Is Algebra Necessary?
This is a response to an article that was pretty popular on HN a while back. It was popular on HN because everyone disagreed with it, but this is the sort of thing that resonates with a lot of people, and I’m disturbed to see that it was published in NYTimes.
A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra.
6 million high school students seems like a possible estimate; there are 17.53 million high school students in the US according to wolfram alpha. However 2 million college freshmen sounds like a vast overestimate. The annual birthrate is 4.29 million and nowhere near all people attend college. Assume 3 million college freshmen per year. 2/3 of college freshmen not understanding algebra is ridiculous, not only is a much larger percentage than the ~30% of high school students that don’t understand algebra, the expected percentage should be smaller for college students, since there is a positive correlation between the students that do not attend college and the students that do not understand algebra. This clearly false figure also makes me doubt the validity of the high school figure. Maybe the author just doesn’t understand the math?
Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent.
5 hours a week of maths prevents developing young talent? If you’re willing to say that, then isn’t the next logical conclusion is to say that 35 hours a week of mandatory school also prevents developing talents. I doubt that many people would sympathize with the notion that school prevents students’ from developing talents.
To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school.
And the solution is to make high school easier? This is like the way states treat standardized tests. So that the state can report higher scores on standardized tests for no child left behind, they make them painfully easy. Each year, at least once, I spend 3 hours in a room, taking a test that in reality takes only about 45 minutes, and which I could have passed with more than a 90% before stepping foot in the class that it is evaluating me in, and forbidden from doing anything other than sitting quietly and waiting after completing the test, not even when everyone in the room, and even nearby rooms, has finished (yes, I’m using this as an opportunity to complain). Making high school easier so that more students pass is also like printing more currency so that people have more money. It doesn’t actually give students more value, because even though they passed high school, that achievement is now worth less. Education is being inflated by jobs requiring more of it, let’s not inflate it more by decreasing it’s value artificially.
“There are students taking these courses three, four, five times,” says Barbara Bonham of Appalachian State University. While some ultimately pass, she adds, “many drop out.”
Well, how many students? Is this mainly referring to students who are mentally challenged or are more-or-less average but culturally or behaviorally inclined to refuse to learn anything? Sadly the vast majority of these students are destined to drop out anyway, and if they don’t, they are unlikely to succeed in jobs that require a high school education (or rather jobs that should require a high school education1)
The main impediment to graduation: freshman math. The City University of New York, where I have taught since 1971, found that 57 percent of its students didn’t pass its mandated algebra course.
Your school should teach math better. If more students are failing a course than passing it, it should be obvious that the professor and the curriculum need to be changed immediately. It is impossible that a competent professor would have that high of a failure rate, which makes the statistic irrelevant.
1 but that’s not something to fix by making high school easier, it should be done by somehow requiring employers to consider hiring burger flippers without high school diplomas.