I am, reportedly, a menace to joyful and equitable achievement, though I demand deep thought and genuine effort from ordinary teenagers who are capable of extraordinary things. I have been overheard objecting to circular reasoning. I once drew a comic strip showing step by step how to solve a complex, multistep algebraic inequality.
I then graphed it.
I criticize math education professors who have to ask others whether inequalities are actually important. I sleep upside-down on a bed of red pens. Using nothing more than a mechanical pencil, an action figure of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and my own crushing disappointment, I once single-handedly paralyzed the admissions leadership of all 10 campuses of the University of California system, leaving them quivering in their offices like bowls of blue and gold Jell-O during an earthquake.
But none of this has anything to do with whether a California public school graduate has the skills, adaptive capacity, and mathematical maturity to succeed in a high-stakes foundational calculus course.
None of this is abstract for me.
I spent years of a successful, decades-long tech career searching for diverse candidates who’d made it through the calculus pipeline because we wanted to hire them for our teams. The shortage of candidates led me to a decision: to leave tech, get credentialed as a public school math teacher, and dedicate my life to helping fix and then strengthen that leaky pipeline from the classroom to industry. I landed my dream job at Mission High School, only to get consolidated and bumped to Lowell. I’ve seen the failures from both ends of the pipeline, and my commitment to this pipeline problem predates my time teaching at a world-renowned magnet school.
The question being posed in the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent article is whether the data support mathematical readiness considerations in the U.C. admissions process. So sure, we should look at that, but we first need to look at the essential prior question — namely, what role the U.C. system plays in the California Master Plan for Higher Education, and who pays the price when that role gets ignored without an honest hearing.
California’s higher education system has an actual design document approved and revised by the legislature and enacted into law. That means the issue under review is not about any individual person’s opinions — it’s about how U.C. admissions offices comply with the legal framework that governs how California’s voters can expect the state’s three-part higher education system to work.
It’s actually a pretty inspiring piece of government writing.
It anticipates and heads off the whole false binary of “access versus excellence.” That’s because the Master Plan and its subsequent revisions have always expected that first-year admissions would never be the only door into the U.C. tier of the system. The authors built the transfer path right in, and it’s been more successful this year than ever before.
Why is this so important? Because some students need more time and support to be ready for upper-division work in a number of hardcore U.C. STEM majors. The people arguing against a one- to two-year delay in degree completion are arguing against what is a rounding error when measured over the length of a whole career. An F in a gateway course, on the other hand, often turns out to be an off-ramp rather than a delay or an extension. And that can be an expensive off-ramp when you consider the cost-per-credit of a course you have to pay for twice — once to fail it and once to retake it. Treating the “give them more time” position as being equivalent to “let them flunk Calc I cold” elides a difference that matters enormously to a disadvantaged student with great promise.
In fact, the piece’s entire body of evidence is based on measurements of outcomes that are pure administrative byproducts, not measures of learning. GPA, retention, enrollment, and course completion are not measurements of a learner’s competence. They offer little as a measure of the learner’s readiness. As William Bruce Cameron (not Einstein) said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
The absence of a standardized measurement isn’t equity — it’s a decision not to look.
What is more, the argument about GPA and retention stability is circular. If grade inflation is the reason we shouldn’t trust GPA, then why is the Chronicle article using the stability of GPA and retention over the long haul to rebut concerns about actual readiness? Either an indicator is reliable or it isn’t. We can’t be selective.
Crowing about “retention” numbers masks an inconvenient and inequitable distinction: the students who got blindsided because they didn’t understand their own poor preparation for a quantitative major count exactly the same as the students who planned for a non-quantitative major from the start. Both are counted as “retained.” That’s a big gap to paper over with a single word, and it tracks with what I saw for years on the hiring side.
As U.C. Berkeley’s Calculus I professor, Zvezdelina Stankova, put it in her recent San Francisco Standard op-ed, the real story isn’t that readiness merely declined — it’s that “the middle collapsed while the bottom became the largest group in the room.” This distributional evidence went unacknowledged in the Chronicle article.
Whatever the details of its actual causality, the downstream reality never gets tied back to the first-year math placement decision at our flagship state university system. There’s a cost but no line item and no data set. That is the problem targeted by the U.C. professors’ open letter.
Well-prepared or not, all students compare themselves to the others in the same room. This is why underprepared students dropped into a demanding lecture course with no accurate understanding of their own readiness pay the highest price. The damage to academic self-concept for such a student is linked to more than just bad feelings; it can lead to premature exit from a field when they simply need more time to complete their prerequisite work.
It’s also ironic that an ideology that objects to timed tests as being too harmful to impose on K-12 students has no apparent objection to letting them drown a few years later in a high-stakes, fast-paced, required gateway course with a hard pass/fail outcome and no life vest.
There’s another problem with the “compromise” position of using the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP)/Smarter Balanced scores, which makes it fail on closer inspection. Because this is a state test available only to California public school applicants, that would create a two-tiered system in the U.C. application process: public school students would be required to submit one uncoached snapshot from 11th grade, while everyone else — including California private school applicants as well as out-of-state and international applicants — would get a repeatable, prep-able benchmark such as SAT or ACT. Once again, framed as policy, this approach is presented as protecting California public school students when, in fact, it would only further disadvantage them.
Once the asymmetry of the CAASPP option is exposed, the most reasonable option is a uniform SAT or ACT requirement. It would apply equally to every applicant, regardless of school type or state. The best way to achieve the equity and excellence goals for admissions that the California Master Plan for Higher Education lays out is to reinstate the SAT/ACT as a standardized benchmark piece of the application package. Admissions experts can use it however they deem best, but genuine equity requires supporting all students fairly to succeed in their chosen majors — even if that means they need more time and support to complete their degrees; this is about a test.
My own public school STEM education led me to amazing adventures including starting software companies, selling them, and years of working with Steve Jobs. I came back to public school STEM education to help guide my students to that same kind of adventurous life.
So far, Lowell has produced three Nobel Prize winners. I can’t wait to see which of our students are on the team that product our fourth. That’s what I’ll be thinking about these first few weeks of the new school year. My students are the reason this fight matters.
I don’t have time to litigate somebody else’s caricature of my efforts.
