I feel like I should post this here, since I’ve talked about this issue before (in particular: here and here).

This week an article/letter/piece was published in the opinion section of the New York Times (here) written by a retired politics professor that is disturbing to me.  He makes several claims and arguments that I fundamentally disagree with.  One of these includes an argument for removing algebra completely from high school and college curricula because the high failure rate makes graduation harder for students who may have no interest or career aspirations in math.  He tries to support these claims with known facts and statistics about American students’ struggles in math and science, which I agree are true and need to be addressed, but makes an unfounded leap from these sad facts to statements of cause (with no supporting evidence) and that his solution is the best (only?) solution.

I’m not going to do a point-counterpoint or direct rebuttal of his position.  Rather, I’m going to state my own position of the matter somewhat independently (you don’t necessarily have to read the article to understand the points I’m making below).

Also, most of what I’m writing below was posted on Facebook (by me) in comment threads related to the article, so if you’re my Facebook friend it may be redundant.

For other really great arguments against this guy’s position, look through the comments section on the article. New comments have been disabled, but last I checked there were about 475 comments, and a vast majority of the ones I read were intelligent, well formed comments that brought up great points that the author seems to have missed or ignored.

——

The American education system has a lot of problems that need to be fixed, and I strongly believe none of them will be solved by removing algebra from a high school or college curriculum. If anything, it will create new problems. The “I don’t know why this is useful therefore it ISN’T useful to me” argument is not valid. Teenagers are not the best judges of what skills their education is really providing them with, and just because a given math teacher can’t come up with an obvious example that will placate a teenager doesn’t mean we should just drop algebra from the curriculum.

“I’m a high schooler and I won’t need X for my specific career goals-” (or worse, “I’m not good at X-“), “-so I shouldn’t need to take classes in high school that are related to X.” Maybe in individual cases this would benefit the student, but you can’t apply this to the entire society. That’s why there is some flexibility in the curriculum and courses you have to take in high school and college, but there is still some STANDARD so that the degree means something. Saying “I have a high school diploma” should mean you have certain skills (the ol’ reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic!). Just like saying “I earned a BA” or “I earned a BS” or “I earned a PhD” or whatever.

As for earlier education (middle/high school), he complains that our students are failing so badly at math, therefore we should stop teaching it. I completely agree that as a nation, we’re behind from the get-go, but that is not algebra’s fault. How about preparing students better from the beginning? Most students don’t even start algebra until middle/high school. What are they doing the first 8 years of their math education? Counting leads to arithmetic which leads to?? More arithmetic?

I think most math educators would agree that it’s not the algebra concepts that are causing most students to fail. It is (1) not attending class, (2) not doing homework/ not studying/ not practicing, and (3) not knowing basic (elementary school) math concepts like multiplication, division, and working with fractions. Throwing out elements of the curriculum isn’t going to improve a failing student’s work ethic or their ability to do arithmetic (and arithmetic is one thing the author deems useful for the common man).

And this doesn’t even touch on the very nature of mathematics being overlooked in this article (and by our society as a whole). It isn’t about the SPECIFIC problem solving techniques (yeah, who uses completing the square anyway?), it’s about the ACT of problem solving. Plus, there’s the added bonus of teaching perseverance, to get the reward of “getting it.” (Anyone else jump up and down when they get a proof they’ve been stuck on for days/weeks/etc?) We already have a population of people who don’t know what math really is because all they remember is arithmetic. Is the solution to educating the people really making it so that all they see is arithmetic? There’s already so much math out there they don’t even know exists, so obviously to make the possibilities known, we should cut back their exposure to problem solving.

And finally, completely replacing algebra with statistics (which is one “solution” the author suggests) is just unreasonable/makes no sense. How can you teach someone statistics who doesn’t know what a variable is, or how to algebraically manipulate an expression, or think about the problem abstractly to arrive at the correct solution? If anything, he should be arguing for a stat/alg blend, and I’ve heard some great arguments for that approach to high school math. But the author is a whiny politics professor with sub-par reasoning skills and it shows. His tone is condescending and insulting to mathematicians and scientists, making his piece ineffective in both content and tone.