I agree that teacher training programs are laughable and rigor has been lamentably lost, but I strongly disagree with your dismissal of shifts toward equity. CRT has nothing whatever to do with my own district's recent decisions to finally pay attention to our low income students.
I taught in my small town, nearly all white-- but half rich, half working class -- town a decade ago. The "gifted" students were actually just the "rich" ones. I taught the non-honors, College Prep (they were not preparing for college) level, and my students were not ungifted, they were just from the wrong side of the tracks, or in our case, the hill towns. I know this is true because I asked my stronger readers and writers directly why they had not signed up for Honors. They told me they did not want to be grouped with the rich kids. A district admin admitted, "There are no poor kids in Honors Math." The seismic shifts that would be required to pull off your bullet list of proposals are not up to bureaucrats to enact, they are up to us as a citizenry to demand, and as it stands now, the only people who demand stuff are the well-educated, upwardly mobile parents whose kids, ironically, would do just fine on their own with a laptop and wifi.
My daughter will be in the first freshman class at that high school in their new untracked, unleveled system, and it's about time.
Whatever she may lose in rigor, I hope will be made up in the education she and her classmates will get in what actual citizenship looks like. People of all walks of life together in one room, compelled to work together. Where else in the US do we see that happening today?
I don't care if we produce the next Einstein. China can "win." I care about turning our common ship in the direction of our founding promises. The civil strife we saw on Jan 6th is just an amuse bouche for what's to come if we don't do that.
The students being the most harmed by the non-tracking are not white kids...they are high-performing, but often poor, children from Asian backgrounds, as well as high-performing Black and Hispanic children.
You may want to look up the examples of Stuyvesant in NYC and Lowell High School in San Francisco. So no, your example of the rich kids being the gifted kids is a parochial experience not duplicated throughout the United States.
If you can't bring everybody up, then bring everybody down.
CRT in math is unspeakable- thanks for speaking out. However I believe that the math curriculum has been a catastrophe for other ideological reasons for several decades. Teacher’s colleges have been dominated by the lazy idea that fun means easy, and a corresponding contempt for any form of learning that requires repetition for mastery. This has destroyed not only the math curriculum but the language curriculum. I was a highly non-interventionist parent, until I noticed at the end of second grade that my oldest daughter essentially didn’t know how to read or perform fundamental arithmetic operations. After spending some time with the curriculum I discovered that the math curriculum had entirely eliminated exercises that involved what was considered rote learning, like adding up columns of numbers. Instead they were given entertaining but completely confusing word problems. Generally the answer required skills not yet taught, even algebra, to solve.. Sometimes neither I nor my husband (we both have advanced degrees in mathematical fields) could figure out what was expected of the answer. When we went to the school, some teachers and administrators were themselves frustrated and supportive, while others said “Oh the kids here are so smart they don’t need drills.” We go to a high-performing school that is majority immigrant Asian. Although the kids are indeed bright, it turned out that they were receiving massive amounts of after-school supplementation in both formal classes and parental tutoring . I’ve begun to wonder whether curricular reforms are actually a clever ploy to reproduce class hierarchy by ensuring that no one without that kind of support can succeed.
This piling on of Critical Race Theory is getting ridiculous. It might help if the authors were actually conversant with its ideas before blaming it for America's decline in mathematics. That decline predates "CRT" by decades. Very sloppy, ideologically driven reasoning here. This kind of thinking needs to get out of the "equation" if the math problem is to be solved.
CRT explicitly devalues reason, logic, and science. This comes from its roots in postmodern philosophy, which has been influencing academia for decades in negative ways. Example of CRT in practice: The Rev Todd Eklof was reprimanded by some of this colleagues fin 2019 or using "reason and logic" in his book "The Gadfly Papers", which asked the Unitarian Universalist Association to engage in dialogues about the developing "cancel culture" and other illiberal trends in the UUA. The UUA freaked out, resulting in a witch-hunt against Eklof that was like right out the Salem witch trials, with all the hysteria and slander that you'd expect. Read all about it in his new book "The Gadfly Affair", which challenges us to overcome this new age of "Endarkenment" (vs "Enlightenment").
So, No, CRT is not benign. It's really ugly. John McWhorter even describes it as "neo-racism", and I'd add strong elements of neo-fascism (think about the persecutions and purges of 20th century totalitarian and fascist regimes, also the "red scare" of the 1950s, and the blaming/shaming/punishing of heretics by many religious sects through the ages). Anti-intellectualism (of the STEM type, not esoteric ideologies) is a core feature of CRT.
The assertion that Critical Race Theory is "rooted" in postmodern philosophy is simply incorrect. CRT was founded by Derrick Bell,a faculty member at Harvard Law School, as a tool of analysis to account for the role of race in American jurisprudence and its absence in legal theory. Unfortunately many conservatives and anti-woke liberals have constructed a sloppy caricature of CRT which appears to be a mishmash of social justice/racial critiques they appear to disagree with. I say "appear to disagree" because their comments suggest they have not seriously read any of the ideas they're criticizing but have simply put them in a bucket labeled Critical Race Theory. This intellectual laziness passing for "Enlightenment"is astounding! CRT is one of a diverse set of ideas
that constitute an ongoing black intellectual tradition reaching back to the 18th Century in North America. Sloppy thinking does a disservice not only to this tradition, but to postmodernism and mathematics education as well.
Read newdiscourses.com. James Lindsay has done in-depth research into CRT and comes to the same conclusions, backed up by many quotes from a variety of sources. I think that you're responding to what I call the "PR" version of CRT - it's a deliberate misrepresentation which hides all the ugly stuff that we actually see in "cancellation culture". That is, the "proof is in the pudding", which is what activated me, Lindsay, and many others.
Critical Race Theory, as a tool of social analysis and a supplement to academic legal theory has it's own source material and adherents. It is clear to me that you are not familiar with this, and from what I can discern from Mr. Lindsay's website - neither is he. To equate CRT and "cancellation culture" is again, sloppy thinking. If you were knowledgeable about CRT and how it is used in legal studies/analysis you would know that there is not a "PR" version of it. Just like there's not a "PR" version of quantum mechanics either.
I stand by assertion that what is occurring here is an ideologically driven project to collapse a number of social justice and racial analytics into a concocted "boogeyman" labeled Critical Race Theory. Once the ugly boogeyman is claimed to exist, then the ideologues have a source for what they consider to be cancellation culture, political correctness etc.,etc.
The analysis of oppressor/oppressed implicit to CRT is a racialization of Marxist class structure. And its emphasis on power as constant parameter encoded in discourse and structures is Foucauldian.
A rather curious comment from a historical point of view. Is the "idea" here that ANY analysis of oppressor/oppressed, by definition, must be an instance of the Marxist class structural paradigm in operation. Or, is this notion reserved for any oppressor/oppressed analysis grounded in race? In other words, racial analysis, specifically critical racial analysis, cannot stand on its own as an organic analytic birthed in the historical soil/soul of America - rather, it's a Prussian or French import.
For many opposed to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) in the 1950's the assumption was that its tenets were not rooted in organic American reality, id est, racial oppression - but was a beachhead for a foreign communist invasion.
CRT today (typified by the 1619 hoax) is effectively a conspiracy theory like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion but extended to include not only Jews but the Hellenized Jews of Indo-Europe (aka *White* Christians). It is certainly fair to look at the grotesque misuse of *race* by government entities under legal precedents, such as Dred Scot, Jim Crow and Plessy, but the outcome of the inquiry should be the opposite of what CRT proposes. Instead of resuscitating pseudo-science on *race* from a century ago, the entire edifice should be dismantled as dangerous and outdated. The last movement to reduce the complexity, diversity and richness of humanity to a few color codes ended up with yellow sew patches and starting a world war that killed 80 million.
"CRT explicitly devalues reason, logic, and science. This comes from its roots in postmodern philosophy, which has been influencing academia for decades in negative ways."
I've seen this claim in other places too, and it puzzles me. Postmodern philosophy is suspicious of "meta" narratives; however, the PM analysis I've read at least attempts to use logic and reason as tools. PM is certainly skeptical of the *narratives* around science, but it's skeptical of all large cultural narratives because they inherently tend to reflect the values of the cultures that produce them.
