My objections to Jo Boaler's recommendations are mainly related to the content covered in chapters 6 and 7 of her book (Mathematical Mindsets). Not all of it is

My objections to Jo Boaler's recommendations are mainly related to the content covered in chapters 6 and 7 of her book (Mathematical Mindsets). Not all of it is wrong. But some of the things she's written in that book, and in the intro the California Math Framework 2021 is wrong-headed: 1. She claims that studies show that detracking improves student outcomes for all students, including the strongest. The cited studies mix a number of interventions, so it's impossible to draw the conclusion that detracking caused the increase in performance. 2. She attacks a straw man when she talks about the 'elitist construction of math'. I don't believe her characterisation that many/most people believe that math ability is genetic. 3. The talk of open-ended 'Low floor, high ceiling' tasks sounds nice in principle. But I challenge you to come up with a task that would work for people spanning 5 grade levels's of math ability (like the 6th graders at several schools in the Bay Area), and that a median California math teacher could supervise effectively. 4. No, there's no rule that says, if you group kids by ability, you can't provide differentiated instruction within each classroom. 5. If high school math achievement is used as a gatekeeper for college admissions, and this reinforces inequity, the answer cannot be to hold some students back. Rather, we should improve early math education so that people can all progress. Even if it's true that folks who study calculus in high school end up studying it again in college, this doesn't indicate they didn't benefit from that high school exposure. 6. The five strides of Equitable Math (https://equitablemath.org/ https://equitablemath.org/) (recommended in the California Math Framework 2021, Chapter 2), is NOT a good guide to improving math teaching. Its characterisation that every problem with math education is the cause of 'White Supremacy culture' is plainly wrong. Many of those problems exist in places like China, and it's hard to claim that's also a result of white supremacy. I highly recommend reading Stride 1 on that web site. 7. She pushed some changes at San Francisco Unified School District, the main one of which was moving Algebra I from 8th grade to 9th grade. She and the district claimed great success, and published some misleading stats. I won't go into the reasons why those stats are misleading here. But just look at what happened to those students when it came time to take the SAT. The first cohort of students who did algebra in 9th grade had a 10% lower pass rate on the Math SAT than did the previous cohort (61%, down from 66%). This is on the public record: you can request the aggregate data from CA Dept Ed (it used to be online, but they took down the page, as they don't care about SAT results now that UC doesn't look at them).