Companies like Google, Apple and Intel offer some of California's most cutting-edge-and highest-paying-jobs. Last year, those three companies alone brought in more than 10,000 people from other countries to take those jobs.
Surely it'd be simpler for them to hire closer to home. Among the key reasons they don't is that too few Californians have the skills-in particular, the deep understanding of mathematics to qualify. It's something the state's new proposed math framework seeks to change.
The current system of mathematics teaching in the U. S. invites few students into the richness of thought and of learning. We blunt our children's possibilities nearly from the start, telling far too many of them at a very early age that math isn't for them. Sometimes those communications are clear and direct; they're planted in decisions, by schools or districts, to put students on different tracks as early as third or fourth grade and teach them that math often limits how far they can go.
My first assignment as a mathematics teacher was to teach 13-year-olds who had been assigned to the lower-level tracks. One girl understood the message of that ability grouping all too well. She caught me up short with the question, "Why should I bother?"
The question became our shared challenge. I gave her more difficult work so she could do well on the national mathematics exam. She passed that exam, which allowed her to train to become a sound engineer.
She had been told she was not good enough for mathematics-and it was not true. Too many students in California are given the same message-and it is one of the reasons the U. S. has relatively few students who are proficient in math. That's why California's new mathematics framework has been introduced.