The Atlantic – A.K. Whitney 
When the political scientist Andrew Hacker published The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions earlier this year, he didn’t break the internet. But he certainly stirred up the math establishment in arguing that anything more complicated than arithmetic is useless to most people, that requiring algebra in high school is an obstacle that drives the country’s dropout rates, and that the Common Core’s approach to math, which calls for more complex math like trigonometry, is a mistake. As a journalist who has made math education her beat for a while now, I have been fascinated by the whole debacle, in part because many of Hacker’s arguments are more than a century old. And I sympathize with the irate mathematicians, because who likes being told their vocation is useless? So when I found out that James Tanton—an Australian who serves as the Mathematical Association of America’s mathematician at large, and a proponent for Common Core—wanted to debate Hacker last month at the National Math Museum in New York, I had to watch.(more)