used to. So they’re not getting suitable applicants.
  3. Ever since the NCLB “test ’em til they drop” era started, kids have been learning rote math that’s good for getting high test scores but not so good for solving actual real-world problems.
  4. Scores have fallen off a cliff over the past five years, but we don’t see it in the chart because it only goes up to 2008.
  5. Washington is doing worse than other states.

There’s evidence that #3 isn’t the answer. To the extent that kids are taught to the test, they’re taught to state tests, since those are the ones used to measure performance. The NAEP is a federal test that nobody teaches to because (a) it doesn’t count for anything, and (b) it’s given to only a tiny fraction of students nationwide (less than 1 percent of all K-12 students). What’s more, the long-term NAEP, which is what I showed above, has been carefully constructed to stay the same from year to year. It’s testing exactly the same thing today that it tested in 1978.

There’s also evidence that #4 isn’t the answer. We don’t have national results for 17-year olds that are more recent than 2008, but we do have results for 8th graders on the main NAEP. Their math scores rose between 2007 and 2011. A sudden and unprecedented collapse between 8th and 12th grades seems unlikely.

There’s also evidence that #5 isn’t the answer. In fact, Washington has done a bit better than the national average over the past decade.

I might have missed a possibility. For now, though, my money is on #2.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate