Tag: math

2+2=5: Oregon Department of Education Pushes Course Claiming Math is Racist Because It Requires a Correct Answer

The Oregon Department of Education is promoting an online course that claims math is racist because it requires a correct answer.

The class, called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” describes itself as “an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and Multilingual students” that provides “opportunities for ongoing self-reflection as they seek to develop an anti-racist math practice.”

“White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions,” the guide states. “Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics.”

First reported by Campus Reform,  the“white supremacy culture” cited by the document include a focus on “getting the ‘right’ answer” and requiring students to show their work.

Campus Reform notes that the authors of the program state that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

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There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math

Mathematics allowed a young Sergiu, who came of age in Ceausescu’s Romania, to escape to a world where right and wrong couldn’t be fudged, and, ultimately, to a life of freedom in the United States. Without math, his life quite literally would not have been possible.

In the piece below he explains how activists are destroying his discipline in the name of progress. Worse, they are robbing poor children of the opportunity to raise themselves up by mastering it — with untold effects on all of us.

Math, with its seemingly unbiased tools — 2 + 2 always equals 4 — has presented a problem for an ideological movement that sees any inequality of outcome as evidence of systemic bias. The problem cannot be that some kids are better at math, or that some teachers are better at teaching it. Like so much else, the basic woke argument against math is that it is inherently racist and needs to be made antiracist. That is accomplished by undermining the notion of right and wrong answers, by getting rid of the expectation that students show their work, by referring to mathematical testing tools as racist, and by doing away with accelerated math classes.

If that sounds like a caricature, I urge you to read this whole document, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Sergiu writes about below. As the linguist John McWhorter put it in a powerful piece published yesterday: “to distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism.”

Sergiu wrote me in an email that the situation in his field reminds him of this line from Thomas Sowell: “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

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Woke Math Doesn’t Add Up

Last week, the ODE promoted through its newsletter a short course called the “Pathway to Math Equity Microcourse.” The “microcourse” is designed for middle school teachers to teach them to use its toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.”

The toolkit, according to a Fox News report, includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” supposedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” The ones cited include that the “focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer’,” and students are “required to ‘show their work,’ ” which used to be keys to teaching math to grade-schoolers.

The toolkit says that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so.” It adds that “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

Objectivity must be banned because its exercise disproves what the wokeist whackos are saying.

The toolkit encourages teachers not to focus on students getting the “right” answer but to come up with more than one answer to questions that are “equally right,” as if that were, ahem, mathematically possible. It also encourages teachers to adopt its guidelines to help “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

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Woke Progressives Target Math Class As Racist For Expecting “Right Answer” Or “Showing Your Work”

The latest target of woke progressive lunacy is facts. Literally, facts.

Mathematics facts, to be exact.

Because now, according to woke progressives, finding the right answer and showing your work is actually racist and white supremacist.

The Oregon Department of Education newsletter promoted a teachers training program called “A Pathway to math Equity Micro-Course,” which is aimed at “dismantling racism in mathematics” through “ethnomathematics.”

Oh, you didn’t know that math is racist? You thought there were just objective facts that follow a set of mathematical laws and rules that don’t care about your feelings or the color of your skin? Just picture me rolling my eyes.

Well, the Oregon Department of Education has put together a toolkit to show teachers how to find the ways that “white supremacy culture” has “infiltrat[ed] math classrooms.”

Apparently, requiring students to “show their work” is racist. They say it is white supremacy to expect a student to write out the mathematical process and show the steps they took to arrive at the answer. Who cares if the teacher needs to see the student’s work in order to  ascertain whether the student understands the underlying mathematics principles or grasps the required processes. It doesn’t matter that showing your work enables teachers and students to identify trouble spots in lengthy or difficult math problems, especially in the event that the student arrives at the incorrect answer.

And speaking of arriving at the incorrect answer, that whole concept is also racist and white supremacist.

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Math Association Say Math “Inherently Carries Human Biases”, Citing Critical Race Theory

The MAA is a professional association of high school and university teachers. It hosts the American Mathematics Competitions for middle and high school students, as well as publishes academic journals. It prides itself as “the world’s largest community of mathematicians, students, and enthusiasts.”

In opposition to President Trump’s recent executive actions to ban the use of Critical Race Theory training in the federal government, the MAA said that critical race theory “is an established social science inquiry which is grounded in decades of scholarship,” further asserting that “it is misguided, at best, to reduce this theory to the race-blaming of white people and to define it and the discussion of systemic racism as a ‘divisive concept.’”

The statement then turned its attention to the inherent bias that allegedly exists in mathematics.

“Although mathematics, science, and higher education develop fact-based theories and practices that should inform policy, they are also political because they exist within a highly politicized system,” says the statement.

“Acknowledging that the United States has serious systemic discrimination has somehow leaped from a political issue to a partisan issue.”

In conclusion, the MMA says that “it is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases.”

“Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential. Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community,” the MMA added. 

Several American university professors signed the document. Among these are Jenna Carpenter, the Dean of Engineering at Campbell University and Victor Piercey, an actuarial sciences professor at Ferris State University.

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