As progressives want to do everywhere, California is destroying math education in the name of “equity.”
The state’s new “math framework” for public schools ditches traditional instruction to emphasize “self-identity” and collaboration in lieu of actual math skills.
It aims to keep all students in the same math courses until 10th grade — no longer grouping students by skill so the kids who can learn more get the more advanced instruction they need.
The result will be far fewer kids able to take advanced classes (calculus, or even algebra), and more “slow” children denied the chance to gain basic skills.
Seriously: The new guidelines push transparent nonsense like “math identity rainbows”: Each student is to pick a color representing his or her individual strength — communicating, perseverance or numerical reasoning (i.e., actual math) — with an eye on teamwork in a supposed “mathematical community.”
They also junk Algebra II for “Introduction to Data Science,” which doesn’t even try to teach core concepts like exponents, logarithms and trigonometry. Black STEM faculty at the University of California warn that this harms, rather than helps, students of color.
Nationwide, hundreds of profs denounce the dumbing-down-math trend. It robs America’s kids and sends a giant gift to China.
Count it as one more area where the “progressive” road to the future is positively medieval.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
