Thursday, February 07, 2008

The 'Multiculturalism-to-Math Ratio'   [Robert VerBruggen]

City Journal has put together some data on education schools:

To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word “math.” We then computed a “multiculturalism-to-math ratio”—a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools.

Some schools slanted in favor of math, but most taught more about multiculturalism.

This is a useful undertaking, but it leaves some possibilities open. For one, teachers might learn how to instruct on math in classes that aren't exclusive to math — classes without "math" in the title. In addition, some of the "diversity" classes might not be totally devoted to left-wing social goals; in a lot of areas, teachers have to deal with situations they've never seen before, and it's not unreasonable for an education school to prepare them for it.

02/07 02:55 PMShare