Category: high school dropouts

Andrew Hacker's New York Times Op-Ed--Is Algebra Necessary?--ran more than three weeks ago, but it is still generating blog posts and comments in a wave that could probably be described with some algebraic equation, but not by me. 

I thought the wave had crested, but when Jennifer Ouellette posted on Scientific American a few days ago, I decided to say something about this. "Today we are defending algebra," she writes. "Again."

Hacker started this discussion by suggesting that algebra was too hard for most students and was a chief reason why many dropped out of high school. Further, it's unclear whether algebra helps many of us at work. In...