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theassociatedpross · 4 years ago

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When Math Doesn’t Add Up: A Defense of Anti-Racist Instruction & Resources in Mathematics Classrooms

Recently, a friend posted an article from Fox News on their Facebook page, called “Oregon promotes teacher program that seeks to undo ‘racism in mathematics’: A toolkit includes a list of ways 'white supremacy culture' allegedly 'infiltrates math classrooms.’” The article was posted with concerns that mathematics instruction was being eroded by the curricular toolkit mentioned in the Fox article. In the comments to my friend’s post, there was a mix of responses. Some responses sought to understand the tool and its use and some expressed deep frustration and confusion. One such comment provided, “I wasn’t aware arithmetic could even be ‘racist’…so confused! I could see if something was subjective, but math …change my mind.” Others questioned the validity of the article because it was from Fox News.

After reading the thread I read the article, and after reading the article I explored the part of the toolkit singled out in the article: “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” I didn’t read all 81 pages of it (many of the pages were reflection guides for teachers to complete), but I did explore it thoroughly. I then posted a response, which I have shared below. After examination of the resource, I concluded that Fox mischaracterized the toolkit. My response in the thread intended to correct Fox’s mischaracterization by providing an example of how and why anti-racist practices are relevant and necessary in mathematics instruction. The response to my post has so far been positive and appreciated. Here is the response in its entirety (edited only to embed hyperlinks and for structural clarity):

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what this curriculum is and isn’t, and I think I can help clarify. Background for those who don’t know me (which will be everyone but [my friend]). I’ve been an educator for over a decade. A middle school social studies and ELA teacher for a decade, a high school assistant principal for two, and was a lawyer before that. For transparency, I’m what you’d call a progressive liberal and am fully invested in dismantling oppressive systems from public education. That said...

This resource is designed to provide teachers a tool to improve their instruction. One way any teacher can improve their instruction is to identify the ideas and beliefs they have that are rooted in bias (typically implicit bias, in that they aren’t aware they have the bias) and replace those ideas with more accurate ones. And I mean this broadly, in terms of their practices. Here’s an example. In college I had a professor that stopped using multiple choice tests because the evidence he came to learn was multiple choice tests (for whatever reason, you’d have to read the research) favored men over women. Men scored higher on average on such tests, consistently, in a way that revealed the test had embedded biases. These affects were eliminated when the same content was switched to short answer. And it makes sense, right? A multiple choice test frames answers in specific ways, limits choice to only those phrasings, and if the test is largely written by men, then the language chosen will reflect the point of view and experiences of men. I’ll note this wasn’t a math class - it was a law and policy class - but the idea remains that written course materials aren’t written in a vacuum; they are written by people with their own experiences, and those experiences can bleed into content, even if unintended.

So let’s look at mathematics instruction and the use of this particular tool.

The biggest concern I see above, a fair one, is that the implication here is that math isn’t objective, and teachers are going to start teaching 2+2=5. This is not what the tool is saying, and I can assure you no math teacher would agree to teach 2+2=5. The objective/subjective description in the tool isn’t about the computations. Rather, it’s about the presentation of mathematical problems and the insistence that, for the application of math to real-world problems, there can be only one solution.

Let’s consider a relevant example. If we look at COVID, we can find concrete numbers about the rate of its spread, the distance it travels in the air, the permeability of masks and their degree of protection, etc. If you were to take this information and phrase it in a math question: In a city of 100,000 people, how many citizens will contract COVID given these concrete data points? This question seems fair, right? The virus doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t know if a person is white or black. So, this seems like a straight-forward, computational problem. If it were, you could run the numbers and find an answer. The math used, the computations, would be the same for anyone who answers this problem. The computations are objective. This isn’t controversial.

But, the above question is problematic, and it’s the implicit problems that this anti-racism tool is seeking to remedy. Let’s explore why it’s problematic.

