Rethinking Schools

In response to this article, I sent the following email to the Rethinking Schools people. I haven't heard back from them, but then again it's only been two days.



Of course, I'll let you know if and how they respond.

Marxist Math Teachers and So-called Social Justice

It's bad enough when my fellow teachers are Marxists, but when a fellow math teacher is a Marxist, I'm truly disconsolate. How can they be so wrong? Where has Marxism ever helped anyone?

One place where this movement thrives is El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, the city’s first “social justice” high school. The school’s lead math teacher, Jonathan Osler, is using El Puente as a base for a three-day conference in April on “Math Education and Social Justice.” Osler offers this compelling rationale for the conference: “The systemic and structural oppression of low income [people] and people of color continues to worsen. The number of people in prison continues to grow, as does our unemployment rate. . . . These problems and many others are being addressed by community organizations and activists, and often find their way into Social Studies and English classes. However, in math classes around the country, perhaps the best places to study many of these issues, we continue to use curricula and models that lack any real-world—let alone socially relevant—contexts.”

I've written at length about the social justice movement--not just why it's wrong-headed, but also why it's harmful. To get a feel for what this movement truly represents, click on the social justice label below or at left and read the posts. To find out how harmful (and academic-content-free) social justice in a math class is, read this post in particular. In that post I dissembled the information put out by the Rethinking Schools people (there's a label below and at left for them, too) regarding how to inject this insidious liberalism and Marxism into a math class. That post, while long, is worth your time if you are interested in keeping math a "pure" science and not allowing it to become another social science.

Teaching So-called Social Justice In A Seattle School

If you don't believe me when I tell you what the left really means by social justice, please go read this short post about Legos. Yes, Legos.

Legotown builders were incorporating “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys,” the teachers write. These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.” When Legotown was destroyed accidentally, the teachers decided “to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.” (emphasis mine--Darren)

Now click on my social justice and Rethinking Schools labels below to learn that this isn't an isolated event.

Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Conference on Math Education and Social Justice

I'm disappointed.

I've read what Robert Moses of The Algebra Project has said about teaching algebra to poor, especially black, students, and for the most part I agree with him. Recently I wrote a post about him, concerned about the use of graphing calculators in his program.

Now I find that he's a keynote speaker at the above-named conference. If you think I'm off-base about what lefties mean by "social justice", note that one of the speakers at the conference is from Rethinking Mathematics. To refresh your memory, Rethinking Mathematics is an offshoot of Rethinking Schools. For a full fisking of their ideas by yours truly, read the following two posts in their entirety:

Math For Social Justice, Part 1
Math For Social Justice, Part 2

If that isn't enough for you, read here about the former Weather Underground terrorist who is now a teacher in the social justice movement.

The evidence is abundant and clear. This movement represents a dangerous trend in education not only because students won't learn math content, but also because they'll be indoctrinated with leftist claptrap.

Kozol Is Still Drinking the Kool-Aid

Chester Finn has a great post about Jonathon Kozol, who's still convinced that the reason there's an achievement gap in our country is because of racism.

Do you hear that, teachers? Your racism keeps brown and black-skinned kids from learning.

And who's going to rush to Kozol's flag, since he's now set the No Child Left Behind Act in his sights? Why, those same racist teachers, of course!

He notified his mailing list that Education Action is now headquartered in a house that "we've purchased for this purpose" (but which also seems to be Kozol's home address) in a lovely, leafy neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off high-rent Brattle Street and a few short blocks from Harvard Square. The perfect place from which to crusade for equality.


"We are already in contact," he wrote, "with our close friends at Rethinking Schools, with dozens of local action groups like Teachers for Social Justice in San Francisco, with dynamic African-American religious groups that share our goals, with activist white denominations [whatever that may mean], and with some of the NEA and AFT affiliates, in particular the activist caucuses within both unions such as those in Oakland, Miami, and Los Angeles. But we want to extend these contacts rapidly in order to create what one of our friends who is the leader of a major union local calls a massive wave of noncompliance."

Have you heard of Rethinking Schools before? You have if you've read this blog enough. They're not--how shall I say it--my kind of people. Read here, here, and here to learn why.

