Georgia’s Department of Education held math equity summits in 2019 and 2020 that instructed state educators to stop grouping students by ability and prioritize their work as educators around equity, according to materials provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation by Heritage Action for America.
(Heritage Action for America is the grassroots partner organization of The Heritage Foundation, for which The Daily Signal is the news outlet.)
The Georgia Department of Education hosted a Mathematics Equity Summit in 2019 and 2020, where it introduced statewide plans to implement an “equity plan” outlined in a toolkit that provided resources for districts and schools to promote equity “in mathematics and beyond,” according to materials that have since been scrubbed from the department’s website.
Georgia’s plan was created by district leadership teams and university partners at the inaugural summit in 2019.
The state Department of Education said the content from the summit “misaligned and misrepresented their values,” according to a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation by Meghan Frick, communications director for the Georgia Department of Education, in response to an inquiry about why the math equity materials were deleted from the department’s website.
The content “wasn’t approved by Superintendent [Richard] Woods and did not go through the proper review/vetting process; that has since been addressed and corrected,” Frick told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Georgia Department of Education said it values “expanding access to options and opportunities for all children,” but does “not support or promote divisive teachings, policies, or practices.”
The Mathematics Equity in Georgia framework listed “key components” to make math more equitable, including removing bias by “recognizing and acknowledging bias at all levels, including biases that extend beyond the classroom” and eliminating any activities that grouped students by ability.
Educators were also instructed to “prioritize the work in the school around equity” and told teachers to provide “culturally responsive teaching” and promote “mathematics culturally relevant pedagogy” in mathematics.
The conference was aligned to the state-adopted Common Core standards, which Frick said Woods is an opponent of and “has since spearheaded efforts to completely overhaul those standards and develop a new set of K-12 Math standards in Georgia.”
Math Equity Programs on the Rise Across the Country
Jonathan Butcher, an education expert at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that this is a trend in math instruction that has been seen across the country over the past five to 10 years.
“Critical pedagogy is the application of critical race theory to teaching, and research from this field shows that critical ideas are being used to shape the hard sciences and math, as well as literature and history,” Butcher said. “Even math is being refocused away from numeracy and technical skills to so-called social justice issues that actually defend discrimination.”
He said it is easy to look at where the educators source their content from “to find the roots of critical race theory in material.”
“They don’t use the words critical race theory, but you can see within it the critical ideas of power and oppression … being one of the driving intellectual ideas behind this kind of equity math, as well as the very idea that we should be looking at math through a racial lens or from a racial perspective,” Butcher said.
