Stanford Professor Single-Handedly Debunks California’s Woke Math Standards

A Stanford University professor slammed California’s proposed Math Framework for being “false” and “misleading.”

Brian Conrad, Stanford University mathematics professor and director of Undergraduate Studies in Math, did a deep dive into the California Math Framework (CMF), which he laid out on his website. The proposal frequently contradicts the findings of academic studies its writers cite, according to Conrad’s analysis.

The CMF writing team “should not be citing papers they do not understand to justify their public policy recommendations and guidance to districts,” Conrad said on his website.

“Unfortunately, I saw that rather than developing data science in depth, the CMF promotes ‘data science’ courses as a detour around algebra,” he explained. “But college degrees in statistics and data science at public universities in California require the missing high school algebra and also require college-level calculus and linear algebra.”

Conrad argues that the “proliferation of new math courses in high schools risks confusing students, parents, and teachers” about what skills are needed for quantitative and STEM degrees such as economics, data science and computer science, which the CMF does not provide.

Instead, the CMF gives a false “impression of being a well-researched and evidence-based proposal,” which in reality “contains false or misleading descriptions” of cited literature that often “arrive at conclusions opposite those claimed in the CMF,” according to Conrad… (Excerpt from the Virginia Star)