Math Education Needs Reform. It Got a War Instead.
20th December 2024
On July 7, 2023, a University of California faculty committee unanimously voted to reverse a highly controversial policy. No longer could high school students take Statistics and Data Science as alternatives to Algebra II to satisfy UC admissions requirements. The decision, made by the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS), marked a tide shift in higher education attitudes toward math.
Among the voices who had been critical of the data science courses was Stuart Russell, distinguished professor of computer science at Berkeley. “All the evidence shows that these courses were deliberately designed not to build on or deepen students’ understanding of mathematics,” he wrote in a letter supporting the BOARS decision. “Such a student could certainly not progress in the data science major at Berkeley. The University is therefore in danger of shutting a vast body of students out of careers in science and engineering by authorizing a misleading path to nowhere.”
Russell was not alone in his opinion. Since 2022, hundreds of faculty across California, including many from Berkeley, had signed a letter and a petition saying that the data science courses currently offered in the state were not rigorous enough to qualify as advanced math. Yet, much to their dismay, for years, UC had been quietly allowing students to satisfy their Algebra II admission requirements with these alternative courses.
But the BOARS decision also sparked renewed confusion about long-standing and fundamental disagreements over how to balance equity-focused initiatives and academic rigor when teaching math to high schoolers. Today, many still believe that data science and statistics courses offer more practical and inclusive options for students who may be less mathematically inclined.
At times, the debate over high school algebra has become so heated—and even personal—that it has ignited a new skirmish in the so-called “math wars,” pitting “traditionalists” against “reformists” in a protracted battle that has played out in social media spats, dueling open letters, opinion columns, and even resulted in a threat of police involvement. But while educators, policymakers, and even tech billionaires duked it out everywhere from the Twittersphere to the California State Senate, teachers, parents, and students have been left wondering what it all means for them.
The problem is the apparently inevitable drift toward the notion “everybody needs to go to college”, and so high schools have to focus on “college prep” to the exclusion of any other possible career path. This is nonsense.
Not everyone is suitable for college; the research I’ve seen indicates that one needs to have significantly above-average intelligence to profit from college-level education. In the days when most people didn’t go to college, this wasn’t a problem–colleges and universities weeded-out the people who wouldn’t fit during the admissions process. In my parents’ day, high school was as high an education as most people got, so it focused on Preparing For Life with training in trades and other useful skill, such as Home Economics for the girls and Shop for the guys. (My dad learned how to set type for letterpress printing in high school.) In Britain, still, ‘school-leaving age’ is sixteen unless one is headed for university, which option requires two years of ‘college-prep’ and a different qualifying exam.