42. America’s Math Curriculum Doesn’t Add Up

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1:04I'm up in Northern Minnesota with my family on vacation right now, so this week's episode is a little different. It's an episode I initially created for Freakin' Amix Radio, and actually not just any episode, my very first try at hosting. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire, with Steve Levitt. If you're a regular listener, then you know how frustrated I am with the current educational system. Today's episode, which first aired about two years ago, marked my transition from someone who only complains about a problem to someone who's trying to do something about it. So here's my question to you. Try to guess what was the reaction when the first aired? Did it spur people into action, made people angry, or was it just completely ignored? I'll tell you the answer at the end. Rationalize the denominator in the equation 3 over the square root of x minus 7. That's my daughter, Sophie Levitt.

2:07I'm going to be a sophomore in high school at the University of Chicago lab schools. These are the kinds of questions she's working on in her math classes. The questions that I'm responsible for helping her with. Rationalize the denominator in the equation 3 over the square root of x minus 7. Find the imaginary zeros of the equation f of x equals 4x to the fourth plus 35x squared minus 9. Can you tell us what an imaginary zero is? No. I have 14 eaters. I spend a lot of time working with them on their math homework. More often than not, after helping them answer whatever questions are assigned that day, I'm left with questions of my own. Questions that I can't find good answers to. Like, why are we teaching kids these things? Does anyone actually use some math we're teaching in their daily life? Is there any benefit at all to learning this stuff? And are there not more interesting and useful things that we could be teaching them? Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-math. I use mathematical thinking, statistics, and data analysis constantly,

3:08whether I'm writing economics papers, trying to get better at golf, or hoping to pick winners at the racetrack. But here's the thing. The math tools I actually use, and the math tools I see people around me actually using seem to have nothing to do with what my kids are learning at school. Which makes me think that we must be able to do better for our children when it comes to teaching them math. So after years of idle complaining, I finally decided to try to do something about it. I wrote up a grant proposal, and I convinced the philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, to give me some resources to put together a small team to explore modernizing high school math. The first step in my journey was to talk to someone who has thought about this subject much longer, and more deeply than I have. My name's Jo Boehler. I'm a professor of mathematics education at Stanford University. So you've written a number of books in mountains of research on reforming mathematics education. Let's just say that someone made you the math Tsar tomorrow.

4:10I'd love that. What were some of your first reforms? The curriculum that we teach in math classrooms was really designed in days that a long past. It was a long time ago that somebody in the US decided to teach what I think of as the geometry sandwich, a course of algebra for a whole year, followed by a course of geometry for a whole year, and then another course of algebra. I don't know any other country that does that, and it's part of the problem. So I would change the curriculum to really reflect real mathematics, and I would also change it to reflect the 21st century because math still looks in classrooms pretty much as it did in Victorian days. In the United States, it was the elite universities that spurred the teaching of higher level math. In 1820, for instance, Harvard began requiring knowledge of algebra to gain admittance. As a result, secondary schools started teaching algebra. 50 years later, Harvard added geometry to its requirements, and the secondary schools followed suit.

5:12After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, math education became a matter of national security. The math curriculum was overhauled with two very different goals in mind. The first goal was to increase the number of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. This led to the introduction of higher level, more abstract math, and the high school curriculum. The second goal was to develop a workforce that could do the complex calculations required to support the military and space efforts. Remember, this predates the age of modern computers. It's funny, really, when I was in school and many years ago, the joke of math teachers used to be, you've got to be able to do all these calculations because you're never going to be walking around with a calculator in your hand. Well, turns out everybody's walking around with a calculator in their hand. I think of it in a way that we're teaching kids to be computers, and they're learning to do what computers do. So high school in particular has lots of andecrated methods that

6:13students sit and work out by hand. They will never do that again in their lives. What kids can be doing that computers cannot be doing is creative flexible thinking. Has the American approach to teaching math been successful? In terms of how US students perform, relative to students from other countries, the answer is no. On the most recent program for international student assessment, known as PISA, a standardized test administered in 70 countries. The US plays 39th in math, just behind Hungary and Slovakia. American math performance is substantially worse than on either science, 25th place, or reading 24th. Joe Boller has devoted her academic career to developing new ways of teaching math that generate creative, flexible thinking. Her work has had a massive impact. A website she helped develop called uqb.com, that is y-o-u-c-u-b-e-d.com translates academic research into actionable ideas for teachers to

