Math Skill is a Civil Right – The movie
By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social
Image from the movie website: https://www.countedoutfilm.com.
Access to basic math thinking skills is a key civil rights issue of our age. This is the top-level framing issue that shaped Counted Out, a cinema-released documentary film that was at least six years in the making, and had premiere screenings in San Francisco and Los Angeles earlier this year. Its overt focus is US mathematics education at both the K-12 level and adult education, but the issues are global.
It’s the third education-focused film by director Vicki Abeles (who lives just outside Berkeley, CA).
Her first one, Race to Nowhere (2009), focused primarily on the highly competitive Bay Area education system, and got a lot of national attention. Her second, Beyond Measure (2015), took a critical look at America’s insane obsession with (multiple choice) standardized testing. More on both of those films later.
For Counted Out, where the focus is exclusively on mathematics education, Abeles assembled a stellar team of filmmakers to give her story the full “Hollywood” treatment, and the result is both impressive and profoundly disturbing.
The film’s title came quite late in the project, which began with the question: Why do so many people have math anxiety? No other school discipline leaves such a destructive legacy. Based on her two earlier films and the material she started to gather for this third one, Abeles was sure the problem originates with people’s math experience at school; in particular the way it is taught, as a performance subject, with frequent high-stakes-tests. But as she pursued that thread, things took an unexpected dark turn, with the realization that (intentionally or not) the outcome of that process is the sorting of society into two groups, “math people” and “non-math people.”
This short segment from the new movie gives an initial glimpse of the scope, and the human (and societal) cost, of that sorting process: CLOSING GATES
Her original strategy for the film was to include a deeper dive into mathematics itself, both its nature and its role in society, than her previous two films (where the focus was entirely classroom education), and during the period 2018-20 she filmed lots of interviews with mathematicians (I being one such).
It was as she got further into the project that a deeper, and in some ways more ominous theme emerged: the degree to which mathematics underpins much of the way that our modern society functions.
Mathematics today is so much more than school math, her interviewees kept telling her. It governs the way we live, work and play in the 21st Century. Whether searching the Web on our laptop or our phone, when applying for housing, making medical and legal decisions, math is shaping our lives.
Here’s a second, relevant clip from the film: SHAPING
In the end, then, the film’s somewhat deeper dives into math itself were cut in favor of the societal issues that it ended up focusing on.
The result is a powerful statement, aimed at provoking change in US education.
The film still provides answers to Abeles’s original questions:
“What is mathematics and what’s it for?”
and
“Are we teaching it the best way?”
She was working on the film at the same time as the OECD’s PISA was working on what became the PISA 2022 framework and California was working on its new California Mathematics Framework. And both were in the news. A lot. (The links are to my coverage, with opinion, in Devlin’s Angle.)
When the CMF came out in 2023, it turned out to be a near isomorphism to PISA 2022. In particular, building society was the clear main goal. Not a traumatic choice for the Nordic nations, who collectively occupy the top slots in the world rankings of successful societies (and in addition regularly outperform America on international math tests), but hugely divisive for California, which continues to profit handsomely from an education system designed in the 1950s to fight the Cold War, and which continues to keep CA as the world’s fifth largest economy (albeit these days with a STEM workforce imported from around the world, and a huge, poorly educated underclass).
All of this provides a contemporary context for Counted Out, that affirms the message Abeles conveys. It’s very much a film for its time.
I became involved in the project that resulted in Counted Out in late 2019, as one of many advisors she recruited from around the world, to make suggestions and comment on various versions of the film.
In January 2020 (just two months before the Coronavirus pandemic hit the US and we all went into various kinds of societal lockdown) Abeles recorded an interview segment with me at Stanford. During the ensuing four years, my occasional advisor-interactions with her gave me a front-row seat from which I witnessed how the focus of the movie was shifting, as she came to recognize the far broader societal story behind the one she originally envisaged.
(Somewhere on her hard drive, Abeles must have hours of interviews with mathematicians across the world that could likely be remixed into an awesome “What is mathematics? The experts speak” resource that I for one would love to see. Watch the long list of credits at the end where she lists all the experts she talked to.)
THE MOVIES
Though her three films are all standalones, I recommend watching them all. Here are brief summaries, along with equally brief commentaries from me.
Race to Nowhere, from 2009. This film will make you mad.
It’s a firehose delivery of first-person accounts that sounds the bell for a three-alarm fire; basically, Abeles provided a platform for standardized-testing victims (students and parents, including Abeles herself and her family) to tell their stories and voice their concerns. Most of the filming was done in California, where Abeles lives, but the issues raised were, and are, nationwide. You won’t see political leaders or educational policy makers and managers make their case for why the system is as they have shaped it. The focus is on the students, teachers, and parents who have to live in the environment the system creates for them. The ones it is supposed to be about.
