The Updated Math Reform Initiative
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you should know that I launched the Math Reform Initiative at the start of the year. This initiative follows from the Financial Literacy Movement I worked on in 2021.
The goal of this initiative is simple: reduce the amount of mandatory (advanced) math credits that Ohio’s high school students have to complete and replace them with the following mandatory classes, which are classes that teach them skills that they’ll actually use as adults:
- Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship
- Media Literacy & Critical Thinking
- Mental Health & Substance Abuse
- Life Skills
But after a lot of thought, I decided to make two small changes and two significant changes to this initiative. But first, a little bit of background.
Risk
When I started this initiative, I initially wanted to add Sex Education (SE for short) as one of the mandatory classes. However, I decided not to do so — and ended up adding Life Skills instead — for one simple reason: I thought it was too risky.
What do I mean by “too risky?” Well, unfortunately a lot of people find SE to be an incredibly controversial topic for kids to learn.
I thought it would be too risky to the success of the movement to add such a political hot potato in with less controversial topics like entrepreneurship and media literacy (though you could argue that mental health and substance abuse is somewhat controversial too?).
In other words, I thought that some/enough people would dismiss the entire initiative just because it included SE. So I decided to leave that battle for another day and include Life Skills instead.
What changed?
First, let me discuss the small changes. I’m renaming Media Literacy & Critical Thinking to just Media Literacy. It’s cleaner, easier to say, and focuses on the goal of that class: teach kids to critically read news articles, understand bias in the news, think about where they get their news from (social media vs. regular media), local media sources, and so on. I’m also renaming Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship to just Entrepreneurship, again for simplicity.
Now let’s talk about the big changes.
I removed the “Substance Abuse” part of Mental Health & Substance Abuse. I’ll discuss why in the next section.
I decided to reverse my initial position on SE, eliminate the Life Skills class, and put SE back in again. So in the updated Math Reform Initiative, I propose to reduce the current math mandate from 4 credits to 2 credits and require students to complete the following courses instead:
1. Mental Health (0.5 credits)
2. Entrepreneurship (0.5 credits)
3. Media Literacy (0.5 credits)
4. Sex Education (0.5 credits)
Mental Health & Substance Abuse
After doing more research, I found that most of what I’m trying to achieve with Substance Abuse instruction is already covered in Health Education class.
Specifically, I found that Section 3313.60, division (5)(b) of the Ohio Revised Code requires the health education curriculum for high school students to include instruction about “the harmful effects of and legal restrictions against the use of drugs of abuse, alcoholic beverages, and tobacco.”
However, I said most, not all of what I wanted. I believe that health education is still missing instruction in psychoactive drugs like marijuana and psychedelics.
Various states — such as Oregon and Colorado — and cities — such as Oakland CA, District of Columbia, Ann Arbor, MI, Denver, CO, and many more — across the nation have either decriminalized, legalized for therapeutic use, made marijuana and/or psychedelics the lowest law enforcement priority, or have planned/are planning legislation looking into to do one or all of the above.
It seems like a matter of when, not if these drugs become common in society, so our kids need to learn about this now in order to be ready when this change happens. But I don’t think this requires creating a new course. Hence, a rough idea of what I propose to address this is the following:
Strike division (5)(c) of ORC Section 3313.60 (note: this will be covered in sex education anyway) and replace it with something like: “Evidence-based instruction on the effects of marijuana, psychedelics, and other psychoactive drugs on the brain. The instruction offered must be approved by the Departments of Education, Mental Health and Addiction Services and Public Safety.”
Sex Education
I first excluded SE because I was being pragmatic. I thought, “let’s win this battle step by step rather than being too ambitious from the start.” Moreover, and I hate to admit this, I was scared that stepping into such a controversial topic so early in my career would be risky for the future of my career.
But I realized that this was cowardly. I was putting my career and a somewhat irrational fear about it above the greater good of high school students.
And last but not least, the more I learn about the most serious problems in the world, the more I realize that there’s no time to wait or waste on being risk-averse. My wife worked in the social work field for a large part of her career and the more she taught me about sexual abuse and single/teen parenthood, the more I realized how serious these problems are, how they continue over generations, and why we simply cannot waste time anymore.
Sure, teaching kids SE won’t magically solve these problems, but based on the research I’ve read it would be a huge step in the right direction.
How do I get involved?
If you want to support the Math Reform Initiative, then please write to your Senators, House Representatives, and Ohio Board of Education President to let them know! Check out this link to find templates and more information for this. Make sure to also read the other articles in this series at this link.
I’m the author of the books “You Say Soccer, I Say Football” and “Community Heroes: What a year as an AmeriCorps VISTA member taught me about community development”
