Looking through my old Math Blaster CDs, I found a hidden interview where the female founder, a retired math teacher, thought the 'newly proposed' methods of teaching math were doomed to fail, and decided to try creating what would be the first educational arcade game in 1986. Of course, her approach of gamification was wildly successful, but she had a document where she cites the sources behind her reasoning, which I had to dig into.
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Apparently, math used to be taught by rote (e.g. learning your times tables), but with the calculator becoming affordable, math curriculum shifted to teaching concepts rather than memorization. Naturally, this caused a widening disparity between White Males and Females, and an even larger disparity between Whites and Nonwhites. This would normally be considered just a fact of life, except...
Economic thinktanks were creaming themselves over women entering the workforce. For those who don't know, thinktanks reports are how the jewish architects pass the design specifications of the economy on to the engineers that implement the changes. The biggest one of the time was Workforce 2000 [link here](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED290887.pdf), known for such lovely quotes as "White Males, thought of only a generation ago as the mainstays of the economy, will comprise only 15% of the net additions to the labor force between 1985 and 2000."
Since the demographics section of Workforce 2000 claimed that the economy of 2000 would be majority nonwhite or female, nonwhite and Female underperformance in Math was considered a 'National Debt' and of 'greatest concern' in other reports focused on curriculum. The biggest of these was 'Everybody Counts: A Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education' [link here](https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/1199/chapter/1).
The report argues that, since women and nonwhites are the future of the nation according to Workforce 2000 (they actually cite Workforce 2000 for this), that their under-performance is worth remediating at any cost.
The most hilarious thing about this is that women and nonwhite performance had already decreased because of other changes - the proliferation of the calculator was used to justify a shift from rote memorization of the basics to attempting to teach number theory and relationships, which are far more abstract as concept, and thus pushed those demographics further behind.
Some other fun quotes from the report:
* Since 1970, the number of Ph.D. degrees in the mathematical sciences earned by U.S. citizens has declined by nearly 50 pecent. The majority of new Ph.D. degrees awarded in U.S. universities now go to foreign citizens."
* "The performance of the top 5% of U.S. students is matched by the top 50% of students in Japan. Our very best students--the top 1%--scored lowest in the top 1% of all participating countries."
Read Gatto if you are curious more about how these changes were actually implemented.
