LiPing Ma wrote about the problem of elementary teachers in the US not understanding math in her 1999 book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics (I'll skip the unwieldy subtitle -- the books compares elementary math teaching in the US and China). For a while a lot of elementary math educators were reading her book and she was invited to conventions. Everyone seemed to think that she was taking their side in the "math wars" (which I don't quite understand) and most seemed to miss her point, which was about how math teachers are trained and how they practice teaching math.

Elementary math educators in much of China (according to the book) have a ninth grade education plus a couple of years at a normal school (teachers' college). Their education level and mindset are such that they do not think that elementary math is boring or simple, and they want to help their students learn it. They are math specialists -- math is all they teach. They work the problems themselves and do not rely on a teacher's manual. If they have trouble with figuring out how to teach a concept, they ask a colleague. Rather than treating a student's mistake as a sign of their own failure or an occasion for potential embarrassment of the student (to be avoided at all costs!), they treat them as occasion for teaching the child and probably many of his or her classmates. If they're stumped, they ask each other, do your students make this mistake? and what do you say to them?

But I suspect that in the US the debate will rage on about what curriculum is best (hmmmm, should students understand what they're doing or know their math facts? do people anywhere else in the world even ask this question?). Elementary teachers will be increasingly confused and frustrated by the pendulum swings of opinion and accompanying changes of curricula and more and more afaid of teaching math, textbook companies will profit, and students will suffer.

I live in a state university town with a large education department and I have met many, many people who are trained or in training to be a "reading specialist," and most of these people are teaching or plan to teach elementary students. (I'm chair of the local Read Aloud advisory board, a volunteer program that mostly serves elementary students, so I really have nothing against reading.) But I have yet to meet a "math specialist." At my high school (in the 1970's) we had a math lab for kids who were failing, and I learned from tutoring that they were failing because they didn't know elementary math (multi-digit multiplication, fractions, etc.). But I don't remember any math labs in elementary school . . . .