This was Abeles’ first foray into film-making, albeit with an experienced (and award winning) editor and director, Jessica Congdon. She wanted to provoke change, and it shows.
My reaction : Why are we still using a national educational strategy put in place to win the Cold War, at no matter what cost to the 95% of children who would never make the elite who would give us that victory. In the early 1950s that was arguably a defensible, strategic, national security decision. America was fighting for its very survival. But, with that war won, we are now paying the cost of the deeply fractured society it led to, with many citizens unequipped to live meaningful lives in a world full of automation and global outsourcing, where the new Global War is being fought on social media. For that struggle, the national security imperative is an education that emphasizes civics, critical thinking, collaboration, and social and emotional learning. And we need to stop overloading students with massive amount of homework, much of it routine “busywork”; none of the nations that outperform us on global assessments do that. (Expect the Old Guard, who did well under the Cold War system, to fight mightily to retain their privilege; google “math wars” to see their desperation when it comes to mathematics education.)
Website: https://beyondtheracetonowhere.org/race-to-nowhere/
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1437364/
The film is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video.
Beyond Measure, 2015. This film will give you hope.
Abeles’ second film helped to answer a question posed by many who saw her first film: “What can we do to change things?” In a sense it picks up the story where Race to Nowhere left off, offering positive pictures of what’s possible in education. (Abeles also wrote a New York Times best-selling book, Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation, that features examples of communities that have implemented positive changes in their homes and schools inspired by her films.)
The film raises a lot of questions about America’s insane obsession with standardized testing, but it also presents evidence to give you hope things can change. With Race to Nowhere, California is sufficiently unique for other states to convince themselves they did not face the same problems. (But they did; California—essentially a nation state—tends to occupy an extremal position on the American spectrum in many regards, and the San Francisco Bay Area where Abeles and I live is a cauldron of competitive activity, but stress-induced teen depression and even suicides are by no means unique to the Golden State.) For Beyond Measure, Abeles cast a much broader net, with segments filmed in Washington State, Texas, New York, and Kentucky, as well as California.
My reaction : America’s obsession with standardized testing, which exploded as a result of the 2001 “No Child Left Behind” Congressional Act, applies a production-line, quality-control system to ensure all the “products” come out of the pipeline with the same features. That system is great for ensuring that the products we buy all meet certain standards, of course, and it also worked in education at a societal level in the 19th and early 20th Centuries industrial age, when most people did routine, repetitive work. (Prior to the 1960s, “computer” referred to a person with a certain kind of job.) But in today’s world, and in particular in today’s America, it’s a disaster. To drive home that point, Abeles gives a fair amount of screen time to the late Sir Kenneth Robinson, one of the better known educators who eloquently (and often with helpful humor) kept ringing the alarm on a system that was killing an entire generation’s creativity.
I note too that the more recent “Race to the Top” program, funded as part of the 2009 “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” to try to undo some of the recognized damage of “No Child Left Behind”, failed in large part because it too depended on standardized testing.
America may in fact be far too big and diverse to provide quality education on a national scale, but at a state level (and perhaps a county level in the really big states) it may be possible to adopt the approaches made in countries such as Finland or Denmark (I have familiarity with both), which (1) require high educational domain qualifications and significant pedagogical preparation for teachers, who are then rewarded with good salaries and ongoing professional development, and (2) put their societal faith into the teachers by trusting them, and letting them handle all the daily details of what goes on in the classroom, including assessment. We know that can work.
In contrast, the large-scale, “production line” model for education simply does not work today, where the goal of public education is (or should be) to prepare people for life and work in a world where all routine tasks are automated or outsourced. Abeles’ title “Beyond Measure” points to the fundamental flaw in that approach.
Fortunately for our sanity, the film also presents existence proofs showing that there are viable (and successful) alternatives to that Cold War, “production line” model of education we have now, where the assessment cart has been tasked with pulling the educational horse.
Website: https://beyondtheracetonowhere.org/beyond-measure/
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4314120/
The film can be rented (for a small fee) on Vimeo.
Counted Out, 2024. This film will make you cry.
The full title of Abeles’ most recent film is Counted Out: Math is Power. It shines a light on one of the primary roots of societal inequity in our data-driven twenty-first century: mathematics education! Yes, you read that right; our mathematics education system is a major cause of much that is wrong with today’s fractured America. If you don’t believe me, at the very least you should watch the whole movie before you start ranting on social media. (Start by checking out again that CLOSING GATES clip from the film that I referenced earlier.)
Vicki Abeles with Bob Moses (1935-2021) in 2014. Photo source https://www.vickiabeles.com/about.
