None of these statements are equal:
> Statement A: "Children of certain minorities perform more poorly at math."
This is a (sad) fact.
> Statement B: "Math instruction is racist."
Could be true. If true, we can agree it's undesirable. The Gates foundation is tossing some money around based on this idea.
> Statement C: "Math is racist."
This is absurd clickbait that nobody actually believes. The writer is intentionally confusing statement B and C because clickbait.
That said, I'm sure there are people here that still don't buy statement B, so for the purposes of argument let's tweak it a bit: "Math instruction is sexist".
There was a study of elementary school children that showed that girls taught by women perform more poorly in math than girls taught by men. With boys, the gender of the teacher didn't matter nearly as much. The researches speculated that women teachers might be projecting their own insecurities about math to the women in the class, essentially giving the girls permission to be bad at math just because they are girls.
Putting aside the other wider socioeconomic factors, it's not hard to imagine a similar phenomenon happening among children of color, and if a billionaire wants to spend his money to try to find solutions to these problems, we should let him.
And if it was the opposite, the researchers would have speculated that it was because the way we teach math is sexist. No matter what, we always arrive at the same conclusions - sexism and white supremacy. Just like with wars, myriads of different reasons and excuses, but always the same outcome.
Bad teaching is just bad teaching. I live in a racially homogeneous country where we have virtually no minorities and we have similar problems as well.
I understand that she might find it infuriating, because 2/3 of it consists of repeated worksheet pages about planning, executing and critiquing improvements in math education.
The other 1/3 of it, however, is largely discussion of bad math teaching, framed as racist math teaching. Most of it simply points out that bad math teaching is frequently authoritarian math teaching.
I find the framing grating and the discussion of pedagogy insufficient -- I would prefer about ten times as much -- but this is a calendrical worksheet book, not a text.
I suspect Weiss [edit: Klainerman] did not read the document he is criticizing, or didn't understand it.
I think the framing you mention is part of a broader effort to understand that in the U.S., authoritarianism is, overwhelmingly, racism. If you can think of a large, structured system in the U.S., you can usually think of ways that it (for some reason...) has worse outcomes for non-white people.
The outrage is really about mandated bad teaching environments. There are also very bad side effects for minorities, but calling it racist, when the culture is overall about domination, is missing the target.
"As awful as this is, the fact that it's funded by The Gates Foundation makes it even worse. So when Bill isn't trying to save the world from Climate Change or drive the world batshit crazy about Covid he's spending his money on racist initiatives..."
All they need to validate their misguided outrage without having to read a damn article. Wish Weiss would start a series about lazy pseudo-intellectualism feeding all this tribalism.
I sincerely don’t care if your average person can’t master calculus but I do care that people can’t split a check and work out the gratuity in their head.
The problem here is that this question is impossible to answer rigorously without treading into areas that are career suicide.
It is extremely clear that mathematical ability is directly correlated to general intelligence. Low general intelligence is going to make it harder for you to be really good at math; higher general intelligence is going to make it more possible.
Instruction factors into this, but if we want to actually determine the impact of instruction, we need to have a controlled experiment - and this means necessarily controlling for intelligence, and then evaluating to determine if the supposed racist bias is as prevalent and as worrisome as commentators like yourself allege.
IQ is the closest measure of general intelligence we have, and the science of psychometrics has been improving steadily over the past hundred years to be less racially biased and more independent of background and prior knowledge. However, IQ remains highly problematic, because any demographic analysis of IQ is going to reveal trends that match exactly the kinds of outcomes we see in math achievement to a tee. This has been consistent for as long as we have been measuring, and does not show any promise of disappearing any time soon.
What do you do with this? Fundamentally, you have a choice: deny the IQ numbers, deny the science behind IQ research itself, continue to claim that IQ measurement itself is racist despite decades of genuine attempts to remove culture as a factor, or lastly - actually accept that the numbers are what they say they are, and stop pretending otherwise.
In general, the world of academia has chosen the first option: denying the validity of the demographic information entirely, and doing everything possible to make it difficult to collect this information, study it, draw conclusions from it, or cite it in anything else. Trying to use it to form any kind of policy decision is impossible.
Only the last option is honest, and only honesty can actually result in anything approaching a productive way of addressing issues in society. If you want to remove racial bias from instruction, first, it is incumbent upon you to prove that it is present; this in turn stems from honesty about what we should actually expect out of everyone.
I don't view such worldviews as racist, just pseudointellectualism.
Phrenology, and no, it's not at all the same. Phrenologists believed that you could determine aspects of a person's propensity towards behavior by measuring their head; psychometricians believe we can determine how intelligent someone is by using an intelligence test. If you really think these two things are at all comparable, it's hard to believe you're posting in good faith.
Truly, you're doing yourself a disservice, and you're showing ignorance and disrespect toward the many social scientists, psychologists, and statisticians who have researched psychometrics and the study of general intelligence for over a century.
> There are many ways to teach children, and children are different. No need to give up or never try due to some linear stats.
Where is this implied in what I posted? I absolutely believe in making sure that people have access to great mathematics education; further, I don't think we should even use aggregate statistics to in any way limit the opportunities we extend to every member of society to climb that ladder if it is their calling.
The problem is that there are people who expect that the constituency of mathematicians is going to be a 1:1 representative sample of the population. In fact, that's probably still "too white" for many, since that would result in 60%+ white people.
In reality, the group is, will, and will always be composed of those who are able to ascend to a level of mathematical greatness that you and I and most other folks wouldn't even dream of. Any attempt to change that forcibly along the lines of racial equity is going to result in something that will make Maoist killings of intellectuals look positively honest and forthright in comparison.