Mathematics and Social Justice | Higher Ed Gamma – Inside Higher Ed

Math education has become yet another battleground in todays culture wars.

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 governors spokesperson declared that the move would help benefit the states 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 debates 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.

According to Robert Parris Moses, the civil rights hero who helped organize the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project that registered thousands of Black voters and who died in July at the age of 86, mathematics is itself a civil rights issue, a passport to full citizenship for disenfranchised people and an issue of justice and equity.

In todays 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 60percent of the disparity in degree completion is driven by which students are placed in remedial math classes.

Mathematical competence remains perhaps the biggest barrier to academic success. Despite over 30 years of math education reform and the steadfast efforts of reformers like Bob Moses and Uri Treisman, we not yet figured out how to bring all students to a minimum viable level of mathematical understanding.

Since math is a promoter of possibility, we must do better.

Several principles have guided math education reform.

We shouldnt be surprised that in todays highly polarized political environment, pedagogy itself has become embroiled in conflict. Critics charge that the new new math, with its emphasis on thought processes and written and oral communication and its shift away from teacher-directed instruction:

Without embroiling myself in this dispute, I do think its fair to say that in todays world, numeracy is about as important as competence in reading and writing. How, then, can we best achieve much higher levels of quantitative and statistical literacy?

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 maths 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.

Using math as a window into social realities is sometimes derided as woke math, and there can be no doubt that there are instances when this approach devolves into discussions of power, identity and oppression rather than actual math instruction.

Diane Ravitch, then in her conservative phase, regarded social justice mathematics (or what she dismissed as ethnomathematics) as anathema, a fusion of political correctness and lax educational standards, and a shameless, bald-faced attempt to bring an explicitly political agenda into the classroom.

Does this pedagogical approach help students master math? We dont 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 dont know.

In the end, the efficacy of this approach is an empirical question that requires randomized controlled trials.

Long a barrier to equal educational opportunity, mathematics is too important to be reserved to those with a knack for solving equations. It is indeed a key to equity and opportunity. Just as we have embraced writing across the curriculum, we also need to do the same for math.

After all, as Galileo so rightly observed in 1623, mathematics is the language not just of science and technology, but of nature and society, too.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Mathematics and Social Justice | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed