Not long ago, Secretary of Education Cardona tweeted a deeply offensive comment about schools preparing students to meet the needs of industry. I operate on the assumption that Secretary Cardona has a fairly low-level political appointee, maybe two years out of college, writing his tweet. Chances are he has never written any of his tweets. But they bear his name, so he has to be accountable for what they say.
Mercedes Schneider expresses the feelings that many educators had when they read his unfortunate tweets:
According to his 12/16/22 tweet, US ed sec Miguel Cardona wants education to be in line with the “demands” of corporate America:
“Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.”
But he also wants teachers to know that teaching isn’t a job (not a “demand”?) but “an extension of life’s purpose,” which may mean that if corporate America “demands” teachers, then that corporate demand is somehow lofty since it is the demand to teach. (Hard to tell, but a day did pass from one tweet to the next, so new day, new catchphrase?)
“Teaching isn’t a job you hold. It’s an extension of your life’s purpose.”
On Day Three of this alienation-via-slogan, we’re back to tying K12 education (and beyond) to the economy, happily-ever-after for the demanding job market but not so much for the objectified, mail-order bride that is apparently the American high school graduate:
Our work to transform our schools is crucial to creating a strong economic foundation for our country.
It’s time to break down the silos between K-12 systems and college, career, and industry preparation programs. This is how we transform education in this country.
So. If my goal as a teacher of high school seniors is to stuff my kids into projected industry slots, according to 2023 Louisiana Workforce Commission projections, the following jobs are expected to grow by 400 positions or more from 2021 to 2023, and therefore represent the chief industry “demands” of the Pelican State for my Class of 2023 grads:
- JOB; # NEW POSITIONS; 2021 STATE MEDIAN HOURLY WAGE
- Waiters and Waitresses, 3,028, $8.93/hr.
- Food Preparation Workers, 2,855, $8.99/hr.
- Fast Food and Counter Workers, 2,617, $9.28/hr.
- Home Health and Personal Care Aides, 2,491, $9.04/hr.
- Cooks, Restaurant, 2,182, $11.58/hr.
- Cashiers, 2,023, $9.49/hr.
- Retail Salespersons, 1,908, $11.33/hr.
- First-line Suoervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers, 1,620, $20.61/hr.
- Labor and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand, 1,567, $13.15/hr.
- Registered Nurses, 1,234, $31.84/hr.
- Stockers and Order Fillers, 1,207, $11.86/hr.
- Heavy and Tractor Trailer Truck Drivers, 1,131, $20.40/hr.
- General and Operations Managers, 1,119, $47.62/hr.
- Nursing Assistants, 1,060, $11.28/hr.
- Construction Laborers, 961, $16.60/hr.
- Light Truck or Delivery Service Drivers, 888, $14.81/hr.
- Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses, 860, $20.16/hr.
- Bartenders, 763, $9.13/hr.
- Carpenters, 677, $22.26/hr.
- Lawyers, 664, $44.86/hr.
- Driver/Sales Workers, 664, $15.00/hr.
- Electricians, 644, $25.13/hr.
- First-line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers, 629, $17.71/hr.
- Sailors and Marine Oilers, 621, $21.48/hr.
- First-line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers, 556, $30.59/hr.
- Dishwashers, 551, $9.60/hr.
- Cooks, Fast Food, 545, $14.98/hr.
- Accountants and Auditors, 535, $29.87/hr.
- Hosts and Hostesses, Restaurant, Lounge, and Coffee Shop, 523, $9.37/hr.
- Medical Assistants, 469, $14.61/hr.
- Paralegals and Legal Assistants, 453, $22.73/hr.
- Receptionists and Information Clerks, 442, $12.78/hr.
- Security Guards, 426, $15.42/hr.
- Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, 418, $27.56/hr.
- Medical and Health Service Managers, 409, $45.58/hr.
- Office Clerks, General, 409, $12.04/hr.
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Scientific and Technical Products, 406, $27.72/hr.
Of the 37 most in-demand 2023 Louisiana jobs listed above, roughly one-third (12) do not exceed $12.00/hr. in median compensation. Moreover, only one-third (again 12) exceed $21.00/hr. (or roughly $42K/yr., assuming 40hrs./wk.) in median compensation.
