In California, the university system experimented for a few years with allowing high school students to take something called Data Science instead of Algebra II, but they have now ended the experiment, saying too many Data Science courses were "not rigorous." (NY Times, Chronicle)
This move was made in response to a widespread protest by STEM educators that included an open letter signed by more than 400 California-based faculty.
We write to emphasize that for students to be prepared for STEM and other quantitative majors in 4-year colleges, including data science, learning the Algebra II curriculum in high school is essential. This cannot be replaced with a high school statistics or data science course, due to the cumulative nature of mathematics.
In other words, students who take a data science course as an alternative to Algebra II in high school will be substantially underprepared for any STEM major in college, including data science, computer science, statistics, and engineering. Such students will need remedial math classes in college before they can even begin such majors, putting them at a considerable disadvantage.
The point seems to be that calculus is required most STEM majors, and you can't take calculus without Algebra II.
Which is kind of weird, because I honestly can't remember Algebra II at all, and I have never been sure that the sequential way we teach math in America is all that important. I suspect that something else is going on, which I will get back to.
People have been pushing statistics or "data science" as an alternative to algebra in high school for a long time now. For one thing, very few adults do algebra; I don't. But I sometimes do use statistics in my work, and I think I am not unusual. I suspect statistics is the most widely used kind of "higher" math in our world. For another, the existing math curriculum generates racial disparities at an extreme level. NY Times:
The push for data science is also complicated by the wide racial disparities in advanced math, especially in calculus, which is a prerequisite for most science and math majors. In 2019, 46 percent of Asian high school graduates nationally had completed calculus, compared with 18 percent of white students, 9 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of Black students, according to a 2022 study by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The numbers for who fails algebra are also pretty dire, and inability to pass algebra is one of the main academic reasons students can't finish high school. Algebra also regularly shows up as the thing students hate the most about high school.
So why not substitute a different kind of math class, one much more relevant to many people?
People have tried. But "data science" classes have been dogged from the beginning by accusations that they are "dumbed down," that they avoid any real math, that they are designed to enable people to graduate from high school rather than to teach them statistics. This is part of the complaint made by the California educators, that a perfectly valid concept is being misused to prop up graduation rates rather than to teach people mathematics.
But I think the real problem is somewhere else. People hate algebra because it is so abstract and seems arbitrary and useless. So maybe what algebra really teaches students is how to focus on complex mental work that is abstract and has no obvious utility. Maybe what students really learn by grinding through the traditional high school math sequence is a different way of thinking, one that is more abstract and less verbal than anything else one does in school, and completely without immediate relevance to your life.
I strongly suspect that what underprepared college students lack is not any particular concept they would have been taught in Algebra II, but practice in mathematical reasoning.
And this is not, to me, an isolated case. The kind of education practiced in American liberal arts colleges was all about developing higher order skills in contexts completely divorced from anything remotely practical. Sure, some students might end up in branches of science where they used math, but that was not really why they studied it and certainly not how it was taught. It was taught for its own sake. Why prepare people who would work in publishing by studying English literature, rather than focusing on contemporary bestsellers? Why let people who want to work in the State Department write theses on Renaissance history?
Because of the idea that a truly refined and educated mind understands things in a deeper and higher way, which anyone capable of such understanding can readily apply to whatever industry he or she ends up in. This kind of education is fading from prominence in most fields. But not, it seems, from math. Math educators still believe that understanding math, having a feel for math, being able to speak in the language of math is a deep thing that one should grasp in the abstract before trying to apply it to thermodynamics or population biology.
It may be that the math educators are right, and people who don't understand math are doomed to misuse it. It may also be that training in abstract systems like algebra really does shape minds in a way that can promote good thinking in many contexts. Hey, maybe there's something to the whole notion that a liberal education trains people to think in deeper and more interesting ways.
Where this leaves us I don't really know. If grinding your way through four years of high school math is the only way to be ready for college science or engineering, then millions of American kids will just never have that option, and this will be especially true for poor kids. We have tried changing our approach to teaching math half a dozen times in my lifetime – New Math, Common Core, Data Science, etc. – and nothing seems to work. This just seems to be a kind of stratification we are stuck with.
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