Is ‘social justice math’ creeping into your child’s curriculum?

With American children heading back to school, Thursday’s Glenn Beck Program focused on the latest developments related to the Common Core standards and how it impacts the future of education in this country. Dana Loesch spoke to Kyle Olson, co-author of Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education, about a disturbing trend in classrooms: Social justice-inspired math.

As Dana explained, because of the way Common Core has been implemented, not all private school or homeschool curriculums are safe. Furthermore, as Kyle pointed out, college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are going to be reformatted in the coming years to be “Common Core aligned,” which means children who do not receive a Common Core curriculum will be at a disadvantage.

“Just because you homeschool or go to a charter school or private school or whatever the case may be, it is critical parents are engaged in that process, aligned with the teachers and school leaders to make sure their child is getting a proper education and one they expect for their kids,” Olson explained.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, is a trend Olson described among math materials that seeks to recalibrate the economic principles from which concepts are taught.

“There is a huge movement to push what is known as ‘social justice math,’” he said. “Proponents of social justice math don’t like how much consumerism is in math.”

If you think back to your elementary school years, your math equations probably centered around going to the store and making a purchase or having to make change in some way. Not anymore. Now, progressives are pushing to have themes like climate change and casualties of war worked into these problems.

“A typical math problem would be you have 13 cents and a green pencil is 3 cents – you know, that sort of problem. They want to get rid of those sorts of problems,” Olson said. “Instead, they want to calculate war deaths, or they want to calculate the number of liquor stores within a particular radius of the school, or problems related to global warming – those sorts of things.”

Ultimately, there is a push to insert a political and ideological bias into areas of the curriculum that should be straightforward and fact-based.