More Filth From the Rethinking Schools People

I've written about them before, here and here.

Now go read their latest, in their own words. Can you say, anti-American? I knew you could!

Math For Social Justice, Part II

Here's Part 1.

Rethinking Mathematics is nothing more than an attempt to politicize the teaching of math. In this I hope it fails, because too much of our curriculum has become politicized already.

Let's take some snips from the web site and comment on them, shall we?

In a "rethought" math class, teachers make mathematics more lively, accessible, and personally meaningful for students, who in turn learn in more depth.

This is a common misperception in education today, one I want to dispel right here and now. By "personally meaningful" these authors mean that we should teach math using examples from the students' own lives. Isn't the purpose of education to expand their horizons, to teach them about what's beyond their noses? We need to teach them about what they don't know, not just reinforce what they already know. As for the remainder of their claims, I don't know why a "traditional" math classroom cannot be lively and accessible to students. Even though I stand in front of the class and teach most of the period, I'd like to think that my classes are nothing if not lively. These Rethinking Schools people (from here forward known as RS people) have set up a false dichotomy. Rapport and instructional delivery make a class lively and accessible, not necessarily the political applicability of the course.

The articles in this book provide examples of how to weave social justice issues throughout the mathematics curriculum and how to integrate mathematics into other curricular areas. This approach seeks to deepen students' understanding of society and to prepare them to be critical, active participants in a democracy.

What exactly is "social justice"? Is it the belief that people should work and earn their own money and not be mooches on society? Is it the belief that everyone is entitled to exactly what they earn, and nothing more? Is it the belief that despite our perhaps humble beginnings, we all have the same legal footing to pursue life, liberty, and happiness? Is it the belief that welfare payments should be limited in duration, thus providing impetus for a person to seek meaningful work? Or is it the belief that the rich are the cause of all troubles in society, and class warfare is the foundation of our society? If I were placing money on this, I know which of these options I'd bet the RS people would choose. The RS people wouldn't teach students to be critical thinkers; rather, they'd teach them to criticize. There's a big difference.

When teachers weave social justice into the math curriculum and promote social justice math "across the curriculum," students' understanding of important social matters deepens. When teachers use data on sweatshop wages to teach accounting to high school students or multi-digit multiplication to upper-elementary students, students can learn math, but they can also learn something about the lives of people in various parts of the world and the relationship between the things we consume and their living conditions. (See "Sweatshop Accounting," page 53, and "Sweatshop Math," page 160.)

I assert here that a math class is not the place for social science. Math is a "hard science"--that is, it's replicable and predictive. I know that every time I add 3 + 4 the answer is going to be 7, no matter what. Social science is a "soft science"--different people, in different conditions, will act in different ways. Three plus four will always be seven. This attempt to politicize the math classroom, and to politicize with an unambiguous leftward bias, is another in a long string of attempts to water down the math curriculum so that "every student can succeed." What it really does is ensure that no student succeeds because no one learns any real math! The left doesn't believe in absolutes, it doesn't believe in standards, it doesn't believe in individuality. No one is better than anyone else, no one is more capable, we're all one big mass. This is why the left preaches about "group" identities (racial, ethnic, sexual orientation) while the right preaches about individuals. The left thinks we're all equal--hence the union mentality--the right says we all have an equal opportunity to pursue our potential. This is yet another big difference.

Social science should not be injected into a math curriculum. Rather, math (as a hard science) should be injected into the social science curriculum (a soft science)--that would truly be teaching "across the curriculum". Don't bring your politics into math; rather, use math to justify (or disprove) your politics. A wonderful example of someone having done this is Bjorn Lomborg, the environmentalist I wrote about here. Somehow, though, I don't think the RS people would want to use math in quite the way Lomborg did, as his conclusions don't match their politics. For example, he found the following, which he published in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001:
1. There is more food today, and fewer people are starving.
2. Life expectancy world-wide has risen from 30 to 67 years in the last century.
3. Poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than it was in the preceeding 500.
4. Air pollution in the industrialized world has declined--in London the air hasn't been cleaner since medieval times.
5. We're not losing forests. (That doesn't mean Brazilians should clear-cut the Amazon.)
6. Oil won't run out.
7. "The world is not without problems, but on almost all accounts, things are going better and they are likely to continue to do so into the future."