According to the state’s own projections, it seems that Louisiana’s 2023 market demands the greatest increase in workers subsisting as the working poor.
As for teaching as an “extension of your life’s purpose”: not in Louisiana in 2023. Teaching is projected to hold steady, with those exiting roughly equal to those entering.
But forget the “life’s purpose” lofty verbage. Let’s just go for respect for human beings as human beings and drop the tweets about using people to plug holes in economic demands.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
he Student Farms
Store em in the silos
Feed em to the cows
Students are the silage
Also, hay in mows
Teachers are the farmers
Growing student crops
Mowing them for silos
When the silage drops
Maybe Cardona should get one of those AIChatBots to write his tweets … it probably couldn’t do worse …
ChatDOE
What do you get when you cross a chat bot with Twitter.
Chatter
Chatter. OMG. LOL.
What do you get when you cross Soon Musk with Twitter?
A billionerror
That’s Elon Musk, of course
A tweet in the hand is worth two chatbots in the bush.
If you want the job as Twitswright, SomeDAM, you have to stop all this thinking for yourself. Here, to practice your jingoism:
that would be the job of “Most Grand Twitswright”
Grand Twitwrights, of course, Twit right, never left. And their twitterings have a Musky smell.
Jon, I think Cardona already has an AI chat box writing his tweets. Or a 22-year-old intern.
Is ” tweetswriter” now a paid position in government?
Where can I apply?
I think my short ditties would fit the format well.
SDP, you would be a great tweet writer for Cardona. As a rule, cabinet secretaries don’t write their own tweets or speeches. They have a team of speech writers.
The only problem for Cardona, is that if I were writing his tweetswriter they would bear no resemblance to what he actually said and in many cases would say exactly the opposite and or mock what he had said.
Gates lined the DoE with his profiteering interlopers before Miguel Cardona became Secretary Cardona. Cardona didn’t hire his staff. He was hired by them. He is just another fig leaf, another person of color with a smooth sales pitch hired to hide Gates’ junk: segregation and economic oppression.
Secretary Cardona has done this before as Connecticut Commissioner of Education. He attacked teachers and walked away with his palms over his ears. There are good people like Cindy Marten in the DoE. Cardona himself might even be a good educator deep down. Gates, however, rules with an iron fist.
LCT– I spent a lot of time researching Cardona’s CT record when he was first appointed. I wasn’t aware of his attacking teachers, you can school me on that. What disappointed me was that his classroom years didn’t include implementing the “accountability systems” of the Obama years – he had already hopped into admin by then, & bought into data-driven policy. I liked that he was never a gung-ho charters guy. What impressed me was that he only sorta bought into evaluating teachers by student scores, & pioneered a regional collaboration among teachers, with newbies shadowing veterans etc. He also initiated programs to attract more state funding to lower-income schools.
Cardona’s published info is all clean. I was referring to something I heard in a union meeting, reliable but not on the web.
Diane I don’t know Cardona personally and haven’t followed him closely.
That said, and IF the conflict between the two quotes is any indication of his principles or depth of purpose, then they sound to me like they come from someone who hasn’t thought much about what education is in its fuller dimension, and specifically, thinking that takes place outside of the capitalist mindset and framework. But if capitalism, with its systematically ingrained arrogance, pseudo-class hierarchies, and transactional thinking, is a person’s only framework, then that’s how they’ll think.
What a waste of a probably otherwise good person. CBK
13 of the 37 would require expertise in hand-washing. Are you listening, Louisiana? Perhaps an honors level class in the state’s high schools should be on offer.
Haaaa!!!
Handwashing and Hairnet Wearing 101
I think Macbeth would work for that lesson
“Out damned spot!”
haaaaa
The person who wrote the tweet works for the Gates network, an infrastructure of capitalist libertarians who would leave children to die in the gutter like dogs?
For a very long time, whoever was Secretary of Education was de facto working for Billy Boy
Privatizer appointees continue to infest the DOE. Cardona seems to largely be a figure head.
Teaching It’s not just a job. It’s a misadventure!!” — Cardona, Secretary of the Navy..I mean Education
haaaaa!
Teaching is not just a job. It’s a knick-knack paddywack!
There goes that darn Mercedes Schneider again, actually thinking and taking the facts into consideration rather than spouting meaningless but lofty-sounding rhetoric.
