It happens every spring — while I’m giving the final exam to high-achieving 10th graders, some student will come up to my desk to ask questions about some extremely basic mathematics this course assumes they learned years earlier.
Knowing that this moment is always on its way, I spend much of each year helping them to remediate these holes in their basic knowledge because these are the kinds of gaps that I know will sink them when they get to their required college-level math courses. We’re talking about things like fractions. The distributive property. Exponents and roots. Intermediate proportional reasoning.
It’s not their fault that their previous 10 years’ worth of mathematical study left them with gaps, but being blameless won’t help when they get accepted to a U.C. Berkeley STEM program but find themselves drowning in Calculus 1.
I teach at the largest single-feeder school to the University of California system. My students are strong and motivated. They did everything the system told them to do, and what the system promised them was that doing is the same thing as knowing.
But it’s not.
So I wasn’t that surprised last week when over 1,000 U.C. faculty, led by Berkeley mathematicians, published an open letter demanding that the U.C. system bring back the SAT and ACT for applicants to STEM majors and that STEM faculty set the mathematical readiness requirements for their programs. They indicated their frustration that they now find themselves reteaching middle-school arithmetic to students enrolled in college-level Calculus 1.
Honestly, I found this relatable.
I say that because, having taught some of these same students, I have seen exactly how they ended up in this place.
As the STEM professors’ letter rather aptly puts it, their proposed reinstatement of the SAT/ACT requirement “is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it.”
That sentence is a live grenade, and it’s being lobbed at a very specific target.
This is all happening because those who removed the testing requirement in 2020 did so in the name of equity. But now both sides are claiming that same word, which is the surest sign this was never really an argument about standardized testing in the first place.
And what we are watching is just the latest salvo in a war that has been raging in California education for more than 30 years — but in this round, the STEM faculty are finally fighting for the gate itself.
To understand why, you have to know who is doing the fighting.
On one side are the people who teach at the end of the K-12 math pipeline: the university mathematicians, engineers, biologists, medical researchers, and physicists whose commitment is to transmitting the content of their programs. Years of teaching and learning at the university level have shown that if students don’t arrive having mastered a body of basic mathematical knowledge at a very high level, then their programs’ calculus requirement cannot be digested straightforwardly. There is no substitute for genuine fluency in Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2. Math is cumulative and unforgiving. You cannot build the second floor of a house on a foundation that doesn’t exist.
On the other side stand the schools of education, the math teacher credentialing programs and the authors of the state math frameworks. These people train the people who teach in the K-12 pipeline. Their commitment is to access, and their beliefs are grounded in a real and ugly history — the fact that the traditional algebra-to-calculus track was long used as a sorting machine to filter out disfavored students before they could even attempt the work. For these folks, the pipeline itself is the problem, and their solution has been to de-emphasize anything that might interfere with or delay a student’s arrival in a college calculus class.
I want to be fair to that second camp, because their base-level concern is not wrong. Anyone who has taught long enough has seen kids wrongly placed or mistracked too early.
But here is where I part company with the field that credentialed me, and where I see it having stopped honoring the evidence.
Let’s begin with what isn’t in dispute, because the unanimity is the story.
“Everyone agrees the learning gaps are real. The only dispute is whether we’re going to measure them.”
The numbers are not subtle. At U.C. San Diego, the Academic Senate working group found that between 2020 and 2025, the share of incoming students whose math skills tested below high school level rose roughly thirtyfold — from under one percent to about one in eight. Seventy percent of those students were performing below middle-school level.
Seventy percent.
UCSD needed to build not just one tier of remedial math but two, one reaching all the way back to elementary-school arithmetic at one of the most selective public universities in the country. Meanwhile over at Berkeley, giving diagnostic exams to first-semester calculus students revealed severe preparation deficits in 20 to 30 percent of them, at least three years running.
This is not the performance of a system failing at the margins.
And here is the thing the equity framing cannot absorb.
The decision that produced this situation — the 2020 vote to drop the SAT and ACT — was not made in a vacuum of uncertainty about whether testing helped or hurt disadvantaged students. It was made against the U.C.’s own evidence. The university’s Academic Senate had convened a Standardized Testing Task Force, which concluded that test scores actually predicted success for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and could actually increase their admission rates — not lower them.
But the Regents voted the other way anyway.
Think about that.