I wrote this in that same post: "Lomborg doesn't say or even imply that man should perform any activity he wants and ignore the environment. Instead, he presents information that allows us to make informed choices about courses of action rather than reacting to rhetoric, emotion, and anecdote." This is the right way to do things. Gather the facts, use the math, and draw conclusions--don't draw conclusions first and then see how you can use math to justify your conclusions. I propose that we live by this quote attributed to Sherlock Holmes: When the facts contradict your expectations, believe the facts. Lomborg did; I doubt the RS people would.

Rethinking Mathematics spotlights several examples of student activism. These include fifth-grade Milwaukee students writing letters to social studies textbook publishers based on their mathematical analysis of slave-holding presidents and textbooks' failure to address this issue (see "Write the Truth," page 140); New York City students who measured their school space, calculated inequities, and then spoke out against these inequities in public forums (see "‘With Math, It's Like You Have More Defense,'" page 81); and students who used math to convince their school administration to stop making so many obtrusive PA announcements (see the activity "Tracking PA Announcements," page 130).

I ask, does a 10-year-old truly have the capacity for independent, critical thought on the subject of slave-owning presidents? Do they truly have enough information, enough knowledge? Cognitive scientists tell us that algebra is difficult for younger students because most aren't able to think abstractly until around age 14. They can't figure out that x=5.5 if 2x+3=14, but at age 10 they can offer political opinions about slaveholding presidents? This is the type of political indoctrination I stand against, this is the dilution of math that I fight. Save that kind of fight for older students in a social science class--5th graders should be learning this material (at least in California) in math class. And there's a quote, the source of which I don't know, which is apropos of this discussion: "Context is often the first victim of activism."

Rethinking math also means using culturally relevant practices that build on the knowledge and experiences of students and their communities. Many of these approaches have been developed by teachers and then described and theorized by researchers of color, such as Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate. A guiding principle behind much of this work is that teachers should view students' home cultures and languages as strengths upon which to build, rather than as deficits for which to compensate. In "Race, Retrenchment, and the Reform of School Mathematics" (page 31), Tate offers the simple example of a teacher's failure to reach her students because she uses story problems that are not grounded in the students' culture; while Luis Ortiz-Franco ("Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood," page 70) encourages teachers to teach about the base-20 Mayan number system as a way to emphasize, to both Chicano students and others, that math has deep roots in indigenous cultures in the Americas.

This sounds much like so-called ethnomathematics, which I addressed in this post. There's no such thing as "culturally-relevant" math, not if you're trying to teach math in a way to prepare students for the rigors of college and to compete in a world economy. And teaching base-20 numbers? It may be "cultural", but how "relevant" is it? How will it help students learn more complicated math? I again quote from my Ethnomathematics post: Young people need to be shown that they need to accomplish something in their own lives and be proud of that, not to be proud by dubious association with a group hundreds of years and thousands of miles removed from them. Can it be more clear?

Engaging students in mathematics within social justice contexts increases students' interest in math and also helps them learn important mathematics. Once they are engaged in a project, like finding the concentration of liquor stores in their neighborhood and comparing it to the concentration of liquor stores in a different community, they recognize the necessity and value of understanding concepts of area, density, and ratio. These topics are often approached abstractly or, at best, in relation to trivial subjects. Social justice math implicitly tells students: These skills help you understand your own lives — and the broader world — more clearly.

Those sound like social science lessons to me--and that's where they belong.

It's unfortunate that some people are trying to impose their political views in the science classroom--creationism and intelligent design, bogus environmentalism, etc. Let science and math serve as tools, not weapons. Are nuclear weapons "wrong"? That's not a science question, that's a philosophical question. How many liquor stores there are per square mile in a certain area is a straight-forward computation using math; interpreting the meaning or impact of the resulting number is not a math problem, it's a social science problem. And it's probably not an elementary school issue, either.

I'm curious. What's next? Engineering For Social Justice? Of course not. No one wants the bridge to fall down. They want the hard science there, same as they want the rigorous training for the pilot of the airplane on which they're flying. There are absolutes there, and there's no way around them--the bridge either collapes or it doesn't, the plane either flies and lands safely or it doesn't. They can't go after these fields. But math education--it doesn't have a direct and immediate impact on life like the examples above do, so the lefties will try to dilute it.

