A few years ago, Andrew Hacker, the political scientist, wrote an Op-Ed for the Times titled “Is Algebra Necessary?,” in which he proposed eliminating mandatory high-school math. Although some of the article’s readers suspected Hacker of satire, he was as serious as calculus, and has extended his argument in a book called “The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions.” Recently, the National Museum of Mathematics, on East Twenty-sixth Street, invited Hacker to defend his assertions in a public debate with James Tanton, the mathematician at large of the Mathematical Association of America, and an educator and consultant. “Colleges mindlessly require mathematics of everybody, even if you are going to major in poetry, modern dance, or interior design,” he said. Hacker, who has taught at Queens College for almost forty-five years, considered some of the arguments put forward by the math lobby-for example, that math sharpens the mind.
Creative math teachers commonly try to come up with concrete, real-world examples to motivate students and make math relevant to adolescents. Furthermore, it found that teachers were often using a watered-down, applied-math approach in classrooms of low-income students, while giving higher income students much more exposure to pure math. “We’ve known all along that children from wealthier backgrounds tend to do better in math, and children from poorer backgrounds tend to do not so well,” said Andreas Schleicher, director of the education and skills department at the OECD, during a public webinar on the report. In the report, “Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All,” published on June 20, 2016, researchers looked at math instruction in 64 countries and regions around the world, and found that the difference between the math scores of 15-year-old students who were the most exposed to pure math tasks and those who were least exposed was the equivalent of almost two years of education.
San Francisco in the twenty-first century is the town that STEM built. Which is why it came as a surprise when the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)-the central office of which occupies the same rarified square mile as the corporate HQs of Twitter, Uber, and Square-announced in 2014 that it would no longer offer Algebra I to eighth graders. Under the city's previous standards, precociously numerate middle schoolers had been allowed to skip ahead to Algebra or Geometry. While SFUSD insists that its new approach does not compromise the rigor of its education, but ensures that all students enter high school with the same mathematical foundation, many parents see the district's new standards as a dumbing down of the curriculum.