Gates Foundation donates $1B to prioritize math education

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday that it is making grants of more than a $1 billion as part of a sweeping national plan to improve math education over the next four years. The increased focus on math comes after the pandemic “wreaked havoc” on learning in secondary schools, and widened gaps based on race in student performance, with math scores among Black students falling more sharply than declines among white students, according to Bob Hughes, director of the Gates Foundation’s elementary and education grant-making program. A new approach in which students work in teams to solve problems, she said, can turn all students into “math kids.” “When all kids are ‘math kids,’ making mistakes will be OK,” she said. In the late 1950s, after the launch of Sputnik, educators called for a new vigor in math instruction to keep up with the country’s Soviet adversaries during the Cold War, said Natalie Wexler, author of “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System — and How to Fix It.” While math is important, Wexler said, only a small percentage of students go on to use math in their daily lives.