Did you know that two plus two is racist? The good news is that under Common Core, two plus two could equal five—so does that make math less racist?
““We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” states the current draft of the California Math Framework, which seeks to train K-12 math teachers that “white supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions.”
A teachers’ workbook titled “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction,” also asserts, “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.”
The workbook adds:
In order to embody antiracist math education, teachers must engage in critical praxis that interrogates the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy culture in their own classrooms, and develop a plan toward antiracist math education to address issues of equity for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students.
In simple language—math is not going to be taught in government schools—bigotry, hate, racism and sex will be the priorities. After all who needs architects, engineers, computer folks? We need to stop racism in algebra.
Research Cited to Show California Math Is ‘Racist’ Often Misrepresented
Dr. Susan Berry, Breitbart, 8/25/21
An investigation into studies cited in the California Math Framework draft that claims math is “racist” found many of their results have been misrepresented by the woke activists behind the Framework.
“We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” states the current draft of the California Math Framework, which seeks to train K-12 math teachers that “white supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions.”
A teachers’ workbook titled “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction,” also asserts, “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.”
The workbook adds:
In order to embody antiracist math education, teachers must engage in critical praxis that interrogates the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy culture in their own classrooms, and develop a plan toward antiracist math education to address issues of equity for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students.
Richard Bernstein wrote at RealClear Investigations in July that the Framework, which could be adopted in 2022, makes the claim its assertions are based on “the latest, seemingly unimpeachable findings of advanced social science research.”
He observed:
Phrases such as “researchers found,” “the research shows” and the “research is clear” are sprinkled through the Framework, which states unequivocally: “The research is clear that all students are capable of becoming powerful mathematics learners and users.” If true, this evidence would provide a powerful rationale for adopting the Framework’s proposals, which, given California’s size and prestige, is commonly seen as a model for other states.
Bernstein found, however, much of the research cited is actually not “clear” at all. In fact, he described it as “actually pretty murky, hotly disputed, or contradicted by other research, misleadingly stretched to cover situations for which it was not intended, or, in some instances, just plain wrong.”
For example, in its declaration rejecting the “ideas of natural gifts and talents,” the Framework cited a study by New York University psychologist Andrei Cimpian in 2015.
“[B]ut the only work of Cimpian listed in the footnotes is a paper written with a Princeton University psychologist, Sarah-Jane Leslie,” which found women and girls are often dissuaded from entering fields considered to require “special ability to be successful,” Bernstein observed.
The paper, however, does not mention whether some people have a natural gift for math or that all people are capable of high-level math.
Leslie responded to Bernstein’s inquiry about the use of her study for the California Math Framework, stating, “This isn’t a question that my own research was designed to address.”
Women, blacks, and Hispanics are often “underrepresented” in university science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, Bernstein wrote, but in making the “woke” claim that white men are preventing women and non-whites from getting ahead in math, the Framework entirely ignores students of Asian descent.
Bernstein explained:
But Asians are only minimally mentioned in the Framework’s many chapters, including those about “teaching equity and engagement in mathematics,” though the document does glancingly mention data challenging its assertion that gifted programs favor whites and males. It reports that only 8 percent of white students are enrolled in California’s math classes for gifted students. While this is higher than the percentage of African Americans (4 percent) and Latinos (3 percent), it is dwarfed by the percentage of Asian Americans (32 percent). These numbers show that if gifted programs are phased out, the students most affected will be overwhelmingly Asian (i.e., people of color), not whites.
