Tom Ultican was a teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California for many years. He now writes about education issues.
In this post on his blog, he dissects a recent publication which seeks to alarm the public about the state of math education. It seems that the best way to get attention is to raise an alarum about “the crisis in the schools…” Reading is in crisis! Math is in crisis! Students are in crisis! Teachers are in crisis! The nation is at risk! Estonia has higher scores than ours!
Some of us have become jaded after so many crises, but the crisis talk is meant to grab attention, and it usually does.
The crisis talk has an insidious goal: to delegitimize public schools; to persuade parents that they should send their children to charter schools or voucher schools.
After 30 years of experience, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that choice schools are not better than public schools. When they record higher test scores, it is because they choose their students carefully, bypassing students who are likely to get low scores.
But, lo! That “math crisis!”
What about this latest alarming report?
Tom Ultican shows that it’s another in a long line of fraudulent reports, distorting statistics to reach a predetermined conclusion. He read it so you don’t have to.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is no accident that these manufactured academic crises occur in tandem with commercial aspirations and interests. The special interest conclusions are not based on an actual systematic study. They are a position paper as a gateway to greed and profit. While math scores were higher between 2007 and 2019, they dropped in 2022 as they did everywhere due to Covid, and the scores of today may reflect changing student population and an over reliance on less effective on-line instruction, which, of course, is never mentioned, rather than failing math instruction. The critique is all part of a plan to gain more access to public money and undermine public education.
Ultican concludes with some good advice for school districts. He urges them to stop buying into the propaganda. He urges districts to rely on the expertise of educators and academics when planning curriculum. Commercial programs that are drenched in marketing often fall short of the goal. He concludes. “Privatizing teacher training in the public sector is a bad idea. School districts and local universities have, for more than a century, done this job very well and provided much more value than any private company can afford.”
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