Let's be blunt. The RS people openly stated that "Rethinking Schools emphasizes problems facing urban schools, particularly issues of race." This tells us immediately that they're looking at the achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. While that's good and important--it's what the No Child Left Behind Act does--the RS people take exactly the wrong approach. Instead of working to improve the math knowledge of blacks and Hispanics (the stereotypical urban school students), they want to feed into the culture of victimhood and self-esteem by making the students feel good about themselves without really learning the math that they'll need to move ahead in education. In other words, the RS people will be creating students who have "thought without learning" (referenced in Part I), which is in fact "perilous."

Certainly working in a school that has a conceptually strong foundational mathematics curriculum is helpful. Teachers cannot easily do social justice mathematics teaching when using a rote, procedure-oriented mathematics curriculum. Likewise a text-driven, teacher-centered approach does not foster the kind of questioning and reflection that should take place in all classrooms, including those where math is studied.

{inserted 2/14/08: this page has been intentionally damaged, how and by whom I don't know. There was a script running here, something about which I know nothing, but several paragraphs are missing. For example, I quoted a RS math problem that dealt with buying candy bars, and how bad that is for someone. Then I spoke against the problem. I pick up here where the text seems unmolested}

Again, it's the interpretation that makes the politics. Notice the value judgements the RS people assign to the first problem--"consumerism" (bad), and unhealthy eating habits (bad). What if, instead of candy bars, the students were buying apples? Does the "politics" of the problem now change?

{other paragraphs are missing here}

The first problem is a straightforward application of mathematics. The assumption I would make, however, is that students would be familiar with multidigit multiplication before transitioning to this word problem. The very basic nature of the word problem is designed to use some knowledge the students most likely already have (they probably all understand what is going on in the problem) to extend their use of mathematics, to show them a type of problem in which multiplication is useful. This type of problem promotes mathematical understanding, which should easily be transferable to other types of math problems.

The second example is entirely different. The second example, by its very wording and nature--indeed, by its design--causes the mathematics to be secondary to the social goals of "global awareness" and "empathy", neither of which is a valid subject for mathematics.

Let me give another example. The first problem would be like a shop teacher's teaching the use of a saber saw. Students would already know the basics of how to hold and power the saw, and the problem causes them to extend this knowledge by actually using the saw to, perhaps, cut a curved line in wood. The second problem assumes from the start that we're going to make a shelf, and it will be a great shelf, and the focus is on the shelf, not the saw. The focus of the lesson in shop class should be the saw, not the uses of the shelf.

Elementary students need the building blocks of knowledge, which include rigorous math instruction. We don't build skyscrapers without starting with the foundation, and master piano players learn scales and Chopsticks before concertos. It amazes that these same people (lefties) who think that these children have the intellectual capacity to solve the world's problems don't think they can handle the memorization of times tables or the stress of taking a standardized test. Hold them to a measurable, identifiable standard? Perish the thought.

In closing, the RS people have things bass-ackwards. We should teach the math first, then the applications, then interpret the findings. Don't try to do it all at once, that only confuses the issue (and the students!). This is an ideal time to point out that we math teachers already do enough cross-curricular instruction in our courses--readings and writings about math and mathematicians, applications to art and science, history of math, etc. The RS people make no secret of their desire to use mathematics for social purposes, so let them do it. How fun would it be to watch social studies teachers apply mathematics to their courses of instruction?! I wonder if they'd gain a new appreciation for having an actual knowledge of math....

Math For Social Justice, Part 1

Nineteen years ago, a group of Milwaukee-area teachers had a vision.

They wanted not only to improve education in their own classrooms and schools, but to help shape reform throughout the public school system in the United States.

Today that vision is embodied in Rethinking Schools.

So begins the self-righteous Rethinking Schools website. Of course, any decent person would have to ask what is wrong with such a vision? The sarcastic me would point you to the location of the teachers and indicate that should tell the reader where the teachers are going. The scholarly me is going to walk you through their website and point out the pernicious belief structure that permeates it.

