An article of mine has just run at The Irascible Professor, which provides “Irreverent Commentary on the State of Education in America today”. The title it’s run under is “Numeracy, is it important?”

The article was prompted by a Washington Post news item from before Christmas: a school board member in Florida failed the math section of his state’s own standardized assessment for tenth graders, but worse, he went on to make public comments that the math being tested was not relevant to real life. I argue against that statement.

Beyond that, I’ll let the article speak for itself. However, I’ve already received several interesting comments via email, which Dr. Shapiro, whom runs the site, has forwarded to me. Not everyone is so forgiving as I (apparently) was to this school board member.

(I wrote that the school board member “is, I’m sure, not a stupid man.” A reader responded that he might very well be stupid, since there is no evidence to the contrary. Yikes.)