She is a teaching professor of mathematics at Berkeley. She won a national award for teaching college math. Her bio says she has a passion for helping students learn it, and she founded a math circle for public school students so they could get more help before college. This is not a professor with a grudge. This is a professor who ran out of options and published her data.
One of her calculus students could not solve seven x minus five equals nine. That is middle school math. Angela Morabito's first answer is about the bill: it costs that student time and money, and it costs every federal taxpayer, because we are underwriting loans for kids who were never made ready for college. She does not blame the students for their own unpreparedness. She puts it on a K-12 system that did not teach them and an admissions office that rubber-stamped them through anyway.
A similar warning came out of UC San Diego months earlier, where professors said their students were not capable of the basics. Morabito's phrase for it is that we are becoming a remedial country, teaching people on a college campus what they should have learned five, seven, or ten years ago. You cannot cram years of learning into one compressed semester. She gives these professors credit for trying and says they have been handed an impossible task.
Jenny Beth Martin makes the point that nobody in the room wins. Not the student who is not ready for college calculus. Not the student who is ready and now gets slowed down. And it is not one professor talking: more than a thousand University of California faculty have signed a system-wide petition to bring standardized testing back for science and engineering admissions, more than two thirds of the system's mathematics faculty signed the letter demanding it, and one professor called the level of agreement unprecedented.
So why is the administration still arguing? Morabito's answer is that their priorities are political, not academic, and that this is in no way limited to California. She adds the part that gets left out: it is also unfair to the capable kid who never got in, because there was nothing to compare him to. Standardized tests are not perfect. They are standardized. When grade inflation is an epidemic, apples to apples matters.
Call your senators and your representative at 202-224-3121.
Watch the full hour at jennybethshow.com. More at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — A Berkeley Professor Publishes Her Own Numbers
00:25 — The Calculus Student Who Could Not Solve 7x Minus 5 Equals 9
00:45 — What It Costs to Be Admitted Unprepared
01:14 — Becoming a Remedial Country
02:47 — A Thousand University of California Faculty Want the Test Back
03:27 — Why the Administration Is Still Arguing
04:37 — The Professor Who Built a Math Circle
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