The New Jersey Board of Education may adopt requirements mandating that all high school students pass Algebra II and Chemistry in order to get their sheepskin.

On Monday, a few high voltage proponents of the change spoke to the NJ Assembly Education Committee.

"We are no longer at the forward front here."

Lucille E. Davy, Commissioner

Ms. Davy is the Commissioner of Education for New Jersey. She majored in mathematics as an undergrad. I assume she once had a handle on Algebra II.

She subsequently went to law school, and is now the New Jersey Commissioner of Education.

Commissioner, when was the last time you needed advanced algebra to tackle your duties?

Requiring all students to take increasingly complex courses simply because we're embarrassed that another state might have more rigorous requirements does not explain why it should be mandatory.

(I could take a cheap ad hominem shot at the redundancy in "forward front" but I fear it might lead to a mandated courses in Rhetoric 101.)

Here's a stunning mathematical fact: one out of five of our high school students are less intelligent than 80% of our student population! About 1 in 2 are below average. You could look it up.

"Business needs this. . . . Business is not
seeing the employees that it needs."

Chris Emigholz
Director of Education Policy, NJBIA

Mr. Emigholz is a lobbyist, a registered governmental affairs agent for New Jersey--Number 49-14 if you're interested. He works for the New Jersey Business and Industry Association.

He talks a lot. He processes numbers. He politics. He gets things done.

Let's look in his briefcase. Notepads, yes, fancy pen or two, lots of documents, a few scattered CD's, maybe even a laptop computer (or two), business cards, a Blackberry Gold, and, oh look, some mints, and, whoops...how'd did that get in there?

What you won't find, however, is a TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator.

He doesn't need one.

Yes, Mr. Emigholz, business is not "seeing the employees that it needs"--hard to find folks who can afford to work minimum wage and raise a family here in the Garden State--but jamming every child with algorithms isn't going to make them more likely to work for less than a liveable wage.


Now, before my education friends jump all over me, I am all for pushing kids to their limits, encouraging them to explore all kinds of worlds that can only be seen through mathematics. (I must be getting strident, I keep italicizing words.) I've been accused of holding my lambs to standards, and I growl a lot in the classroom. We get things done.

Still, I managed to get through several jobs (stevedore, lab tech, warehouse checker, pediatrician, and, by golly, science teacher) and not once have I ever needed to whip out Algebra II for work. I will sometimes play with it for fun, though....shhhh.


(I did use a little chemistry when working at Laird and Company bottling apple jack and other bottled pleaures, but I took chemistry in high school because I loved it.)

If you want a child to study something perceived as irrelevant, something most adults, even successful ones, cannot do, simply to increase a potential pool of engineers who will compete with each other and keep labor costs down, then shame on you.

Here's some math for you--there are over 1.1 billion Indians alive today. China has over 1.3 billion people.

India has over 340 million kids under 15 years old. As of 2000, the United States had less than 60 million in the same age bracket. Unless you accept eugenics, the only way we're going to catch up with absolute Indian brainpower is start a Swiftian campaign of pregnancy early and often. (It would put a whole new spin on sex education.)

Would that be acceptable, Mr. Emigholz?

I have a better idea--let's mandate a logic course. Maybe then our children will make better choices than we did on who to empower in government, and no longer tolerate what passes for "reasonable" discourse in politics today.

Quotes are from "An official call for tougher curricula" in yesterday's
Philadephia Inquirer, written by Rita Giordano