I am out of the loop, but surely this would be politicized math education? Which is absolutely different from mathematics research and not related to reproducibility.

how does that happen? idk much about what's going on in the US, but the what now? how do you make math political?

What happens is social scientists look at certain outcomes like people who go to Harvard are the top economic winners and people that take advanced courses go to Harvard. So the reasoning is if we can get people of an arbitrary group into Harvard we will “even out” outcomes.

But what this logic fails to consider is that people who graduate from Harvard aren’t successful simply because they went to Harvard. Their success comes from many attributes like their intelligence, etc that advanced courses are designed to separate the cream.

So then they organize and legitimize their power (removing merit and replacing with lotto or affirmation quotas) by claiming the existing system is racist. When you ask for specific examples they respond that it’s “systemic” and although no one can detect it, it’s imbued in everything. The solution is “anti-racism” which means to make up for past discrimination by systematizing present and future discrimination. This is why your HR department probably has a commissar on it now. They might call it DEI Officer or sone other bullshit job title.

This is what social sciences have contributed the last 40 years.

That's one thing that social sciences has contributed though you didn't provide any sources.

"This is what social sciences have contributed the last 40 years." This statement implies that's the entirety of what they have contributed which is false.

I mean, what I'm pointing to here is critical theory. From CRT going into gender and critical queer theory all the way into fat studies, etc. It can all be grouped under grievance studies and it's a large part of what the social sciences have outputted. It also happens to be political useful and used to cite "the science" as a justification for wielding power and making claims to knowledge.

Anyways - you seem to like to take this line all the time - "where's the evidence". It's everywhere. It isn't my job to keep you informed of the world you occupy. Either willfully or not, your inability to keep up on developments isn't an excise to demand "sources" when you have access to the same search engines as everyone else. This information isn't difficult to find.

I'm torn here.

Yes, some people use "where's the evidence" as a conversational gambit to try to shut down discussion they don't like. (And if you provide evidence, they may say "that's only one source, got any others?") And if they're being dishonest in asking, there's no point supplying the evidence they request; it is useless to try to have a conversation with those who will not listen.

On the other hand... when you make a claim, the burden of evidence is actually on you, not the other person. And if you say "you have access to the same search engines as everyone else", well, that's true. On the other hand, one person writes a post, and ten people read it, or a hundred people, or a thousand. Making the thousand do the searching, instead of having the one writer do it, is really inefficient.

This leaves you at "do the work of providing the evidence, but don't feed the dishonest trolls", which is... well, at best it's not very actionable advice.

I told you I was torn...

so the solution to racism... is being racist against different people?? what even

this has to be a joke, it makes no sense...

It isn't a joke. In fact, mainstream books such as "White Fragility" and "How to be an Anti-Racist" literally advocate for this. We see policy decisions justified by these "studies".

I mean, affirmative action is literally this in practice.

> how do you make math political?

By proposing a math curriculum that requires teaching all students the same material, regardless of their ability, with the aim of increasing social equality.

I'm OK with that aim; but I know from my own experience that trying to teach calculus to someone that's not ready for it isn't just a waste of effort, it's disastrously counter-productive (I totally fell out of love with maths when I was taught integration, failed to "get" it, and my well-regarded teacher didn't get why I didn't get it).

My understanding is that nowadays in UK state schools, maths is largely student-paced, using worksheets; they've given up on trying to get a whole class of students to all understand the same stuff. That's partly because a set of worksheets is much easier to come by than a good maths teacher, of course.

I'm not a maths teacher, and I don't know enough about the California curriculum arguments to have a view.

all students in the same grade learn the same material (atleast till tenth grade, after which they can choose their stream and now add math as an additional even in non stem sections)

Math is not politicized in California. Math education, and the social applications of math, are politicized.