Where’s the part about preparing students to decipher political nonsense or dodge political propaganda? Or, choosing a President?
Good questions
But the whole point is to produce non-thinking students who don’t question anything and simply do the job they were trained to do.
Having the students do endless online test prep exercises based on the CC$$ is PERFECT training for this.
Yes sir, Mr. Gates. Will you be taking that latte on the Mezzanine Deck?
Oh, these cynical (but accurate) comments are so depressing. I think I’ll go watch MSNBC gloat over Kevin McCarthy’s shortcomings and vote shortages…
History shows us that Jefferson was right when he wrote what we the people must do to hold on to our freedoms to stop tyrants from taking them away from us, at least those freedoms protected by the US Constitution.
If the majority of the working people aren’t willing to make that sacrifice when the time comes and this is apparently one of those times, then ruthless narcisistic, psychopathic/sociopathic overloads like Trump and Musk will do whatever they want with the rest of us, and their groveling ass-kissing minion lackeys will make sure they get what they want no matter how many of us have to be sacrificed.
We should also demand that “health” be added as the 6th freedom, so everyone has to be vaccinated to protect everyone else from ignorant idiots that are so stupid and dumb they’d end up spreading deadly diseases killing millions or even billions.
Minor correction: “. . . then ruthless narcisistic, psychopathic/sociopathic overloads like Trump and Musk will do whatever they want TO the rest of us. . .”
What Sec. Cardona needs to know is what Diane Ravitch understands.
And admits she doesn’t understand.
And admits when she doesn’t understand.
Diane listens to us teachers because she respects us as experts. Corporate meddlers do not listen to teachers because they think they are the experts. They do not even realize when they are insulting educators because they don’t respect us. They wind up applauding the likes of Michelle Rhee. Personally, I’m used to it. I still haven’t forgotten the Teacher Appreciation Week when President Obama appreciated only charter school teachers. The fools in charge have been throwing wild punches at me for years.
Imagine that. For the first time in my memory, a Secretary of Education with a freaking clue.
The politicians always give this job to some water-carrier for Bilious Billy because they know who has the $$$ to make the big campaign donations.
The CHIPS law provide $1B over the next decade plus to build a microchip manufacturing facility in the Syracuse/Rochester region, a few thousand engineering and technical jobs, high paying, I asked: the minimal math skills, I was told Algebra 2 – should schools change their curriculum to increase numbers of kids who pass Algebra 2? Btw, currently very few
As Mercedes points out, the same area will need far more fast-food clerks and janitors. Mathematics skills required: First job: Ability to enter all items and amount tendered into cash register, read change amount, if any, and retrieve said change. Second job: Ability to measure out cleaning solutions as needed.
Like with writing, there are many reasons to learn mathematics beyond how often it is used in later life.
Writing is used from the moment it is learned. One doesn’t learn to write so that one day you might be a journalist or author. Writing is an everyday tool that one uses for any purposes, personal, professional, or simply to communicate.
True, but if the justification is the interest of the subject in itself, then the approach taken to it in middle- and high-schools would be vastly different, no?
Let us daydream about what a “Mathematics for the Joy of It” curriculum would look like.
First, it wouldn’t start until people were old enough to have the development in the prefrontal cortex that enables abstract thinking.
Prior to that, people could, instead, do exercises designed to sped up development of pattern recognition capabilities (like those described in Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It).
One might use as the texts for the courses that would replace current mathematics instruction Mathematics for the Nonmathematician by Morris Kline and Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers by Jan Gullberg.
Dr. Ravitch,
Mathematics is used from the moment its learned. An everyday tool as well. I suspect that you use Gauss’s formulation of modular arithmetic daily even though you are not a mathematician. If you arrange to meet a friend in 2 hours and it is currently 11 am, you know that 11+2=1
In any case, most of these comments do not advocate in favor of writing because of it’s utility in life. The bulk of the comments concern how writing helps sharpen thinking. The same is true of mathematics. Let me quote GH Hardy by way of Paul Lockhart’s excellent essay A Mathamaticians Lament:
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker
of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than
theirs, it is because they are made with ideas
You are right, TE, I use mathematics every day. I don’t use algebra or geometry.
