Lee’s answer to the math teachers, administrators, or superintendents who may feel nervous about the radical innovations in math EDU by MMU series & why math EDU needs super stars

By Dongchan Lee

Date: March 10, 2017

In any profession, there are very good ones, good ones, mediocre, bad ones, and very bad ones in what they are doing, be it music, arts, sports, debates, programming, acting, thinking, or even dating, etc. That is a part of life. And yet, there are stars and the super stars. That is life. In all other professions, we appreciate the stars and super stars instead of being afraid of them.

Why should you be afraid of the stars or super-stars for the math education? Stars or super stars will not destroy the job markets. They actually inspire and energize the job markets. Without stars, the industries have become boring. The stars have reversed the boredom. And the stars and super stars in (math and science) education will not only energize, but also they will bring the districts and the charters closer. That is the power of the (super) stars. There is no reason to be afraid of Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, Pele, Maradona, Isadora Duncan, Charlie Chaplin, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Mozart, Bobby Fischer, Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, Tagore, and Rumi of math education, is there?

These super stars made the break dance, hip hop dance, basketball, boxing, golf, soccer, modern dance, comic action film, modern martial art film, comic martial art film, movies, classical music, chess, physics, dramas, poetry to the levels that populace can be excited about and to appreciate in the main stream. Without these super stars, most of us will not be able to enjoy all the creative frontiers of the human endeavors. Unless the super stars of math and science education arise, I don’t think the future of math education innovations will go far. The medicores simply maintain or get worse as the rest of the world rises, but the super stars cut through all.

The current global math stagnations in the developed countries will not change much according to the math growth patterns of PISA, TIMSS, and NAEP over the past 15-20-25 years. Only the super stars of the math education with the super innovations can lift up the whole groups instead of the incremental, not very efficient reforms after another.

So what can MMU x.x series do to your districts, charters, CMOs, and even state DoEs and MOEs (Ministries of Eudcation)?

In most of the urban districts of the USA, the big city districts with the high poverty and high math poverty students mostly cluster around 0.5-1-2 years behind for which MMU 1/3 will be enough although some top CMOs can do the jobs occasionally before the expand inter-states while the traditional districts seem not to be able to lift up this scale in 5-10 years of time frame in the past.

MMU 1/3 is on par or larger than the overall math impacts of the top 3-5 CMOs that have won the Broad prize, but even the top CMOs tend to lose their efficiencies rapidly as they expand to the inter-state operations, e.g. KIPP.
MMU 0.5 alone can basically end most the math gaps between the Whites and Hispanics.
MMU 2/3 is bigger than the ending the math gaps between the White and the Black math gaps, about as large as the difference between the math top state vs. the math bottom state of the USA’s 50 states.
MMU1 is far above these differences as a surplus to enjoy for the hardcore.
And this is not the end of the story. If the public awareness rises, MMU1 may be boosted up further to the original USL level, i.e. 5-10-15 time’s higher levels than MMU1. (But only history will tell if people are ready for that kind of change.)

So, MMU 1/3 is to end the math poverty. MMU 0.5 is set the stage for math prosperity. MMU1 is completely off the chart, i.e. from the average of the math poorest states (e.g. Alabama) to the levels higher than the best in the world like Singapore average.