There’s the old familiar Military, Tobacco, Pharmaceutical and Medical Insurance Industrial Complexes. But welcome to the new and exciting Educational Industrial Complex.
What is it and how does it work? It works very well, thank you! And it is working to supply your K-12 school district with mathematics textbooks (referred to as reform math or fuzzy math texts) that were recently characterized by Stanford Math Professor, James Milgram as:
I would suggest that the best way to think of these programs is as training for jobs at Target or MacDonald’s. For example, we simply do not see students coming from this background in any advanced mathematics classes at Stanford.
Please forgive the hyped intro, but the story that follows (which is summarized in the blue and yellow chart) is worth reading because it is being repeated in school districts across the country where choreographed ploys are used to bypass parent concerns about poor math texts.
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