On Wednesday, July 12, the California State Board of Education adopted a new K-12 mathematics curriculum and condemned that of the state 5.8 million countless public schoolchildren. The board has hindered math education for the the next eight yearsuntil the resume is scheduled for reexamination.
The theme of the new curriculum is the fashionable shibboleth “equity,” meaning equality of outcome. Equity manifests itself in the curriculum in two ways: by redesigning the teaching of mathematics to make it easier and sweeter; and make political organization and political issues the subject of mathematics class.
Reengineering takes place by making the math class more frivolous and less demanding.
An example of frivolity is the creation of “mathematical identity rainbow”. Students weave six colored cords (pink, orange, yellow, blue and purple) to show that they are part of a classroom community. Yellow, for example, represents “communicate.”
Making math less demanding involves: Lowering the memorization of addition facts, subtraction facts, and times tables. Reduction of standard algorithms (such as long division). Vague, undulating “big ideas” (like ratios) rather than normal course progression: arithmetic, algebra I, geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, etc. Student self-discovery rather than an explicit and direct instruction.
The new curriculum argues that math teachers should take the political stance that math plays an important role “in structures of power and privilege” in American society and that the math classroom “can support action and positive change.”
The curriculum recommends that teachers use “trauma-informed pedagogy” in the classroom. This pedagogy holds that students are emotionally crippled by a racist, sexist, and violent society ruled by a capitalist class. Accordingly, teachers should train students to effect transformative social change.
Political organization and making political issues the subject of math class lead to lessons about, for example, the need to make decisions about natural resources and ecosystems in light of “political virtue.” The teacher is supposed to highlight the “connections” between mathematics and “environmental and social justice.” Students can write an “opinion piece” or an “explanatory text”.
Another political topic in math class is minimum wage laws. The curriculum promotes the idea of a “living wage” as the only “fair” wage: a wage must be sufficient to cover all basic living expenses. Of course, this policy topic does not belong in a K-12 math class. Not only that, but social studies have been ignored by the math curriculum designers.
In reality, wages are determined by marginal value productivity, what each worker brings to the firm, not by wishful thinking. The curriculum is supposed to focus on equity, but the designers show a woeful ignorance of the disparate impact of minimum wages. They should read the classical study by the late African-American economist Walter E. Williams of how minimum wage laws mandate unemployment for black teenagers.
Curriculum designers should not have wallowed in utopian political sentimentality, nor should they have neglected effectiveness in teaching methods. There is no royal road to geometry; it requires hard work.
Teachers should adopt instructional methods tested by randomized trials and assessment techniques that approximate random assignment. Researcher in education Tom Lovelessnow retired from the Brookings Institution, look what research not cited or used in California’s new math curriculum. It turns out that the framework “ignores the best research” on K-12 math.
Panels of experts organized by the How Clearinghouse works, Loveless notes, have combed the research literature and screened studies based on quality, using strict protocols. Is this the research the California math curriculum designers relied on? No, they ignored it. It doesn’t match their progressive education biases.
Brian Conradprofessor of mathematics and director of undergraduate studies in mathematics at Stanford University, spent considerable time i effort looking at the research the california curriculum cites. The curriculum claims to be based on research, but in fact, it is based on “false or misleading” descriptions of what is in the cited articles. He found that the curriculum designers were at best sloppy and at worst misrepresented the research. They pushed research claims that seemed to support progressive approaches, but really didn’t.
For example, Conrad says the curriculum misquotes an article to promote the general use of “invented strategies” (that is, having students discover their own strategies) as a proven approach to learning standard algorithms.
Conrad also finds that the curriculum distorts citations in a way that indicates “an ideological (rather than evidence) opposition” to allowing students to progress in math before their grade level.
Svetlana Zhitormirskaya, a mathematics professor at the University of California at Irvine, sums up the “sad and dangerous” situation for K-12 math education in the state. The new curriculum, he says, makes California “the laughingstock of the world.” Unfortunately, workforce readiness will decline and student knowledge will suffer because of the misguided efforts of the designers of the new curriculum.
