Across the United States, a recent movement has initiated discussions of whether academic math curricula should be restructured.

Specifically, this initiative seeks to address the alleged racism within math education through various approaches, including having "high-achieving" and "low-achieving" math students being placed in the same classes.

This is being done to address the supposed segregation in math classrooms alleging white and Asian students occupy higher classes while Black and Latinx students are enrolled in lower-level courses.

The movement also proposes lessening the number of AP calculus offerings— a traditional gateway course for many colleges and STEM careers—and giving other classes like statistics the same prestige. The overall initiative has been highly controversial, however. An open letter opposing the matter was, and hundreds upon hundreds of college professors have signed it.

SAVE MATH EDUCATION from policies that "elevate trendy but shallow courses over foundational skills."

Our children's futures and our country's future hang in the balance—so we have to boost this. https://t.co/7fUE7lxGjX

— Free Black Thought (@FreeBlckThought) December 8, 2021

Another professor, York College's Dr. Erec Smith, expressed his opinion on the matter during an interview with Fox News. Smith, who is Black, teaches rhetoric, and cofounded the Free Black Thought organization, slammed the movement as being "soft bigotry."

"This is dumbing down," he said of the initiative. "If you're creating a form of education specifically for one group of kids because they can't learn like everybody else, that's just another iteration of the soft bigotry of low expectations."

"[Math] can be racist if you abide by this new movement on the quote-unquote 'woke left' that says that reason and rationality–and even a scientific method itself–are inherently white and, therefore, racist to expect from Black students" Smith added. "This is just another iteration of that."

He also explicitly reacted to specific schools' responses to the movement, such as Chicago's Evanston Township High School offering AP math courses exclusively for Black-identifying students.

"I think it's more separatism. I think it's more segregation, and I think it's unnecessary," Smith said. "Regressing into stereotypes to teach certain groups of people is going backward culturally."

"That is the danger of this new far-left version of education," he added. "When they do get into college, it's not a good fit because they're in a situation that they haven't been prepared for. It just sets them up for more failure."

Dr. Erec Smith

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