If you hear of your school district making math more inclusive or bending mathematics to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, run for the hills! It’s time to find a new school.
Recently, Pittsburgh’s Public Schools Board approved a $50,000 grant to Quetzal Education Consulting, an antiracist group. The goal of Quetzal is to provide resources for “schools and educational spaces” to “transform their culture and praxis to foster anti-oppressive spaces.” As reported by the New York Post, Quetzal would provide a series of workshops tackling “oppressive practices in math instruction” and allow “math teachers to grow their antiracist math praxis.”
The latest move in DEI consulting is dangerous on two fronts: One, these are large sums of money going to organizations whose ideological agenda is to sow dissent in America’s public school systems; and two, this agenda serves to undermine mathematics education and bring math into the Orwellian space where 2 + 2 = 5. Or, in this case, 2 + 2 = DEI.
A Pervasive DEI Consulting Industry
DEI consulting has become a lucrative cottage industry, with school districts spending tens of thousands of dollars hiring consulting firms like Quetzal or having DEI consultants on staff. The North State Journal reports that Wake County, the second-largest district in North Carolina, and its Office of Equity Affairs had a budget of almost $1.3 million for its department in 2021–22, mostly staff. The Center for Antiracist Research, founded by the original antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi, is restructuring, perhaps even collapsing, due to reported financial mismanagement and Kendi’s “exploitative” work methods.
The money trail suggests that such consultants are doing these initiatives not for the greater good but for personal enrichment. They create the demand for their services by criticizing America as an inherently racist country, one that will hold back American students of color unless DEI initiatives and antiracist workshops are provided at taxpayer expense. In pushing this narrative, they have hoodwinked school administrators and parents into believing that DEI initiatives will somehow produce a future more conducive to human flourishing. What invariably happens is that DEI consultants get more money for themselves and their friends to give lectures on antiracism at $360 a ticket. (READ MORE: Mike Johnson’s Disbelief in Evolution Is Not Absurd)
Such news showcases the dangers of DEI consulting, especially as the cost per student continues to skyrocket. As the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy reports, Pittsburgh Public School District’s “average current expenditure per student in 2021-2022 was $28,071” while ranking 454th out of 599 Pennsylvania school districts. Increasing the cost per student by paying for antiracist workshops will not provide better outcomes for students.
The act of changing the mathematics curriculum to include DEI initiatives is the educational equivalent of 2 + 2= 5, the great litmus test of obedience in George Orwell’s 1984. In Orwell’s great work, the subjects of the regime had to admit that the most basic mathematical truth was false. They proved their loyalty to the Party and Big Brother by acknowledging that the Party could change reality and dictate what is true.
As in Orwell, now the goal of changing and inserting DEI initiatives into math curriculum serves an ideological agenda. If we acknowledge that mathematics is “inherently racist,” as Seattle school districts believe mathematics to be, and if we believe that mathematics describes reality in numbers and equations, it is not a far leap to acknowledge that efforts to change mathematics education are akin to changing reality itself. Such DEI initiatives would remake the world in its progressive image and, in the process, give these consultants a job.
How Do We Understand Math?
While these initiatives promise to provide a more “equitable” playing field, the only thing they will accomplish is students unable to measure the size, perimeter, and area of a field.
Mathematics, more so than any other discipline, conveys truth and models the world through numbers, equations, and algorithms. We cannot change math any more than we can change reality, for mathematics is the autobiographical language of the universe. To quote Galileo, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.” We cannot stop the universe from expanding any more than we can make 2 + 2 = 5. Mathematics is not invented but discovered, for the phenomenon of size, velocity, or parabolas are already happening without our realizing it.
Through mathematical reasoning, students can not only model what’s happening in the world right now but also predict what may happen in the future. The point of a problem about two trains going at different speeds hurtling toward the same location isn’t about punctuality but (hopefully) helping kids to connect mathematics with the real world. In so doing, students can see that the world is not random but orderly and that this order can be understood via the language of mathematics. The inclusion of DEI into mathematics undermines this fundamental insight by leaving students with the suspicion that the world is fundamentally against them.
So what is the proper way to teach math? In short, teachers and parents should celebrate the difficulty of mathematics. Math is no respecter of persons and is, indeed, hard for everyone. That’s the point: Mathematics stretches your thinking through difficult problems, recalling facts like multiplication tables more quickly, paying attention to precise details, and looking at a dilemma from another perspective.
Regardless of the type of school you attend — public, private, charter, classical — one’s math class can and should be both difficult and wondrous. Mathematics as a subject demonstrates the order and harmony in the world around us in a way language cannot always do. We can use mathematics not only to solve problems but also to gain confidence that our world is not inherently random and chaotic — that there is an order to the world that we can see, test, and demonstrate through the power of mathematical reasoning. This is simply one of many truths, drawn from the right understanding of mathematics education, that students need today.