Some leaders reduce our math crisis to two words: test scores. For decades, hopes of progress were dashed by flat to declining scores. Full-bore panic about fading global competitiveness. Urgent calls for more drills, worksheets, and double-dose tutoring. Whatever it takes, get those test scores up. 

But here’s the real crisis. We teach the wrong math and test it the wrong way. We devote thousands of hours to the obsolete rote math that pervades our high-stakes exams—math that students will never use as adults—while totally ignoring the math that defines our lives. This is a failed agenda set by math-confused policymakers, with a math-confused populace going along.  

The very word “math” may jolt you back in time to high school. To algebra, geometry, trig, and—for the gifted—calculus. A blizzard of esoterica: factored polynomials, side-angle-side, irrational numbers, the chain rule. Worksheets honing our ability to execute few-step procedures quickly and accurately, by hand. A math curriculum laid out for the United States by the Committee of Ten in 1893, when rote math was essential for many respected professions: architects, surveyors, civil engineers, munitions experts, astronomers. 

Then came the computer. From a few mainframes in the 1960s to ubiquitous supercomputer smartphones today, we live in a world of data, data, everywhere. Math surrounds and defines us through algorithms, optimization, statistics, probability, and AI. 

These changes beg for a wholesale overhaul of the math we teach in school. But we’ve chosen poorly, placing ever-higher stakes on ever-less-relevant rote........

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