CRT may have come from a root of PM thought, but I don't think one can blame its devaluation of reason and logic on PM. It's a horrifying reduction of the world to power games that makes it do that. If logic and reason hinder your ability to take power, the response is not to change the things that logic and reason suggest are a problem, the response is to throw out logic and reason. People say that the obsession with power games is Foucault, but there isn't anything I'm aware of from Foucault that suggests logic and reason should be devalued.
I can't say I'm conversant in CRT, but I am certain of this: eliminating reliance on standardized testing and offering only one-size-fits-all math instruction that ignores differences in aptitude and existing knowledge are perverse.
It would be better to redress "underrepresentation" of black and Hispanic-surnamed applicants in elite universities by recourse to quotas, allocating a minimum number of slots to such applicants and selecting those who are best qualified by test scores and other neutral criteria than by simply ignoring test scores when evaluating applicants, which is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
One-size-fits-all teaching disserves the interest of students who are either capable of learning at a faster pace and/or have already mastered the skills being taught. It also disserves the interest of students who are falling behind and need remedial instruction. Hence it also disserves the interest of society at large.
They include a link to an encyclopedia article on CRT. Based on what I read there, I'm not sure where they misapplied those principles. It certainly seems to me that what people consider to be CRT is rapidly expanding, but I think that's more a function of a vacuum for a good way to identify an overlapping and related set of principles that may or may not "technically" be part of CRT. Can you offer some analysis as to its misuse here? You say it's a "legal theory" but the encyclopedic seems curiously devoid of "legal" definitions, instead comprising propositions about the state of human institutions and culture.
The link above published in the May 7th Boston Review provides a good framework for understanding CRT's recent elevation to right-wing boogeyman status, along with making the critical distinction of separating Critical Race Theory from Critical Race Studies. The article also names a number of the legal scholars, mostly from Harvard Law, who were instrumental in CRT's development. All would lay claim to CRT, but like many academic endeavors, they do not always agree. Although many would suggest that Prof. Derrick Bell is the founder of the analysis, Kimberle Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, has done much to advance the legal theory. There is no easy introduction or Cliff Notes for CRT. The idea that it is being advocated as an addition to the curriculums of primary and secondary schools is ludicrous. There is a good article about Professor Crenshaw and her work in the internet magazine Vox, May 28th, 2019 titled "The Intersectionality Wars"
That's a good read; thank you for linking it. I can't help but think it paints the critics of whatever it is we're apparently mistaking for "CRT" with a rather broad brush: it has many critics who are not right-wing at all. In fairness, the critics of "CRT" also paint with an overbroad brush.
The problems in K12 mathematics existed long before DEI and single-tracking initiatives. DEI may not be a panacea, but history proves that it's also obviously not the root cause of the problem. The red meat laid out at the beginning of this article is mostly a red herring.
However, I really paid $10 to comment on the article’s defense of ostensible measures of merit. Professional mathematics is a case study in how an old guard obsessed with preserving "objective selection process based on merit" can corrode the culture of a field and drive away a generation of the best and brightest minds.
When my undergraduate mentees ask about Mathematics PhD programs, I warn them vehemently that against pissing away a year of their late teens/early 20s pouring over Berkley’s archive of test questions. Sometimes I use stronger language. That time is too valuable, and the rewards of a Mathematics PhD candidacy too modest, to justify the waste. Alternatives abound.
If mathematicians are frustrated with the quality of the domestic students in their PhD cohorts, the single best intervention would be to insist that NSF funds for mathematics research go only to mathematics departments with acceptable preliminary examination pass rates.
CRT is a collectivist inhumane ideology that runs roughshod over the rights and well being of individuals: never mind if a gifted child misses the opportunity of a lifetime to become a great mathematician as long as the masses in the classrooms are repeating the same dogma in sync and leaving school equally ignorant.
I agree that teacher training programs are laughable and rigor has been lamentably lost, but I strongly disagree with your dismissal of shifts toward equity. CRT has nothing whatever to do with my own district's recent decisions to finally pay attention to our low income students.
