California’s Department of Education has decided to gut the state’s mathematics program because too many Asian Americans have succeeded in gifted programs.
As a part of the department’s push to enact greater racial “equity” in education, it seeks to remove tracking options for students more proficient at math than their peers, putting public school students who require calculus and other advanced math classes for their college applications at a massive disadvantage compared to their private school peers.
“In California in the years 2004–2014, 32 percent of Asian American students were in gifted programs compared with 8 percent of White students, 4 percent of Black students, and 3 percent of Latinx students,” the proposed framework by the department laments. The principles adopted by the department framework to undo such an evil include rejecting the “ideas of natural gifts and talents” and the belief that treating “everyone the same” is sufficient. Instead, they wish to eliminate “option-limiting tracking,” and in the process, “the rush to calculus.”
In practice, the proposed rules would ban grouping students by ability or merit, all but eliminating algebra for middle schoolers and a crucial two years of calculus for high schoolers aiming to pursue a STEM career. The result: California would actively decimate the earnings and career potentials of its own public school students in the name of evil “equity.”
Wealthy children will always have Kumon and coding classes to beef up abysmal public school programs or subsidize private school classes. Wealthy parents will always find a way to decorate their children’s resumes with prime volunteering gigs at their rich friends’ charities and internships at their rich accountants’ firms.
But for the poor children who have to work shifts at the local pharmacy after school instead of running debate club or fundraising for UNICEF? Stellar marks in AP Calculus are their only chance at admission to the engineering department of UC Berkeley or the math department at UCLA.
Calculus isn’t the Holy Grail, of course. Some students would benefit by taking statistics and personal finance over calculus and number theory. But for those underprivileged children dreaming of becoming surgeons, nurses, computer scientists, or climate scientists, they need the public school system to offer gifted options. They just cannot compete with the private school children without them.
California’s plan promotes “equity” the same way the USSR did: by forcing everyone into misery, but equally. It’s a moral travesty and one built on the very racism it claims to refute.
