There is nothing particularly objectionable about amending school curricula from time to time, nor is recommending that teachers think about personal biases such a bad idea.
The “Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction” is going much, much bigger than that, though.
This Gates Foundation-funded initiative seeks something more like a socio-educational revolution for students in grades 6-8, as it wants to democratize the classroom, functionally diminish the distinction between teacher and student, and dissolve the notion that demonstrating comprehension is a necessary part of formal education.
These efforts have been made necessary by the strictures of formal learning, and strictures of formal learning find their source in, you saw it coming, white supremacy.
“The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing [sic] the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture in math” reads an introduction to the guide, which seeks to show teachers how to dismantle racism in mathematics instruction.
Now, buckle up for some theory.
“White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when: Students are tracked (into courses/pathways and within the classroom),” the outline says. “Too often students are tracked based on the notion that adults know what the right thing is for them, which does not allow room for student agency, reinforcing paternalism and powerhoarding.”
Paternalism and powerhoarding are two of the main “white supremacist” concepts which the outline addresses as problems in math instruction, though it takes no time to divulge the white origins of these concepts. It strikes me as important to demonstrate how exactly it is “white,” and therefore bad, to hold that the judgments of 12 and 13 year-olds may, in fact, be limited because of their age.
Here is another zinger: “White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when: The focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer. The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
And another: “White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when: Students are required to ‘show their work.’ Math teachers ask students to show work so that teachers know what students are thinking, but that centers the teacher’s need to understand rather than student learning. It becomes a crutch for teachers seeking to understand what students are thinking and less of a tool for students in learning how to process. Thus, requiring students to show their work reinforces worship of the written word as well as paternalism.”
The asininity of these theories is self-evident enough. Without a means to demonstrate comprehension, or a student-teacher relationship that presupposes a need for frequent correction, nothing properly educational is going to happen in a classroom.
It is worth thinking about how these ideas about “systems” garner so many subscribers, despite their gratuitousness. Such ideas are doing particularly well in the public discourse marketplace because they have deeply moral components, but they are especially successful because they are contemplated primarily at a level of abstraction. That’s because they are much easier to consider in the abstract. Once the implications of such “systems” theories are made concrete, they fall apart or become untenable in any practical or moral sense.
Think about this example. President Biden said after the Capitol riot, “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” continuing, “We all know that’s true. And it is unacceptable.”
The abstractness of the theory insulates Biden from having to reckon with the concrete implications of it, which would naturally be that racists or propagators of racism do not deserve praise. He didn’t call a particular officer racist, after all. But in point of fact, the widespread and entirely deserved praise of the late Capitol officer Brian Sicknick, officer Eugene Goodman, and others, which has been offered by many who are prone to be sympathetic to Biden’s theory about what “would have happened,” demonstrates how practically and morally untenable his theory is. As law enforcement officers, they stand among the alleged upholders of the systemic racism which would have resulted in Black Lives Matter being treated “differently” had they been the intruders. Those officers can’t be both heroes and propagators of racism, or if they can, you better explain to them and to everyone else how exactly that is.
The “Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction” is, like the ideology underpinning it, faux intellection guising as enlightenment, but it isn’t difficult to see the appeal. Ideologues know well that nothing helps further a cause quite like disenchantment with “the system.” That, and the endless pockets of William Henry Gates III.