The experts studied the question. They produced an answer the ideology did not want to hear, so that answer was set aside, and the policy went forward in the name of the very same students the evidence predicted it would hurt. Then when the predicted harm arrived — in the form of a thirtyfold increase in students who couldn’t do middle-school math at a flagship university — their response was not, we were wrong but rather, we just need more time and more support; anything except a data set that might make us face the truth.
This is why I say the field is captured. It’s not that the people in it are cynical — most are not. Capture is subtler than cynicism. But this is what happens when a theory becomes unfalsifiable, when no possible evidence can be permitted to count against it. This is a theology, not a theory. These data should have ended the argument years ago.
What is more, a discipline that was sincerely committed to universal opportunity would have treated its own task force’s findings as decisive. But that’s not what they did. Instead, they’ve spent years making excuses and insisting that these data are an inconvenience which needs to be worked around.
That is the very definition of an ideology.
And like most ideologies, it preaches its own double standards.
For example, when a calculus hall fills with students who range from fluent to functionally pre-algebraic, U.C. faculty call that a “polarized course,” and they point out plainly that it weakens the education of everyone in the room. It is impossible to teach at the level the subject requires, they explain.
When I read that passage, I laughed out loud — not because it’s wrong but because of who is finally saying it.
For as long as I’ve been teaching, ed schools have always had a one-word answer for the polarized classroom: differentiation. Their argument is that if we credentialed math teachers were simply skilled enough, we’d be able to deliver meaningfully different instruction to all students in the same room at the same time — regardless of whether they are four grade levels apart.
When that magical thinking fails to pan out, they blame the teacher. Differentiation is the establishment’s universal solvent. There is no preparation gap they claim it can’t dissolve, no bimodal distribution it can’t, in principle, smooth out.
I’m not the only one who has experienced this cognitive dissonance. Zvezdelina Stankova has taught math at Berkeley for nearly 30 years, and she helped organize the letter. She described one recent calculus class as the moment when something broke: “The bottom was taken out,” she said, “and there were 25 to 30% of the students who were in free fall. There was nothing you could do for them.”
Read that last sentence again, and notice who is saying it.
This is not some burned-out high school teacher. Not a testing-company lobbyist. This is a veteran U.C. Berkeley mathematician, looking out over a roomful of students that her own university admitted, and concluding — after years of trying everything — that there was nothing more she could do for them.
If differentiation can’t save that classroom, who can it save?
We cannot have it both ways. Either the massively heterogeneous classroom can be differentiated into success or it cannot. If the mathematicians are right, then the establishment owes a generation of K-12 teachers an apology for blaming us for a structural problem that defeats the best-resourced instructors in one of the flagship public higher education systems in our country.
It’s fair to demand that struggling students in a polarized classroom receive more support. But a system that refuses to measure readiness ahead of time doesn’t spare the underprepared student a reckoning — it just guarantees that their reckoning will arrive after they have enrolled, borrowed against their degree, and discovered during week six of the term that the help they need now should have been given to them years ago.
Differentiation is less a response to struggling students and more a way to relocate responsibility — downward, on to teachers whose classrooms have been overpopulated for many years with an impossible spread in the first place.
The honest objection to all of this doesn’t come from the equity sloganeers; it comes from the people with the data. Zachary Bleemer, a Princeton economist who has studied U.C. admissions more closely than most, argues there’s “no advantage to the student to being pushed into a less selective university.” Maybe he’s right — a struggling student will face better odds on a well-resourced campus than at a financially strapped community college.
But then let’s name what this debate is really about.
It’s about what happens to this student after they’ve been admitted to university — not whether they’ve arrived ready to do college-level math — because on that question there’s no dispute at all. Everyone agrees the learning gaps are real. The only dispute is whether or not we’re going to measure them.
And here’s where the dispute collides with willful blindness from a field that seems more driven by fear of blame than by courage.
They’re confusing the thermometer with the fever.
In a few days, the U.C. Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, will sit down to discuss whether any of this is going to change. Most of California won’t even notice. But I will be thinking about a specific desk in my classroom, and all the students who’ve sat there.
I am tired of being asked to pretend that my job is to stay quiet about glaring mastery. That isn’t equity and it never was. It was a way of delaying the moment of truth far enough into the future that someone else — a Berkeley lecturer, a calculus midterm, or maybe the student herself at 2 a.m. in her dorm — would get stuck with the bill.
We knew. That’s the thing I can’t get over. We knew.
We had the data and we saw the problem, but we sent these students downstream along the conveyor belt anyway.
