The real math crisis isn’t the test scores. It’s the test

This past school year, Cambridge, Massachusetts, placed every eighth grader in Algebra I. It didn’t go well. Ultimately, more than 60% of rising ninth graders will repeat the course. 

The consequences were immediate: weeping students, angry parents, and roiling debate about the rollout, teacher support, and tracking.

Lost in the shuffle was this essential point: We teach obsolete rote math that adults don’t use, while missing entirely the math that defines our lives.  

Let’s start with the math sequence followed by kids in Cambridge and across America: Algebra I, Geometry/Trig, Algebra II, pre-Calculus, and the much-desired Calculus. This track was laid out in 1893 by the Committee of Ten, a working group of educators, when respected professions (e.g., surveyors, engineers, astronomers, munitions officers) needed humans able to execute rote math procedures quickly and accurately by hand: factor (x³ − 6x² + 11x − 6), compute square roots, solve systems of linear equations. Quite sensibly, school helped kids master a body of rote math. 

But then, emerging computational resources began absorbing all rote math tasks. The fantastic book (and movie) Hidden Figures showcases the talented Black women who performed rote math by hand for the Apollo space missions. By 1970, these women recognized that mainframes made their skill set obsolete. Yet 56 years later, our education system hasn’t reached this realization. Worse, math scores are a principal measure of education quality for states, districts, and schools. Rote math scores define the futures and self-esteem of every American teenager. Rote math that adults don’t use, that smartphones perform flawlessly, and that pushes aside the math that matters. 

In our personal lives, we need to understand the probability behind a medical diagnosis, the long-term impact of compound interest, the risks of online gambling, the statistics behind “studies show” headlines, and the algorithms that determine what we read, watch, and believe. In our careers, we need to estimate market sizes, devise statistics to track an organization’s progress, predict revenue growth, optimize scarce resources, deploy proprietary algorithms, and make sound decisions. The powerful, fascinating math that is essential in life, but doesn’t make the cut in the math curricula of most students. We pay a high price for this. Only about a third of U.S. adults have the numeracy skills needed to navigate real-world financial and health decisions, while most—by some estimates, more than 90%—report some degree of math anxiety. Generations of Americans suffer from math, rather than capitalize on it. 

Meanwhile, we define the quality of a K-12 education—for a person, school, district, state, and nation—according to how humans perform on tasks that AI does perfectly. Why? We test kids at such a massive scale that the only way to keep costs in check is to rely on exams expressly designed to be graded by a computer. And if a computer can grade it, a computer can do it. If a young adult enters the real world with skills inferior to what a set of AI agents does for $20/month, they will struggle to find any decent career path.

But even if you disagree with our critique of today’s math curriculum, there is a deeper problem. We never had the conversation. Policymakers, school boards, journalists, and philanthropists have largely treated the traditional math sequence as a given rather than asking whether it still serves students in an AI-driven world. 

It is not too late to have these conversations. Cambridge—and districts across America—can still have the discussion they skipped, shifting the focus from “How can we do obsolete things better?” to “What mathematical capabilities will students need to thrive in an AI-driven world?”  

Review the current high school math curriculum and ask, “Do any of us ever use this?” On the website for Ted’s new book, Aftermath, you can find a simple eight-question math quiz using practice questions from The Nation’s Report Card Grade 8 exam, the PSAT, SAT, ACT, and a state-mandated exam. Start by asking community members—especially school boards and local legislators—to take this quiz (12 minutes, no devices), and reflect on whether these questions should define the futures of every kid coming through our school system. 

As we consider how to educate for a world shot through with algorithms, AI itself also gives us powerful new tools for listening. Instead of relying on a handful of public hearings, school districts can use AI to synthesize thousands of perspectives, identify common ground, surface disagreements, and explore alternatives. AI makes it practical for communities to contribute their expertise and experience and for even the busiest institutions to listen.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools recently engaged more than 10,000 families, educators, students, and community members to shape its AI strategy, surfacing broad support for AI literacy alongside concerns about academic integrity and the pace of adoption. In our own Unlocking Literacy initiative at Northeastern University, we ran a national engagement on literacy. We used AI to enable participation in multiple languages and from people with different literacy levels, then synthesized what communities told us. 

Imagine applying that same approach to mathematics. Instead of assuming the traditional sequence is immutable, districts could ask students, parents, teachers, employers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers what quantitative reasoning people actually need in an AI-driven world. AI can make it practical to gather thousands of perspectives, identify where there is consensus, clarify where there is disagreement, and make curriculum decisions that reflect today’s realities rather than yesterday’s assumptions.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. If we continue graduating students whose greatest strength is performing tasks AI already does effortlessly, we will leave them poorly prepared for the world they are inheriting. 

But if we have the courage to rethink both what we teach and how we decide what to teach, we can prepare a generation to do what only humans can: reason, create, judge, and solve the problems that matter most. It’s long past time to change the equation.

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Ted Dintersmith is an advocate for transforming education and the author of “Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math that Schools Won’t Teach You” (2026). Beth Simone Noveck is the director of The Governance Lab at Northeastern University and the author of “Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy” (2026).