Blood Math: Brawl Over Politics in the Classroom is Misguided
By SUZANNE LA BARRE

It's a simple enough equation: Spark kids' interest in math, await future Nobel Laureates.

Few would contest the virtue of the latter—particularly in a country that cultivates more Albert Fishes than Albert Einsteins. It’s the former that raises hackles. Last month, a Brooklyn conference on using social issues to teach math drew the ire of conservative critics and others, who say politics shouldn't sully the public school classroom.

Trotting out the old David Duke argument, these critics insist lessons on military expenditures, poverty and geographical racism amount to indoctrination. ("Would you like it if the Grand Wizard taught Civil War history?") Social justice math educators, on the other hand, say they're just trying to make math fun and relevant.

Trouble is, they're both wrong.

That's because social justice math isn't really about politics, it's about good teaching—a point lost on both sides. Conservatives, for instance, generally holler "liberal trickery!" when they see deviations from traditional 1+1=2 math. An instructor who analyzes Barbie's leggy bod to teach ratios is a radical feminist. Another who uses Census data to explain correlations between Zip codes and factors such as income, race and education is a GDR-enamored communist.

Of course, this is irrational. Calmer observers agree that a teacher soap-boxing about Karl Marx is qualitatively different from a teacher showing students that Barbie in the flesh would look like Jenna Jameson on stilts. Conservatives, though, don't make such distinctions. Alleging liberal brainwashing is an easier tack and distracts from the biggest affront to right-wing politics, which is that numbers don't lie. (See Iraq war spending.)

As for proponents of social justice math, they're confusing social justice with effective instruction. Making math relevant is great if it works. But a lot of it smacks of silliness.

For example, an East Oakland math teacher counts a project on Tupac Numerology—the conspiracy theory that the famed rapper murdered in 1996 faked his death and left clues in the number seven—as an assignment for high school juniors. The idea is to appeal to kids who would otherwise sleep through class. It's a noble effort, except that the actual math is about as complicated as an MTV countdown, when most juniors are learning algebra, geometry or calculus.

Maybe this sort of exercise is an anomaly. Maybe most social justice math is rigorous and teachers nationwide are molding utter whizzes, who can solve the Riemann hypothesis in their sleep. But how would we know? Little research exists to demonstrate that social justice math improves student learning and test scores.

At best, social justice math can pique students' curiosity. That's no small feat. A lot of us—this writer included—prefer the sound of nails on a chalkboard to crunching numbers. But after that, teachers have to ensure students are properly challenged. And unless Tupac and Barbie can be substituted for sine and cosine, teachers will have to move beyond politics.