In an old Saturday Night Live skit, Chevy Chase, portraying Gerald Ford, says “It was my understanding that there would be no math.” Half a century later, it seems like this has become America’s national motto. Even as high-tech manufacturing has migrated relentlessly to China, plenty of Americans seem to think that they — or anyone — should be able to flourish in a modern economy without a functional understanding of mathematics. U.S. high school math scores lag significantly behind other countries, even though scores in reading and science are above average, and our country is utterly dependent on a continuous inflow of foreign talent for a number of critical STEM fields. Math, out of all subjects, seems to hold a special terror for Americans, who often seem to view the subject as a test of innate intelligence rather than a skill that can be acquired and honed through hard work.
In response to lagging math scores, educators in California have been trying to water down math education — banning students from taking algebra in 8th grade, replacing advanced algebra classes with “data science” courses that don’t even teach the algebra required to understand basic statistics, and so on. I see this as an extremely wrongheaded move, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. But data analyst Armand Domalewski, a friend of mine, has been following the issue far more closely than I have, and has been outspoken about it on social media, so I thought I would ask him to take a crack at saying what needs to be said.
One of the strangest things about California is that it is simultaneously one of the technology capitals of the world and has some of the worst math scores for children in the entire United States. In practice, California has relied on a combination of pockets of home grown math excellence and imported math whizzes from around the globe to bridge the gap between the math skills it needs and the math skills it has. It works, somewhat—but we can and should do better by all of the kids in our state.