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College admissions requirements send signals to high schools about what courses are valued. But when those requirements fail to change with the times, they can actually stifle innovation. Take the teaching of data science in high school. The development of such courses has been stunted in virtually every state in the country, because they don’t clearly fall within the defined math requirements...

Growing up, I always felt like the slow tortoise of the race. I was the last one to finish an assignment, the last to get the answer right, and the last chosen for flag football. Oftentimes, I left the classroom silent and ashamed, not understanding how I was constantly behind everyone else.

As the start of the school year approaches, we keep hearing about the risks of learning loss. In a typical year, we are told, students lose an average of 36 percent of their academic year gains in reading over the summer, and a whopping 50 percent of their gains in mathematics.

On the surface, mathematics appears to be a set of truths, and math education a way of transmitting those truths — in the same way the law seems to be a set of rules, with criminal justice a system for enforcing them. However, just as the criminal justice system has been called “slavery by another name” for disproportionately imprisoning black people, our system of math education also plays a role...

What a difference a pandemic makes. Just last week, the University of California system broke with decades of tradition by deciding to permanently suspend the SAT and ACT tests as admissions requirements for the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.