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Why do fewer than 5% of adults use the math they learned in high school, and what would happen if a state legislator, school board member, or governor had to take the same standardized math tests they use to judge our schools? In this episode, Ted Dintersmith, an education advocate, venture capitalist, filmmaker, and author of Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won't Teach You, joins Richard Culatta to make the case for rethinking what, and why, we teach.
Ted Dintersmith was once ranked the top-performing venture capitalist in the country. He spent two decades at Charles River Ventures before President Obama appointed him to represent the United States at the United Nations General Assembly. He then turned his attention to schools, producing the documentary Most Likely to Succeed. For his more recent documentary, Multiple Choice, he spent an entire school year visiting all 50 states to see what was actually happening in classrooms.
In this conversation, Ted and Richard dig into why standardized math testing rewards what is easy to grade rather than what is useful; why accountability measures built for a pre-computer world are still driving what happens in classrooms today; and why the math that actually shapes people's lives, from reading a jobs report to understanding a school’s ranking, is almost never taught. They also talk about what it looks like when kids are given real, relevant problems to solve, and what Ted believes the rise of AI means for education.
Richard and Ted discuss:
- Why the math and reading scores used to judge schools do not reflect the quality of learning happening inside them
- What standardized math tests actually cover, and why so much of it is leftover from a pre-computer era
- Why fewer than 5% of adults use the math they studied in high school and what that means for how we spend classroom time
- What kinds of math genuinely shape people's lives, from jobs reports to school rankings to personal finance
- Why Ted wants legislators, school board members, and governors to take the same standardized tests their policies are built around
- What a real story from The Wire reveals about making math relevant to students
- Why Ted sees the rise of AI as an urgent, “code red” moment for rethinking what school is for
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