The Overwhelming Case for Modernizing Math

Hello! I’m Aly Martinez and I’m going to kick off this month’s newsletter with a subject I adore — math — and some troubling facts about the misalignment between the obsolete learning path in so many schools and what kids will need in their lives.

Math is my first and deepest academic love; before I became SAP’s Chief Program Officer of mathematics, I taught math and then served as the district math administrator in San Diego. (You might remember my “math goggles” from a previous newsletter). The thing I’m proudest of having done there is modernizing the way we teach math — something that much of our nation is struggling to do.

The case for modernizing math is overwhelmingly clear. As our friends at Data Science 4 Everyone have noted, our kids are going to need to thrive in a world swimming in data. The top emerging jobs read like a list of data science topics — machine learning engineer, data scientist, big data developer. The AI boom means ever more automation of rote tasks — and ever more opportunity for people who grasp the world of data.  

Impossibly, the math experiences in our schools will leave most students unprepared for the opportunities we see on the horizon in the careers of the future. The status quo has students marching through a set of math courses ordained in the days of slide rules, with little or no agency, and little to no ability to make choices based on career interests or personal interests. Many will leave high school having never engaged with real data from their lives or the world or having worked meaningfully with statistics and technology to analyze, understand, and question data trends. And it is infuriating to see that the students who most will be shutout from those modern topics and agentive learning paths are Black, Latinx, and other marginalized populations of students. In fact, student achievement in data analysis and statistics has been declining nationally for the past decade, even before the pandemic. Today's 8th graders have the same data literacy as 6th graders in 2011. These declines of two grade levels are part of what sinks U.S. scores internationally. 

"Math is power. And, it is the most impactful when students have access to diverse and additional rigorous math courses like quantitative reasoning, calculus, and data science."

I also know that our single-path system is deeply disserving our young people, and needs to be open to a more modern, more varied approach. And our kids know there’s a disconnect between the courses they’re being offered and the jobs they’ll want, as reflected in the 2023 National Youth Truth survey, “Making Sense of Learning Math Insights from the Student Experience”.

The good news is that many states are now giving the math mismatch serious attention. It’s a hot debate in my home state of California; at least 27 states have taken some action to introduce data science to K-12 students, ranging from simple actions like creating subject codes, to providing training for teachers, to changing required standards for all students. And, all major K-12 subject associations (like NCTM and CSTA), the American Statistical Association, and the Academic Data Science Alliance have all supported this work as well. The National Academies also released a national review on the foundations of K-12 data science, and there is even legislation in Congress (Data Science & Literacy Act).

As I said in my testimony to the California State Assembly Education and Higher Education Committees in early October, the K-12 education system should be a place where every student has the opportunity to be seen and to develop the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to lead choice-filled, successful lives in our communities. Our school system must strive to ensure that every student experiences a rich, relevant, and meaningful mathematics that honors their passions and goals, but also aligns with the careers in their future. Students should be agents of their learning. 

The more we can create a K-12 system that centers students in their learning and provides them with access to relevant and diverse math courses, the more students will be able to build the mathematical “toolbox” they need for the impact they hope to have in the future. 

In partnership,

-Aly Martinez

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