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When entrepreneur Elon Musk took the headlines With its noisy comments to support the H-1B visa program, the subsequent debate focused on the implications of his position on immigration.
But this debate obscured the reason that America even has such a program in the first place: home -grown students are poorly trained in mathematics.
According to federal law, the H-1B program Visa Visa gives foreigners who perform services “in a specialist occupation”. A specialist occupation is defined as “theoretical and practical application of a whole of highly specialized knowledge”, plus requirements for higher education.
The program is Annually covered at 65,000 ordinary H-1B-VISA, With another 20,000 for those foreigners who have achieved advanced degrees from American universities.
SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said that the technical industry has a great need for employees via H-1B-VISA and has set up a national debate. (Samuel Core / Getty images)
Given the fierce support of Musk of the program, it is no surprise that a federal report states that in 2023 “computer -related professions were the largest professional area, accounting for 65% of all beneficiaries (of the program).” For comparison: less than 1% of the H-1B-VISA was given to foreigners in the Social Sciences.
Although much of the coverage of the H-1B debate focuses on the corner of the foreign-versus-American employee, the real problem with regard to H-1Bs is that the US does not produce domestic ones Employees with the required math skills Required by Musk’s SpaceX and other high -tech companies.
In 2024, a shocking 72% of the students of the eighth degree that achieve the national assessment of educational progress research could not score at the competent level of 6% compared to the 66% of the eighth classes who have no skill in 2019 have reached.
Why are American students doing so badly at math? The answer lies in the ineffective mathematical instruction that they receive.
At the beginning of the years 2010, most states adopted the Common Core National Education Standards, which were advertised as a cure for the mathematical misery of America. Unfortunately, Common Core turned out to be a bad medicine.
Common Core confused many students by emphasizing indirect ways to get the right answer instead of just learning simple mathematical operations.
When multiplication of numbers, for example, children are often asked to take photos instead of simply remembering the multiplication tables.
Michael Malione, a professional mathematical nator in California, said that his students were instructed by their public schools to sign and shade different areas with rectangles in the multiplication of fractures, instead of simply multiplying the counter and multiplying the denominators to it to get correct answer. Requiring students to learn math in this way is both inefficient and ineffective.
Why are American students doing so badly at math? The answer lies in the ineffective mathematical instruction that they receive.
“We are going to take a photo every time we get 10 problems with fractional multiplication, if you could put them in your head?” Malione asks. “That is insane.”
Malione sees students “who are completely lost and they don’t get the step -by -step guidance in the beginning.”
In view of the experience of Malione, it is not surprising that a study funded by the government has shown that Common Core had significant negative effects on the mathematics performance of eighth rankers.
Mathematics professors from the college are shocked by the poor math skills of students.
A mathematics instructor in the Silicon Valley complained that the lack of algebra knowledge “is the number one shortage and his chronic”. He said, “We do not produce the kind of students and graduates who needs Silicon Valley.”
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Sugi Sorensen, a top engineer in the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory who also teaches students in mathematics, insisted on a return to proven traditional math practices, including the control of the basic skills of addition, deduction, multiplication and division by “the memorization of math fact and and division and Procedures “so that students can perform calculations quickly, accurately and effortlessly.”
Furthermore, math subjects must be consecutive, “where new concepts have been built in a structured, hierarchical way on previously learned,” said Sorensen.
Finally, Sorensen recommends that mathematics operations such as Lange Division “must be” explicitly taught and practiced for control “, with the emphasis on accuracy.
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America has almost 50 million K-12 students. If schools use proven mathematics instruction methods instead of failed progressive techniques, there would be less need for H-1B-VISA because there would be more than enough young Americans with the skills that companies need. The Tech Titans at Trump’s inauguration must tend to do that in schools. It’s time to make math again.
Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education of the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of the PRI book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students and Parents reveals the collapse of learning in American schools.
