Experience is a hard teacher. And the only defense against its lessons is a hardened carapace of ideology. Unfortunately, Ontario’s Mathematics Coordinators Association is captive to an ideology, and so impervious to lessons available to it.
Our own Ari Blaff’s reporting demonstrated that the fashionable but flimsy ideology of anti-racism is corrupting education in Ontario — creating a dangerous environment for teachers, and ultimately abandoning to academic mediocrity the underprivileged students the system claims it wants to serve.
Blaff’s reporting showed that a “no tolerance” policy for violence produced safe schools in Ontario. When it was abandoned for a policy that sought primarily to equalize disciplinary actions across racial groups, violence increased dramatically.
Ontario’s attempt to end academic streaming, which groups classes by ability, is simultaneously depriving the most competent students of challenging work and saddling the most challenged students with work they can’t complete. “Students at the high end are not getting the enrichment they require and students at the low end aren’t getting the support they need,” one teacher told Blaff.
Ontario’s math teachers are subjected to absurd indoctrination from consultants who say that insisting “2 + 2 = 4” promotes “white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.” The introduction of an anti-racist mathematics curriculum that encourages students to “invent their own ways” of solving problems has corresponded with a catastrophic drop in math scores on standardized tests among Ontario students.
The Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association issued a response to the intrepid reporting by Ari Blaff. They express their wish to “state unequivocally where we, and the organization, stand on issues of equity and anti-oppression as they relate to mathematics education.”
The OMCA repeats at face value the invidious description of their critics from the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming that “far-right extremists believe that trans people, like immigrants and non-whites, are hastening the destruction of an idealized white, Western culture.” What this has to do with their declining achievements as educators is anyone’s guess.
The only thing unequivocal in their statement is their commitment to meaningless jargon. The OMCA says it wants to honor “the diversity of students’ lived experiences and mathematical backgrounds so all students develop positive mathematics dispositions and identities.” They want to “identify and address systemic barriers to equitable mathematics education . . . so that every student . . . can meet their fullest potential.”
The problem is that taking time in math class to teach students about oppression has led to more failure in math, and we presume it consequently forms poor “mathematics dispositions” in students. Handicapping the best students in the name of equity necessarily rules out all students’ meeting their full potential; so does refusing to group struggling students together to provide them with extra support. If you want students to develop a positive academic self-image, the answer is to teach them the subject matter to proficiency, or as close to it as their abilities allow.
Teaching kids that math is about recovering “indigenous knowledge” or dismantling “white supremacy” is educational fraud and institutional abuse. It is not just conservative critics of progressivism but a long line of radical black thinkers who saw traditional education as a force for liberation and empowerment that could help individuals defy and overcome extant prejudices in the society around them. Teaching the latest progressive gobbledygook instead of basic math skills will inevitably have the effect of locking children into poverty, habituating them to dysfunction, and diminishing their capacities as free citizens. In the name of equity, Ontario’s educators are making a wreck.