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Students in the class of 2021 did not have to prove they could write or do math at a basic level to earn their diplomas. A bill headed to Gov. Kate Brown would prohibit any such requirement at least until 2027. A bill to prohibit Oregon schools from requiring students to show they can read, write and do math at a basic high school level is headed to Gov. Kate Brown after lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday. The idea is to hit pause on the requirements, in place since 2009 but already suspended during the pandemic, at least until the...

Armed with George Polya's 1945 classic "How to Solve It--A New Aspect of Mathematical Method", it should be possible to prove that the elite educationists who foisted the nuclear hot-potato of Common Core Math into the laps of the American public did it with full, willful malice, and ram it back up their ying-yang. You know its true, you knew it before the kids were at home all day on Chromebooks and you could hear the teacher, even good ones, insisting that if students had thrown off the Common-Core Math stupidity and solved their problems the straightforward way, they were...

If California education officials have their way, generations of students may not know how to calculate an apartment’s square footage or the area of a farm field, but the “mathematics” of political agitation and organizing will be second nature to them. Encouraging those gifted in math to shine will be a distant memory. This will be the result if a proposed mathematics curriculum framework, which would guide K-12 instruction in the Golden State’s public schools, is approved by California’s Instructional Quality Commission in meetings this week and in August and ratified by the state board of education later this year....

The world is full of sinister voices, always trying to lure your children toward extremist, far-right ideas. How can you protect your kids from growing up to be literally Hitler-- or worse-- Ben Shapiro? We did several minutes of research and found the 7 books you must avoid at all costs: 1. The Bible: This deeply problematic book teaches that all human beings are of one race, with only two genders, made in the image of God. Yeesh. Not a good look, God. 2. Any math book: Math is a gateway drug into the white supremacist idea of "either/or" thinking....

All students deserve powerful mathematics; we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents," reads a bulletpoint in chapter one of the framework. "The belief that 'I treat everyone the same' is insufficient: Active efforts in mathematics teaching are required in order to counter the cultural forces that have led to and continue to perpetuate current inequities." The entire second chapter of the framework is about connecting math to social justice concepts like bias and racism:

Public schoolsIn the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Who Are Gifted at MathThe new framework aims to keep everyone learning at the same level for as long as possible. Robby Soave | 5.4.2021 1:39 PM California's Department of Education is working on a new framework for K-12 mathematics that discourages gifted students from enrolling in accelerated classes that study advanced concepts like calculus.The draft of the framework is hundreds of pages long and covers a wide range of topics. But its overriding concern is inequity. The department is worried that too many students are sorted into different math...

The commonwealth of Virginia, which used to be reliably red and mostly conservative, is providing more evidence of an increasingly blue and liberal hue. Virginia is "considering" renovating its math courses. As the publication Virginia Mercury noted, "In webinars (Virginia Department of Education) officials have been upfront that the initiative is based on data, especially standardized test scores that show Black, Hispanic and low-income students have lower pass rates on state math assessments than White and Asian students. Those critical of the initiative have argued that Virginia is lowering its standards in favor of certain students instead of improving instruction...

The American education system is producing adults with more degrees that are infinitely dumber — and that’s not just an opinion. In recent years, students are graduating at higher rates, yet they are scoring lower and lower on standardized tests. How is that possible? It’s possible because our education system is being effectively rinsed of hard academics and objective metrics, in favor of woke, emotional, psychological conditioning. In essence, students today are being taught that it’s not what you know, it’s how you feel. How you feel is the goal of education initiatives like critical race theory, and “anti-racism”— initiatives...

The 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress report, also known as The Nation's Report Card, shows that U.S. educational achievement, to put it nicely, leaves much to be desired. When it comes to reading and math skills, just 34 percent and 33 percent, respectively, of U.S. eighth-grade students tested proficient or above -- that is, performed at grade level or above. Recent test scores show poor achievement levels in other academic areas. Only 18 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in U.S. history. It's 27 percent in geography and 23 percent in civics. The story is not much better when it...

JUST IN: Virginia Dept. of Education to drop all advanced math classes below 11th grade due to unequal representation of minority races - Fox News

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system. Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI). "[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade," he said. "That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in...

Pascal’s Triangle has many applications in mathematics and statistics, including its ability to help you calculate combinations.

Is there anything worse for black K-12 students who want to become engineers than teachers who think they can’t meet the same standards as their classmates?New York City’s Department of Education recently decided to change admission into its Gifted and Talented program from a single test for students in kindergarten through third grade to a questionnaire for the pre-K teachers of applicants and a lottery system. This change—widely criticized by parents — is a perfect example of the pitfalls of the current push for equity in education.I have no issue debating the merits of the previous admissions process. My problem...

The Bill and Melinda Gates’ gazillion dollar Foundation wants you to know that we’ve been doing it wrong lo these many years. Math that is. We’ve been using - and teaching - math in a racist way.“It allows the defensiveness of Western mathematics to prevail, without addressing underlying causes of why certain groups of students are ‘underperforming,’ a characterization that should also be interrogated,” the text warns. “It also presupposes that ‘good’ math teaching is about a Eurocentric type of mathematics, devoid of cultural ways of being.”Allow me to interpret that mouth-full-brain-empty word salad: math is hard, and racist; and...

“Mathematics is the language of the universe“. You might have heard this a lot of times from a lot of people. Did you ever think what does it mean? and How is it justified? In this article let us do an analysis of this special language of the universe called Maths. We live in an age of huge technological and scientific advancements. Today we can do a lot of things which we did not even think about a few years ago. We can land rovers on Mars, we can accelerate tiniest of all particles to unbelievable speeds and smash them....

Full Title: We're as good as it gets: Intelligent life is extremely UNLIKELY to exist anywhere else in the universe because it took a series of miracles for humans to evolve, say scientists Statisticians say the evolution of intelligent life is 'exceptionally rare', and that human-like civilisations are extremely unlikely to exist on other planets. In a new paper, Oxford researchers theorise that, for life to evolve in the same way elsewhere in the universe, it would take longer than the whole of Earth's projected lifespan. Evolution on Earth from the Big Bang up until the current day has involved...

Benford’s law, often known as Newcomb-Benford law, is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits of unconstrained numeric data in the real world. The intuition behind the law dates to the 1880s when an American Scientist, Simon Newcomb started to discover a pattern among the log tables. He noticed that people usually have a lot of markings on numbers starting with small digits like 1 and 2. He didn’t research much about his observation, so after 50 years, Benford continued his research on this phenomenon and found out many interesting things by applying it to populations, length of...

President Donald Trump’s campaign said Monday that, according to data shared by former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, the president was within one state of winning the election. On a conference call with reporters, Director of Battleground Strategy Nick Trainer referred to a Zoom call published by Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon discussing the current state of the race ahead of Election Day.

In recent years, education activists have adopted the argument that white supremacism and the misuse of mathematics explain racial inequality in educational attainment. “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness,” University of Illinois professor Rochelle Gutierrez has claimed. In New York City, school officials and the mayor’s office have embraced this narrative. Schools chancellor Richard Carranza linked black and Hispanic students’ mathematics deficiencies to teachers’ implicit bias. Yet at the same time, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s education masterplan foresees offering algebra, a gateway to higher-level math courses, to all eighth-graders by 2022. Advocacy groups and even some academics contend...

The Mathematical Association of America released a statement Friday claiming both that mathematicians should engage in “uncomfortable conversations” about race, and that policies of from the Trump administration, like the lack of a mask mandate in the United States, are somehow an affront to mathematics. The group concludes with a call for a “pursuit of justice” within math.