As I read through the Rethinking Mathematics component of the website, a thought kept recurring to me--this sounds like Paulo Freire. Freire was a Brazilian educator who wrote a book entitled Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he opined that the "filling the brain" model of education is oppressive and that students should learn within the context of doing social good for their communities, a model of education he called "problem-posing". There is much to attack in applying Freire's work to American schools, but the American left is as enamored with this man as I am of Starburst candies. I read the Rethinking Mathematics section before reading The History and Philosophy of Rethinking Schools, which I linked to above. Had I read the History and Philosophy first I wouldn't have had to use my brain so much to find the link to the leftist Freire:

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote that teachers should attempt to "live part of their dreams within their educational space." Rethinking Schools believes that classrooms can be places of hope, where students and teachers gain glimpses of the kind of society we could live in and where students learn the academic and critical skills needed to make that vision a reality.

It was all there for me. But at least I had these Milwaukee educators pegged.

Now don't get me wrong and create a false dichotomy here, with Waldorf-type schools on the one hand and the stereotypical gray-concrete-Soviet-factory-type of school on the other. As I've stated before I believe that education is a social process, one that is greatly facilitated by rapport between teacher and student and by working with other students. I'm all about "academic and critical skills" that prepare students for the trials (and triumphs) of adulthood in our society. However, I very much disagree with Rethinking Schools' social view and the leftward direction in which that would lead students, to the detriment of us all.

Schools are integral not only to preparing all children to be full participants in society, but also to be full participants in this country's ever-tenuous experiment in democracy. That this vision has yet to be fully realized does not mean it should be abandoned.

While I question whether our 229 years of American independence from Britain, or our 218 years of living under the Constitution (counting from 1787), as an "ever-tenuous experiment in democracy", I'll not debate that point. What I would like to bring up is a quote from the Chinese philosopher Confucius, a quote I think apropos of this discussion: "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous." If I may be so bold as to interpret his meaning, Confucius instructs us that before "thought", before "critical thinking", must come "learning", the mastery of facts, agorithms, etc. Students must have a solid foundation of knowledge in the arts and sciences before they can apply this knowledge to solve problems. Those that have the learning but don't use it (learning without thought) have perhaps wasted their time but have done no harm, but surely the same cannot be said of the person who pontificates without knowledge of fact.

Put simply, if you pose a problem and teach students how to solve it, they learn to solve one problem. Teach them the fundamentals of solving the problem, and they're able to solve a host of related problems. Didn't someone famous once say something about giving a fish to a man and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime? (Yes, I know who it was.)

And what type of problem do you pose? Ah, therein lies the pitfall.

These Milwaukee teachers refer to their publication as "activist", a term I'm sure has a loaded meaning for them. I'm convinced the following, innocuous-sounding paragraph has a different meaning to those who know the codewords than it does to the lay person:

While the scope and influence of Rethinking Schools has changed, its basic orientation has not. Most importantly, it remains firmly committed to equity and to the vision that public education is central to the creation of a humane, caring, multiracial democracy. While writing for a broad audience, Rethinking Schools emphasizes problems facing urban schools, particularly issues of race.

Perhaps even the lay person can see the direction the authors will take us, and it's certainly not a direction in which I'd want to go.

So far I've gone after the philosophy of the Rethinking Schools people and haven't yet discussed the text of the Rethinking Mathematics section. You can see that this post is called Part 1; in later parts I'll attend to math specifically instead of generally. My goal here is to show you the bias and danger inherent in this philosophy as a whole before getting into the details of math instruction. I'll close with one more paragraph.

There are many reasons to be discouraged about the future: School districts nationwide continue to slash budgets; violence in our schools and cities shows no signs of abating; attempts to privatize the schools have not slowed; and the country's productive resources are still used to make zippier shoes, rather than used in less profitable arenas like education and affordable housing.

I love these unsubstantiated statements that are presented as facts. While I have no doubt that some school districts are cutting budgets, the question to ask is, why? Is there no good reason ever to cut a government budget? But let's look at education spending. The EIA website, which I quoted here, gives us the following information:

The percentage increases in current spending on public education for the last 10 years are: 4.7, 6.0, 5.7, 5.7, 6.5, 6.8, 5.5, 6.6, 3.0 and 4.4. NEA estimates that total expenditures on U.S. public schools in 2004-05 were $495,235,283,000.