I taught in my small town, nearly all white-- but half rich, half working class -- town a decade ago. The "gifted" students were actually just the "rich" ones. I taught the non-honors, College Prep (they were not preparing for college) level, and my students were not ungifted, they were just from the wrong side of the tracks, or in our case, the hill towns. I know this is true because I asked my stronger readers and writers directly why they had not signed up for Honors. They told me they did not want to be grouped with the rich kids. A district admin admitted, "There are no poor kids in Honors Math." The seismic shifts that would be required to pull off your bullet list of proposals are not up to bureaucrats to enact, they are up to us as a citizenry to demand, and as it stands now, the only people who demand stuff are the well-educated, upwardly mobile parents whose kids, ironically, would do just fine on their own with a laptop and wifi.
My daughter will be in the first freshman class at that high school in their new untracked, unleveled system, and it's about time.
Whatever she may lose in rigor, I hope will be made up in the education she and her classmates will get in what actual citizenship looks like. People of all walks of life together in one room, compelled to work together. Where else in the US do we see that happening today?
I don't care if we produce the next Einstein. China can "win." I care about turning our common ship in the direction of our founding promises. The civil strife we saw on Jan 6th is just an amuse bouche for what's to come if we don't do that.
The students being the most harmed by the non-tracking are not white kids...they are high-performing, but often poor, children from Asian backgrounds, as well as high-performing Black and Hispanic children.
You may want to look up the examples of Stuyvesant in NYC and Lowell High School in San Francisco. So no, your example of the rich kids being the gifted kids is a parochial experience not duplicated throughout the United States.
If you can't bring everybody up, then bring everybody down.
The vast majority of school systems in this country look a lot more like Sheela's than like NYC/SF.
CRT in math is unspeakable- thanks for speaking out. However I believe that the math curriculum has been a catastrophe for other ideological reasons for several decades. Teacher’s colleges have been dominated by the lazy idea that fun means easy, and a corresponding contempt for any form of learning that requires repetition for mastery. This has destroyed not only the math curriculum but the language curriculum. I was a highly non-interventionist parent, until I noticed at the end of second grade that my oldest daughter essentially didn’t know how to read or perform fundamental arithmetic operations. After spending some time with the curriculum I discovered that the math curriculum had entirely eliminated exercises that involved what was considered rote learning, like adding up columns of numbers. Instead they were given entertaining but completely confusing word problems. Generally the answer required skills not yet taught, even algebra, to solve.. Sometimes neither I nor my husband (we both have advanced degrees in mathematical fields) could figure out what was expected of the answer. When we went to the school, some teachers and administrators were themselves frustrated and supportive, while others said “Oh the kids here are so smart they don’t need drills.” We go to a high-performing school that is majority immigrant Asian. Although the kids are indeed bright, it turned out that they were receiving massive amounts of after-school supplementation in both formal classes and parental tutoring . I’ve begun to wonder whether curricular reforms are actually a clever ploy to reproduce class hierarchy by ensuring that no one without that kind of support can succeed.
This piling on of Critical Race Theory is getting ridiculous. It might help if the authors were actually conversant with its ideas before blaming it for America's decline in mathematics. That decline predates "CRT" by decades. Very sloppy, ideologically driven reasoning here. This kind of thinking needs to get out of the "equation" if the math problem is to be solved.
CRT explicitly devalues reason, logic, and science. This comes from its roots in postmodern philosophy, which has been influencing academia for decades in negative ways. Example of CRT in practice: The Rev Todd Eklof was reprimanded by some of this colleagues fin 2019 or using "reason and logic" in his book "The Gadfly Papers", which asked the Unitarian Universalist Association to engage in dialogues about the developing "cancel culture" and other illiberal trends in the UUA. The UUA freaked out, resulting in a witch-hunt against Eklof that was like right out the Salem witch trials, with all the hysteria and slander that you'd expect. Read all about it in his new book "The Gadfly Affair", which challenges us to overcome this new age of "Endarkenment" (vs "Enlightenment").
