As the Los Angeles Times’ Monday installment of “The Vanishing Class” series described, 35% of future elementary school instructors who studied at Cal State Northridge, the largest supplier of new teachers to the Los Angeles Unified School District, got Ds or Fs in their first college-level math class last year.
Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer has cited the “cumulative failure of our ability to teach math adequately in the public school system.”
William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University and executive director of its Third International Math and Science Study Research Center, was asked by The Times whether other countries have as much trouble finding adequately trained math teachers as the United States.