[nyc640]

It's not that they published a paper without any Black co-authors.

There has been a controversial push in California to reform public school math education guidelines called the California Math Framework [1]. It [2] frames current math education in California as failing minority students and gives suggestions for how to remedy it. The issue has been controversial as some see it as injecting social justice topics into the math curriculum, while others see it as necessary to contextualize math within our broader society. (edit: corrected by the other reply to your comment that said some of the parts of the framework about adding social justice topics have been removed from the most recent draft of the framework)

The tweet author is pointing out that this 800-page framework about addressing inequalities in math education for minority (in particular Black and Latino) students was written by many authors, but none of them were Black. This seems like a valid criticism given the issues that it is explicitly trying to address.

There have also been similar criticisms levied at the new framework because it was written entirely by academic researchers studying pedagogy and had little to no input from actual teachers.

[1] https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2021/11/cali...

[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

[prepend]

> academic researchers studying pedagogy and had little to no input from actual teachers.

This makes sense but doesn’t square with the lack of black authors. Would black academic researchers studying pegagogy be better than actual teachers?

It seems the issue is lack of teachers participating in the design and testing of the framework than the race of the authors.

Is there a evidence or accusation of discrimination in the selection of the authors?

[nyc640]

I honestly have no idea because I haven't done (nor do I plan to do as I don't live in California anymore) enough research to have an informed opinion on the topic.

However, I think it is generally valid to say that if you are explicitly trying to address how a system (CA math education) is failing a certain group of people (black students), it would be useful to consult with members of that group or people who work closely with members of that group.

Again, I'm not taking a strong stance here and I'm sure there could hypothetically be some world where this may not be true and the X truly most qualified people to tackle this issue are all not Black. But even from a completely cynical, practical standpoint you can see how the optics look bad when the state of California admits to failing its Black students yet tasks a committee of professors to solve the issue without any representation from the groups it has failed.

[foogazi]

> However, I think it is generally valid to say that if you are explicitly trying to address how a system (CA math education) is failing a certain group of people (black students), it would be useful to consult with members of that group or people who work closely with members of that group.

What is the group ?

Is it black teachers or black students ? Black students from CA ? Black students from CA that failed math ?

[syspec]

Any of those would be better than what their choice of none of those

[gumby]

> This makes sense but doesn’t square with the lack of black authors. Would black academic researchers studying pegagogy be better than actual teachers?

It helps to have people who understand education and who understand (often from personal experience) the very phenomena one claims to be addressing.

> Is there a evidence or accusation of discrimination in the selection of the authors?

There is no accusation, merely an observation which was enough to attract the ire of the Stanford prof.