A middle school teacher in Mobile, Ala., has been placed on administrative leave after school officials found out about the use of a math assignment full of racist stereotypes.
The Burns Middle School teacher, who has not been identified, gave a 10-question math quiz—including questions about drugs, prostitution, and drive-by shootings—to her 8th grade students. When the students took it as a joke, the teacher said they had to complete it and turn it in, according to Fox10 News of Mobile. One of the students showed his parents the assignment, and they reported it to the school’s principal, who immediately suspended the teacher.
The questions are, clearly, inappropriate and offensive. For example: “Tyrone knocked up 4 girls in the gang. There are 20 girls in his gang. What is the exact percentage of girls Tyrone knocked up?” Or: “Dwayne pimps 3 ho’s [sic]. If the price is $85 per trick, how many tricks per day must each ho turn to support Dwayne’s $800 per day crack habit?”
Yikes. But the scarier thing is that this apparently wasn’t just an ill-advised move by a single teacher. Fox10 News found out that similar versions of this quiz have been turning up in classrooms across the country since the 1990s. Unsuprisingly, the teachers have, for the most part, been punished for giving these tests.
Apparently, this “assignment” is a joke called the L.A. Math Proficiency Test. In each iteration, the questions vary slightly, but the basic premise of using illegal, offensive scenarios to illustrate math problems is always the same. According to internet fact-checker Snopes, this test is real and has been online since at least 1993, with possible hard copies turning up as far back as the mid-1980s.
Snopes described the test’s “humor” by saying, “it simultaneously deplores the state of education in large urban centers and furthers the myth that teens from such regions are thoroughly steeped in a drugs, guns, gangs, and promiscuity culture by asserting that even the math questions directed towards them have to be framed in that context to be relevant to their lives.”
Even worse, the test’s header asks for the student’s name and gang affiliation. As most teachers know, the best way to relate to your students is probably not by assuming (or joking) that they’re in gangs.
It’s not clear if teachers are giving this assignment as a joke or if they really think students will respond well to the problems or if there’s another reason. Either way, the test has gone viral and has garnered a lot of outrage online.
How, I wondered, could a math test be racist?
Then I saw it with my own damn eyes.
A racist math test.
2016.//t.co/amLgjoRx67
-- Shaun King (@ShaunKing) June 1, 2016
It seems like a good time to bring up some of our coverage of teaching in diverse classrooms:
- Just last week, a Harvard Graduate School of Education graduate gave an inspiring poetic speech about how educators should deal with race in classrooms.
- Two of our teacher bloggers compiled great lists of recommendations for summer reading on race: teacher coach Elena Aguilar has a list of suggestions from Ta-Nehisi Coates to “The New Jim Crow,” and teacher David B. Cohen compiled several recommendations of not only reading, but listening and watching.
- Some say education schools must better prepare teachers before they set foot in an actual diverse classroom. See: “For Preservice Teachers, Lessons on Cultural Sensitivity” and “Study: Teacher-Prep Programs Need to Deepen Educators’ Racial Awareness.”
- Finally, Education Week is currently doing a yearlong series of overcoming bias and discrimination in schools. The whole series is very well done, but in particular, read: “Classroom Biases Hinder Students’ Learning” and “Illustration: Microaggressions in the Classroom.”