By matloff
A couple of years ago, when an NPR journalist was interviewing me, the conversation turned to quantitative matters. The reporter said, only half jokingly, “We journalists are innumerate and proud.”
Some times it shows, badly. This morning a radio reporter stated, “Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders among South Carolina African-Americans by an almost 9-to-1 ratio.” Actually, that vote was 86% to 14%, just above 6-to-1, not 9-to-1. A very troubling outcome for Bernie, to be sure, but an even more troubling error in quantitative reasoning by someone in the Fourth Estate who should know better.
One of my favorite quotes is from Chen Lixin, an engineering professor at Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xian, who has warned that China produces students who can’t think independently or creatively, and have trouble solving practical problems. He wrote in 1999 that the Chinese education system “results in the phenomenon of high scores and low ability.” I must warn that we in the U.S. are moving in that same disastrous direction.
But I would warn even more urgently that the solution is NOT to make math education “more practical,” as proposed recently by noted political scientist Andrew Hacker. His solution is that, instead of requiring Algebra II of high school kids, we should allow them to substitute — you know what’s coming, don’t you? — statistics. Ah, yes. Well, I disagree.
Hacker’s rationale is explained by the article I’ve linked to above:
Most CUNY students come from low-income families, and a 2009 faculty report found that 57 percent fail the system’s required algebra course. A subsequent study showed that when students were allowed to take a statistics class instead, only 44 percent failed.
Most statistics courses are taught, sad to say, in a formula-plugging manner. So, aside from the dubious, not to mention insulting, attitude that …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com