National US mathematics organisations are complaining that math education is “unjust and grounded in a legacy of institutional discrimination,” reports Campus Reform.
In a joint statement released, TODOS: Mathematics for All as well as the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) said “social justice” is “a key priority in the access to, engagement with, and advancement in mathematics education for our country’s youth”.
“[A] social justice stance interrogates and challenges the roles power, privilege, and oppression play in the current unjust system of mathematics education — and in society as a whole,” reads their social justice missive.
NCSM and TODOS have both asserted that, historically, math has perpetuated “segregation and separation” since “mathematics achievement, often measured by standardized tests, has been used as a gate-keeping tool to sort and rank students by race, class, and gender starting in elementary school”.
“Citing the practice of ‘tracking’ in which pupils are sorted by academic ability into groups for certain classes, NCSM and TODOS argue that ‘historically, mathematics and the perceived ability to learn mathematics have been used to educate children into different societal roles such as leadership/ruling class and labor/working class leading to segregation and separation’.”
Both state that to “master the basics” before tackling complex problems, is not the way forward. “In practice, children placed in ‘low’ groups experience mathematics as an isolating act consisting of fact-driven low cognitive demand tasks and an absence of mathematics discourse opportunities. This is because of a pervasive misguided belief that students must ‘master the basics’ prior to engaging with complex problems solving.”
NCSM and TODOS are deeply worried about white teachers in classrooms teaching mostly minority and immigrant students. “The groups also bemoan the ‘white and middle class’ workforce of math teachers, fretting that it may not appropriately ‘reflect’ the demographics of the communities in which they teach, such as immigrant or racial minority communities,” notes Campus Reform.
As Campus Reform noted: “Social justice could be the key to solving these issues, they say, calling on math teachers to assume a ‘social justice stance’ that ‘challenges the roles power, privilege, and oppression play in the current unjust system of mathematics.'”
A free webinar, called “A Call for a Collective Action to Develop Awareness: Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education” is being hosted.
Similarly, in a new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” Cathy O’Neil details how math is essentially being used for white “evil”.
From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, O’Neil looked at how algorithms and big data were “targeting non-whites, reinforcing racism and amplifying racial inequality”. These “WMDs,” as she calls them, have three key features: They are opaque, scalable and unfair.
White and Asian students are consistently at the top of math-achievement rankings in the US. While “whiteness” is generally blamed, research shows Asian students on average outperform white students in math.
