RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-weapons-of-math-destruction-learning-k-12-education-curriculum-students-teachers-instructions-policy-d6f18070?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The California State Board of Education issued on July 12 a new framework for teaching math based on what it calls “updated principles of focus, coherence, and rigor.” The word “updated” is certainly accurate. Not so much “principles,” “focus,” “coherence” or “rigor.” California’s new approach to math is as unfair as it is unserious.

The framework is voluntary, but it will heavily influence school districts and teachers around the Golden State. Developed over the past four years, it runs nearly 1,000 pages. Among the titles of its 14 chapters are “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” “Structuring School Experiences for Equity and Engagement” and “Supporting Educators in Offering Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Instruction.” The guidelines demand that math teachers be “committed to social justice work” to “equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics”—not with the ability to do math. Far more important is teaching students that “mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist within our society.”

California’s education bureaucrats are seeking to reinvent math as a grievance study. “Big ideas are central to the learning of mathematics,” the framework insists, but the only big idea the document promotes is that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society.

To achieve equal outcomes, the framework favors the elimination of “tracking,” by which it means the practice of identifying students with the potential to do well. This supposedly damages the mental health of low-achieving students. The problem is that some students simply are better at math than others. To close the gap, the authors of the new framework have decided essentially to eliminate calculus—and to hold talented students back.

The framework recommends that Algebra I not be taught in middle school, which would force the course to be taught in high school. But if the students all take algebra as freshmen, there won’t be time to fit calculus into a four-year high-school program. And that’s the point: The gap between the best and worst math students will become less visible.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/student_debating_once_a_bastion_of_logic_has_been_invaded_from_the_left.html

During my 48 years teaching at Towson University, all my classes involved informal or formal debating: the quintessential activity of academic classes outside and sometimes including the sciences and arts. Sadly, like everything else in academia, debating has succumbed to leftist ideology.

I love debate for its focus on credibility and evidence. It should be teaching the up-and-coming generation of thinkers. However, as James Fishback has noted, judges’ political preferences have come to dominate high school debate.

Under its major sponsor, the National Speech & Debate Association’s website, judges post “paradigms.” The purpose of paradigm alerts is to let debaters know in full disclosure judges’ stylistic biases, say, if they are put off by overly rapid speaking or if they approve of debaters’ apprising their audiences of the relative importance of specific arguments.

But in the last few years, Fishback explains, “Judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common…[at] national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.” In general, Fishback argues, high school debate has been degraded “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say….” One of several examples Fishback provides is a debate judge under whose list of “Things That Will Cause You to Automatically Lose” is ‘Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”

I can attest that the same is true in collegiate debate, the last place in education I would have expected political bias to interfere with education.

Several colleagues, including one who has both designed debate camps and programs and served as a tournament judge and another who is a major administrator in the National Communication Administration, tell me that, among debate coaches and judges, coaches and judges throw around their biases as a sign of virtue. This is a disheartening and dispiriting sign that we’re seeing the end of the unbiased marketplace of ideas and academic freedom. Worse, this is happening in an activity that, by definition, should be resistant to politically approved outcomes.