Education Week - December 11, 2019 - 12

| CITIZEN Z

ABOUT THE CITIZEN Z PROJECT
U.S. public education is rooted in the belief by early American leaders that the most important knowledge to impart to young people
is what it means to be a citizen. If America is experiencing a civic
crisis, as many say it is, schools may well be failing at that job.
This article is part of an ongoing effort by Education Week to understand the role of education in preparing the next generation of
citizens. See other stories in the Citizen Z series:
> www.edweek.org/go/CitizenZ
Do you have a great idea for teaching students about civics?
Share it with us: www.edweek.org/go/civics-ideas

Getty and Vanessa Solis/Education Week

Is Math the Missing Link in the Debate
On Improving Civics Education?
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

men 20 years ago were voting very
Republican and have more recently
favored Democrats, while the pattern
is reversed for men with less formal
education. "They're beginning to
see that some of the party bases are
changing a bit."
The unusual lesson illustrates a potential missing piece in the national
conversation about improving civics
education: How math can be harnessed toward schools' goal of readying youths for engaged citizenship.
Mathematics underpins the U.S.
political system and civic institutions.
That includes the legislative process,
campaign finance, and the census.
In the U.S. Constitution, the connection between math and civics is both
a consistent subtext and sometimes
disturbingly literal-as in the hateful
"three-fifths compromise," which for
80 years defined the value of enslaved
people within the national system of
electoral representation.

Analyzing Choices
Beyond civics with a capital C,
math can help students analyze different choices and possibilities, and
therefore make better sense of their
upcoming duties as voters and members of civil society. That goes for issues of national import, like health
care, to smaller decisions made at
school board meetings and by local
government, and even down to everyday matters like how to produce
the least waste when buying plastic
water bottles.
"Students are going to run this
world one day and make the rules and
determine the policies that govern everything on this planet, and math is a
prism for understanding that. It may
be the most powerful prism," said
Karim Ani, the founder of the curriculum company Mathalicious, which
develops math lessons for teachers
that encourage such discussions. "If
we don't help students to see that, not
only are we falling short of the possibilities of school, we are also being

inauthentic to math."
In the same way that civics tends to
conjure up mental portraits of George
Washington wearing a powdered wig,
math can feel awfully irrelevant to students. Sure, teachers have been told
forever that they should motivate students with "real world" problems. But
many purported examples out of textbooks-trains passing, dripping water
tanks, divvying up Girl Scout cookies-
can remain detached from anything
consequential (or interesting).
Put the two subjects together
thoughtfully, though, and they can
be a powerful antidote to one thing
that's ailed civic culture over the last
30 years. As a number of math and
social science academics have noted
since the mid-1990s, the explosion of
online information of varying quality means that good citizenship now
hinges on being able to analyze statistics, graphics, and numbers-both
to test competing claims, and to advance new solutions and ideas in the
civic sphere.
There are now different terms of art
to describe this set of skills, two common ones being "quantitative civic
literacy" or "social mathematics."
Surprisingly, the actual curricular
implications of quantitative civic literacy for K-12 education have been
comparatively understudied.
In a 2005 dissertation-one of
only a handful of publications on the
issue-James W. Mauch reviewed
several states' social studies expectations, two sets of national standards,
and one popular American Government textbook to gauge how they addressed the concept.
While the resources implicitly endorsed the idea of social mathematics, they rarely specified how students
could use math to make sense of civic
arguments and processes. "While the
words 'evaluate,' 'analyze,' and 'compare' appear in many of the content
standards," Mauch wrote, "little discussion takes place concerning how
students are to evaluate, analyze, and
draw these comparisons."
Now, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in the idea that math

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 11, 2019 | www.edweek.org

could be a missing link in civics education-and vice versa-and that the
connections between the two need to
be a more explicit focus of teaching.
"When we think about civics, we
often think it's the social studies
teacher's job," said Mary Candace
Raygoza, an assistant professor at St.
Mary's College of California and the
author of a 2019 paper on the topic.
"But if we think about what it means
to do mathematics as something we
need for understanding and revealing what's going on in the world-especially with pressing issues of social
concern-we have to think about it as
the job of the math teacher, too."

