With great fanfare, NBA immortal LeBron James established the “I Promise charter school in 2018 to educate “at-risk” students. The I Promise School, which teaches children from 1st to 8th grade, promises:
With education as the driving force of change, the LeBron James Family Foundation is not only spreading that impact and improving lives of inner-city students and families, but also shifting the course of an entire community. Focusing on his hometown of Akron, the Foundation’s I PROMISE program provides year-round resources, access to opportunities, supportive skill development, constant encouragement and other wraparound supports to more than 1,300 Akron Public School students who have all been guaranteed college scholarships if they do their part. These efforts have culminated in the groundbreaking new public school – the I Promise School – that is taking an innovative approach to providing a challenging, supportive, and life-changing education, creating a new model for urban public education.
Soaring and inspiring words…it’s too bad that the Akron Beacon Journal reported this week that the 2023 “class of eighth graders at the I Promise School hasn’t had a single student pass the state’s basic math test since the group was in the third grade.” Moreover, “The state has also issued its first concern about the school: two of I Promise’s biggest subgroups of students, black students and those with disabilities, are now testing in the bottom 5% in the state, landing the school on the Ohio Department of Education’s list of those requiring targeted intervention.”
The response from those responsible? “Huminahuminahumina…” Stephanie Davis, the new principal of the school this year who was introduced as “the perfect person to lead the I Promise School and all of our families to the success we know they will achieve,” according to the school district, had no immediate explanation.
Why did it take three years for administrators to address this problem? Will the basic assumption that it makes pedagogical sense to have all “at risk” students in any class, rather than allowing them to benefit from the influence of less disadvantaged lids? What does it take to shut down a school as incompetent?
What are the odds that the I Promise School’s failure to live up to its promise will be blamed on systemic racism? I wonder how many of those 8th graders who can’t pass a math test can recite the minutiae of Malcolm X’s life story…
In related depressing education news from this month:
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A new program created by professors at San Diego State University and Loyola Marymount University is being promoted by the Oregon Department of Education as a way to “dismantle” instances of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom.” An example of “white supremacy” highlighted by the course is “the concept of mathematics being purely objective,” which, the course teaches, “is unequivocally false.” “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” describes itself as “an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and Multilingual students” that provides “opportunities for ongoing self-reflection as they seek to develop an anti-racist math practice.”
- California’s State Board of Education this month approved its “2023 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools,” overhauling how the math is taught in the state. The new math teaching guidelines provide a framework of “teaching around big ideas” through student-led “inquiry.” Under the new formula, math concepts such as algebra will be taught “visually and through words.” “Student tracking” practices, which provided math-adept students access to advanced instruction are out, so differences in “school experiences” like accelerated versus non-accelerated courses won’t interfere with “equitable student mathematics success.” Translation: California wants equal results in math instruction regardless of effort and ability. This will, you see, make “affirmative action” superfluous.
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Advanced placement for math in middle school is now forbidden in Cambridge, Mass. Public Schools, which began phasing out advanced math courses in grades six through eight when district officials noticed sharp racial disparities in grades. Students who were being placed in the advanced math track were mostly white and Asian, while the lower-level courses had a high percentage of black and Latino students, the Boston Globe reported this month. Now none of the district’s four middle schools offer Algebra I.
In a statement, the school district said, “Cambridge Public Schools is deeply committed to providing a high-quality, rigorous learning experience for all of our students, while also placing a strong focus on addressing the academic achievement and opportunity gaps in our community. We are in the process of developing an equitable plan with great thought and intentionality that establishes a level of mathematics literacy required for full participation and access to opportunities.”
Tip: Never entrust your children’s education to administrators who use words like “intentionality.“
Ethics Alarms 
Math is racist.
Oops. I posted that before reading the related news items. I guess I was just surprised the principal of LeBron’s school didn’t immediately default to math being white supremacist.
The story about LeBron’s school is actually relatively good news. When I saw the headline, I had assumed the school’s administrators were buying themselves luxury homes or giving lavish salaries for no show jobs to relatives with funds embezzled from the project.
Don’t relax too soon. That may be next week’s news.
I was standing in line at the Dollar general the other day. On obese black women walked in with a 3-4 year old boy in tow.
First words out of her mouth as she entered the aisle next to me, “Shut up or I’ll cut your ass.”
This is why they suck math.
Math is a bitch that don’t encourage shit.
Emotionally this boy will grow up with stunted cognitive development resulting from direct and indirect emotional trauma.
Math is rough unless you are naturally gifted. I am not, yet I have spent nearly 100hrs this year relearning and developing new ways of explaining algebra and geometry to my son.
Most of my work with him is not math related though provoked by math, it’s how to handle and navigate and use his feelings as he encounters impossibly difficult tasks.
