Andrew Hacker has taught political science at Queens College, City University of New York, for nearly 45 years, plus quantitative reasoning for the last three. Not one to decelerate, at 86 he is doing nothing less than taking on the mathosphere, where, he admits, he has few fans. His experimental course requires no geometry, algebra or calculus; instead, he teaches facility with numbers. He calls it adult arithmetic, and it involves statistics, analytic thinking and rigorous computation. Further challenging convention, his new book, “The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions,” published next month, argues against the requirement that all high school students take a full menu of math.
Q. Why take on mathematics?
My reason is not very popular. At the very time we should be honing and sharpening quantitative reasoning skills we punch students into algebra, geometry, calculus. The Math People take over and ignore much simpler needs. Arithmetic is super essential — we quantify everything.
It began to bother me: One in five of our ninth graders fails to get a high school diploma, and the single biggest academic reason is that they fail math. And this is getting worse with the Common Core. A CUNY study of its mandated algebra course found that 57 percent failed.
Q. Aren’t algebra and geometry essential skills?
The number of people who use either in their jobs is tiny, at most 5 percent. You don’t need that kind of math for coding. It’s not a building block.
Colleges do require math to get in, much more than their students will need. It’s a “rigor” ritual that makes them feel better about themselves.
Q. What about those entrance exams?
If a college wants its applicants to have some math, they can scrutinize high school transcripts. On the whole, I’d be happy if the ACT and SAT quietly disappeared. Speed may be necessary for firefighters and airline pilots. But not in the intellectual enterprise. And yet, on many fronts, test scores in math provide an edge for awards and admissions.
Q. Girls have lagged on the SAT math section for decades, by 31 points on average in 2015. The belief is that boys are better at math. You don’t buy that.
Research shows that girls do better than boys in math class, where sentient teachers evaluate their work. An ACT review of high school transcripts found girls’ math grades to be about 4 percent higher than boys’ — and yet boys beat the girls by about 4 percent on the ACT. A College Board survey of college freshmen had girls doing 6 percent better, but in a report on college-bound seniors, the girls do 6 percent worse on the SAT.
There are many reasons for this. More boys take physics and computer science, which hone quantitative and spatial skills. What ultimately pulls girls’ scores down, though, is their tendency to be conscientious, to overanalyze and to recheck answers on tests, which squanders crucial seconds; they are also more apt to skip a question if they aren’t sure, whereas boys take a stab.
I’ll give you my definition of education: 17 years of sustained sitting. Boys are much antsier than girls. Girls are better studiers than boys.
Q. Will the revised SAT, debuting next month, result in higher scores for girls?
Perhaps it will. What may help are new data-based questions, which can draw on their analytical strengths. The hitch is that more of the math will be couched in paragraphs, which may intensify the pressure for speed.
But the new SAT will emulate the ACT’s format, going from five to four options, which should save a few seconds on each item. And like the ACT, it will cease penalizing guessing. We’ll soon see if this will make girls more daring.
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