My feeling is that educators who work in a bubble (with other educators) fail rather remarkably in reaching out to the populace outside of academia.

There are exceptions, of course. There are a few college profs here and there who excel at public outreach. But they are a small minority.

The uncomfortable truth that the Math Equity proponents skirt is that one can’t unscramble an egg.

By which I mean: if a parent, or a society, or a school fails a student in their early years, educators later (whether a couple of years later in middle school, or high school, or community college) can only patch over the damage.

This may seem harsh and even cruel of me, but time cannot be undone. A child is only age 5 for a single year, for example. In that year her brain will develop and that development sticks. 10 years later you can’t go back and undo that, you can only try to remediate any damage that was done.

So if a child was failed in their mathematics instruction at age 7, some community college math instructor is going to have a hard time helping that student comprehend quantitatively what their fellow students who were privilidged at age 7 can do.

This is a very tough thing to accept. Educators like to think they are helpers, and they are. But we each are much more destined by early childhood experiences than is commonly preached.

It’s not really genetics that determines quantitative ability or mathematics (which is a language), but early childhood. Sure, many people try to find genetic determinism for these things, the the evidence appears to show only a weak influence of genetics for these things.

As a society we suffer a lot from the lack of attention given to early childhood problems. How many social ills could be reduced if only we helped families with young children more?