It has recently become something of a public scandal that seventy or eighty Baltimore schools have 0, 1 or 2 students at the “proficient” level on state math tests. It isn’t really news. It isn’t just an effect of the pandemic. The public has had access to information for decades that shows generation after generation of Batimore’s children learn very little math beyond addition and subtraction. Fractions are a huge problem. Multiplication causes distress. The city schools track anyone who makes a good start on algebra in middle school to a few “selective” high schools; the chances of learning algebra, geometry, trigonometry or calculus at the other high schools is slim to none, as reported year after year in the state statistics. In fact, Baltimore City stopped administering the tests beyond Algebra I as a general policy even before the pandemic hit.
In the most recent data, 7% of Baltimore’s students are said to be “proficient” in math. City and state officials agree the tests are hard. But that only means that you have to actually know some math to do well on them. We don’t need the tests to tell us that most students don’t know much school mathematics in any way that is useful to them. You only have to sit down and discuss a topic to find that out. Bring a table of data to some 10th graders, say, gas prices changing over time. Ask: “Hey, are these prices changing faster this year or did they change faster last year?” Shouldn’t be hard. Several possible approaches to the question. If it were me, I’d pull out my phone and put some numbers into a calculator or spreadsheet to get an idea of how to answer. But most young people in Baltimore schools, or in any other economically oppressed district across the country, rural or urban, won’t even take a shot at a quantitative answer. They tend to answer questions like this without talkiing about the numbers: “They went up faster last year,” or “They went up faster this year.” When asked to explain why, many young people then appeal to their experience: “Our family needed $70 just to fill up our car last week.” This makes sense—to start figuring out a question based on intution and experience.
But because of the way the schools operate, young people need prompt after prompt to test or develop an intuition of this sort. “Let’s look at last year. Did the prices go up or down? How much? How do you know? What about this year? How much? O.k., How could you tell how fast the prices were changing? How do you tell how fast a car is moving? How is a speed or velocity measured? How is it calculated?” And so on. None of these questions are hard in themeselves. Students from very early grades through middle and high school can have good conversations about them. They can be coached through finding answers to speed questions, comparison questions, application to “real life” and so on. But left to themselves without coaching, many students will just leave mathematical questions alone. They haven’t learned to do mathematics in the sense of diving into a quantitative or spatial problem and seeing where it leads them. We generally say, “they aren’t engaged.”
The young people’s lack of engagement is evidence not of the students’ achievement, but of ours. We should be asking complex kinds of mathematical questions in schools and in neighborhoods from early ages, just as we ask children to talk about the plot of a movie or a book or to discuss something in the news. Why don’t we do this with math?
The main reason is that in economically oppressed communities young people are being trained to follow orders and not to think. They learn to ask, “When am I going to use algebra in real life?”, and they learn that from adults and older young people in their community. The answer they almost never hear: “In virtually every role that self-determining people have in the 21st century, abstract symbolic languages play an enormous part. You can’t participate in those roles without algebra and the symbolic languages algebra leads to.”
This is a fact that is so obvious, many relatively self-determining people don’t even realize it. Obviously, if you own a business—an aspiration for many of Baltimore’s young people—you need to do many kinds of complex math, even if your business doesn’t seem STEM-based at all. You need bank accounts, loans; have to deal with interest rates and taxes; do payroll; make budgets and quantitative predictions; estimate costs and cash flows, and on and on. If you try to do these things without technology, you’ll be much too slow to compete, and doing them with technology means understanding the abstract symbolic systems even simple user interfaces rely on. Virtually every job that gives some degree of autonomy to the employee requires the use of spreadsheets, databases, quantitative reports and analyses. Even if you aren’t doing these yourself, you are certainly working with people who are, and you have to have some idea of whether they make sense when they tell you something, or whether they are out to lunch. Vast numbers of people struggle with getting an economic foothold in adulthood because their inability to rapidly understand and react to quantitative information puts them at a disadvantage. Many end up settling for work or lifestyles much less empowering than they imagined, because the economic and social role they get assigned allows for only low level, subordinate style actions and little decision-making authority.
It is certainly true that being relegated to this subordinate status is often an effect of systemic racism. But the relegation isn’t justified any longer by reference to a person’s race. It is justified by reference to the person’s inability to function efficiently in a fast-paced, technically sophisticated world. At the college admission level, the rejection letters say, “We don’t think so and so will be able to meet the academic pressures of this institution.” When someone is denied a job or a promotion, the reason is, “simple assignments came back with too many errors, or too far behind schedule.” There is no need to invoke race, and indeed many white people might be dismissed for similar reasons. But the fact is that white people generally and especially those from more privileged backgrounds are surrounded from early ages by those who expect them to perform quantitative and technological tasks quickly and efficiently. If they have trouble, they are helped or outright rescued so that their deficiencies don't show.
It is also true that the barrier of mathematical or technical proficiency is experienced as a relatively vague fear or insecurity, whereas the barrier of being poor— lacking the money to buy someone’s time to help you, or to buy a program that does the math for you, or just buy a computer that doesn't glitch all the time—feels concrete, immediate and overwhelming.
The root of the problem, what is hidden by the idea that either the schools or the students are somehow failures, is that we have no expectation that the mass of students in poverty will ever truly need these sophisticated abstract skills. They are being prepared to do menial work, and need only learn how to submit and follow directions. They are being taught to accept the presence of control, surveillance and the violence of the state. The “standards", it is true, are intended for full participation in the technocratic world of the 21st century, but the fact that 93% of Baltimore’s children can't meet these standards surprises no one and offends very few. Few are offended because few believe the masses will ever be anything other than surplus labor.
The lack of math learning in Baltimore schools is indeed a scandal, but it isn't news, and certainly isn't a surprise. Things will change only when there is sufficient demand from students and families to access not a subordinate position in society, but a position of true self determination, which today includes command of abstract symbolic languages.