The Stanford professor and the math wars

Math problems without easy answers.

Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash

Math was never my subject. Going through public schools in California, I did fine in elementary and middle school, though it helped that my parents sent me to after-school Kumon classes for years. I loved algebra in eighth grade, where I had a teacher who was passionate and dynamic. The trouble started in high school. I couldn’t keep up in honors geometry, so I fell back to the non-honors version. Advanced algebra was not a problem. Pre-calculus, though, brought me to tears, and I struggled to understand the material no matter how late I stayed up studying or how many problems I worked through.

I knew that I “should” take calculus as a senior, because that’s what the “good” colleges wanted to see, and all of my friends did just that. But I knew I was going to be miserable (and being a teenager, I was miserable to begin with); I didn’t want to spend my last year of high school like that. Unfortunately, there were no other math options for me, so I took statistics at a community college, passed, and then went off to college. I was going to be a literature major and a journalist — someone who would never need to think about math again!

The joke’s on 16-year-old me, because I’ve spent the last few months thinking more deeply about math than I ever thought possible. The result is a just-published 9,000-word cover story in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the math wars. I profiled Dr. Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor who is the nation’s most influential expert on math education. She rose to prominence with research and writings that advocate for a more dynamic, inclusive, grounded-in-the-real-world style of math instruction. It’s a style that my younger self would have likely have preferred, and one that many teachers swear by. Reporting on these ideas made me rethink my own relationship with math: was I really bad at it, or was I just not consistently taught well? Or were my teachers doing their best in the system they were working in, and it was the overarching math system that was the problem?

As I sifted through years’ worth of books, studies, news articles, blog posts, school board agendas, press releases, and tweets, and interviewed dozens of people, including Dr. Boaler, I found that in the long history of the math wars (which I previously had no idea existed), there have always been people who oppose her types of ideas on ideological grounds. But there are also people (who sometimes, though not always, overlap with the first group) with substantive questions about whether the views Dr. Boaler advances are backed by evidence. I thought it was worth trying to get answers to those questions.

As I write in the piece:

Welcome to America’s knock-down, drag-out math wars. Boaler is fighting for what she calls a more inclusive way of teaching, armed with influential research. To the K-12 teachers who agree that math isn’t just for “math people,” that memorizing times tables should be replaced with real-world problem-solving, the Stanford professor is a “beacon of hope,” as one educator put it. But Boaler is a divisive figure. She has at times misinterpreted studies and made bold assertions with scant evidence, experts say, empowering skeptics who fear that her proposals would water down math and actually undermine her goal of a more equitable education system.

Last spring, a high school friend (who helped me out with a lot of math homework back in the day and now does math for a living) told me about the controversy over the California math framework. That’s the non-binding guide that will shape how math is taught in K-12 public schools, of which Dr. Boaler is one of five authors. I was on my way out from BuzzFeed News around the time, so when I started at The Chronicle in the fall, I knew this was one of the first stories I wanted to tackle. The math wars have always been high-stakes, but in 2022/2023, they feel particularly so: the booming tech industry has transformed my city and state and the world at large, yet so many Californians (particularly those not white or Asian) have been unable to reap the rewards because they lack the quantitative skills to be engineers or data scientists. Admission to selective colleges is even fiercer than when I was applying, and public schools that are making it harder to skip ahead in math (with the goal of improving equity) are facing pushback from worried parents. These tough questions about access and achievement are being worked out at a time when math is (still) dominated by white men, when education is at the heart of the culture wars, and when Fox News is routinely targeting women and minority scholars.

All of which is to say that math turned out to be one of the most complicated and fascinating subjects I’ve ever written about. It meant diving into fights over university admissions websites, interdepartmental Stanford fights, Twitter fights, neuroscience, the Cold War, and so much more. Here’s the story again — thanks for reading.