Math is the Path to the Middle Class

It was great news for Rhode Island recently. General Dynamics Electric Boat has been awarded a $17.6 billion contract to build ten Virginia-class attack submarines and the Quonset Point facility will be adding 450 jobs. Some commuting workers from Massachusetts may benefit as well.

This is consistent with President Obama’s pledge to build the economy from “the middle out.” The wages from these jobs would inject an additional $30 million into the local economy with beneficial ripple effects (the “multiplier”) boosting barbers and bakers and candlestick makers.

But not so fast. Once of the most common positions on the Electric Boat website is a “QP Inside Machinist.” This job is described as follows:

“Set up, program editing and operation of CNC milling and turning centers. Verifying part configuration to plan requirements using various high tolerance precision measuring tools; must be able to work independently and with minimum supervision.”

From the list of qualifying requirements, this one stands out: Strong mathematical skills in geometry & trigonometry preferred.

Oops. How skilled are our recent high school grades in math? Are they ready for the rigors of the workplace? Or, rather, have they succumbed to our cultural aversion to math?

In Hollywood, only geeks and geniuses (e.g., Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting”) are good at math. The cool kids steer clear. It’s too hard. It’s not cool. It’s the butt of jokes.

But as can be seen, math may be a qualifying requirement for a well-paying middle class job. And as our information-based economy continues to unfold, this will be increasingly true.

Long gone are the days when one can make a good wage based on the sweat of one’s brow. Lifting 50 pound bags of flour is now relegated to pallet jacks, with a single operator displacing dozens of Italian immigrant mothers who had previously been paid to stack tons of goods. We hate technology, but each of us with a smart phone is embracing it. The workplace has changed.

But have our cultural and educational systems changed apace? Has mathematical literacy, numeracy, become increasingly desirable and culturally acceptable? Alas, it has not.

It is shockingly apparent that we have not prepared our kids for the new workplace. They believe math is hard, uncool, geeky, and hence, avoid it. But if the alternative is a minimum wage job as a barista, are we serving them well?

A plethora of studies have shown that high school math skills are correlated to higher earnings later in life. And not just earnings, math ability also eases our way through the increasingly complex thicket of everyday life. A 2013 study done by researchers at Princeton University found that in the financial meltdown of 2008, poor basic math skills correlated strongly with mortgage defaults. Controlling for all other factors (age, ethnicity, education, household income), the researchers studied hundreds of subprime mortgages across New England. Their findings were surprising in that it wasn’t specifically the choice of mortgage contract that led to default, but rather other life behaviors indicating poor overall financial decision making.

How to motivate kids to learn math and teach them more effectively?

One whimsical thought is that if only the media, Hollywood, and sports idols could embrace this cause, things might be different. We have shifted culturally against smoking tobacco and in favor of gay rights, why not a campaign to make math acceptable? It’s too easy to laugh at math geeks, as witnessed by “The Big Bang Theory” whose innumerate character played by Kaley Cuoco wins our affection.

A more serious route being debated by educators is to teach math in context. For instance, high schoolers should be taught basic financial skills and, in the process, exponents and logarithms. That is how interest calculations and amortization tables are made, why not learn how in context and not as part of an abstract course in algebra? This could be amplified by having chemistry and biology teachers, for instance, explaining the math required to understand their subject matters.

After all, math was not invented as an abstract topic. Fractions were an outgrowth of commerce, where early merchants needed to portion out fractional bushels of grain or wheels of cheese. Multiplying 2/3 times 4 was a practical exercise, not something dreamed up to torture a fourth grader.  Likewise, geometry and trigonometry were developed from the building trades and nautical navigation, not as an abstract brain teaser for high schoolers.

This won’t be solved anytime soon, but we must make numeracy a top goal. Those well-paying jobs at Electric Boat are awaiting.

Lies, damned lies, and the financial meltdown

Luther Burbank, visionary, namesake.

A recent article in the Attleboro Sun Chronicle welcomes three new principals to our local school system (“Class Acts”, 9/3/2012). It is a heartwarming article and we all share in the excitement and promise of these promotions. But then, almost an afterthought, we notice something – the three new principals are all female.

There is a little known statistic that approximately half of our population is male. So when three executive positions are filled in the district, mightn’t we expect that at least one would be male?

Curious, we check the district’s website. Of the ten executive positions (nine principals and the superintendent), two are male and eight female. It looks pretty grim for the local guys.

On its face, just based on the numbers, this is highly discriminatory.

But there are lots of good reasons for the disparity. There are cultural and social forces at work that make the pool of female educators much larger than that of males. Females enter the profession at a much higher rate than males. The federal government (National Center for Education Statistics) reports that as of 2008, 76% of all public school teachers were female. So the fact that 80% of Attleboro’s school executives are female is not far off the mark.

It just goes to show that sometimes prima facie (“on its face”) discrimination can be explained by a deeper understanding of background facts.

Meanwhile, there is a small California savings and loan institution named after Luther Burbank, the famed botanist. Luther Burbank Savings was founded in 1983, committed to serving and retaining its customers rather than profiting public stockholders.

The bank is financially conservative and handily survived the financial meltdown of 2008. It did so by avoiding exotic financial vehicles such as sub-prime mortgages and collateralized mortgage obligations. It held the mortgages it issued for its own portfolio and did not sell them off. The funds released to mortgage borrowers came from the bank’s own depositors to whom it owed a fiduciary duty of care. It was successful because it required borrowers to qualify for the mortgage commitments they were about to undertake.

It would seem that this behavior should be congratulated and emulated. If more banks had behaved like this, there would have been no housing bubble and no financial meltdown.

So to honor Luther Burbank, your Department of Justice sued them for maintaining loan policies that had a “disparate impact” on African-Americans and Hispanics. The government observed that loans were made to the minority community at a statistically lower rate than their population.

The bank, admitting no guilt, settled the suit to avoid ruinously expensive litigation. It has loosened its lending standards and its depositors money is now at much greater risk. This is all due to the government’s “disparate impact” theory which says, regardless of fundamental causes, that if statistical variances exist, they must be discriminatory. No analysis of underlying causes is permitted.

If the problem is that minorities fail to qualify for standard mortgages, then we need to address those core issues. Holding a figurative gun to the head of a small community bank and forcing it to take greater risks runs counter to the lessons learned since 2008. And basing this on superficial statistics seems nonsensical at best.

If similar reasoning were applied to the Attleboro School district’s hiring policies, heads would roll.