From the same source:

So we were treated to speeches from NEA state affiliate presidents from Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts and Ohio – decrying their fiscal situations, referencing devastating cuts to education funding and complaining about "Third World budgets."
...
How about devastating budget cuts? Here are the per-pupil spending estimates for 2004-05 from NEA, released just last week:
Michigan: up 3.6 percent
Illinois: up 6.0 percent
Kansas: up 3.5 percent
Massachusetts: up 5.1 percent
Ohio: up 5.8 percent
California: up 2.4 percent
Nationwide: up 3.3 percent

So the claim for "slashing" budgets is interesting. But we all know that violence "shows no signs of abating", right? Uh, not quite. According to the FBI, crimes of all types have shown a sharp decline in the last few decades. In fact, this report shows that last year crimes were down overall nationally, and in every region. I'm not one who thinks privatizing schools is bad, so let's look at the last part, that "our productive resources are still used to make zippier shoes, rather than used in less profitable arenas like education and affordable housing."

What are they saying here? That our industries should be giving away their profits to public schools? If so, what are taxes for? Or are they saying that profit is bad, that we should not have "zippier shoes" until what these educators see as societal woes are all solved?

Why does the left hate capitalism? What is it about the left that they don't understand that humans are most productive when there is a profit motive at work? They don't like monopolies, because there's no competition in industry and that's bad for the consumer. But they don't like the profit motive that breeds competition, either. Leaves only a few choices that I can see, excessive socialism or communism, and neither meets with my approval.

Future posts will deal with Rethinking Schools' painful political views as they relate to teaching mathematics.

Here's Part 2.

Ethnomathematics

One of the latest insidious trends in education is that of "education for social justice", wherein we "empower" students by teaching them about real-world issues instead of boring "book learning", and instill in them a desire to seek out and work towards social justice. Of course, the problem there is, whose idea of social justice do we teach? Do we teach the "greater good for society" idea, or the "individual is supreme" idea, or the "down with the man", or the "correct every injustice" idea, or the "I'm a victim, hear me roar" idea, or the "my country, right or wrong" idea, or some other one?

I wrote here about teaching anti-military "values", here about race and the Civil Rights Act among others, here about the Vagina Monologues and addressing that play at school, and here about the First Amendment. Again I ask, whose idea of social justice should be taught? My ideas about equal opportunity, personal responsibility, race relations, the proper role of government, and/or power relationships in society are much more conservative that those of many teachers--but so what? How can I use those ideas, or other teachers use their opposites, to teach logarithms and trig functions?

Enter ethnomathematics. The idea's been around for awhile, but just this week Diane Ravitch addressed it in the Wall Street Journal. Let's discuss the key points in her article.

Now mathematics is being nudged into a specifically political direction by educators who call themselves "critical theorists." They advocate using mathematics as a tool to advance social justice. Social justice math relies on political and cultural relevance to guide math instruction. One of its precepts is "ethnomathematics," that is, the belief that different cultures have evolved different ways of using mathematics, and that students will learn best if taught in the ways that relate to their ancestral culture. From this perspective, traditional mathematics -- the mathematics taught in universities around the world -- is the property of Western Civilization and is inexorably linked with the values of the oppressors and conquerors. The culturally attuned teacher will learn about the counting system of the ancient Mayans, ancient Africans, Papua New Guineans, and other "non-mainstream" cultures.

Isn't 2+2=4 in every culture? And if it's not, shouldn't we be teaching children what's going to help them succeed in our culture? Give them, as Lisa Delpit called it, cultural capital? Mathematically (not sociologically) speaking, does it matter that the Mayans invented the zero before Europeans? I think not. And the only reason we even learn Roman numerals is so we can read the copyright dates on movies, know what page of the the prologue of a book we're on, and know what Pope number we're on.

