Let’s teach them what they need to know
Association for Women in Mathematics
The following entry originally appeared in the 2025 March-April Newsletter for the Association for Women in Mathematics.
I don’t know the full history or choices along the way that built the 20th and 21st century math curriculum in California public schools, or anywhere else, for that matter. But I do know that the space race in the 1950s and 60s and the related Cold War throughout the second half of the 20th century drew the best and the brightest of our students into physics (Hilborn and Howes 2003, fig. 1; Lövheim 2021). In terms of mathematics, calculus is fundamental to understanding physics and working in any of the related fields, including astronomy and engineering. So, it doesn’t surprise me that our public-school mathematics curricula builds directly toward having the top students complete a two-course sequence of Calculus I and Calculus II by the time they graduate from high school. But there is a case to be made that our national interests have changed, and I believe that we do a disservice to our high school students when they graduate without having engaged with statistics, modeling, or really any data analysis at all.
Below I detail some of the ongoing debates happening in the state of California. I also describe one of our newest threats to poverty and income inequality: online sports gambling. And while I wholeheartedly agree that we need to continue to offer some of our students calculus (we still need physicists, after all!), I would like to see the structure of the curriculum flipped to focus most students on data acumen skills and only some students on calculus skills.
The California debate
For admission to the University of California (UC) system1, three years of college-preparatory mathematics that include the topics covered in elementary and advanced algebra and two- and three-dimensional geometry are required; a fourth year of math is strongly recommended. The course sequence Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II is the typical way, in California, to fulfill the requirement.
In 2020, the UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) for the University of California system (including UC Berkeley and UCLA) officially confirmed long-standing practice that the Algebra II requirement could be validated2 by students who had taken Statistics (BOARS (2020)). The 2020 BOARS decision was grounded in being an “equity issue”, where they state, “By clarifying the definition of college math readiness and expanding the choices of area C math courses students can take to be eligible for UC admissions, students should be encouraged to pursue the mathematics education most relevant to their academic and career goals.”3 However, they seem to undermine the equity issue with the following statement: “Students who are interested in pursuing a college major in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM), or data science and the social sciences, are strongly encouraged to consider a math course sequence that prepares them for calculus, either during high school or in their first year at UC.” Which reads as if they still believe that calculus should be the pinnacle of mathematics regardless of whether or not calculus is the most important mathematics course for a particular student (STEM or not).
Recently, BOARS has revisited their 2020 decision, spurred on partly by complaints from mathematicians who believe data science, which is classified as a statistics course, is dumbing down the mathematics curriculum. In 2023, more than 400 faculty from California institutions signed an open letter (Charikar et al. 2023), which argues, among other things, that the only reasonable path for any STEM major is the Algebra II to Calculus pathway. Roughly 55% of UC students are not, however, STEM majors (University of California 2024). The result was that in 2024, BOARS and UCOP (UC Office of the President) reversed their 2020 decision and declared that beginning with Fall 2025, only courses, such as Pre-Calculus or AP Calculus, that have elementary and advanced algebra and geometry as prerequisites, can be used to validate Algebra II (BOARS (2024)).
The UC system doubled down on the calculus pathway, despite observations like those of mathematician David Bressoud (DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus, Macalester College) who explains how broken the calculus pathway really is. Bressoud recognizes that the “singular focus on calculus sucks the oxygen out of” building a strong curriculum for statistics and data science. He argues that a “truly co-equal path that develops computational and data skills” is needed (Bressoud 2020).
The consequences of the recent UC decision are that many school districts are dropping statistics and data science (and some computer science) courses. The hierarchy of courses (some validate and some don’t) discourages school districts from spending money on courses that don’t validate the UC Area C requirement. Unfortunately, in California, the UC requirements drive the high school curricula, and the recent BOARS decisions will not be good for statistics and data science course offerings throughout the public schools.
Why the debate matters: consider sports gambling
The high school / university curricular debate aside, it is worth considering why the debate feels so important. The Stanford History Education Group did an extensive analysis to assess college students’ online reasoning skills. The researchers found that the students’ ability to reason about information on the internet was “bleak”. The students were unable to reason through why they should or shouldn’t believe a particular online claim. The study found that students accepted as truth the information presented to them, even when there was no supporting evidence or citations (Stanford History Education Group 2016). In many scenarios, an inability to discern online truths will not negatively impact one’s life. There are some situations, however, where having a good sense of online scams can help a person avoid bankruptcy.
In May 2018, the US Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a law that prevented gambling on both collegiate and professional sports. In the wake of that decision, sports gambling has become ubiquitous, particularly within online platforms. That is, the dismantling of the regulation opened the doors, but online technology opened the flood gates. Websites like FanDuel and DraftKings make it remarkably simple to connect your bank account to the gambling platform, and they bombard you with exciting opportunities to win big.
One of the ways that online gambling platforms make money is through something called a parlay bet. A parlay is a type of bet in which multiple selections are made on different events (e.g., LA Dodgers win the game and Ohtani hits a home run at some point during the game and the total score of the game is fewer than 7.5 runs). It is difficult to win a parlay bet because each event must come out in your favor in order to win. As such, the platform offers long odds (extra payouts) for those rare occasions when a parlay bet succeeds. The long odds make the bet seem like a good idea to the average amateur gambler. Unsurprisingly to mathematicians, however, “the bookmakers are taking advantage of the increased risk involved in a parlay by offering lower odds” than the probability calculation would suggest (Leans.AI, n.d.). And certainly, the platform would not allow you to take the other side of the parlay bet. That is, the platform offers a big payout if your parlay wins, but if the betting market were even somewhat close to fair, the offer should be for a truly enormous payout if your parlay wins.
Understanding the concept of expected value (the long run average on the return of, say, a parlay bet) is paramount to being able to know whether the online gaming platforms are taking advantage of their users (spoiler: they are). Season 5 of Michael Lewis’ podcast, Against the Rules4, walks through how being data illiterate leaves a person open to getting taken advantage of by online gaming platforms. He describes the tactics that the industry uses (e.g., not allowing large bets from individuals who win) to take advantage of a population of people who are not trained to understand critical reasoning through data. The podcast serves as a warning for anyone considering online sports gambling, but it is only one voice in a sea of industries set up to take advantage of people who are not trained to understand data, evidence, and reasoning–all important concepts taught in a data science course.
Recommendation
In the end, I find the curricular part of the debate between Algebra II and Data Science to be distracting. The material in both classes is equally important. But I believe that the material in data science and statistics courses is more equally important, especially when it comes to serving the vast majority of high school students in California public schools. That is, I’d like to see us focus on how we can get every single high school student graduating with some kind of training in data. While I recognize that there is only so much space in a high school curriculum, I advocate for statistics and data training above most other things, including Algebra II. I worry that we do our students a disservice when we send them insufficiently prepared into a world optimized to take advantage of them. It is in our national interest to minimize the information asymmetry between the average patron and the industries who are using data against consumers. Let’s teach our students what they need to know.
References
Footnotes
The 23 California State University campuses follow the same requirements.↩︎
“validate” is the formal term used to indicate fulfilling a particular requirement.↩︎
Area C represents the high school mathematics subject requirements for admission into the University of California system.↩︎
available at: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules↩︎