7:22use in their classrooms. Uqb distale 32 million page views over the last three years. Could you give me an example, a more specific example of 21st century math taught in a way that students would find inspiring? Let's think about algebra, for example. Many people see algebra as you know as methods and rules, but you can take any algebraic expression and see it visually. So I love to show people a visual of a growing pattern. So it starts off as a little collection of squares and then a bigger collection of squares and then a bigger collection again. And what I ask people is how do you see this? How do you see it growing? And people see it in many, many different ways. So some people say to me, oh it's like raindrops falling as the shape gets bigger. It's like a layer of extra rain on top of the shape. And other people say, oh I see,

8:23it's like a volcano erupting. The top goes up and then the sides come out. And so there are probably 12 different ways people will talk about seeing the growth. Now it turns out that you could describe all of these 12 ways algebraically and we would have a room full of algebraic expressions, all of them equivalent to each other, which is a really nice discussion. You can do this with any mathematics at all. I mean we always say at our centre at Stanford, you can give us any boring, most procedural maths that you teach and we will make it creative and visual for you. And when maths is creative and visual, people see connections in different ways of thinking are valued. And so all sorts of lovely things happen. To me, the biggest change in the world over the last 50 years has been the emergence of data and computing. And it strikes me that math curriculum hasn't kept up with that at all, both in terms of thinking about what students

9:27need to succeed in the world. But even maybe more broadly than that about what role humans play. Could you talk a little about that? Yeah, absolutely. And so you're right. When we look at the world out there and the job students are going to have many students will be working with big data sets. So we haven't adapted to help students in the most important job many people will do, wishes to work with data sets in different ways. So statistics is really important as a course, but is under played. This is a fifth of the curriculum in England and has been for decades. But here in the US it's sort of a poor cousin to calculus. So it seems to me pretty obvious that we need a radical transformation in the math curriculum. And I think it seems obvious to you as well. Why do you think the struggle has been so difficult and the existing approaches have proven so

10:27resilient to reform? So teaching is always very hard to change because people learn it from their own school days. And then they want to become the math teacher they had. Well, math teachers do anyway. And when people have tried to change, they've really received aggressive pushback, which is cause some of them to sort of withdraw and go back into teaching the way that they were. Boller knows firsthand what this pushback is like. During the early 2000s, she found herself caught up in what's known as the Math Wars, a debate over the math curriculum between reformists and traditionalists. And if you think wars is an exaggeration. People went to extreme lengths to try and stop reforms. I think somebody went on a hunger strike even in LA. Yeah, it was really a battleground. At the time, Boller was working on implementing a new curriculum. I interviewed some of the parents working to stop the new curriculum. And I remember one of the mothers saying to me,

11:31you know, I'm not traditional about anything else. But if you can change math, anything can change. I actually had the students doing regressions. That's Sally Saddoff, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, and a former ninth grade math teacher. I asked them to go out into the world and collect data on two variables they thought were related, like height and shoe size. And then to plot those points on an XY plot and then find a best fit line in those data and calculate the slope of that line. So that was actually a really interesting project because students that were really disengaged from my class actually, it sort of sparks some creativity in them. I remember I had one student, this girl, Jamie, who had no interest in my class. Jamie's main interest was offering to give me a makeover. And the interesting thing about the project was my high achieving students chose

12:35kind of boring projects like height and shoe size or age and height or something like that. Jamie actually, her project was on the relationship between hairspray use and hair damage, which was a topic that was close to her heart. And it kind of showed that she could bring some of her own interests into math, which I think until that moment she thought was just completely boring and had no relation to anything she would be interested in life. In addition to being an economist and teacher, Sally Sadow also happens to be my cousin. If you've seen the Freakonomics documentary, Sally is a tireless redhead running an education experiment in Chicago Heights in which we paid kids to do well in school. Since then, she has earned her PhD in economics, gotten tenure at UC San Diego, and become one of the leading voices on the economics of education. When I graduated from college, I was really interested in education and educational achievement gaps. And so I wanted to start off by teaching school. Well, I started off in a large public high school and went from there to a charter

