It's quite reminiscent of the Common Core fight. No one read the standards. I mean, you ask someone to sit in front of you and read "Summarize categorical data

It's quite reminiscent of the Common Core fight. No one read the standards. I mean, you ask someone to sit in front of you and read "Summarize categorical data for two categories in two-way frequency tables. Interpret relative frequencies in the context of the data (including joint, marginal, and conditional relative frequencies). Recognize possible associations and trends in the data." and they just don't get that worked up. Instead it was a cultural fight over power, control, and who gets to set the agenda, that ignored the fact that Republicans participated in creating the Common Core. Nothing gets people to the polls like "schools brainwashing children" -- see Glenn Youngkin. We have the shittiest math education in the developed world, and it comes down to teacher training, teacher support, professional development, and ensuring that children are fed and in safe situations where they can do laundry and wear non-smelly clothes to school [1]. In Finland that is understood, and lo and behold, good scores overall. In the US we think that curriculum is a magic bullet. Like changing the textbook will change what kids learn. As a former math professor, this is bullshit. I can take whatever curriculum you want in math and transform it to meet students where they're at -- because I f*(&ing know math. Too many of our teachers don't, and it's our fault as a society. I left education because of the crap wages and that creeping feeling that my individual efforts to better things just couldn't match the magnitude of the problems. America keeps being a magic-bullet country. The vaccine will fix COVID, so we don't need societal support for public health measures. Right or left, I don't care; the right thinks "individual responsibility" is the magic bullet in the face of infrastructure problems, funding problems, everything, while the left thinks technocratic solutions or "being correct" will be the fix. I strongly support the shift to more applications of math, more stats and probability, more analysis of real-world systems. There is plenty of room to challenge gifted students in this context and I have done so myself -- you do need the time and support to build scaffolded projects so when "that kid" is done you can say, "Well, what about this?" and when that other kid is still struggling you can break it down. The factory grind of education in American and the fact that many math teachers don't even have a degree in math means that is quite difficult to put in place. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/schools-laundry-rooms.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/schools-laundry-rooms....