Partisans of social justice mathematics advocate an explicitly political agenda in the classroom. A new textbook, "Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers," shows how problem solving, ethnomathematics and political action can be merged. Among its topics are: "Sweatshop Accounting," with units on poverty, globalization, and the unequal distribution of wealth. Another topic, drawn directly from ethnomathematics, is "Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood." Others include "The Transnational Capital Auction," "Multicultural Math," and "Home Buying While Brown or Black." Units of study include racial profiling, the war in Iraq, corporate control of the media, and environmental racism. The theory behind the book is that "teaching math in a neutral manner is not possible." Teachers are supposed to vary the teaching of mathematics in relation to their students' race, gender, ethnicity, and community.

This isn't math, it's indoctrination. Ravitch is very clear here; there are those who truly believe that math cannot be taught in a neutral manner.

Ravitch brought up a comparison of some math textbooks to show how close we are to this kind of idiocy.

In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 "contemporary mathematics" textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included "factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions, and functions." In the 1998 book, the index listed "families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study, feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises, and fund-raising carnival."

While the latter book might appear more interesting, if it's not discussing factoring, it's not algebra.

How does the rest of the world teach math?

It seems terribly old-fashioned to point out that the countries that regularly beat our students in international tests of mathematics do not use the subject to steer students into political action. They teach them instead that mathematics is a universal language that is as relevant and meaningful in Tokyo as it is in Paris, Nairobi and Chicago. The students who learn this universal language well will be the builders and shapers of technology in the 21st century. The students in American classes who fall prey to the political designs of their teachers and professors will not.

I've often said that if you look at an algebra class in the best schools in any country on the planet, my guess is they're all going to look alike. They will be teaching integers, not indoctrination; math, not manipulation; solution sets, not social engineering.

Just today I took an online survey about how I conduct my classes. It asked questions like, "Do you use ethnic names and culturally relavent situations in your word problems?" Honestly, how paternalistic must one be to think that a Hispanic kid needs to see "Juan" instead of "John" in a word problem, or that he/she can't calculate the area of a circle unless it's the area of a tortilla! As Ravitch said above, math is a universal language. Word problems exist to help students translate from real-world issue to mathematical equations, solve the mathematical equation, and then see what that mathematical answer means in the real world. The exercise is mathematical, not social. Everyone hates Train A and Train B problems, but they serve their function well. Don't most cultures now have access to trains?

Some would argue, why not make those word problems socially meaningful? To which I answer with the question, whose definition of socially meaningful do you use? Should we discuss the War in Iraq with a pro-military stance, and come up with some content-rich math problems to support my political stance? My guess is that if I did that, the lefties would squeal that I should stick to math! And so I shall.

Yet we have this so-called ethnomathematics. That survey I took today asked if I teach that the Chinese discovered the Pythagorean Theorem long before Pythagoras and the boys did. Why should I? What is the point? (Granted, I bring up all sorts of facts about the Pythagorean Theroem. But I do it as an exercise in its universality, not to make Asian students feel good.) Just today on her site, Joanne had a story about a soon-to-be-required class in African and African-American history for all students in Philadelphia. One of the points that came up in the comments was, if it's history that's taught, more power to them. If it's nothing more than an attempt at making black students feel good about themselves, it'll be a useless class. One person questions "the idea that 21st century people should feel proud of what people who looked sort of like them did centuries ago, maybe." One commenter wrote:

My family came from Germany originally.

I take no blame for Hitler
I take no credit Einstein, Handel, Mozart, etc.

That they and my great grandparents were born in the same part of the world does not automatically bring me disgrace in the case of one or pride in the case of the others. Their work to the detriment or betterment of mankind stands on its own as does my work. While I may not ever be as famous as those I have mentioned, I can take pride in the work I do whether it was as an engineer or now as a teacher.

Young people need to be shown that they need to accomplish something in their own lives and be proud of that, not to be proud by dubious association with a group hundreds of years and thousands of miles removed from them.

Amen. That's not to say that history isn't important--it is. But while I'm proud to be an American, with all that entails, and I'm the beneficiary of the work the Founding Fathers did, I can't say I'm proud of that work. I had nothing to do with it. I'm just darned glad they did it.
When I can bring up something applicable, like the Arabic origin of the word "algebra", I do. But I don't make that the center of the class. Ethnomathematics. What tripe.