This is not just the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” this is flat out racism: only Whites and Asians can understand math.
Math education is “unjust and grounded in a legacy of institutional discrimination”
It’s finally happened, guys. Math is now racist.
National mathematics organizations have come out to complain that math education is “unjust and grounded in a legacy of institutional discrimination,” reportsCampus Reform.
In a joint statement released last year, two organizations, TODOS: Mathematics for All and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) said “social justice” is “a key priority in the access to, engagement with, and advancement in mathematics education for our country’s youth.”
“[A] social justice stance interrogates and challenges the roles power, privilege, and oppression play in the current unjust system of mathematics education—and in society as a whole,” reads the lengthy missive.
NCSM and TODOS went on to assert that, historically, math has perpetuated “segregation and separation” since “mathematics achievement, often measured by standardized tests, has been used as a gate-keeping tool to sort and rank students by race, class, and gender starting in elementary school.”
“Citing the practice of ‘tracking,'” notes Campus Reform, “in which pupils are sorted by academic ability into groups for certain classes, NCSM and TODOS argue that ‘historically, mathematics and the perceived ability to learn mathematics have been used to educate children into different societal roles such as leadership/ruling class and labor/working class leading to segregation and separation.'”