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Friday, September 29th, 2023

Americans have poor math skills. It’s a threat to US standing in the global economy, employers say

Author:     JON MARCUS
Source:     Associated Press | The Hechinger Report
Publication Date:     September 27, 2023 | 7:05 AM PDT
 Link: Americans have poor math skills. It’s a threat to US standing in the global economy, employers say
Stephan:  

The Republicans are earnestly and actively trying to dismantle public education, trying to replace it with some bastardized profit-making system. They are also gutting libraries, gutting history programs because they don’t want children to know the truth about slavery, and they are sponsoring legislation that as I reported the other day will result in the loss of 200,000 teachers. The totality of this MAGAt effort is a radical debasement of education in the United States, and nowhere is that more alarming than in the decline of the math skills of American students. This article lays it out, and it is horrifying and is going to have long-term very negative consequences for the entire nation.

American students Credit: Associated Press

BOSTON — Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.

“They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.”

Tran also loves math. This summer, he studied calculus five hours a day with other high schoolers in a program at Northeastern University.

But Tran and his friends are not the norm. Many Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already abysmal scores on standardized math tests are falling even further.

The nation needs people who are good at math, employers say, in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes. They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

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The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, […]

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