California’s effort to win the race to the bottom of mathematics education has been jammed up, thanks to two open letters signed by almost 3,000 teachers, mathematicians, and other knowledge workers in California and the greater United States. The California Department of Education (CADOE) produced a working draft of the new Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools in January 2021. The CADOE then opened a 60-day period of public comment which invited immense criticism of both the overall tone of the document, as well as specific curriculum changes. The stated intent of the new Framework is to narrow the achievement gap between underprivileged children and those who are more affluent. However, the real effect will be to reduce access to an already awful mathematics curriculum for all students, and replace the teaching of math with emotional discussions about dead-end subjects like climate change and white privilege.
The most controversial tenet of the new Framework is that it discourages youth from getting to calculus during high school. It advises, among other things, that the way to get underachieving youth a better edge on math (or, “make math more equitable") is to have all students take the same math classes up to 10th grade, and delay Algebra I until 9th grade. Primary author and Stanford Prof. Jo Boaler has stated that “the push to calculus is deeply inequitable and has kept out students of color and girls for generations now..” What remains of the math classes will be focused on “data science” (e.g., compiling data into Excel spreadsheets and building PowerPoint presentations), and infused with “trauma-informed pedagogy,” “environmental and social justice,” “contributions that historically marginalized people have made to mathematics,” and a rejection of the “ideas of natural gifts and talents.”
Though the Framework was to be implemented by the end of this year, an open letter published by the right-leaning Independent Institute prompted the CADOE to delay the Framework’s adoption until May 2022. The open letter, called “Replace the Proposed New California Math Curriculum Framework,” has been signed by over 1,200 math professionals who work in California. A follow-up letter that addresses the national trend in math reforms, and targets the California Framework by name, was published in early December, and already has almost 1,500 signatures. The national letter, “Open Letter on K-12 Mathematics,” also reports that these reforms will effectively privatize advanced primary school math education, since private schools will not have to follow the new guidelines.
It is unclear what will happen to the Framework between now and May 2022, but it is garbage and should be scrapped. However, we should recognize that this is really a single issue fight, and misses the more important point. Mathematics as taught today really does just teach students to memorize rules, devoid of the process that led to those rules. A real math education should seek to have kids recreate the discoveries that generated modern civilization, such as Cusa’s solution to the isoperimetric problem, Archytas’s doubling of the cube, or Gauss’s proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. In reliving these discoveries, students end up learning all the math mechanics they would get in primary school anyhow, but they would also be reproducing modern human culture.
