You Do the Math

When anything pertains to numbers "You do the math" is obviously the arbiter to settling an argument or for proving a point. Or, for confirming a theorem, or to support a hypothesis.  It had always worked that way, hasn't it?

However, when Brian Williams, a lead MSNBC news anchor, made such an attempt at doing the math, not only did it not add up, incredulity had to be redefined along with giving him the utmost benefit of the doubt; his Hurricane Katrina fiasco notwithstanding.  Below is a quote of what he said on national TV.

“When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear,” said Williams. “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. Don’t tell us if you’re ahead of us on the math. He could have given each American $1 million and have lunch money left over. It’s an incredible way of putting it.”

It was obvious his "doing the math" was not even close to a facsimile of elementary arithmetic or a simple exercise in common sense.  But he was right about one thing, by his own account, "It’s an incredible way of putting it.”

When a certain presidential candidate uses a number, such as "150 million people have been killed [by guns] since 2007.", we know it was a gaffe; otherwise, it was one where math was left undone just to make a hasty point while sounding knowledgeable.  Or, so he thought.

To paraphrase Henry Higgins from "My Fair Lady", let me say this, "There even are places where math has completely disappeared; in politics, politicians have never used it for years".

America is an unlikely place for math to lose its roots from the winds of change but it is clearly hanging by a thin filament hardly noted except by those  whose business it is to be concerned with academic erosion of some sort.

The program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, revealed that among the 35 industrialized nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. now ranks 31st. (That was in 2015). In 2018, the prognosis has gotten worse. The U.S. is no. 38 and "it is getting worse".

“We really are doing a lot worse in math than we are in science and reading,” said Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, who had early access to the PISA results.

What are we to make of this nation's elementary education? What are we to expect of our ability to compete in a world where the landscape for economic competition is constantly changing with technology as the main driver. And we know math is the language of technology.

Here is what is happening.  The country still has the best learning environment for science and technology and an industry and an economy to support it. Tech schools, such as MIT and Caltech, just to name a couple, are magnets to the worldwide population of talented undergrads who come here for their advanced education.  For decades a majority of them stayed to pursue careers along with the best economic advantage American corporations have to offer. In other words, they provided the necessary intellectual transfusion to keep technology development to continue and flourish here..

Unfortunately, that phenomenon may also have obscured the view of the decline of math proficiency in 1 to 10th grade education here. Educators, or significantly those tasked to make a top-view assessment of education in general, did not see that coming until those foreboding stats on math proficiency came to light.

Now for an even dire view of what is happening. Today, the foreign undergrads after their masters or PHDs are going back to their homeland because those countries are now able to provide the same level of incentives for these young talent to go back home and practice their craft and entrepreneurship for their countries.  

Add to that the loss of intellectual property through nefarious means, sometimes facilitated by the same talents educated here or by foreign governments from where those students came from, and the wake up call is non-too-soon, if not much too late. I am not making a derogatory accusation here but by simply taking cue from how seriously the U.S. is assessing the theft of technology and intellectual property, with losses already in the billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is left with an alarming number of its high school graduates unable to perform at the same level that graduates from developing countries are able to do.  The export of industries and jobs to foreign soil was not whimsically contrived by American corporations who moved chunks of their factories and business supports there (accounting, help desks and anything that can be done online) but by plain acknowledgment of the level of expertise, know how, and dedication by the local workers in the host countries at lower pay scales.

The U.S. is trying to reverse that trend now, hopefully not too late to the level of futility, but there are a few critical changes that need to be made.

Math.  This country needs to do the math.  Literally and figuratively. Math literacy could never have been so crucial.  While most American students are too often not learning the metric system but complain when admonished to do so, their foreign counterparts are adept at both the English and metric systems and the cross-over equivalency with ease and flair of bi-linguality.  When computer language is written in zeros and ones what better system is more adept at adapting than the metric system where the placement of zeros is all that is needed at up-scaling or down-scaling values.  Surely, if American students are expected to know  feet from inches and the fractions thereof (1/8, 1/4, 3/32, 7/64) and feet to miles and acres and multiples or fractions of it, millimeter and centimeter and meters and kilometers are a cinch to master when all that is needed is move zeros either at before or after the decimal points.

Math. That should be the singular word to turn things around. It is also the one great way to reform undergraduate studies, specially where liberal arts education is dominated by a teaching faculty who make it their business to transform this nation's culture and moral landscape that should have remained free from way too much fiddling and re-adjusting. That is where math, as a metaphor or code, excels at maintaining order and consistency.  Not, for example, by multiplying gender identities or subtracting and adding or re-classifying moral codes and behavior.

It is time we do the math.