Education

Calif. college chancellor wants algebra requirement abolished, calls it a ‘civil rights issue’

If Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of California Community Colleges, has his way, students in the state’s community college system will no longer be required to take algebra, the Daily Caller reported Thursday.  The reason?  According to Oakley, it’s a civil rights issue.

“This is a civil rights issue, but this is also something that plagues all Americans — particularly low-income Americans,” Oakley said. “If you think about all the underemployed or unemployed Americans in this country who cannot connect to a job in this economy — which is unforgiving of those students who don’t have a credential — the biggest barrier for them is this algebra requirement. It’s what has kept them from achieving a credential.”

Translation: If you’re poor, you’re incapable of learning algebra and it’s too hard for us to teach it.  That would be a stunning bit of news to the algebra teachers I had in college…

He further told NPR:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

We’re certainly not saying that we’re going to commit students to lower levels of math or different kinds of math. What we’re saying is we want more students to have math skills that allow them to keep moving forward. We want to build bridges between the kinds of math pathways we’re talking about that will allow them to continue into STEM majors. We don’t want to limit students.

The last thing I’d say is that we are already tracking students. We are already relegating students to a life of below livable wage standards. So we’ve already done so, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

The Daily Caller added:

NPR suggested that Oakley was trying to improve the California community college graduation rate, pointing out that less than half of the system’s students transfer to a four-year college or obtain an associate’s degree from the community college within six years. But the chancellor denied this implication.

“Since the 1950s, we decided that the only measure of a student’s ability to reason or to do some sort of quantitative measure is algebra,” said Oakley. “What we’re saying is we want as rigorous a course as possible to determine a student’s ability to succeed, but it should be relevant to their course of study.”

The chancellor said that other higher education institutions, such as the Carnegie Foundation and the University of Texas, were pondering the change. He suggested that statistics could replace algebra as a new requirement.

“[Statistics] is a skill that we should have all of our students have with them because this affects them in their daily life,” Oakley said.

Brit Hume correctly observed: “I’d respectfully suggest that learning algebra – or even just trying to – helps develop young people’s thinking capacity.”

One person summed it up this way:

That pretty much sums it up.

https://twitter.com/MarkACollett/status/886576246754291712

Racist?  Hmmm…  Of course, everything is racist to liberals these days…

God help us.

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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