I emphatically second the recommendation to read Lockhart’s magnificent essay!
Click to access LockhartsLament.pdf
And it is precisely the current mathematics hell for all that Lockhart argues against so eloquently in this essay.
And that Vi Hart also argues against in her many wonderful videos, like this one:
Dr. Ravitch,
You use number theory every day, typically presented as a far more advanced topic than algebra or geometry. Here is another calendar example: a week from today it will be Tuesday, so 2+7 = 2 (mod 7)
Bob,
I agree that mathematics is taught very badly in K-12 (and for the first couple of years of college), but I do not remember you conditioning your support for the teaching of writing on the quality of instruction. If writing was taught as badly as mathematics, would you be against the teaching of writing beyond some basic level?
If it had these profoundly negative consequences, yes.
I totally support teaching mathematics. But taking an entirely different approach to the instruction.
Anyone that does home repairs or renovates a property depends on accurate math skills to order materials and plan a budget for the project, and it may include a tiny bit of geometry.
All these are examples of extremely rudimentary mathematics. One could dispense with the teaching of the same with a day’s worth of instruction per year.
So, using a ruler. Done.
I do lutherie as a hobby. I can attest that most adults, after graduating from 12 years of compulsory math education, have but the slightest idea how to measure something accurately. I certainly wouldn’t want to own a guitar put together by such a person. It would not be playable.
There is lots of mathematics that is useful for the average person.
It’s actually a pretty long list, but what is included in Algebra 2 is not on it.
And as far as thinking goes, TE had algebra 2, so that should tell us something.
The math that would be useful to the average person is rarely remembered by adults. Tell me, what is 3 cups of AP flour in grams? of fine white sugar?
and this stuff–everyday math–is hardly complex and isn’t what is MOSTLY taught in people’s high-school math classes. As complicated as it gets in everyday math is probably interest calculations, and though people talk a lot about how important those are, almost no one, in actual life, actually does them, unless he or she works in banking or finance.
Counting the number of apples in the bag when one is planning to bake a pie isn’t exactly mathematics justifying our current mathematics curricula.
The main purpose of education is not economic. I repeat for emphasis: The main purpose of education is NOT economic. A simple, basic lack of understanding of that key point has disastrous consequences. The Constitution cannot be terminated when it doesn’t suit our personal interests, and likewise, algebra and writing cannot be terminated when they don’t suit our personal interests. We want every citizen able to use judicious reasoning at the highest levels possible. Civilization depends on it, and it’s no hyperbole to say so.
I agree. I also think that the way we are approaching mathematics instruction in K-12 requires complete reinvention. It’s an utter failure.
My point (or one of them), LCT, is that the economic argument made by those who champion or current utterly failed approach to math education is totally bogus. These people argue that it’s of value because a) we use it a lot (we don’t) and it is so needed for contemporary jobs (almost no adults remember much of anything from their K-12 math instruction, and few use what they do remember, aside from very basic arithmetic, in their jobs).
So, the economic argument is bs. It cannot be the case, if most adults are practically innumerate, that mathematics is essential for their functioning in the 21st century. QED.
Oh, I forgot, cosmetologists use Bayes’s Theorem all the time to figure out the probability that they will have to pay for a hair dryer repair in the next three months given the probability that a customer will want hair dye during that time.
NOT
I see grave danger in that line of thinking. Our schools are not failing. Math is cognitive, not competitive. We give students the knowledge tools and it’s up to them to apply the knowledge creatively. If they don’t score as high on standardized math tests as do other nations, who cares? One way to improve math instruction os to get rid of College Bored math tests and return to the way math was taught before data driven drivel, but not to change the curriculum; just to get rid of the testing.
The folks who put together the CC$$ math standards understood this: that math is about abstract conceptualization involving patterns. But they totally did NOT understand that little children are not developmentally ready for abstract thinking. They are extremely concrete thinkers, if one is talking about explicit, conscious thinking, as opposed to subconscious thinking. So, they put together “standards” that were basically ridiculous.
The fact of the matter is that most adults hate and don’t know any mathematics, beyond absolutely basic arithmetic and a few very basic notions from geometry. In other words, their math instruction FAILED. Almost completely.
This level of failure is difficult to find anywhere else.
