The dangerous math that Florida doesn't want its children to learn

Well, this is curious. The state of Florida has rejected a bunch of math textbooks because they contain forbidden subjects, including things like "Critical Race Theory" and "Social Emotional Learning." What on earth, one wonders, could be so offensive in a math textbook for children? The Florida Education Department didn't provide any specific examples. 

By the way, most of the rejected books are for elementary school kids.

Fortunately, I've dug deeper and discovered what the offending math concepts are, so that I could share them with you, dear reader. Here, then, are the six math topics that apparently drove the Florida Education Department to issue its ban:

1. The offending math texts call π an "irrational" number. As everyone knows, pi (π) describes the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its radius, a value that is approximately 3.1416. 

Florida's government knows that math cannot be irrational! This seems to be an attempt to insert Social Emotional Learning into math. 

Incidentally, Florida is in good company here: back in 1897, the Indiana State House passed a bill that declared that π equals 3.2. (It doesn't.) Luckily, when the bill reached the Indiana Senate, a Purdue University professor was in the audience, and he helped the senators realize they shouldn't pass it. They didn't.

2. Many of the textbooks refer to "binary" numbers. Of course, if there are binary numbers, there must be non-binary numbers. Are these mathematics textbooks trying to sneak in references to sex and gender? Florida's Education Department can't allow that.

3. Some of the texts describe "magic squares." Magic, of course, is the work of the devil. Florida wisely decided to keep such offensive terms out of its math curriculum. 

(Aside: a magic square is a square filled with numbers from 1 to N, where the numbers are arranged so that every row, column, and diagonal sums to the same value. These can be fun puzzles for children and adults.)

4. A number of texts introduce the idea of the "golden ratio" and "golden rectangles." Clearly this is a reference to worshipping the golden calf, from the Old Testament, which everyone knows is a false god. What are those math textbooks trying to do here?

Making matters worse, the golden ratio is another irrational number! See my discussion of π above. 

(Aside: two quantities a and b are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities; in other words, if (a+b)/a = a/b.)

5. Most of the offending math texts use the expression "higher power" to refer to exponents rather than to a deity. Obviously this cannot be permitted.

6. Let's not forget the Pythagorean theorem. All the math texts describe this creation of a pagan mathematician from ancient Greece, whose philosophy resembled modern socialism. Why are math books promoting pagan ideology?

The right-wing governor of Florida (and presidential wannabe) Ron DeSantis enthusiastically endorsed the rejection of these textbooks, saying in a press release, "I’m grateful that Commissioner Corcoran and his team at the Department have conducted such a thorough vetting of these textbooks."

Yes, the governor of Florida is deeply concerned about protecting the children of his state. (That's why he's been such an ardent opponent of vaccines.) 

Now if only those math textbook publishers can just make π a nice, rational number, and get rid of any references to binary numbers, I'm sure Florida will forgive them.

(Note: this is satire. Second note: the copy of this article that appeared at Forbes, where I cross-post all my blog articles, had over 40,000 views in just its first few hours, but the editors there took it down because they were afraid (as they informed me) that the satire would confuse readers. I requested that Forbes put it back up, but so far they haven't.)

Stop teaching calculus in high school

Math education needs a reboot. Kids today are growing up into a world awash in data, and they need new skills to make sense of it all. 

The list of high school math courses in the U.S. hasn’t changed for decades. My daughters are taking the same courses I took long ago: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. These are all fine subjects, but they don’t serve the needs of the 21st century. 

What math courses do young people really need? Two subjects are head-smackingly obvious: computer science and statistics. Most high schools don’t offer either one. In the few schools that do, they are usually electives that only a few students take. And besides, the math curriculum is already so full that some educators have argued for scaling back. Some have even argued for getting rid of algebra, as Andrew Hacker argued in the NY Times not long ago.

So here's a simple fix: get rid of high school calculus to make way for computer programming and statistics.

Computers are an absolute mystery to most non-geeks, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A basic computer programming class requires little more than a familiarity with algebra. With computers controlling so much of their lives, from their phones to their cars to the online existence, we ought to teach our kids what’s going on under the hood. And programming will teach them a form of logical reasoning that is missing from the standard math curriculum.

With data science emerging as one of the hottest new scientific areas, a basic understanding of statistics will provide the foundation for a wide range of 21st century career paths. Not to mention that a grasp of statistics is essential for navigating the often-dubious claims of health benefits offered by various "alternative" medicine providers. 

(While we're at it, we should require more statistics in the pre-med curriculum. Doctors are faced with new medical science every day, and statistical evidence is the most common form of proof that a new treatment is effective. With so much bad science out there (just browse through my archive for many examples), doctors need better statistical knowledge to separate the wheat from the chaff.) 