So, No, CRT is not benign. It's really ugly. John McWhorter even describes it as "neo-racism", and I'd add strong elements of neo-fascism (think about the persecutions and purges of 20th century totalitarian and fascist regimes, also the "red scare" of the 1950s, and the blaming/shaming/punishing of heretics by many religious sects through the ages). Anti-intellectualism (of the STEM type, not esoteric ideologies) is a core feature of CRT.
The assertion that Critical Race Theory is "rooted" in postmodern philosophy is simply incorrect. CRT was founded by Derrick Bell,a faculty member at Harvard Law School, as a tool of analysis to account for the role of race in American jurisprudence and its absence in legal theory. Unfortunately many conservatives and anti-woke liberals have constructed a sloppy caricature of CRT which appears to be a mishmash of social justice/racial critiques they appear to disagree with. I say "appear to disagree" because their comments suggest they have not seriously read any of the ideas they're criticizing but have simply put them in a bucket labeled Critical Race Theory. This intellectual laziness passing for "Enlightenment"is astounding! CRT is one of a diverse set of ideas
that constitute an ongoing black intellectual tradition reaching back to the 18th Century in North America. Sloppy thinking does a disservice not only to this tradition, but to postmodernism and mathematics education as well.
Read newdiscourses.com. James Lindsay has done in-depth research into CRT and comes to the same conclusions, backed up by many quotes from a variety of sources. I think that you're responding to what I call the "PR" version of CRT - it's a deliberate misrepresentation which hides all the ugly stuff that we actually see in "cancellation culture". That is, the "proof is in the pudding", which is what activated me, Lindsay, and many others.
Critical Race Theory, as a tool of social analysis and a supplement to academic legal theory has it's own source material and adherents. It is clear to me that you are not familiar with this, and from what I can discern from Mr. Lindsay's website - neither is he. To equate CRT and "cancellation culture" is again, sloppy thinking. If you were knowledgeable about CRT and how it is used in legal studies/analysis you would know that there is not a "PR" version of it. Just like there's not a "PR" version of quantum mechanics either.
I stand by assertion that what is occurring here is an ideologically driven project to collapse a number of social justice and racial analytics into a concocted "boogeyman" labeled Critical Race Theory. Once the ugly boogeyman is claimed to exist, then the ideologues have a source for what they consider to be cancellation culture, political correctness etc.,etc.
The analysis of oppressor/oppressed implicit to CRT is a racialization of Marxist class structure. And its emphasis on power as constant parameter encoded in discourse and structures is Foucauldian.
A rather curious comment from a historical point of view. Is the "idea" here that ANY analysis of oppressor/oppressed, by definition, must be an instance of the Marxist class structural paradigm in operation. Or, is this notion reserved for any oppressor/oppressed analysis grounded in race? In other words, racial analysis, specifically critical racial analysis, cannot stand on its own as an organic analytic birthed in the historical soil/soul of America - rather, it's a Prussian or French import.
For many opposed to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) in the 1950's the assumption was that its tenets were not rooted in organic American reality, id est, racial oppression - but was a beachhead for a foreign communist invasion.
CRT today (typified by the 1619 hoax) is effectively a conspiracy theory like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion but extended to include not only Jews but the Hellenized Jews of Indo-Europe (aka *White* Christians). It is certainly fair to look at the grotesque misuse of *race* by government entities under legal precedents, such as Dred Scot, Jim Crow and Plessy, but the outcome of the inquiry should be the opposite of what CRT proposes. Instead of resuscitating pseudo-science on *race* from a century ago, the entire edifice should be dismantled as dangerous and outdated. The last movement to reduce the complexity, diversity and richness of humanity to a few color codes ended up with yellow sew patches and starting a world war that killed 80 million.
"CRT explicitly devalues reason, logic, and science. This comes from its roots in postmodern philosophy, which has been influencing academia for decades in negative ways."
I've seen this claim in other places too, and it puzzles me. Postmodern philosophy is suspicious of "meta" narratives; however, the PM analysis I've read at least attempts to use logic and reason as tools. PM is certainly skeptical of the *narratives* around science, but it's skeptical of all large cultural narratives because they inherently tend to reflect the values of the cultures that produce them.
