When I decided to read every word of California’s 1,000-page proposal to transform math education in public schools, I learned that even speculative and unproved ideas can end up as official instructional policy. In 2021, the state released a draft of the California Mathematics Framework, whose authors were promising to open up new pathways into science and tech careers for students who might otherwise be left behind. At the time, news reports highlighted features of the CMF that struck me as dubious. That draft explicitly promoted the San Francisco Unified School District’s policy of banishing Algebra I from middle school—a policy grounded in the belief that teaching the subject only in high school would give all students the same opportunities for future success. The document also made a broad presumption that tweaking the content and timing of the math curriculum, rather than more effective teaching of the existing one, was the best way to fix achievement gaps among demographic groups. Unfortunately, the sheer size of the sprawling document discouraged serious public scrutiny.

I am a professional mathematician, a graduate of the public schools of a middle-class community in New York, and the son of a high-school math teacher. I have been the director of undergraduate studies in math at Stanford University for a decade. When California released a revised draft of the math framework last year, I decided someone should read the whole thing, so I dove in. Sometimes, as I pored over the CMF, I could scarcely believe what I was reading. The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say.

The document tried hard to convince readers that it was based on a serious reading of neuroscience research. The first chapter, for example, cited two articles to claim that “the highest achieving people have more interconnected brains,” implying that this has something to do with learning math. But neither paper says anything about math education.

The CMF is meant only to guide local districts, but in practice it influences the choices they make about what and how to teach. Even so, the version ultimately adopted by the State Board of Education is likely to distort math instruction for years to come. Armed with trendy buzzwords and false promises of greater equity, California is promoting an approach to math instruction that’s likely to reduce opportunities for disadvantaged students—in the state and wherever else educators follow the state’s lead.

Temple Grandin: Against algebra

In my position at Stanford, I’ve heard from people around the country about the math preparation necessary to attain a variety of degrees and succeed in a range of careers. A solid grounding in math from high school—which traditionally has included two years of algebra, a year of geometry, and then, for more advanced students, other coursework leading up to calculus—is a prerequisite for a four-year college degree in data science, computer science, economics, and other quantitative fields. Such a degree is, in turn, the price of entry for jobs not only in the sciences and Silicon Valley but also in a number of seemingly distant fields. A data scientist at a company that makes decisions about how and when to store, freeze, and transport food once told me that he and his crew “could not do our jobs” without fluency in areas of college-level math that require previous mastery of the basics.

Without overtly saying so, California is building off-ramps from that kind of math. The CMF pitches relatively new courses, branded as “data science,” both as an alternative to a second year of algebra and as an entry point into fast-growing career fields. But the course name is something of a misnomer.

In private industry and higher ed, data science describes a powerful synthesis of computer science, mathematics, and statistics that seeks to extract insights from large data sets. It has applications in industries as varied as health care, retail, and, yes, food-supply logistics. The ability to do actual data science rests on math skills that have been taught for eons. Data literacy would be a better name for the most widely taught high-school data-science classes, which were developed by UCLA’s statistics department and my own university’s Graduate School of Education. To be sure, schools should be teaching citizens enough about statistics and data to follow the news and make educated financial and health decisions. Many parts of the math curriculum can be illustrated with engaging contemporary data-oriented applications. But much as a music-appreciation course won’t teach you how to play a piano, data literacy is not data science.

Advocates of the new courses have suggested that they produce better outcomes for groups, such as girls and students of color, that are traditionally underrepresented in mathematics. But proponents should own up to the downstream effects: In practice, steering sophomores and juniors away from Algebra II forecloses the possibility of careers in certain fast-growing quantitative fields—which would seem to do the opposite of promoting equity. Many schools in Europe and Asia separate students into different career paths early on in their education, but a key goal of the American system has been to help students keep their options open. In other contexts, the CMF is notably skeptical of efforts to group students in math class according to ability, out of a fear that disadvantaged students will be placed in low-expectation tracks that they can never escape. But for some reason, shunting them away from advanced math is portrayed as progress. The STEM fields won’t increase their diversity through math classes that contain very little math.

Read: Math is personal

Ultimately, I ended up submitting 170 pages of documentation about extensive flaws in the CMF draft that I read. I was hardly the only one finding fault. A multiracial national coalition of more than 1,700 quantitative experts from higher education and industry strongly objected to the early drafts. Faculty in the University of California and California State University systems wrote letters warning state officials against prematurely steering students away from algebra-intensive academic and career options. UC administrators had begun to allow data-literacy courses to fulfill Algebra II admissions requirements, but a faculty working group representing all campuses in the system voted unanimously this summer to reverse that policy.

Before the State Board of Education in California approved the third version of the CMF in July, officials did try to address some of its flaws. Although school officials in San Francisco had largely ignored parents who questioned the district’s policy against offering Algebra I in middle school, critics refused to give up, and for good reason. A recent working paper from three Stanford researchers indicates that the San Francisco Unified School District’s decade-long experiment was a bust. The percentage of Black and Latino students taking advanced math courses did not increase. Some students who would otherwise have studied calculus as high-school seniors were unable to do so. The kids who succeeded in reaching calculus typically did so through extracurricular measures, such as summer classes. Later CMF drafts quietly removed the mention of the SFUSD policy while still generally endorsing the ideas behind it.

Meanwhile, the ideas that animate the CMF—particularly its endorsement of data-literacy classes as a substitute for math and its suggestion that large swaths of the traditional high-school math curriculum are obsolete—are popping up in other states. In Ohio, for example, a menu of alternative math “pathways” in high school has been touted as providing entry into a variety of appealing and lucrative careers. But the pathways labeled for data science and computer science remove many Algebra II skills; the fine print reveals that the pathways are inadequate for students who might want college degrees in those fields. School officials in Middletown, Connecticut, have proposed to revamp the traditional calculus track by scaling back on preparations for eighth-grade Algebra I and introducing mash-up algebra-and-geometry courses that would magically pack three years of instruction into two.

Unfortunately, not every state has a critical mass of academic experts and private-sector tech practitioners to push back when school systems try to rebrand an inferior math education as something new and innovative. The students who are most reliant upon public schools are the most harmed when districts embrace policies based on superficial appeals to equity or false promises about future job opportunities. When only the children of families with resources beyond the public schools are gaining preparation for the lucrative degrees and secure jobs of the future, public education is failing in a primary duty.