As criticism of the “new” new math being taught in the upper right hand corner of America simmers, and below it the eradication of any expectation that black students be expected to add and subtract to get a diploma festers, academics are trying to find better strategies to avoid the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and teach students sufficient skills to survive, if not thrive, in the future.
When Oregon governor Kate Brown signed a law in July that suspended math and reading proficiency requirements for high school graduation for three years, an uproar ensued. Republicans charged that the state had abandoned academic standards, while the Democratic governor’s spokesperson declared that the move would help benefit the state’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”
A headline on The Dispatch, a conservative website, might give you a sense of the debate’s tenor: “Oregon Democrats Resurrect the ‘Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations’ … A new law allows students to graduate from high school without the ability to read, write, or do math.”
The rationale behind these woke solutions is easily digestible. There’s just one minor problem.
In today’s data- and technology-rich, STEM-oriented society, those without quantitative and statistical literacy, he believed, were relegated to the back of another bus.
Civic equity and access to the advanced employment ultimately hinge on mastery of math. But in California as recently as 2017, 110,000 of 170,000 undergraduates placed in remedial math never, ever fulfilled the math requirement for an associate degree.
According to one study of community college students, 50 to 60 percent of the disparity in degree completion is driven by which students are placed in remedial math classes.
At the end of the day, it students can’t do math, they still can’t do math, and that means they can’t do jobs or live lives that require math. No amount of gibberish excuses is going to change that unfortunate fact. What to do?
One exciting strategy that a growing number of K-12 math teachers have pursued is to link math and social justice issues.
These instructors have sought to engage students and demonstrate math’s relevance by studying racial and class disparities, crime and incarceration, inequalities of wealth and income, gerrymandering and ranked-choice voting, immigration, the distribution of disaster aid and college entrance exam scores, the relationship between campaign spending and votes received, and environmental issues using algebraic functions, data visualization techniques, mathematical modeling and statistical methods.
Is this the magic that’s missing from math instruction, linking the skills to social justice?
Does this pedagogical approach help students master math? We don’t know. Is teaching math through a social justice lens creating a two-tiered system, in which affluent students learn “college prep math” while those from low-income backgrounds learn “real-world math” that ill prepares them for success in college STEM courses? Again, we don’t know.
A few questions persist. The most obvious is whether this will serve to teach math or become an opportunity to bring social justice into yet another discipline, as if history and English weren’t enough. Then there’s the indoctrination problem, which we’re reliably informed never happens. Would students be asked to calculate the extreme rarity of an unarmed black man being killed by police relative to the number of police engagements, or would that not be the part of the lesson plan?
But mostly, is this version of woke math good enough to prepare students to go to college, to study physics or engineering, or only to become a community activist while making change at the Piggly Wiggly?
Is there a sound reason why pedagogical theorists have given up on just teaching math and demanding that students of all stripes be required to learn it, rather than coming up with gimmick after gimmick to circumvent the pedagogical failure to prepare all students for a “data- and technology-rich, STEM-oriented society” in which they can succeed?
Or is it true that this really reflects the soft bigotry of low expectations, that black kids just can’t learn math? If they can, and they can, then what’s wrong with just teaching them math as they do anyone else?
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