13:35school in East Palo Alto. Unfortunately, I wasn't a very successful teacher. They didn't say I was fired. I was not rehired. I think a lot of the reasons that they let me go had to do with things like classroom management. My class seemed a bit out of control. Part of that was just that I was young and I didn't know how to manage the students. They weren't scared enough of me. Part of it, I think, was to some extent that I was doing some non-traditional teaching on Fridays. I would do something called function Fridays. I would play the song, bring out the funk, and I would have this little box where I put candies in and they had to try to predict how many candies would come out based on how many candies had gone in and out on prior demonstrations. And if they correctly predicted the function, they got the candy. This class seemed to think your teaching style was hurting these kids. Do you have any idea whether it actually turned out to be true? What was interesting is after I left the school, I heard from a colleague of mine that when the scores came in in the summer, my students had actually done really well. And everyone was shocked

14:38that my students had performed so well on the test. And there was some saying, oh, so I guess Sally wasn't as bad a teacher as we thought she was. The rate in which data are being created is mind-blowing. Every second of every day, enough data are created to fill 50 libraries of Congress. 90% of the data ever created by humanity was produced in the last two years. The labor market is having a hard time keeping up. According to LinkedIn's 2018 jobs report, seven of the 10 fastest growing job categories in the United States are data centered. Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, Big Data Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, to name just a few. And these are well-paying, exciting, challenging jobs. And other in-demand jobs like Software, Engineer, or Finance, and Endless, these jobs require data fluency as well. Do you think that the students we are graduating from high school are well equipped to thrive in a

15:42data-intensive world? I teach business school students now, and I spend a lot of time, for example, trying to explain to them that even though there's big data, and they often in their work, they work with big data, they struggle to understand, for instance, the difference between correlation and causation. Understanding that basic idea, I think, is something that if it was started earlier for students, they would be able to understand all this data that is coming at them. And they have to understand it's, you know, it's in the newspaper, it's in their lives. And I think because they live with it, they understand it, but I think there's some really important concepts that are missing. My own personal opinion is that there are a few things more valuable in the modern world than data fluency. By that, I mean a basic comfort with data, an understanding of the difference between correlation and causality. The ability to evaluate claims that others make with data, and maybe even to take a pile of data and to make some sense out of it. Yet most high school

16:44students are barely exposed to data. Only 10% of high school students take a statistics class, and even most statistics courses are primarily theoretical rather than requiring students to get their hands dirty with data. Mostly, if students are exposed to data, it is only because of enterprising teachers like Sally. It seems to me that the years we now devote to topics like geometry and trigonometry would be better spent focusing on achieving data fluency. But even if everyone shared my opinion, and I'm sure many people don't, it's not at all clear how it could ever transform a high school math curriculum that is proven quite resistant to change. A natural place to start is by changing the incentives faced by teachers and schools. One of the strongest incentives is the high stakes testing done in almost every state. How students perform on these tests can determine school funding, teacher bonuses, whether a principal is fired, and even whether a school will be shut down.

17:44Here is Sally Seydoff again talking about high stakes tests. Well certainly if you put different concepts on the test, schools will reorient how they teach to those tests. We always think of teaching to the test as a bad thing, but we want people to teach to the test. We put those concepts on the test because that's what we want students to learn. But do you think if we could give the teachers the right set of tools for teaching data, you think the teachers would make the investments to make that work? I can imagine especially math teachers would be open to this idea. What I wanted most to do was to be a school teacher. That's David Coleman on the CEO of the College Board. The College Board for those who don't know is the nonprofit that administers the SAT, PSAT, and Advanced Placement Exams. It was founded in 1899, then called the College Entrance

18:45Examination Board by 12 elite East Coast schools in an attempt to standardize the college admissions process. David Coleman didn't plan on getting involved with the College Board. After graduating from Yale and completing a Rhodes scholarship, he found himself looking for a job. I went back to New York City where I grew up and talked to principals of high schools and the problem was they were making layoffs. They told me that I could be a substitute if I wanted. The other side of the coin is that McKinsey had been interviewing me for a job and it offered me a job at management consulting firm and I turned them down because I said I would prefer to be a public high school teacher. I'm surprised I know you eventually went to McKinsey. I'm surprised they would have you back because I would have thought that saying you wanted to be a public high school teacher would have completely convinced them that you were not right for the job at McKinsey. In Canada, I think I may have had the most interviews ever for the job because they so wanted to scrutinize me after that

19:51decision. They did indeed find it strange. While at McKinsey, Coleman devoted much of his time to pro bono education projects. First with the New York City public schools, then later with school superintendents across the country. He left McKinsey in 1999 after five years and launched an education startup which analyzed state test score data and that was eventually bought by McGraw Hill. Just prior to joining the College Board, he played a key role in the National Governors Association's Common Core Standards. Coleman was responsible for the English language arts portion of the standards. In 2012, with the standards now in the hands of states, Coleman was hired as CEO of the College Board. Under his stewardship, the SAT has been radically overhauled. Let's talk about why it began. So the reason the SAT was developed is in a remarkable moment of self-criticism and idealism. Colleges recognized that they were recruiting from a very small part of America, from largely white men, from a set of a small select set of private schools.

