On Monday, economist and former President of Harvard University Larry Summers shared a letter declaring that the rising trend of “antiracist” mathematical education in America is a threat to the American economy and national security, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Summers, who also served as Secretary of the Treasury in the final years of the Clinton presidency, cosigned the letter with 600 other academics, all condemning this new form of education in K-12 schools. The letter says that efforts to force racial awareness into math have sacrificed the value of a strong education in mathematics in order “to reduce achievement gaps.”
Summers described mathematical education as “an economic and national security imperative,” contrasting the current approach in the United States to the one currently taken by China, where “math standards are not subject to continued erosion by social justice warriors who can’t themselves define exponential growth or solve quadratic equations.”
The bizarre push to make math about race has been funded by billionaire leftists such as Bill Gates, who used the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” a nationwide nonprofit initiative asking teachers and schools across the country to consider the possibility that math “is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.” Among other things, this and other similar efforts have tried to declare that some of the foundational tenets of math in education, such as students showing their work and how they arrived at the correct answer, are racist.
The coalition behind the letter signed by Summers and 600 others, “K12MathMatters,” says that this politicization of math only reduces “access to skills needed for social mobility.”
“While the U.S. K-12 system has much to improve,” the letter reads in part, “the current trends will instead take us further back. Reducing access to advanced mathematics and elevating trendy but shallow courses over foundational skills would cause lasting damage to STEM education in the country.”