Having learned how to make powerful use of all the ways Hollywood craft can manipulate its audience, Abeles goes for the jugular with this film, by letting us get to know (and care for ) people who the present educational system failed badly, and follow their stories as they battled, sometimes against massive odds, for their share of the proclaimed “American Dream” to be able to live better lives.
My reaction : This is David and Goliath stuff. Through the human stories she tells, Abeles shows clearly just how nationally self-destructive it is to use arcane, mathematical “performance-art” testing as a filter to prevent large sections of society from having control over their lives.
True, the film offers shining glimmers of hope for “changing the [educational] equation,” as one contributor remarks, but the unavoidable, stark message is that as a society, we have chosen (yes, chosen ) to use mathematics to “count people out.” (Yes, it’s that CLOSING GATES clip again.) It’s high time we fixed that mistake.
I note that the giant shadow of the late Bob Moses hovers over the entire film. Sadly, he passed away in 2021, before its completion—but not before providing Abeles with some valuable, and inspiring, contributions. (She recorded his contributions back in 2014, while still finishing up her work on Beyond Measure, coincidentally filming him in the same Miami school district she had grown up in.) Abeles has dedicated Counted Out to his memory.
Website: https://beyondtheracetonowhere.org/counted-out/
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32232788/ (The entry is not yet complete)
WHO IS VICKI ABELES?
Corporate lawyer turned film-maker and educational-change advocate Vicki Abeles. Photo courtesy of Vicki Abeles.
So who is this filmmaker who keeps presenting us with giant mirrors to show us how our education system is affecting our lives on so many levels?
Well, she’s a former Wall Street attorney who turned to filmmaking when she noticed, as a parent, that children across the U.S. were struggling with a silent epidemic of school stress, her own, twelve-year-old daughter among them. What she was seeing was very different from her own school experience.
She had always liked math, and when she was a student at Miami Killian Senior High School, she was President of the National Mathematics Honors Society, and won a mathematics award from her school. She was, she says, good at math (at least when taught in the rules-based way that was prevalent back then).
After she graduated from high school in 1979, she earned a bachelors degree in psychology from the University of Miami in 1983, with a minor in mathematics, and then in 1986 a JD in law at the George Washington University Law School. (She also has a sister with a PhD in mathematics.)
From 1987 through to 1994 she worked as a corporate finance and securities attorney; spent a year at Goldman Sachs trading on the gold desk; and then did a twelve-year stint as a consultant to corporations focusing on IPOs and high yield bond offerings, and to multi-family family offices on investments, estate planning and taxes.
Then, in 2007, her experience as a mother of children going through the Bay Area school system resulted in her embarking on the two-year investigation into America’s education system, as it had become, that led to the award winning Race to Nowhere, which became one of the most watched documentaries ever produced, with millions of viewers around the globe. Commenting on that major life-change, she has written:
“My own awakening to the toxicity of the achievement race came the way it does to many parents: via years of trying to keep up with it. When my three kids were younger, our family spent weekends together, played in parks, visited museums, gathered around the table most nights for dinner.
But as my kids got older, their lives mutated into a state of busyness and stress that gave our home the air of a corporate command center. And I should know—I was a Wall Street attorney who saw her twelve-year-old daughter working longer hours than I ever did for law school. I decided to pick up a camera to expose this silent epidemic of anxiety, depression and disengagement that has infiltrated our schools, our lives, our culture, our society.”
The original idea to use film as her medium came from a request from a friend to provide a short film to use as part of a fund-raising drive, and that 17-minute short eventually grew and morphed into Race to Nowhere. Fortunately for all of us (apart from the High Priests and the Old Guard who have been steering the old Cold War educational chariot for the past 75 years), Abeles did not stop with that first film, but kept picking up a camera, in the process learning to use it to even greater effect. “[Film] is,” she says, “the best medium to change hearts and minds.” Counted Out delivers that in spades.
Do watch those movies!
ENDNOTE: I’d like to acknowledge Vicki Abeles’ assistance (as a source) with writing this article. I was schooled by journalists at The Guardian newspaper in the UK (where I was their “math columnist for several years in the 1980s), so the story you see here was written entirely by me, and I did not show any of it to her or anyone else prior to publication. Moreover, the idea for writing this story was mine and mine alone; no one asked me to write it, nor did anyone pay me to do so. So any complaints about what you read here should be hurled at me.
Sadly, with the broken nature of American society right now, there are frequent public assaults (mostly, but not all, verbal) on education and educators (particularly math education) from people with—or anxious to have—political power and the parents who listen to them. Consequently, I fear Abeles will in any case get her share of the inevitable backlash. Which is a pity. Her message is an important one, and she tells it well, and as a result some will see her as a dangerous threat. This sad state of affairs is itself evidence of an education system that has failed to keep up with drastically changing circumstances.