20:55And they actually saw this and saw that it was wrong and said our democracy is in jeopardy if we don't let a wider set of merit in. That was in 1926. In the spirit Coleman describes, the original goal of the SAT was not to measure what you would learn in high school, but rather to identify people's intrinsic ability or aptitude, thus the name, Scholastic aptitude test. The original SAT was styled after the recently invented IQ test, which saw its first widespread application in the screening of military recruits in World War I. The original SAT looks nothing like the more recent versions. One section involved the College Board inventing an artificial language, giving the test-taker rules for how to create the past and future attempts, how to transform verbs into nouns, adverbs or adjectives, and how to distinguish singular or plural. Then armed with the definitions of ten words in this artificial language, the test-taker had to craft sentences and

21:56translate from the artificial language into English. In another section, the student was given six words and had to say which three of those words had the most in common. For instance, Columbus, Beethoven, Socrates, Wagner, Viverdi, Corné. The answer here would be the three composers, Beethoven, Wagner and Verdi. If the goal of the SAT was to broaden the pool of applicants from a narrow set of elites, however, this particular question hardly seems likely to accomplish the goal. Notably, out of 310 questions on the original SAT, only ten tested mass skills, and these focused exclusively on arithmetic and simple algebra. My favorite question, which shows just how much both social norms and prices have changed over time, is this one? If a package containing twenty cigarettes costs fifteen cents, how many cigarettes can be bought for ninety cents? By 2012, the SAT looked very, very different. It also was facing a great deal of

23:02criticism. When I became president of the College Board, very few people saw the College Board as opening up new areas of merit they saw us as certifying the inequalities that exist. And so the first question to ask is, is there something about the test itself that was unfair, that was either perceived to be or actually was deeply unfair? And it was our view that there are at least two things. The SAT came to be dominated by a kind of obscurity. So for example, what is the definition of an SAT word? Is a word you have likely not seen before and won't see again? And candidly, what does that have to do with succeeding in college? And then moving on to mathematics in the redesign, we got rid of all those problems that used to be called tricky. The really big new idea of the SAT is the only thing you're allowed to put on it is that which is most widely used. So we survey first year math teachers in first year college professors, not only in math but outside

24:02of math. And we analyze which math is most used in their courses. That's a knowable question. At the same time, we ask high school teachers what math is the most important for using college and compare those two data sets? Any guess as to what we see? My guess is that the high school teachers say something that's orthogonal to what the college teachers say? It will break your heart. The college teachers say very few things matter and matter a lot. The high school teachers say everything matters. Think of the stress of that. They must do everything or they are betraying their kids, which force them to race through the curriculum. Less their kids are not ready. What the college teachers say but has not heard is if your students can do these core set of things, we can do the rest. But if those are shaky and they're merely faintly aware of them and aware of a lot of other mathematics, we're stuck. And what are the core math concepts? The first is the

25:07most humble but it's powerful as arithmetic. The command of the four operations, you know, subtraction, multiplication, division, and addition, but crucially fractions. The next area of math that's hugely predictive of your future success is what I would call data analysis and problem solving, including rates, ratio, proportion, designing quantities that interact with one another in that way, and watching their growth over time and development. The third area of math that's extremely widely used is what I would call the heart of algebra, which is linear equations. That portion of algebra is then very widely used and other disciplines to open up many other problems. So what I find really compelling about what you just said, David, is that you are using data analysis to really understand what students need and the outcome is that what students need in math, among other things, is data analysis skills. That's exactly right. And it's demonstrable. I'll tell you another interesting thing Steve that we haven't talked about. Do you know how when we grew up, students would

