The Oregon Department of Education is promoting and encouraging its educators to register for a course that likens modern math instruction to the “toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture.”
A newsletter sent by the government body last week included the mention of a course titled “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction,” which teachers may partake in on Feb. 21. The program seeks to align educators with the “path to math equity” through exploring “ethnomathematics” with “culturally relevant, antiracist pedagogy, practices, and curriculum.”
“White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions,” the course description stated. “Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics.”
The course continued in a section on “white supremacy culture” in math classrooms, saying, “This reinforces the idea that there is only one right way to do math. The history of mathematics, its colonization, and what is deemed as ‘acceptable’ knowledge is rich and complex, therefore, the way that mathematics is taught in the United States needs to be interrogated because it currently centers Western, Eurocentric ways of processing and knowing information. When students are required to learn in this way, they either have to unlearn their learned native traditions to meet teacher expectations, or they are deprived of learning math in their ancestral history. For teachers, teaching the way they learned also reinforces the right to comfort for teachers because to conform is easier than to challenge themselves to teach math differently.”
The program insisted that educators “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.” It added that it is “unequivocally false” to assume math is an “objective” discipline.
“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” it said. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
The course instead encouraged teachers to “come up with at least two answers that might solve this problem.” The course is also riddled with guidance to reject “individualism” in favor of “collectivism.”
“While there is some value in students being able to complete work independently, when this is the only or most common avenue for learning or practicing, it reinforces individualism and the notion that I’m the only one,” the document stated. “This does not give value to collectivism and community understanding, and fosters conditions for competition and individual success, which perpetuates the idea that if a student is failing it is because they are not trying hard enough or that they don’t care.”
The wording also featured an apparent attack on capitalist practices.
“We cannot dismantle racism in a system that exploits people for private profit,” it said. “If we want to dismantle racism, then we must build a movement for economic justice.”
The Oregon Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
