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Ideas


CALIFORNIA’S MATH MISADVENTURE IS ABOUT TO GO NATIONAL

The fight over math in the Golden State’s public schools is likely to spread
across the country.

By Brian Conrad

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
October 2, 2023
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Updated at 11:00 a.m. ET on October 5, 2023

When I decided to read every word of California’s 1,000-page proposal to
transform math education in public schools, I learned that even speculative and
unproved ideas can end up as official instructional policy. In 2021, the state
released a draft of the California Mathematics Framework, whose authors were
promising to open up new pathways into science and tech careers for students who
might otherwise be left behind. At the time, news reports highlighted features
of the CMF that struck me as dubious. That draft explicitly promoted the San
Francisco Unified School District’s policy of banishing Algebra I from middle
school—a policy grounded in the belief that teaching the subject only in high
school would give all students the same opportunities for future success. The
document also made a broad presumption that tweaking the content and timing of
the math curriculum, rather than more effective teaching of the existing one,
was the best way to fix achievement gaps among demographic groups.
Unfortunately, the sheer size of the sprawling document discouraged serious
public scrutiny.



I am a professional mathematician, a graduate of the public schools of a
middle-class community in New York, and the son of a high-school math teacher. I
have been the director of undergraduate studies in math at Stanford University
for a decade. When California released a revised draft of the math framework
last year, I decided someone should read the whole thing, so I dove in.
Sometimes, as I pored over the CMF, I could scarcely believe what I was reading.
The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping
generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated
research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions
from what they actually say.

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