Freddie de Boer and the Math Wars

... I think I played that game in elementary school on an Apple IIe

Freddie de Boer has an interesting and important take on the California Math Wars, the furor around CA’s decision to stop teaching certain types of math in schools, algebra to 8th graders, not putting kids into advanced class tracks, etc. All with the stated intention of helping disadvantaged minorities, because math is racist or something. Freddie’s simple and economically sensible point is that they are not closing any advantage gap here because rich parents are going to buy math classes for their kids anyway, so you are just taking them away from the poor. Advantaged kids still get advanced math, poor kids have even less access than before.

It’s kind of blindingly obvious, isn’t it? Freddie calls it madness, and I agree. If your goal is to close the achievement gap between races or classes or whatever, the answer isn’t to take free classes away from those who could use them. If you want to help disadvantaged kids say get into college or do well in STEM, you offer more free classes, not less¹.

But what if your goal isn’t helping disadvantaged kids? What if you are not insane, not engaging in madness? What goals could be achieved by doing these same things, but would need to be given a different motivation for people to accept?

Imagine you run public school system was so bad at teaching that no matter what you tried you couldn’t get kids to do well on tests, and it was making you look really bad. Your schools are a huge, ungovernable mess. Your teachers are ineffective, partially because their entire teacher training was indoctrination and training to indoctrinate. The teachers’ union makes it impossible to effectively discipline or remove bad teachers, and the school is dysfunctional enough that the good ones leave for greener pastures as soon as they can, creating a huge adverse selection problem. State level bureaucracies send teaching experts, most of whom have never taught in the classroom, to tell teachers how to teach better with highly questionable methods, often making things worse. Test scores are really low, and while you can argue around English and the squishy subjects, you are really getting beaten up on math. There is one answer to each question, and no matter what you try your students just aren’t learning how to find it.

You know what would be great? If you could just stop getting judged on how well your school district’s students did on standardized tests, and just stopped having math classes, that would be awesome. Then your teachers could just teach whatever they want, or nothing, and it wouldn’t matter. Bad teachers? Who cares? Kids don’t come to school because it is too violent? So what? State agencies demand your teachers stop reading books to teach language? Whatever, go for it. That would solve pretty much all your problems.

But how do you sell that to the public? You get paid to teach kids things, and the only way people can tell if you are doing that is by testing. Folks are not going to like not having any way to tell if you are doing your job. You would need to have a really good excuse to convince people to stop measuring your performance…

Ooooooooh… what if testing was racist? What if math classes hurt poor kids? What if even questioning your ability to run schools was racist?!

Man, that would be perfect.

Now, sure, maybe some people advocating doing away with testing and math are not cynically covering their ass for failing at their jobs. Maybe they are actually crazy. Many probably are. Most movements are largely made up of a bunch of people who only really know which team they are on and just parrot the party line whether or not it makes sense. The core of the movement, however, that is made up of people who want specific things for a purpose. Their stated reasons might not make sense, but what they actually do has a goal that is served by their actions. It might be worth considering what those goals might be, and why they choose to cloak them in seemingly insane stated reasons.

1. Yes, I know, public school isn’t free per se. On the margin, however, it is effectively free to offer another math class for the low income families affected, and is at least zero price. Local taxes might go up, but this is California here, they are going up whether or not the schools teach anything.