BOSTON (AP) – Like many high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.
“They're all crazy smart. In their normal work they are engineers, they are scientists,” Tran, 17, said. “And you can't do any of those things without math.”
Tran also loves math. This summer, he studied calculus five hours a day with other high school students in a program at Northeastern University.
But Tran and his friends are not the norm. Many Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already incredible scores on standardized math tests are falling even further.
The nation needs people who are good at math, employers say, in the same way that movie mortals need superheroes. They say America's poor performance in math is no joke. It poses a threat to the nation's global economic competitiveness and national security.
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The Reference Training Collaborativea coalition of eight newsrooms, documents the mathematical judgment facing schools and emphasizing progress. Members of the Cooperative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger reportIdaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina and The Seattle Times.
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“The advances in technology that will lead to where the world is going in the next 50 years will come from other countries, because they have the intellectual capital and we don't,” said Jim Stigler, a professor of psychology at the University. of California, Los Angeles, who studies the teaching and learning process of subjects, including mathematics.
The Department of Defense has called for a major initiative to support science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, education. He says there are eight times as many college graduates in these industries in China and four times as many engineers in Russia as in the United States.
“This is not just an educational question,” said Josh Weiner, vice president of the Aspen Institute think tank. In July, the think tank warned that other nations were challenging America's technological dominance.
“We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China,” the Aspen report says, calling it a “dangerous” failure and urging policymakers to make education a national security priority.
Meanwhile, the number of jobs in math occupations — jobs that “use arithmetic and apply advanced techniques to make calculations, analyze data and solve problems” — will increase by more than 30,000 per year by the end of this decade, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show. This is much faster than most other types of tasks.
“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the mathematics department at Tennessee Technological University.
Tennessee Tech is running a summer camp that teaches cyber security, which requires math, to high school students. “That light bulb goes off and they're like, 'This is why I need to know this,'” Allen said. Computer-related jobs — ranging from software development to semiconductor manufacturing — also require math. Analysts say these fields have or will develop labor shortages.
But most American students are not prepared for these jobs. In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment of Mathematics, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems Worldwide. Students in China scored the highest. Only one in five American high school students who attend college are prepared for university-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council.
One result: Students from other countries are preparing to lead in these fields. Only one in five graduate students in math-intensive courses, including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities is American, the National Institute on American Policy reports. The rest come from abroad. Most will leave the US when their programs are over.
In the US, poor math skills could mean lower wages for today's kids. A Stanford economist estimated that unless pandemic math declines in the U.S. are reversed, students now in kindergarten through 12th grade will earn from 2% to 9% less over their careers, depending on the state they live in, than their predecessors were trained just before the pandemic began.
But it also means that the country's productivity and competitiveness may fall.
“Math underpins everything,” said Megan Schrauben, executive director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity's MiSTEM initiative, which is trying to get more students into STEM. “It is critically important to the future well-being of our students and communities, and our entire state.”
In Massachusetts, employers expect a shortage over the next five years 11,000 employees only in life sciences.
“It's not a small problem,” said Edward Lambert Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “We're just not starting students, particularly students of color and lower-resource families, on career paths related to math and computer science and those things that we need to stay competitive in or start them early enough.”
The Bridge to Calculus program at Northeastern, where Kevin Tran spent his summer, is a response to this. The 113 students who participated were paid $15 an hour, most from Boston and its public schools, said program coordinator Bindu Veetel. The university provided the classroom space and some of the professors.
The students' days began at 7:30 a.m. when teacher Jeremy Howland had them do exercises in their heads. “Banda-ping,” Howland said whenever they were right.
Students learned to apply this knowledge in courses in coding, data analysis, robotics and elementary electrical engineering.
It's not just a good deed that Northeastern is doing. Some of Bridge to Calculus' graduates end up enrolling there and moving on to highly ranked computer science and engineering programs, which – like those at other US universities – struggle to attract homegrown talent.
These American high school students said they understand why their classmates don't like math.
“It's a struggle. It's a constant thought,” said Steven Ramos, 16, who said he plans to become a computer engineer or electrician instead of following his brother and other relatives into construction work.
But with time, the answers come into focus, said Wintana Tewolde, also 16, who wants to be a doctor. “It's not easy to understand, but once you understand it, you see it.”
Peter St. Louis-Severe, 17, said his math is fun. “It's the only subject I can really understand, because most of the time there's only one answer,” said St. Louis-Sever, who hopes to be a mechanical or chemical engineer.
Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back.
What employers really want “is trainability, the ability for people to learn the systems and solve problems,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA, an information technology trade association. Other countries, he said, “are dying for the way our children learn creativity.”
Back in class, students asked Howland's questions about polynomial functions. And after an occasional stumble, they did all the exercises correctly.
“Banda-bing,” their teacher replied happily.
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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. AP is solely responsible for all content.
