Advocates for teaching math whiffed
Anyone for research-based instruction?
Working together the Council for Exceptional Children and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a statement about teaching mathematics to students with disabilities: “NCTM and CEC Position Statement on Teaching Mathematics to Students with Disabilities.” The document begins with. this description of the organizations’ goal for the statement:
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) jointly recognize the important role of educators in ensuring students with disabilities have access to and success with grade/course-level standards, receive high-quality instruction and are supported by systems that believe in their abilities.
After this well-intentioned, self-declared assertion of their intent, the two large and influential groups made statements that do not offer much promise for helping students—including those who have disabilities—learn mathematics. The statement follows this introduction with assertions about students’ rights. Students with disabilities have a right, they say, to (a) supports for succeeding in mathematic, (b) high-quality instruction, and (c) instruction who think they are capable of learning.
Wow? Although I rephrased the actual statements, I am not making up what they said. The original used more eduspeak, but that’s pretty much what they said. Here’s the actual quote:
Students with disabilities have a right to access, and be provided with
appropriate supports to be successful with Grade/Course-Level Content
Students with disabilities have a right to high-quality instruction aligning with content and intervention designed to facilitate success with grade-level content
Students with disabilities have a right to be supported by educators who believe in their abilities.
Okay! Those bullets are a lot more high sounding than my characterization of them. Well, the rest of the document continued in that sort of languag. Lots of words, including plenty of fancy ones…covering what see to me to be pretty vacuous ideas.
How about recommendations for teaching? Instead of clear and actionable recommendations about helping students with disabilities succeed, NCTM and CEC continue with more pablum much like what they provided in the foregoing list. And a big concern for me is that in as they present a host of often vapid suggestions that are barely—and often not at all—founded scientifically strong research.
It’s very nice that CEC and NCTM care about kids with disabilities. It’s wonderful that they want them to succeed. It’s too bad that they did not take the obvious next step and spill the beans: If you car about students with disabilities succeeding, you should provide. instruction that has been scientifically documented to be effective—even if lots of the effective practices don’t fit into the developmental-discovery approaches popular in the schools.
Now, Dear Readers, I’m not the only one who found the CEC-NCTM statement wanting. And this is not a very thorough critique. However, thirty people (yes, 30, if I counted correctly) with substantial expertise in mathematics and special education politely and professionally called “BS” on the statement, too.
Please read the original1 of the CEC-NCTM argument. Then, read the critique by Powell and colleagues (2025).
You, know, it’s baseball season here in the US, so I can use a poem by E. L. Thayer about baseball as an analogy to describe this effort by the big organizations: It seems that those organizations were like the famous “Casey” that Mr. Thayer memorialized. The poem is in the public domain, so I could reprint it here, but I’ll just remind readers that at the end of his well-known poem, Mr. Thayer revealed that “mighty Casey has struck out.”
Reference
Powell, S. R., Barnes, M. A., Root, J., Hughes, E. M., Ketterlin-Geller, L., Nelson, G., Rojo, M., Allsopp, D. H., Witzel, B., Myers, J. A., Flores, M. M., Lembke, E., Burns, M. K., Namkung, J., Poncy, B., Parks Ennis, R., Morin, L. L., Arsenault, T. L., Doabler, C. T. … & Peltier, C., (2025). The NCTM/CEC position statement on teaching mathematics to students with disabilities: What’s in it and what’s not. Research in Special Education, 2. https://doi.org/10.25894/rise.2796
Footnote
I am reluctant to provide a link to the NCTM-CEC document itself because it appears to be hosted on a server that almost certainly mines visitors’ data for uses I consider inappropriate if not outrageous. Here’s a link to the CEC press release announcing the statement: https://exceptionalchildren.org/blog/joint-position-statement-teaching-mathematics-students-disabilities. That press release has a button that you can use to get the document, if you choose to do so.