One of the most infamous fads took root in the late 1980’s, when many schools moved away from traditional mathematics instruction, which required drills and problem solving. The new system, sometimes derided as “fuzzy math,’’ allowed children to wander through problems in a random way without ever learning basic multiplication or division. As a result, mastery of high-level math and science was unlikely. The new math curriculum was a mile wide and an inch deep, as the saying goes, touching on dozens of topics each year.

Many people trace this unfortunate development to a 1989 report by an influential group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. School districts read its recommendations as a call to reject rote learning. Last week the council reversed itself, laying out new recommendations that will focus on a few basic skills at each grade level.

Under the new (old) plan, students will once again move through the basics — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and so on — building the skills that are meant to prepare them for algebra by seventh grade. This new approach is being seen as an attempt to emulate countries like Singapore, which ranks at the top internationally in math.

All these references to Singapore are encouraging, given this country’s longstanding resistance to the idea of importing superior teaching strategies from abroad. But a few things need to happen before this approach can succeed.

First of all, the United States will need to abandon its destructive practice of having so many math and science courses taught by people who have not majored in the subjects — or even studied them seriously.

We also need to fix the current patchwork system of standards and measurement for academic achievement, and make sure that students everywhere have access to both high-quality teachers and high-quality math and science curriculums that aspire to clearly articulated goals.

Until we bite the bullet on those basic, critical reforms, we will continue to lose ground to the countries with which we must compete in the global information economy.

Thus the sense of crisis that arose when Metropolitan Life, the giant insurance company, announced that it was selling Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The 80-acre site, located just south of East 23rd Street along the East River, contains 110 buildings and 11,200 apartment units, and has long been an oasis of reasonable rentals for the city’s middle class.

The obvious fear — and a likely scenario — is that this enormous chunk of residential units will be purchased by a developer who will upgrade the properties and rent or sell the apartments at luxury prices. The tenants are trying to organize to buy the property themselves and stave off that eventuality.

The odds seem long, at best — a kind of last stand for cheap rents in Manhattan, where the median rent for market-rate studios is now roughly $2,000 a month. Compare that to the average regulated rent for a one-bedroom in Peter Cooper Village, just under $1,200, or a three-bedroom, at less than $1,600 a month (comparable, stabilized Stuyvesant units go for a bit less), and the stakes begin to look big, indeed.

The tenants are being organized by Daniel Garodnick, a city councilman who lives in Peter Cooper Village. While they deserve sympathy, there is a limit to what they can reasonably expect in the way of public support. Metropolitan Life got subsidies to build the complex in the 1950’s, as an effort to help provide housing for World War II veterans and their families. But the agreement now gives it the legal right to sell, and the city cannot go back on the deal.

Nor should it subsidize the tenants’ attempt to keep control of their complex, understandable as it is. There are more pressing demands for limited public dollars, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to produce affordable housing in the other four boroughs, where somewhat less astronomic land prices and available tracts for building make projects more reasonable.

Seventy percent of the apartments at Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town are rent stabilized. While the stabilization laws no longer provide the unlimited rights they once did, they still give a great deal of protection to existing tenants, especially those of modest means. If a new owner of the complex does eventually try to turn the apartments into luxury housing, the top priority should be protecting the lower income residents, who have the most rights under the rent stabilization laws and who may need legal advice.

Many other residents have the resources to protect themselves from any possible attempt by the next owners to violate the rules. The median income for Stuyvesant Town residents is almost $79,000, and at the better-appointed and more spacious dwellings of Peter Cooper Village, median earnings are more than $81,000. That is on par with residents farther north along the East River, on the Upper East Side, where market rents prevail.

Metropolitan Life has put on the market an asset that may be worth as much as $5 billion. In doing so, it seems to have done more than shake up real estate prospectors; it has unwittingly tapped the collective exasperation over New York’s unique housing market, which mainly accommodates the wealthy, a few poor who require subsidies, and the lucky, like those who live on those 80 acres along the East River.

I SOMETIMES think I should write a handbook for college admission officials titled “How to Play the U.S. News & World Report Ranking Game, and Win!” I would devote the first chapter to a tactic called “SAT optional.”

The idea is simple: tell applicants that they can choose whether or not to submit their SAT or ACT scores. Predictably, those applicants with low scores or those who know that they score poorly on standardized aptitude tests will not submit. Those with high scores will submit. When the college computes the mean SAT or ACT score of its enrolled students, voilà! its average will have risen. And so too, it can fondly hope, will its status in the annual U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings.

My college requires applicants to submit their test scores, and it refuses to cooperate with the rankings. But among our peers, more and more institutions are adopting the SAT-optional strategy. This is not surprising. Once a few colleges adopt the tactic, their competitors feel pressure to follow suit, lest they suffer a drop in rank. And so a new front opens in the admissions arms race.

Those institutions that have adopted the SAT-optional strategy rationalize their decision by claiming that standardized tests are faulty measures of academic ability. The problem is that every indicator of academic ability used by college admission officers is imperfect.

Consider high school grade point averages. We all know brilliant students with low averages because they are bored by unchallenging classes. And conversely, these days a high grade point average is as likely to reveal rampant grade inflation as individual brilliance.

Likewise, college essays and even graded high school papers may say more about the writing abilities of parents or professional coaches than of students. Interviews are notoriously unreliable, with different interviewers giving widely divergent scores.

Standardized tests, for all their recognized imperfections, are carefully designed and tested to measure such basic intellectual skills as reading comprehension, vocabulary, critical thinking, computational ability and quantitative reasoning. Are admissions officers at SAT-optional universities saying that the test scores do not provide probative evidence of the possession of these skills? Are they saying that these skills are not relevant to success in the educational program of their colleges? Neither claim is remotely plausible.

Moreover, if standardized test scores really are so imperfect, we should scrap them altogether. It’s illogical to count a test score if it is high but ignore it if it is low.

Those who advocate making test scores optional sometimes argue that individual applicants know best whether their test scores are good measures of their academic abilities. But how can a high school senior know this? We all believe that we are better than our test scores and, for that matter, our grade point averages, our writing samples and our interview performances. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

Those who drop SAT or ACT requirements say that doing so helps open admissions to more members of certain racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups that tend, on average, to score lower on these tests. Dropping the requirement encourages such students to apply and makes it easier for the college to admit them.

But if the scores on these tests are in fact evidence of academically relevant skills, shouldn’t the college know how much of a deficit the student will need to overcome if he or she is admitted?

The college isn’t doing any favor to applicants by pretending that these skills are not important, or that the beneficiaries of these policies will not have to compete with students possessing those skills in abundance. An institution that, commendably, seeks to enroll more minority and lower-income students can do so by giving less weight to SAT or ACT scores, either across the board or in selective cases. But concealing the applicants’ test scores is just willful blindness.

Making SAT scores optional is the latest instance of a disheartening trend in college admissions. In the rush to climb the pecking order, educational institutions are adopting practices, and rationalizations for those practices, unworthy of the intellectual rigor they seek to instill in their students.