View From the Ground
In Indiana, Alison Strole's teaching
illuminates what instilling quantitative literacy in students might look
like in a classroom.
Strole is no "math war" partisan:
She does use explicit teaching methods when introducing new math
skills and concepts, and she expects
students to be fluent with math procedures. But she's also committed to
ensuring that students can apply new
mathematical knowledge in ways that
feel authentic and relevant.
Recently, for example, her school
had just installed some solar panels.
So Strole adapted a Mathalicious lesson that teaches algebra expressions
within the topic of solar power. She
asked students to do a cost-and-benefit analysis of sticking with electric
versus buying or leasing solar panels-and even whether the school's
solar energy production was on track
to help the city meet the United Nations' goals for renewable energy by
2030.
Then they had to write a memo for
the district's energy manager and the
mayor on what other steps Fishers
would need to take to reach that goal.
And, in fact, the lesson did catch the
attention of the mayor, who sent a representative to field students' questions
about solar power in the city. They
had good questions: Did a brand-new
development in town feature solar

power? Why not? Would solar power
be an emphasis in future ones?
Best of all, Strole recounted, the city
official confided he'd been doing the
same kind of calculations as her students to weigh the financial costs and
benefits of solar and wind power.
Across the country, of course, there
are lots of challenges to ambitious
teaching like this. Access to Mathalicious's proprietary lessons costs
money, and not all the core math curricula that districts purchase contain
similar teaching supports.
Teacher knowledge can be a sticking point, too. At the secondary level,
teachers generally earn a degree or
certification in either math or social
studies, and through no fault of their
own lack the knowledge to unite
the two disciplines well. (Strole is
licensed in social studies and math,
and while at university, she insisted
on getting student-teaching experience in both.)
There is also a legitimate concern,
even among those sympathetic to the
idea, that interdisciplinary lessons can
muddle the teaching of both subjects
if not done as thoughtfully as Strole's.
That's what worries Seth Andrew, the
founder of the Democracy Prep network of charter schools focused on
civics preparation. (He now leads a
nonprofit civic incubator.)
"I'd rather students have rigorous
civics and rigorous math than trying
to put a round peg in a square hole and
be bad at both," he said.
But schools, he said, can take some
initial steps as they consider the idea.
Democracy Prep, for example, began
by simply including civics examples
in word problems-for example, using
435, the number of representatives in
the U.S. House, as the denominator in
fractions questions.
By the time students reached the
upper secondary grades, the tasks
were more sophisticated. Every essay
students submitted had to include
some sources of mathematical data
and consider how that information
backed up their argument, he noted.

'Social Justice' and Beyond
There's another potential pitfall for
reframing math as a civic problemsolving tool: the risk of getting drawn
into a longstanding culture war.
Since around 2000, a limited but
dedicated number of teachers have
explicitly focused on social inequalities in their math courses. Sometimes
called social-justice math, the idea
has long drawn protests from conservatives. Indeed, the boundaries between specific social justice themes
and the broader notion of quantita-

tive literacy for civics remain fluid,
even contested. But Raygoza, of St.
Mary's College of California, believes
that the importance of quantitative
civic literacy transcends these subdisciplines.
"We need to have these conversations with all math teachers. And we
need to talk about our worldviews,
ideologies, perspectives on what the
roles and functions of schools are-
because those shape how we think
about what it means to use math to
understand and change the world,"
she said.
Lessons about touchy social topics
can also be presented in a way that do
not lead students to a predetermined
conclusion. One of the Mathalicious
lessons, for example, has students
use systems of linear functions to
explore how parking tickets tend to
affect people with different incomes
in vastly different ways. A key insight
in the lesson is how hard it can be for
those who can't pay the initial ticket to
dig out once late fees and interest start
compounding.
The lesson is clearly inspired by
the abusive municipal-fine structure
in Ferguson, Mo., a precipitating factor in the riots and protests there in
2014. And teachers can explore that
connection when teaching it. But the
question at the lesson's heart is fundamentally broader. It also prompts
students to consider Finland, where
parking fines aren't flat but vary depending on a person's income-and
wealthier people pay orders of magnitude more per ticket.
So students have to use the math
to explore the broader civic question
of cities' need to raise revenue with
two competing notions of what's a
"fair" way to set fines. While math
can illuminate the tradeoffs in the
two options, it does not point to easy
answers.
Strole keeps that in mind when her
students are using their math skills to
make arguments about policies. In the
solar-energy lesson, some students
disagreed with the goal of the 2030
plan, and she was OK with that.
"This is their life; it's going to affect
theirs more than mine," she said. "I
don't think it's my job to tell them how
to think or feel."
But there's one thing she insists on,
and it's that her students use math
when drawing conclusions about the
civic problem at hand.
"We live in a bubble on social media
with people with like-minded opinions. I want them to open it up and see
both sides to arguments, and be able
to support theirs with more than an
opinion," she said. "And in my classroom, the support is the math."

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Education Week - December 11, 2019

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