(CALIFORNIA GLOBE) – “Like the return of the undead, woke math has come back to haunt California’s classrooms and make it even harder for the state’s struggling students to receive a quality education,” Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute writes at Townhall.com this week.
Last year, the California Department of Education released the first draft of a new curriculum framework for K-12 mathematics, which guides classroom teaching. But this release was only after a six-month delay due to pressure from members of Congress and other officials, parents, educators, and even school districts, Izumi and Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation explained in July. Why the delay?
The “controversial and ideological 2021 proposed Math Framework rightly generated huge opposition because of the seismic changes it made to current math practices in California schools,” Izumi and Wu explained. “As noted in a letter against the proposal signed by 500 mathematicians and top educators, the framework politicizes math by assigning math problems that address ‘social inequalities,’ denies math as a neutral science, urges teachers to take a ‘justice-oriented perspective,’ and discourages accelerating talented students because of racial balancing considerations. As the letter emphasized, ‘The proposed framework would, in effect, de-mathematize math.’”
