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-Great Cultural Revolution
Woke Math Comes To California
2021-11-12
A taste:
[AmericanConservative] When American universities began to omit standardized testing scores there were concerns that excellence was yielding to dogma. Hard science requires hard numbers. Which is to say that replacing quantitative test data with teacher recommendations, grade point averages, and personal narratives is opting for an approach that is necessarily less scientific, as the information involved is not referenced against a uniform (i.e. standard) set of metrics. Proponents will respond that stepping away from universal ranking is intentional. From their vantage point it’s not about selecting for raw achievement but rather imposing equality of opportunity.

So perhaps it’s only natural that advocates in California are now looking to update the state’s public school curriculum for mathematics. Not content to alter the application process in higher education, officials also want to impose their worldview onto the foundation of science itself. They’ve set their sights on its lingua franca─mathematics─and their reform campaign offers a glimpse of where the United States may be headed.

Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at U.C. Davis, reports that the philosophical undercurrents driving the new guidelines include the notions that showing your work and arriving at the “right” answer aren’t important since they’re relics of “white supremacy.” They also include the belief that accelerated tracks of instruction for gifted students that include more difficult classes like calculus should be avoided.

If you’re surprised by these educational tenets, rest assured that you’re not alone. A group that includes several hundred university professors signed an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom warning him that “there is no realistic hope for a more fair, just, equal and well-stewarded society if our schools uproot long-proven, reliable and highly effective math methods and instead try to build a mathless Brave New World on a foundation of unsound ideology.”

The warning signs have been visible for some time and now the chickens are coming home to roost. In the 2020-2021 school year the California school system lost over 160,000 students compared to the previous year.

One California father (whom I’ll refer to as Boomer since he asked not to be identified) recently established his own school in the Bay Area. He notes that “our local public school was teaching math at a level about two years behind the international best-practice standard. The fourth grade students were still mastering addition, and just being exposed to multiplication tables.”
Posted by:Photing Shalet8979

#5  "Woke meth comes to California"?
Posted by: Skidmark   2021-11-12 22:24  

#4  
They cannot be this stupid, can they?

Don't encourage them.
Posted by: Bubba Lover of the Faeries8843   2021-11-12 17:45  

#3  Might want to avoid crossing a bridge built according to this new, non-racist, math. Just saying...
Posted by: CrazyFool   2021-11-12 15:04  

#2  If they're really serious about this, they should institute mandatory classes in learning Chinese.
Posted by: Tom   2021-11-12 14:19  

#1  Surreal.

I wanted to resort to smirks and sneers -- with an ironic post a la "maff be rayciss" or somesuch -- but it's just not funny any more.

This madness isn't aimed at destroying white supremacy. It's a nuclear warhead that will destroy America's technological, scientific and ultimately our economic and military supremacy.

When a future Gibbon writes his history of the decline and fall of the American Republic, there will be a special chapter for the insane destruction of math education across the land.

This must be deliberate. They cannot be this stupid, can they?

Posted by: Merrick Ferret   2021-11-12 14:13  

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