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Buried deep in the article are these two important paragraphs:

The role of calculus has been a talking point among math educators for years, said Trena Wilkerson, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “If calculus is not the be-all, end-all thing, then we need everyone to understand what the different pathways can be and how to prepare students for the future,” she said.

California’s recommendations aim to expand the options for high-level math, so that students could take courses in, say, data science or statistics without losing their edge on college applications. (The move requires buy-in from colleges; in recent years, the University of California system has deemphasized the importance of calculus credits.)

Calculus - both in terms of derivatives and integrals - underpins a vast amount of statistics and "data science" (which is basically using applied optimization algorithms when "n" is large). A simple regression line is based on deraviatives where the sum of squared errors is zero.

This is why calculus is required for business majors - for example, you can't fully grasp economic fundamentals without understanding area under a curve or the slope of a point if tangency.

I'm all for altering word problems to make them relevant. I really didn't give a rip about science-related word problems but put a dollar sign in front of them, and they're exciting. But dropping calculus is idiocy.

And replacing calculus with stats and "data science" is like throwing non-swimmers into a 20-foot deep lake.

Trena Wilkerson, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

I taught math, among other things, for many years, but I never considered myself a math teacher. But for those who don’t know, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is the source for most of the crazy ideas in the math curriculum.

Remember ‘Modern Math’ from the late 60s? That came from the NCTM. In my first real teaching job, I was teaching 4th and 5th graders how to calculate problems in base 6! That knowledge sure did those kids a whole lot of good. /s

The drive to eliminate rote memorization of the times tables, also comes from the NCTM. I have seen 8th graders resort to their calculators to do a simple problem like 6 x 8. If they accidentally hit a 5 instead of the 6 they are quite happy to put down 40 as their answer.

I do understand why the NCTM do what they do. Nearly all of them loved math all their lives, were reasonably good at it and enjoyed discovering its beauty on their own. They found the memorization a drills boring and they want to see students discover the patterns of math on their own. But they neglect or reject the fact that most humans don’t love math but use it as a tool to solve problems. So they develop teaching methods that might be useful for the 5% who are gifted in math, but which handicap the 95% who are not.