With the kids grown, I tend to lose track of just what crap

is being taught in our schools:
Each year, I get invited to Washington DC to serve as a pimp. A scientific pimp. I’m expected to join a small legion of volunteers to beg my senators and representatives to spend tax money on a program called the Math and Science Partnerships. This program is supposed to help improve how math and science is taught in this country. What could be wrong with that?
...
Narrow intellectual gatekeeping is omnipresent in academia. Want to know why the government wastes hundreds of millions of dollars on math and science programs that never seem to improve the test scores of American students?[3] Part of the reason for this is that today’s K-12 educators—unlike educators in other high-scoring countries of the world—refuse to acknowledge evidence that memorization plays an important role in mastering mathematics. Any proposed program that supports memorization is deemed to be against “creativity” by today’s intellectual gatekeepers in K-12 education, including those behind the Math and Science Partnerships. As one NSF program director told me: “We hear about success stories with practice and repetition-based programs like Kumon Mathematics. But I’ll be frank with you—you’ll never get anything like that funded. We don’t believe in it.” Instead the intellectual leadership in education encourages enormously expensive pimping programs that put America even further behind the international learning curve.

I realize I'm not a Fully Degreed Teaching Expert, but how the hell do you even pretend to teach math without any memorization?

You don't, which is what's screwing things up. And it appears these clowns want it that way.