The premise of removing advanced placement courses for advanced students is itself racist. The idea that “Black, Latinx, and Multilingual students” can’t keep up just because of their blackness and latin and multilingual heritage goes way beyond the “racism of low expectation”. It’s foolish to say “the concept of mathematics being purely objective … is unequivocally false.” Mathematics is purely objective, like it or not.
I started to read the “strides” from “Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” As Jack likes to say, “authentic frontier gibberish”. To argue with it would make you stupid too. The only credible response is a big, wet, tongue-out raspberry. But I wonder about two things.
First, are Exeter, the Latin School, and Sidwell also removing advanced placement courses for advanced students?
Second, what is LeBron James’ reaction or response to the failure of his admirable attempt to improve education, and is he outraged that the administration of the I Promise School spent his money with no results? I mean, where did the money go?
The logical extension of the argument that we don’t need Math because we have computers to do calculations is that we don’t need education at all. The logical extension of that is that in twenty or thirty years we become less than a third world country and have no civilization left.
I skimmed through “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” and it seems like what they’re actually trying to do is make sure all students have a good natural language grasp of applied mathematics in addition to teaching the technical terms. They’re using translation mindset to make sure teachers make math accessible to students from all linguistic backgrounds by grounding the exercises in a robust understanding of vernacular English. This is good.
What I find ironic is they aren’t describing what they’re doing in ways that all adults understand. They could just say that while the principles of mathematics are objective, the application of those principles is subject to Garbage In, Garbage Out: if you construct a problem with biased assumptions, you will get biased answers. The anti-racism part is in the teaching, to make sure teachers consider that trouble learning might be due to language issues rather than character issues.
Semantics mindset users who don’t also use translation mindset (adding empathy mindset to semantics) do often have a habit of encountering people who don’t immediately understand information formatted in a particular way and dismissing their intelligence. That is indeed a contributing factor to racism. However, a translation user (such as myself) describing the process of negating this bias would not assume that the audience is racist, and especially not “white supremacist” specifically.
It’s simple enough to say that semantics users can fall prey to bias and get very good at rationalizing their biases (and the biases of their fellows) using biased semantics. Dismissing people who aren’t as well versed in a specific semantic paradigm, using biased labels, and framing problems with built-in assumptions are all ways that semantics users can spiral into bigotry. That can happen to anyone, it has happened all around the world throughout human history, and in particular it happened to Europeans for hundreds of years.
I would very much like to see a class that specifically teaches students how to not fall into those traps, such as by using observation mindset. Part 4 of the syllabus (“Connecting Critical Intersections: The interconnectedness of English language learning and the development of mathematical thinking”) looked alright, but if they don’t know how to describe what they’re doing so it makes sense to everyone, they are not off to an auspicious start.
Part 5 (“Sustaining Equitable Practice: Coaching structures that support math educators’ in their ongoing centering of equity principles”) also confuses me, because I wouldn’t expect students to be learning about critically assessing statistics and mathematical models until they started, well, learning about statistics and mathematical models. These problems seem to be more basic, like algebra. It’s never to early to learn about critical thinking, but when you apply “am I asking the right question” to algebra, it usually has to do with more concrete calculations like gas mileage, rather than social justice impact.
Maybe a better approach would be to get qualified math teachers. The goals you stated are impossible for teachers that don’t really grasp the concepts of the class they are teaching. We need to require a mathematics degree for math teachers (and not a “math education degree”).
On the plus side, it’s unlikely that any of the “students” in the examples noted are likely to turn up later in engineering schools where they will supply mocking answers to diversity questionnaires.
RE: California
Under the new formula, math concepts such as algebra will be taught “visually and through words.”
Yeah, I remember the good old days when we all learned math and algebra exclusively through smell and taste, rubbing our fingers over the book pages, and listening to instrumental music. The teacher never once wrote anything on the chalkboard nor ever spoke a single word. THIS IS NEW!!! THIS IS PROGRESS!!!
Also: “visually”…? What about blind students?!?
WHERE’S YOUR INCLUSIVITY YOU BLIND-PHOBIC MONSTERS?!?
–Dwayne
I would very much doubt any of the students could recite the story of Malcolm X’s life. That isn’t something they would be allowed to know. Malcolm X rebelled against the leftist orthodoxy and several assassination attempts by the Nation of Islam were made. His death was called for by Louis Farrakhan. Although several Nation of Islam members were convicted of his murder, most of their convictions were overturned because the FBI tampered with the evidence (so, a longstanding tradition). His outing of Elijiah Muhammed as a pedophile and his regret over white hatred in his later days make him unsuitable for a black role model by leftists. Luckily for the left, he was killed before those views could be widely spread.
However, I will concede that the children may repeat that Malcolm X was a gay hero of the black nationalist movement as a result of their indoctrination.
Jack, just include the word Trump in the article somewhere. It’ll drive up traffic.