For many years, I lived in Toronto (Canada) and attended a church near the downtown commercial core. There is a curious old building in a quiet, treed corner of the church’s lot known as the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse. Two centuries ago, Toronto taxpayers resented paying for poor children to attend school. Today this attitude might seem strange. In any event, back then, a local brewer stepped in and built a free schoolhouse for poor children on that property.

Everything old is new again, it seems, including an apparent war on teaching poor kids. In recent years, it has surfaced as a war on math. Why math? Well, there are right and wrong answers in math. So trophies can easily be won by those who insist that right answers make no difference..

When we studied Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in Grade Eleven English Literature back in the 1960s, it was more complex. Some interpretations of the old man’s struggle with the forces of nature were more insightful than others. But no single interpretation was correct or self-evident. Dumbing down the course would mean substituting poorer quality literature, with less to learn or experience.

But dumbing down a math course is an easier and more evident victory.

Which brings us to an interesting item from California. Last week we learned that the University of California may have tried to bury a consequential new vote on math:

Emails obtained by The Chronicle show that after the committee’s July 7 meeting, members repeatedly pushed their chair, Barbara Knowlton, a psychologist at UCLA, to broadcast what they had decided: that courses billed as “data science” would no longer count as a substitute for algebra II, one of the UC system’s longstanding requirements. They cited widespread concerns that the courses were not preparing students for college-level math. – Stephanie M. Lee, “Did the University of California Try to Bury a Consequential Vote on Math?,” Stephanie M. Lee, December 20, 2023

So what exactly is data science?

Data-science courses have recently been promoted as an alternative to algebra II, including in California, but there are no widely accepted standards for what math they should teach. If students don’t learn the concepts traditionally imparted in algebra II by the end of high school, the concern goes, when will they learn them? (For more on this highly contentious subject, check out these stories.)

Stephanie M. Lee, “Did the University of California Try to Bury a Consequential Vote on Math?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 19, 2023

If “data science” is a way of teaching math without teaching math, it will just be another way for teachers to fail upward.

You may also wish to read: Further dispatches from the war on math. Discussions of social policy where math is relevant can be useful. But a student who does not understand how an equation works will fail at both math AND social policy. Increasingly, the United States depends on foreign talent in math and science. It seems an odd time for a nation to be sponsoring a war on math.