“The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.” — John Dewey

A couple of weeks ago, Armand Domalewski wrote a guest post for Noahpinion about how the new California Math Framework threatened to dumb down math education in the state — for example, by forbidding kids from taking algebra before high school:

Well, I’m going to write another post about this subject, because the direction in which math education is trending in America under “progressive” guidance just frustrates me so deeply.

A few days after Armand’s post, the new California Math Framework was adopted. Some of the worst provisions had been thankfully watered down, but the basic strategy of trying to delay the teaching of subjects like algebra remained. It’s a sign that the so-called “progressive” approach to math education championed by people like Stanford’s Jo Boaler has not yet engendered a critical mass of pushback.

And meanwhile, the idea that teaching kids less math will create “equity” has spread far beyond the Golden State. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools, on similar “equity” grounds.

It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. More fundamentally, though, it runs counter to the whole reason that public schools exist in the first place.

The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.

Before public education — one of the key crusades of the original Progressive movement — only private actors invested resources in educating children. Families taught their kids skills, rich families hired tutors, companies trained their workers, churches provided some classes, etc. But it was a threadbare, uneven patchwork. Worse, it was highly unequal — if you weren’t born to a family with lots of time and/or money to spare, you didn’t get nearly as much education. This led to inequality throughout society, as well as the preservation of intergenerational wealth. Furthermore, it wasted much of society’s productive potential, because the unlucky kids weren’t learning as many useful skills as they could have been.

Universal public education was a way to attack all of these problems at once. By investing state resources in childhood education, it not only boosted human capital and economic growth, it eroded inequality of birth and circumstance. Teachers, hired by the state, provided some of what poor kids’ families couldn’t provide. Everyone except for a very few fringe ideologues now agrees that this model was a success; public education is pretty much universally believed to be a key input into economic development, and plenty of research supports that notion that it fosters intergenerational mobility as well. It is not a perfect equalizer and never will be, but it is one of the more important equalizers that exist in our society.

When you ban or discourage the teaching of a subject like algebra in junior high schools, what you are doing is withdrawing state resources from public education. There is a thing you could be teaching kids how to do, but instead you are refusing to teach it. In what way is refusing to use state resources to teach children an important skill “progressive”? How would this further the goal of equity?

I can easily see one (very twisted) perspective that might lead someone to think it would do so. If you take a strongly “hereditarian” view toward education, then you believe that inborn mental ability — what we typically call “IQ” — determines most of what people can and can’t learn. If you are a strong hereditarian, then perhaps you believe that students who don’t learn algebra well are simply born without the cognitive ability to learn it.

And if you believe that, then you might conclude that the only way to create equity in society would be to handicap the kids who were born with the ability to learn algebra. Like the Handicapper General in Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical sci-fi short story “Harrison Bergeron”, you