way dumbed down

I've been tutoring out of my house in order to pay my bills while continuing to homeschool my daughter. It's also a way to contribute something to the neighborhood. Hey, it feels good to spend my time on something that's useful, needed, you know.

Doing this work is making it obvious to me that the public school system in New York City is continuing to educate with the "expect less" curriculum in the poorer school districts.

The children I'm working with aren't being educated in the normal way. For instance, when a fourth grader has difficulty with multiplying two-digit numbers, instead of giving them more help they're taught an "easier" method. Strangely, lots of time is spent on teaching this dumbed down version of multiplication.

My students haven't had any real problems learning the standard technique, given the extra time to get use to it. Their main problem stems from not having memorized the multiplication tables!

So my question to educators out there is - why are schools dumbing it down?