"Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/edray-goins-black-math...
And this is the current production! You don't want to see the statistics regarding the number of African American faculty members in mathematics!
So what else is our current system perpetuating besides inequality? What exactly are we "weeding out" in calculus? Or college algebra?
We don't let kids trust themselves intellectually in the classroom.
Black people score lowest on IQ tests than any other population group in the world. It's been repeated the world over, dozens of times, over a minimum of 30 years, and psychometricians are dying to somehow disprove it, but have so far been unable to do so. You'll see a lot of assholes who've done absolutely zero reading on this subject post after this saying, "OMG THAT'S NOT TRUE", but if you actually go digging around in Google Scholar and sampling the research, you arrive at the same inescapable conclusion: the highest IQ individuals are Ashkenazi Jews, followed by Asians, followed by Whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by Blacks.
When people read this, they're bothered by it - and rightfully so, because it's troubling - but they don't know what to do about it. No one seems to know. No one seems to know because so far the research is pretty clear on intelligence, IQ, g factor, whatever you want to call it so you can sleep at night... but here's what we know so far:
1. You're born with it or you aren't. Some people have a high g factor, some don't.
2. There's nothing you can really do to "get smarter". Whatever you've got is what you've got. Research consistently shows you can move the needle a few points, and that's about it.
3. There's far, far more variance in population groups than between them, so while Black people collectively seem to score lowest, within that population, there's no shortage of genius-level Black people. Same for every other population group.
Don't ask me what to do about this; I don't know. That problem is beyond not only my capability, but my interest. I just know we have a problem and we need to look into it.
Of course there should be a small part of the education system capable of identifying and guiding the geniuses... but it should be in the context of helping every student identify their internal motivation... which is really the only way to instill the critical thinking skills everyone seems so keen on.
Kids in my classes who are probably not going to be engineers are still having a lot of fun tinkering with engineering problems. Kids in my classes who are probably not going to be computer scientists are having a lot of fun tinkering with ARM-Thumb machine language. Kids in my classes who are not going to be number theorists or statisticians are still going to have a lot of fun playing with elements of number theory and frequencies of elements in English text in my elementary cryptography class.
Some will be superstars and decide they want to do things close to this in the future. Others will decide they want to do something completely different, but understand more of these different paths. And everyone can come away knowing that maybe they won't be at the top but they can still do hard things.
The key is: A) not having a preconceived idea of who's going to be good at something, and B) creating many axes students can differentiate themselves in the classroom, so that someone who is not at the top still has areas to strive and can be a valued member of the classroom community.