Mixing Social Justice and Math Is Insanity
– By Howard Sierer –
Once again, California is leading the nation toward educational mediocrity.
First, the state stopped using the SAT as a college admission criterion; now it plans to dumb down its K-12 math instruction. The danger is that this idea will spread nationwide as progressive teachers and their unions find yet another vehicle to teach “social justice.”
The California Department of Education has long insisted that social justice be an integral part of K-12 instruction. Now it has turned its attention to the hard sciences, in this case, mathematics. Who knew that arithmetic, algebra, and geometry were tools used by white males to discriminate against women and minorities?
The department’s new “Teaching for Equity and Engagement” purports to show math teachers how to take a “justice-oriented perspective” with their students. This foolishness is supposed to advance “equity” for women and minorities. Instead, it will eat away at America’s global competitiveness.
Ironically, it will have a negative impact on equity: even more parents with financial means will be incentivized to send their K-12 children to private schools or arrange for private math instruction. Does anyone think Silicon Valley parents will settle for “social justice math?”
Students who benefit from private instruction will stand head and shoulders above those who enter college with “social justice math” skills. Disadvantaged students whose parents have fewer resources will start behind and stay behind.
Faced with this shocking attack on mathematics, hundreds of the country’s leading professors of quantitative sciences as well as practicing scientists and engineers expressed their opposition in an “Open Letter on K-12 Mathematics.” The letter begins, “We write to express our alarm over recent trends in K-12 mathematics education in the United States.”
The 471 signatories include four winners of the Fields Medal in math; two winners of the Turing Award in computing; winners of the Nobel prize in physics and in chemistry; 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences; and faculty at Stanford, Berkeley, Cal Tech, MIT and other top U.S. universities in the hard sciences.
The signers say the California course roadmap will reduce the “availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers” and discourage students from taking calculus. Calculus is the language of physics and much of engineering.
It’s likely that many signers, if not the majority, are politically left of center. Nonetheless, they warn against elevating “trendy but shallow courses over foundational skills” like algebra and calculus. Those disciplines “are centuries old and sometimes more,” the letter says, but are “arguably even more critical for today’s grand challenges than in the Sputnik era.”
Humanities and the social sciences have been at the center of educational controversy for years as progressives strive to remake society. But the erosion of math and science education to accommodate identity politics is even more threatening to America’s prosperity and survival in a competitive world.
Math is usually not K-12 teachers’ strong suit, especially in the lower grades when children’s interest in the subject is either kindled or dampened. “Social justice math” gives teachers a chance to make math simpler and less exacting, making it easy to see why California teachers are likely to embrace it.
Add in the fact that a substantial majority of these teachers are Democrats with progressive leanings. “Social justice math” opens yet another avenue to preach leftwing politics.
California’s revisionist math is likely to spread to other Democratic strongholds while it is likely to face more parental opposition in conservative states. Why? Conservative states have 41% more children per capita than do more progressive states, with Utah highest in the nation. That means a higher proportion of citizens anxious about the quality of their children’s education.
By eliminating standardized tests and lowering math proficiency standards, California hopes to give the impression that achievement shortfalls don’t exist among those in its preferred identity-politics cubbyholes, in this case by dumbing down math skills for all its public-school students.
“Social justice math” is yet another trendy progressive idea, one of many that seem to sprout like weeds. Their negative societal impacts are recognized only after millions have been adversely affected.
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