In the problem I imagined, I provided you with a specific scope of information. I stipulated what was relevant to determine the “correct” answer. But, there are relevant conditions that would need to be considered to answer a question like this in the real-world that were omitted from my presentation of the problem. What considerations were omitted that would need to be considered if we were trying to solve this problem in the real world? For starters, you’d have to consider population density. We know the virus spreads faster in areas where there are more people. If each person is a vector of transmission and you place more people in a smaller space, then density matters. And if density matters, you are now opening up the data and history of population density. This includes neighborhood designs and housing designs (single-unit, multi-family, apartments). Now you are including social context, social data, into the mathematical data set to arrive at the accurate answer. But there’s more. We know that neighborhood design in the United States was not created in some objective way. Neighborhoods were explicitly segregated (through redlining and other explicitly racist policies and practices), neighborhoods continue to be de facto segregated (through gentrification), and this plays a role in who lives where - in the denser cities or the less-dense suburbs and rural areas. Specifically, the data shows that Black families tend to live in areas of higher population density. These facts are relevant in terms of generational wealth (who can afford health care), access to health care (how easy is it to get from home to my doctor), access to healthy food (e.g. less fresh produce in high poverty areas, which include the denser cities, which affects community health), and access to good paying jobs (e.g. higher paying jobs that can accommodate working from home, which decreases a person’s risk to contracting COVID, versus working in jobs that have to be done in-person). So now, if we’re looking at what seemed to be a cut-and-dry math problem, an “objective” problem, what we see is, to get to the most accurate answer, to really know what the rate of spread will be, the mathematicians in the real world would have to include these data sets from the realm of social science.

And it’s the inclusion of data like this, that most teachers wouldn’t think to consider, that this tool is seeking to help with. So, when a teacher says there is only one right answer, we can push back to say “what do you mean by that? Do you mean that we just run the numbers from the initial question?” Traditionally that is yes. But this tool says, “Hey, we need to be able to identify, and teach students to identify, those problems that omit essential information relevant and necessary to truly arrive at the correct answer. At what the true rate of COVID spread is.” And this is so important! If we don’t include this data and miscalculate the rate of spread, then our policy decisions will be misinformed, and our own personal behaviors will be misinformed. And we know that my characterization above is accurate because it’s supported by the evidence. (No less than the CDC outlines the above, too: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html). Black people are 2-3 times more likely to contract COVID as a result of the system’s design, which is rooted in systemic-racism and white supremacy (PBS has a wonderful documentary and resources on the history of redlining and its affect on the ability of communities of color to accumulate wealth). But Black people are far less likely to have access to the vaccine (see Scientific American article).

When we look at this question now we see that the initial framing was problematic, and indeed racist. Omitting data sets that affect Black communities is racist. Framing the question in a way that only considers some raw numbers, and implying that those are the only numbers needing to be considered to arrive at the “correct” solution, is racist. Training teachers to spot weaknesses like this in a curriculum, or in their own practices, to ask deeper questions and train their students to ask deeper questions, is good for math instruction and good for student learning.

So the tool isn’t eroding the objectivity of numbers. Rather, it’s examining the subjective role that teachers play in the creation of math problems, the subjective role of defending which numbers are considered relevant to answering a problem, and the subjective role of limiting or allowing discussion on math problems like this. If the initial question were asked in class and a student raises their hand to ask: “Do these numbers take into affect the increased rate of spread in high-poverty neighborhoods and its disparate impact on Black communities?” will the teacher say, “Wow, that’s an important question to ask if we’re to accurately model and calculate the impact of the spread,” or will the teacher say, “Those numbers don’t matter. Just calculate the numbers in the problem.” This matters. Because either we will honor the lived experiences of our students and examine questions relevant to their lives, or we will gate-keep and shut down inquiry that explores questions raised by students. The tool is designed to prepare teachers in mathematics to have these considerations in instruction.

No one is being told to change how numbers work, but they are being asked to change how they develop questions and to change how they consider which numbers are relevant to a problem’s solution. When they say math isn’t objective, this is what they mean, that real-world calculus doesn’t exist only within certain numbers, that there are variables we often omit, and that those variables are often directly tied to systemic and structural racism and white supremacy.

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