CRT may have come from a root of PM thought, but I don't think one can blame its devaluation of reason and logic on PM. It's a horrifying reduction of the world to power games that makes it do that. If logic and reason hinder your ability to take power, the response is not to change the things that logic and reason suggest are a problem, the response is to throw out logic and reason. People say that the obsession with power games is Foucault, but there isn't anything I'm aware of from Foucault that suggests logic and reason should be devalued.
"CRT explicitly devalues reason, logic, and science."
IMHO, that sentence is an example of what it claims something else is doing.
I'm done...😖
I can't say I'm conversant in CRT, but I am certain of this: eliminating reliance on standardized testing and offering only one-size-fits-all math instruction that ignores differences in aptitude and existing knowledge are perverse.
It would be better to redress "underrepresentation" of black and Hispanic-surnamed applicants in elite universities by recourse to quotas, allocating a minimum number of slots to such applicants and selecting those who are best qualified by test scores and other neutral criteria than by simply ignoring test scores when evaluating applicants, which is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
One-size-fits-all teaching disserves the interest of students who are either capable of learning at a faster pace and/or have already mastered the skills being taught. It also disserves the interest of students who are falling behind and need remedial instruction. Hence it also disserves the interest of society at large.
They include a link to an encyclopedia article on CRT. Based on what I read there, I'm not sure where they misapplied those principles. It certainly seems to me that what people consider to be CRT is rapidly expanding, but I think that's more a function of a vacuum for a good way to identify an overlapping and related set of principles that may or may not "technically" be part of CRT. Can you offer some analysis as to its misuse here? You say it's a "legal theory" but the encyclopedic seems curiously devoid of "legal" definitions, instead comprising propositions about the state of human institutions and culture.
http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory
The link above published in the May 7th Boston Review provides a good framework for understanding CRT's recent elevation to right-wing boogeyman status, along with making the critical distinction of separating Critical Race Theory from Critical Race Studies. The article also names a number of the legal scholars, mostly from Harvard Law, who were instrumental in CRT's development. All would lay claim to CRT, but like many academic endeavors, they do not always agree. Although many would suggest that Prof. Derrick Bell is the founder of the analysis, Kimberle Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, has done much to advance the legal theory. There is no easy introduction or Cliff Notes for CRT. The idea that it is being advocated as an addition to the curriculums of primary and secondary schools is ludicrous. There is a good article about Professor Crenshaw and her work in the internet magazine Vox, May 28th, 2019 titled "The Intersectionality Wars"
That's a good read; thank you for linking it. I can't help but think it paints the critics of whatever it is we're apparently mistaking for "CRT" with a rather broad brush: it has many critics who are not right-wing at all. In fairness, the critics of "CRT" also paint with an overbroad brush.
The problems in K12 mathematics existed long before DEI and single-tracking initiatives. DEI may not be a panacea, but history proves that it's also obviously not the root cause of the problem. The red meat laid out at the beginning of this article is mostly a red herring.
However, I really paid $10 to comment on the article’s defense of ostensible measures of merit. Professional mathematics is a case study in how an old guard obsessed with preserving "objective selection process based on merit" can corrode the culture of a field and drive away a generation of the best and brightest minds.
When my undergraduate mentees ask about Mathematics PhD programs, I warn them vehemently that against pissing away a year of their late teens/early 20s pouring over Berkley’s archive of test questions. Sometimes I use stronger language. That time is too valuable, and the rewards of a Mathematics PhD candidacy too modest, to justify the waste. Alternatives abound.
If mathematicians are frustrated with the quality of the domestic students in their PhD cohorts, the single best intervention would be to insist that NSF funds for mathematics research go only to mathematics departments with acceptable preliminary examination pass rates.
CRT is a collectivist inhumane ideology that runs roughshod over the rights and well being of individuals: never mind if a gifted child misses the opportunity of a lifetime to become a great mathematician as long as the masses in the classrooms are repeating the same dogma in sync and leaving school equally ignorant.