Convincing schools to give up calculus won’t be easy. I imagine that most math educators will scream in protest at the mere suggestion, in fact. In their never-ending competition to look good on a blizzard of standardized tests, schools push students to accelerate in math starting in elementary school, and they offer calculus as early as the tenth grade. This doesn’t serve students well: the vast majority will never use calculus again. And those who do need it - future engineers, physicists, and the like - can take it in college. 

Colleges need to adjust their standards too. They can start by announcing that high school programming and statistics courses will be just as important as calculus in admissions decisions. If just a few top universities would take the lead, our high schools would sit up and take notice.

We can leave calculus for college. Colleges teach calculus well, and 18-year-old freshmen are ready for it. Every major university in the country has multiple freshman calculus courses, and they usually have separate courses designed for science-bound and humanities students. Many students who take high school calculus have to re-take it in college anyway, because the high school courses don’t cover quite the same material. 

Let’s get rid of high school calculus and start teaching young students the math skills they really need.

Government ranking of U.S. universities: a truly bad idea

The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has come up with a plan to produce official government rankings of our universities.

The plan was announced this past August, and over the past month, the Obama administration has been holding public forums around the country to get input about its plan.  But it seems like they’ve already made up their minds.

I hope not.  This is such a bad idea I don’t know where to start.  But I’ll start.

First of all, we have multiple rankings systems already, including the highly regarded U.S. News college rankings, which millions of students, faculty, and administrators use every year.  Even though everyone loves to complain about it, U.S. News is pretty darned good: they rank colleges in many categories, by region, by specialty, and more. They also rank graduate programs and professional schools such as law and medicine.

If you don’t like U.S. News, there are several other rankings, including the more recently established World Rankings from Shanghai and The Times Higher Education rankings. These are excellent rankings, well-documented using multiple criteria, and not nearly so US-centric. All these websites are chock-full of useful data about hundreds of universities.

I know, I know: “ratings aren’t rankings” as Ben Miller wrote recently at the Inside Higher Ed site. But I’m not at all confident that the proposed ratings won’t turn into a ranking system, especially with the weight of the federal government behind them.

So we don’t need a federal ranking of universities. That’s the first problem.

Second, this push to create official ratings will inevitably lead to a new bureaucracy within the Education Department, which will then create a constituency that will fight to keep itself in existence. How many staff will Secretary Duncan hire to create these rankings? Dozens? Hundreds?  And how many university employees around the country will then have to be hired to answer whatever questions the government asks?  This seems like it could quickly become a very expensive proposition, running in the tens of millions of dollars annually, or perhaps even more. I haven't seen any estimate of how much this new system would cost, but I'm betting on a lot. What will we cut from the federal budget to create this new system?

Third, a ranking system will likely spawn a host of new requirements that universities will have to satisfy. Why? Well, primarily because federal financial aid to universities will be tied to their ratings. Thus it’s pretty clear that universities will do whatever they can to keep the feds happy. And I’ve no doubt that with a full-time bureaucracy in place, the federal raters will keep moving the goalpost - coming up with new measures that in turn will spur new costs throughout academia. I’m highly skeptical that any of these government metrics will lead to better education.

We’ve already seen what government scorecards do in our public education system. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind program, we now have incessant testing of students, beginning in elementary school, and thousands of hours devoted to teaching students how to take tests rather than learn new material. Schools have not improved as a result. Do we want this trend to creep into colleges too?

I’m not the only one who thinks this a bad idea. Janet Napolitano, the president the University of California system and former Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, told the Washington Post that she is “deeply skeptical” of the criteria that a federal ratings bureau would develop.

“It’s not like you’re buying a car or a boat,” said Napolitano.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has already criticized the critics of the new rankings system, calling the criticism “premature and a little silly.”  Duncan emphasizes the need to address the alarming number of college students who default on their student loans. This is certainly a problem, but a college ranking (or rating) system is not the solution.

Perhaps the biggest problems with student debt is the rapid rise in mediocre, for-profit online colleges. If the feds want to get the loan problem under control, they should stop funneling money to these Yugos of higher education. As the PBS show Frontline pointed out in 2010, for-profit universities are

 “churning out worthless degrees that leave students with a mountain of debt.”  

And they’re not cheap, either - the GAO found that

“tuition in 14 out of 15 cases, regardless of degree, was more expensive at the for-profit college than at the closest public colleges.”

So yes, we do have a problem with student debt. One solution would be to exclude truly bad colleges, which are responsible for a disproportionate share of student debt, from federal aid. But that would mean naming the bad apples, who in turn will claim that the government is somehow being unfair. Perhaps the new ratings are an attempt to be fair, but it just makes no sense to rate everyone in order to identify the worst universities. Having a federal government agency produce college rankings is just a bad idea.