Ted Dintersmith

I go back to when people in the workplace needed to do things like factor polynomials by hand.

Well, now that's all subsumed by computers.

And we still do that in school.

We not only still do it, it's mandatory.

It's multiple years of kids' time in school.

It's super high stakes.

It largely serves to rank and sort kids and punish millions.

And it's all towards skills that computers do well.

excellently tied to math that adults just don't use.

And I could rip through most of what's covered in high school.

And if there are any listeners who say, oh yeah, this morning I needed to take the cube root of minus 27, or I'm going to do well today because I can sort through a piecewise linear function, or yeah, the chain rule is going to make my day.

It's like, wait a minute.

And I think that's that gross mismatch between what we not only insist on in school, but devote thousands of hours to, versus a world that doesn't care about that anymore, but cares about all these really powerful, interesting math ideas, ideas that absolutely shape our lives.

You know, the more we do that, the longer we persist, the more kids leave school, you know, with really dismal prospects and a hollowed-out sense of purpose.

Well, one of the drivers, and there are several, I mean, first, they got an immediate boost because they put a gate,

after third grade.

So you couldn't go to fourth grade unless you could pass reading tests at third grade.

So you sort of basically strip out the bottom 10% of test scores, and then your fourth grade scores get a boost, and that happened.

And in looking at the data, they've kind of flatlined against the standard of the test.

They've increased in state rankings because many states have actually declined.