by Rick Moran, PJ Media:
California’s Math Framework (CMF) has been adopted in most of the state’s 950 school districts. And the one person most responsible for writing and pushing the framework, Jo Boaler, has been the target of a 100-page anonymous complaint that she misrepresented dozens of citations that underpin her research.
The CMF is a series of policy and curriculum “suggestions” designed to bring “equity” to the math scores of minority students.
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Some of Boaler’s outrageous suggestions already adopted are almost beyond belief. Julia Steinberg has listed a few in The Free Press.
- Most students won’t learn algebra until high school. In the past, when that was expected of middle schoolers, the CMF tells us, “success for many students was undermined.”
- This means calculus will mostly be verboten because students can’t take calculus “unless they have taken a high school algebra course or Mathematics I in middle school.”
- “Detracking” (ending advanced courses) will be the law of the land until high school; students will be urged to “take the same rich mathematics courses in kindergarten through eighth grade.”
Also, “letter grades will be discouraged in favor of ‘standards-based assessments.'” It’s not very clear what “standards-based assessments” are, but it sure sounds academic and harmless, right?
The worst of it boggles logic and reason.
- Lessons will foreground “equity” at the expense of teaching math basics like addition and subtraction. “Under the framework, the range of student backgrounds, learning differences, and perspectives, taken collectively, are seen as an instructional asset that can be used to launch and support all students in a deep and shared exploration of the same context and open task,” the CMF continues. It adds that “learning is not just a matter of gaining new knowledge—it is also about growth and identity development.”
I couldn’t close my mouth for a few seconds after reading that. “The board’s overriding concern is not education or mathematical excellence, but minimizing racial inequity,” wrote Steinberg.
These are some of Boaler’s grand ideas to “reform” education. And, as it turns out, she’s a Grade-A charlatan based on another complaint filed in 2006.
The complaint came on the heels of Boaler’s publication of a study claiming students at a predominantly Hispanic high school in California (which she called “Railside”) outperformed students at two more affluent, predominantly white schools due to reforms like heterogeneous classes. But when three math professors (including James Milgram, a fellow Stanford faculty member) analyzed the larger dataset Boaler had selectively cited, they found the data actually supported the opposite of Boaler’s conclusion:
Shortly after the complaint went public, Boaler left the U.S. to teach in Great Britain where they’re even more fanatical about “equity.”
The state Board of Education adopted CMF in 2022 and it’s now a large part of the math curriculum in California schools. But there were so many complaints and lawsuits from parents about their children being unable to learn algebra in the name of “equity” that the algebra course has now been added back to the curriculum by the San Francisco school district.