26:08call themselves proudly like verbal kids or math kids so you could get an 800 on the verbal section, even though you didn't like numbers and you never had to encounter them and there are a lot of kids like that. And then there are math kids. The new SAT disrupts that picture in what's called now not verbal but evidence-based reading and writing. There are five passages. Two of them always are a passage from science that includes numbers, data, and a passage from social science like economics that includes data. And so you can no longer be perfectly verbal without being able to read and analyze data from charts, tables, and graphs. Because what was so silly was that people call themselves highly verbal and wide readers when in fact they're literate when they reach science or the social sciences if they can evaluate numbers. Honestly, when David Coleman told me how heavily the new SAT emphasizes data, I didn't really believe

27:10him. I knew that he knew that I am on a mission to make data fluency an integral component of high school math. I thought he was just telling me what I wanted to hear. But I analyzed the new SAT and everything he says is true. 20% of the SAT math questions test data fluency and amazingly 10% of the questions on what used to be the verbal section are data questions also. A decade ago, those numbers would have been close to zero. The college board has quietly been leading the charge on data fluency. And that matters because the SAT is becoming an even more powerful force for change in the education system. Students have, of course, always cared deeply about their SAT scores. But what you might not know is that the SAT is starting to be adopted by a few states as their high stakes test for teachers and principals as well. I suspect that will become increasingly common. And if David Coleman has his way, there will be a lot of teaching to the test going on.

28:14Coming up after the break, I'll get into more of my own data sets. About 2% said that they used calculus on a daily basis. And we'll visit the school in California where the data revolution is already underway. And that's what I like about this class because it shows me how to detect like my teacher would say like liars. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremphaya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphaya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremphaya proper training is required. Tremphaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions increased risk of infections

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31:19created business guide that you should download today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era, how AI is changing every day work, and right now it's free. In this guide you'll see how AI could reshape work across your organization and how you can prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to NetSuite.com slash admire. Get your free guide at NetSuite.com slash admire, NetSuite.com slash admire. A few months ago my team used the Freak Dynamics Twitter account to gather some data on my hypothesis that most of what we are teaching kids right now in high school math is pretty useless. So definitely we're here recording and so will you just start by saying your name and what your job is. My name is Daphne Marchenko and I'm a research analyst at the University of Chicago. Daphne recently earned her PhD in education at Cambridge in the UK. Before that she was a Stanford

32:22undergrad majoring in Russian language and medical anthropology. She also was a world class rower representing the US twice on the 123 national team. So we've been putting together a survey that we sent out to Freak Dynamics listeners. We asked our survey respondents which subjects they use in their daily life, traditional math and data related. So trigonometry, geometry, calculus, versus more data related skills like analyzing and interpreting data and visualizing it. So what percent of people say use calculus in a daily basis? About 2% said that they use calculus on a daily basis and almost 80% say they never use it. Okay. I would think calculus will get used more than trigonometry, although that would be hard if only 2% are using it, but what percent use trigonometry in geometry? Yeah, less than 2% of respondents said that they use trigonometry in their daily life, but over 70% of them said that they never use it. And how about geometry? Geometry was a little bit better. There were about 4% of respondents who said that they use geometry

33:27daily, but again over 50% said that they never use it. So it's a pretty sad day when we're celebrating the use of geometry because 4% of the people report the using. And if you think about it, who's responding to our survey, right? So these are people who love Freak Dynamics and listen to the podcast. If there's anybody who might actually, you expect to use math on a daily basis, you might think it was the Freak Dynamics podcast. I mean, I can't imagine if you took a random subset of US population how banishing small all of these numbers would turn out to be. So that's really dis... I mean, it's not disabointing because we knew it's going to be true, but it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing that we teach a math curriculum that nobody pretty much is using. Now, what do we find when we asked about some of the daily data tools? Like, what about simple things like, I've always thought we should teach Excel in the schools. Do people actually use Excel or is that just my imagination? Yeah, close to 70% of people said that they use Excel or

34:29Google spreadsheets on a daily basis. We asked people how often they visualize and present data to make an argument. So if you include those who say they visualize data daily, weekly, and monthly, you're going to get over 70%, close to 75% of people. Okay, great. So, but we didn't just ask them what they used. We also asked them what they wished they had learned more of, right? So, tell me which of the traditional math topics were people hoping that they had gotten more of in high school? None, virtually. So how about the data skills? I mean, we don't hardly teach data skills, so my guess is people are going to want more of that. That's what our premise was. Is that what the data tell us? Yes. On every single one of the data-related questions we asked over 40% of people said that they wished they had learned more, but the ones that really stood out were how to analyze and interpret data to discover hidden insights. We had close to 65% of people say that they wished they'd learned more about that. I wish I had learned more about that. That's the most valuable skill in the world.

