Jo Boaler is utterly missing the point.
My argument is simply, Enough is enough.
We need all of our children to be mathematically competent so we can get their voices and minds into positions of leadership. We need our Black and brown children to achieve the levels of mathematical competence they will need to get them into leadership and to fulfill the promise of their brilliance.
We need all our youth to be mathematically well-educated and well-prepared.
We need them to have an effective mathematical education.
And we need to be using facts and metrics that reflect reality, not magical thinking.
This requires that California stop merely rearranging the furniture of the high school math framework every eight years and start pouring some of our energies in to addressing the actual problems that are preventing our historically least-reached students from entering middle school with a healthy and solid foundation in early childhood and elementary mathematical capacity.
We need appropriate developmental mathematics from early childhood onward. We need it NOW. Mathematical play leads to mathematical curiosity. Curiosity leads to intellectual hunger and to rigor, precision, and competence.
I want us to wake up and work together flood the world with diverse, well-educated high school graduates armed with mathematical competence because THAT is the foundation of accomplishing great things in the outer world.
THAT is what's going to save civil society and our planet.
I read accounts like David Brooks' latest report about the future of right-wing America and it puts me into a cold sweat.
These people are training their children to take over.
It's time we on the left and in the center start taking that threat seriously.
That threat is an existential threat to our children, which is what gets me up in the morning to teach my high-achieving, high-poverty students to become mathematical warriors. I want them to be well-equipped to do battle with these people.
I wake up every morning and work to help build the world that OUR children have the vision and brilliance to create -- not the world that those children are being equipped to create.
It's time for us to push past the first wave of naive, solipsistic navel-gazing of "reform mathematics."
Our underserved youth are tougher, smarter, and hungrier to master mathematics than Jo Boaler realizes.
It's time to move on from what doesn't work and hasn't been properly measured.
