Matt Rosenberg has an interesting post on how the University of Arizona has been awarded a $10 million federal grant to come up with more culturally-sensitive math instruction for Hispanic students. He links to this report:

Latino youths, especially those from low-income or working-class families, tend to score lower on standardized math tests than their white counterparts and are among the lowest of all ethnic groups.

"The achievement gap is real, and it is growing," said Virginia Horak, an associate math professor and one of the principal investigators on the grant.

The grant will fund research, professional development of teachers and development of leaders in math education, she said.

Among the goals of the new center are to create teaching materials and ways of teaching that bring in a cultural and linguistic context specific to Latinos, said Ron Marx, dean of the UA College of Education.

[ . . . . . ]

The UA departments involved in the grant are mathematics, language and reading and culture.

Uhm, what exactly is a Dept. of Reading and Culture? Also, note the prominant role for the College of Education which itself is a huge part of the problem, primarily due to the education profession's gullability in adopting education fads and the low standards of scholarship, faculty intelligence, and admission standards:

Critics have a laundry list of complaints about teacher training. They include: too much theory and not enough practice, mediocre subject-area training and low admissions standards.

Some critics complain of a vicious cycle: graduates of weak public high schools go to weak education colleges and then return, poorly prepared, to teach in the public schools.

As Thomas Sowell has noted:

Education majors achieve much lower SAT scores than those choosing other majors. When they finish college, it's the same story. Education majors are outscored, on the Graduate Record Exam, by other majors anywhere from 91 to 259 points. College students who major in education are among the least qualified. Some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors, have been entrusted with the education of our children. We shouldn't be surprised by their falling for fads and substituting methods that work for methods that sound good. This mediocrity isn't new. When Harvard University's president retired in 1933, he told the trustees that Harvard's Graduate School of Education was a "kitten that ought to be drowned." More recently, a knowledgeable academic said, "The educationists have set the lowest standards and require the least amount of hard work." In some circles, education departments have become known as the university's "intellectual slums."

Related posts here and here.