35:31Yeah, and on top of that, we had 60% who said that they wished they'd learned more about how to visualize and present data to make an argument. So those two definitely go together. Okay, great. So this is reassuring because here we are off on this wild goose chase of trying to change the minds of decision-makers or Americans about math, but the data support us, which is good. If making an argument that you need more data in an education, it would be good to be able to say that the data support what we're trying to do. Yeah, it is. It's overwhelmingly convincing that people believe data-related skills are important to get by and work today. So we have compiled a set of data that will allow us to not just, I think it's really important when you're trying to convince people not just to assert something to them, but to really show them. But what you also need is you need to really understand the institutions and the incentives. And that's not something I know very much about, but that's something I think you know a lot more about. So tell me, who makes the decisions? How does curriculum get set in the US in education systems?

36:36In public education, the people with power are those on the state boards of education. So each state will have a state board of education. They're typically six to ten people on the board and they're the ones who make those decisions about the curriculum. What gets taught, how testing is done? So literally this set of six to ten people have the power to set the guidelines, say, for whether or not data courses are required. That's correct. So what you're implying is that each state sets its own standards. There is the Common Core curriculum, which are a set of standards set out for all states to adopt if they wish to. Most states have, but again, it's up to the state to decide which standards to adopt, how they adopt them, and how it gets taught. And is the Common Core, is that our friend or a foe when we're trying to push data? The Common Core does have a set of standards around statistics and probability. They do recognize that we're in a changing world, but they're continuing to focus or

37:37place more emphasis on those traditional math subjects. Okay, so there are these state boards of education who have all the power. And so it seems to me what you're saying is if we can get in front of those boards and we can convince say even one of them of the wisdom of what we're doing, they can flip a switch, although it's probably way too simple, and put into motion a whole series of events which will lead in that state to the teaching of data being part of the math curriculum. I think taking a step back, state boards are always inundated with requests for changes that they should be making to the curriculum, to the testing. And at Common Responses, well, what am I supposed to take out to make room for this? One thing state boards of education could do is to implement a data proficiency course instead of algebra two. We see that algebra two has become a chokehold for a lot of students that's preventing them from continuing on and meeting those graduation requirements.

38:38And a number of states have even put in waivers to allow students to opt out of algebra two and take other courses. Is there something out there that schools could use that could actually teach kids data in the way we're imagining? There is a curriculum out there. It's called Introduction to Data Science. It was created by academics at the University of California, Los Angeles, in partnership with the LA Unified School District. So Los Angeles Unified School District is, I believe the second largest school district in the country. That's Sue Yen Machado. She's the program director for the Introduction to Data Science project, or IDS for short. In 2010, UCLA in partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District received a National Science Foundation grant to design a high school course that would teach statistical thinking. It was piloted in the 2014-15 school year with 10 teachers and 10 different high schools. The Introduction to Data Science class covers just

39:40about everything you might want to do with data, creating a data set, cleaning the data, visualizing it, and analyzing it. The course even teaches how to design randomized experiments. The students use a mix of large data sets and data sets generated by themselves through something called participatory sensing, which puts data collecting at the hands of students. As part of the initial grant, we developed an app where students go and they collect data about their lives. Machado allowed us to talk with some of the kids taking the class. My name is Sonia. A project that I'm doing is about California wildfires and how they have been spreading over the years. I'm Sayla Garcia, 12th grade. I'm studying about crime rates in Los Angeles. And I've noticed how on the news, they keep on talking about crime. This is bad. This is, it's all negative. So most people are going to think Los Angeles is really unsafe. South Central is really unsafe. They don't really show you. Crime rates have gone down in the last five years.

40:41And that's what I like about this class because it shows me how to detect like my teacher would say like, like, this podcast is supported by Nurtek O.D.T. Remediatant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but Migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time and throws everything off. So when Migraine takes your time, take Nurtek. It's for the acute treatment of Migraine with or without aura and adults. Nurtek can provide pain relief in two hours which can last up to two days. Ask your health care provider if Nurtek is right for you because your time is for you. Not Migraine. Don't take it allergic to Nurtek O.D.T. Alertic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and rain on syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-Nurtek or visit

41:42Nurtek.com. All right, back to your podcast playlist or whatever's keeping you going today. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Trampaya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Trampaya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject trampaya, proper training is required. Trampaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trampaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to