Here’s the problem: we start math instruction too young, before people are developmentally ready.
Sorry, my longer note on this topic is in moderation below. I am frustrated by these discussions of math instruction because people insist upon sticking with an approach that clearly fails most people MOST ADULTS ARE INNUMERATE, even though they have had 12 years of mandatory math instruction.
So, that instruction failed.
This should give people pause. That it doesn’t shocks and angers and frustrates me.
Cosmetologists also use Einsteins field equations to figure out the expansion of the Universe.
And that’s some pretty sophisticated math.
And cosmetologists also use the reddening of light and the relativistic Doppler shifft to determine how fast a customer is leaving after a botched dye job.
But cosmetology may be an exception go the file when it comes to math required for normal jobs.
The main purpose of math is so you can trick people into buying and doing stuff they normally would not buy and do.
In other words, the main purpose is econometricks
Bob, according to the 2012 & 2014 PIAAC studies on this, only 30% of US adults are innumerate. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020025.pdf
I was pretty poor at math K12 and avoided it in college, but K12 served me well in a corporate job where arithmetic and basic algebra were a routine part of getting the work done. The daily practice especially honed mental math & estimating skills which have helped me lifelong.
Comparing my millennial sons’ pubschooling ‘90s forward, I agree wholeheartedly that math instruction methods are terrible at elemsch level. That makes midsch/ hisch math much harder than it should be. But I saw that my sons, like me, became adept with routine math because of daily use in pt jobs while in high school, and later, working as independent contractors & running small biz ventures.
Well, much depends on one’s definition of innumeracy, doesn’t it? It has been my experience that most adults I meet or have worked with have very rudimentary mathematical abilities and are math phobic, and I am including teachers and editors (most of my colleagues) there, all people with college educations. Very few of the folks who worked as English textbook editors could be trusted to work on even a middle-school math textbook program, print or online. Almost none of my teaching colleagues could calculate grades on a curve or were comfortable working with basic statistical concepts related to testing.
I know for a fact that adults in Pharmacy Tech training programs usually have to be taught all over again how to calculate percentages of medications. (I once edited a pharmacy tech training program and dealt with its authors.)
But let’s take this PIACC definition.
Percent of American adults subjected to 12 years of compulsory math instruction: almost 100 (3.1 percent drop out of high school, but they have to turn 16 first, so they’ve had compulsory math instruction up to that age)
Percent who can’t do really basic math after that: 30
I would say that even a 30 percent failure rate is ridiculously high.
A rough outline of my radical proposal for a saner system of instruction in math is in moderation below.
Thank you for that info, Ginny.
My dad used to complain decades ago that innumeracy was caused by the cash register with the menu or bar code instead of numbers. When my students leave me in June, I don’t so much care whether they remember everything I said. Most of the information will be filtered out by the brain in its effort to be efficient. Use it or lose it.I just want my students to have been challenged to think in their interactions with me.That’s English. And it’s math too.
❤
It’s true that a calculator produces accurate answers faster than the brain. But you still need to be able to calculate numbers when you are shopping or doing other daily transactions.
Whether we like it or not Siri will be able to carry out these functions and AI will construct letters and research, change is inevitable, we can moan, etc., get up on the wave or get rolled over by the wave
Education in 21st-Century Skills at Flor-uh-duh Bob’s Virtual Voucher School of the Future! Sample Student Schedule
Hand-washing and Hairnet Wearing 101
Obeisance to Superiors, Level 8
Work-life Balance for People with Three Minimum-Wage Jobs
Break for Student Janitorial Duties
Intermediate Kneejerk Political Jingoism
HIStory from Creation to Dimocrat Babylon to the Rapsure
Call Center Script Reading as the Highest Expression of Human Potential
oops, Rapture
Blondie did it better.
If anyone wants to get an idea of why extraordinarily useless stuff continues to be done in K-12 education despite its obvious uselessness, just read the thread about math instruction above. And this is on a blog frequented by folks with actual education experience, many of whom often have wise things to say about teaching. Nonetheless, the amount of utter poppycock expressed (and strongly believed) on this topic of the nature of our math instruction is overwhelming. I have to draw this conclusion: people will support any kind of nonsense if it is what they are familiar with, and they will reflexively look ’round for reasons for continuing to do whatever they have always seen done, no matter how counterproductive it is.