42:45learn more or visit trampayaradio.com. With the Discovered Cashback Card, it's payback time when you earn cashback on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cashback at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cashback at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply, see Discovered.com slash 5 for details. This school year, there will be 125 IDS classes taught. That's an amazing accomplishment. But to fundamentally change things, that number of classes needs to be multiplied by 100, or even a thousand. It's hard work building to that scale from scratch. It struck me that the college board, which is responsible for the advanced placement, AP tests, might be able to use its enormous reach to jumpstart this process. So I asked David Coleman whether the college board

43:46had given any thought to an AP data science test. We have, but I think the more profound thing we've done in Canada, and I'll explain why, is to include data science in the core exams we give, like biology, like AP government, is to make data analysis something you encounter over and over again. I want to again push back slightly against the most powerful picture of data science, as isolating it as a discipline all by itself. It often comes alive in its actual application to situations, and I would just be careful of that. And the reason why I'd be careful of making an AP data science course is not because we don't love it and think it's valuable. But we find our courses spread much more quickly for all kids when they're not elective or a special course, that is if I weave data analysis into AP biology that's widely given, or if we weave it into AP government and politics, which 400,000 kids take, that will touch kids in public schools and all levels of our society. If I create a kind of elective data science course, that might only be

44:50taken by a few who choose to take it. But will teachers in AP biology or AP government have the skills to teach the data fluency parts of their courses? One magnificent thing about teaching is it's often the most lively when the teacher himself or herself is learning something. I think the model of practice expertise being the only way that teaching is exciting as false. And so I think what's more interesting is can we create environments for teachers and students where together the data comes alive and fascinates them. And so I think the question is not to kind of try to suddenly retrain the American teaching force to be data analysts, but instead design superb data experiences, superb courses where the hunt for data and the experimentation is so lively that it excites them as well as their students. And then they together might be surprised at the outcomes. I believe that we owe it to our children to prepare them for the world that

45:50they will encounter, a world driven by data. Basic data fluency is a requirement, not just for most good jobs, but also for navigating life more generally, whether it is in terms of financial literacy, making good choices about our own health, or knowing who and what to believe. Math class isn't the only place to teach data skills, but it seems like a good place to start. The current math curriculum isn't preparing students well for either the workforce or the classes they will take in college. It isn't even helping them do well in the new SAT. There's every reason to think that with a bit of retooling, the current batch of high school math teachers could be outstanding teachers of new data-focused courses. Radical changes never easy. I posed the question to you, the listeners at the top of the show. What was the reaction to the episode when we first released it? Well, the response was shockingly positive. The students and parents and teachers who wrote us overwhelmingly agreed with our arguments. But most importantly,

46:54it turned out that there were already a bunch of non-profits working in the area, but they were working independently and not having the impact they wanted. And over the last two years, we've come together and we've just this summer formed a consortium. It's called Data Science for Everyone and we're willing to do whatever it takes to give every child a chance to achieve data fluency. It's a hard problem though and we're just getting started. So if you have great ideas in this area, send them our way. Now, I'll probably won't surprise you that one of the first schools on board is SailCon's lab school. That's one of the topics we talked about in episode 22. And if I hadn't had SailCon on the show, none of this would have happened. If you want to learn more about what we're doing, visit our website at data science for everyone.org. That's the words data science, the number four, and the word everyone. Data science for everyone.org. Thanks for listening. People I mostly admire is part of the Frekenomics Radio Network and is produced by Frekenomics

47:57Radio. This episode was produced by Zach Lapinski. Jasmine Klinger is our engineer. Theme music composed by Luis Gerrard. Thanks for listening. I know that when he read the book or audiobook, he didn't like one take and I did like a thousand. I was like, f***, why doesn't Devonery the whole damn thing? The Frekenomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. This podcast is supported by Nurtek O.D.T., from Ejapan. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but Migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So, when Migraine takes your time, take Nurtek. It's for the acute treatment of Migraine with or without aura and adults. Nurtek can provide pain relief in two hours which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare

49:01provider if Nurtek is right for you because your time is for you. Not Migraine. Don't take it allergic to Nurtek O.D.T., allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and rain on syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-Nurtek or visit Nurtek.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today. Did you know that psoriatic arthritis may progress over time and could cause permanent joint damage if left untreated? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away. Turmphaya, Gusokumab, taken by injection, is a prescription medicine for adults with active

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