There is a reason why so many kids think that so much schooling is atterly useless, boring waste of their time. Because it is.
My teachers should have ridden with Jessie James
for all the time they stole from me.
–Richard Brautigan
Again, these are empirical questions. Talk to American adults.
They HATE math.
They think that they are TERRIBLE at math.
They have forgotten almost all the math they ever learned.
In other words, this is what they got from 12 years of mandatory math instruction as currently practiced.
Most practices that failed this spectacularly would long ago have been abandoned. But, duh. . . .
Yes, there are worlds of beauty and understanding and creative expression and clear reasoning toward valuable results that mathematics opens up, and there are the various worlds OF mathematics that professionals inhabit, but ALMOST NONE of our students end up adults who operate in those worlds. AMOST ALL OF OUR STUDENTS, products of the current system, remember ALMOST NONE of the math they were taught, but they DO REMEMBER, and will tell you point blank, that they hated math, that they hate it now, and that they weren’t any good at it.
THAT’S WHAT THEIR MATH INSTRUCTION TAUGHT THEM.
In NEA survey found that 60 percent of American adults could not calculate a 10 percent tip, even though all they had to do was move the decimal point.
That’s how successful our 12 years of math instruction, as currently conceived, is.
Well, they should not be calculating a 10% tip anyway, because that’s just cheap.
I mean really.
Waiters get paid a very low base salary and the tips are the only thing that can give them a decent hourly wage.
So the people who are calculating 10%may be good at math, but they are not very good at compassion.
I hope that no one here gives 10 percent tips!!! That’s horrible. In our sicko society, wait staff are often paid far below minimum wage.
This discussion reminds me of back when people used to argue that we MUST continue teaching Latin because learning it taught people to be rigorous in their grammar and expression. What poppycock.
Learn Latin because you want access to enormous amounts of stuff written in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. Learn Latin so you can read stuff that Catullus and Miton wrote, in the original. But don’t start on that stuff about the importance of Latin to roots to vocabulary (one of the many FOLK TALES of our trade). But don’t learn it because it will give you “mental discipline” (lol). One could say that a freaking memorizing the first 10,000 digits of pi.
I have always found the fascination with memorizing pi curious.
Talk about a completely useless endeavor.
I’d say memorizing pi to 10,000 digits is much more likely go give you a mental disorder than mental discipline.
If you didn’t already have one.
true that
Here’s an approach to mathematics instruction that would be far more productive than is what we are doing now:
Delay beginning mathematics instruction until people are at least 15 or 16 years old. In the two years that follow, they will learn and retain FAR MORE math than they now do in 12 years. They will understand it far more deeply. It will interest them far more. They will remember far more of it. WHY? Because by that age their brains are beginning to develop the necessary neural equipment for doing explicit abstract reasoning. That equipment is not fully in place until kids are about 24 or 25 years old.
Do a little VERY ELEMENTARY counting, addition, and subtraction in Kindergarten and First Grade, and stop there.
Prior to the beginning of formal math instruction at 15 or 16, do classes in which people practice various pattern manipulation exercises. This to build their ability to recognize patterns and the cognitive machinery for doing that. Time doing puzzles and games involving patterns.
Also prior to the beginning of formal math instruction, form clubs for learning math and competing with other students in math–as an ELECTIVE art and sport.
Pull the best students from those clubs for one-on-one tutorials with professional mathematicians. Why? Because it is extraordinarily important to identify the savants early and give them special training–the future Eulers and Gausses and Ramanujans. These people are rare. They have innate talent. They are extraordinarily valuable to the society at large. They need to be identified and invested in. The prodigies.
We have nothing to lose by adopting my program for math instruction because what we are doing now is an utter failure. ALMOST ALL GRADUATES OF OUR CURRENT PROGRAMS, BY THE TIME THEY REACY ADULTHOOD, ARE INNUMERATE.
We can do better.
See Bethree’s note, above, about innumeracy rates. She cites a study that puts innumeracy in the adult US population at 30 percent. My estimate (most, that is, >50 percent) comes from watching, throughout my life, other adults struggle with extremely basic math or watching their eyes glaze over when anyone incorporates even the tiniest bit of mathematics into an argument.