When entrepreneur Elon Musk made headlines with his vociferous comments supporting the H-1B visa program, the ensuing debate focused on the implications of his position on immigration.
But this debate obscured the reason America even has such a program in the first place: its homegrown students are being poorly educated in math.
According to federal law, the H-1B program gives visas to foreigners coming to perform services « in a specialty occupation. » A specialty occupation is defined as requiring « theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge, » plus higher education requirements.
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The program is annually capped at 65,000 regular H-1B visas, with another 20,000 for those foreigners who have earned advanced degrees from U.S. universities.
Given Musk’s vehement support of the program, it is no surprise that a federal report states that in 2023, « computer-related occupations were the largest major occupational area, accounting for 65% of all beneficiaries [of the program]. » In comparison, less than 1% of H-1B visas were given to foreigners in the social sciences.
While much of the coverage of the H-1B debate focuses on the foreign-versus-American-worker angle, the real issue regarding H-1Bs is that the U.S. is failing to produce domestic workers with the requisite math skills required by Musk’s SpaceX and other high-tech companies.
In 2024, a shocking 72% of eighth-grade students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam failed to score at the proficient level — a full 6% increase over the 66% of eighth graders failing to achieve proficiency in 2019.
Why are American students doing so badly in math? The answer lies in the ineffective math instruction they are receiving.
In the early 2010s, most states adopted the Common Core national education standards, which were touted as a cure for America’s math woes. Unfortunately, Common Core turned out to be bad medicine.
Common Core confused many students by emphasizing indirect ways to arrive at the right answer instead of just learning straightforward mathematical operations.
For example, in multiplying numbers, children are often asked to draw pictures instead of simply memorizing the multiplication tables.
Michael Malione, a professional math tutor in California, said that his students were instructed by their public schools to draw and shade different areas of rectangles when multiplying fractions, rather than simply multiplying the numerators and multiplying the denominators to get the correct answer. Requiring students to learn math this way is both inefficient and ineffective.
« We’re going to draw a picture every time we’re given 10 problems with fractional multiplication, when you could do them in your head? » Malione asks. « That’s insane. »
Malione sees students « who are completely lost and they’re not getting the step-by-step guidance early on. »
Given Malione’s experience, it is unsurprising that a federally funded study found that Common Core had significant negative effects on the math achievement of eighth graders.
College math professors are shocked at students’ poor math skills.
One college math instructor in the Silicon Valley lamented that the lack of algebra knowledge is « the number one deficiency and its chronic. » He said, « we’re not producing the kinds of students and graduates that Silicon Valley needs. »
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Sugi Sorensen, a top engineer at famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory who also tutors students in math, urged a return to proven traditional math practices, which includes mastering the basic skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division through « the memorization of math facts and procedures » so that students « can perform computations quickly, accurately, and effortlessly. »
Further, math topics should be sequential, « where new concepts are built upon previously learned ones in a structured, hierarchical manner, » Sorensen said.
Finally, Sorensen recommends that math operations such as long division « should be explicitly taught and practiced until mastery, » with an emphasis on accuracy.
America has nearly 50 million K-12 students. If schools use proven math instructional methods instead of failed progressive techniques, there would be less need for H-1B visas because there would be more than enough young Americans with the skills companies need. The tech titans at Trump’s inauguration should lean on schools to do just that. It is time to make math great again.
Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of the PRI book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning in America’s Schools.
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Publish date : 2025-02-03 12:00:00
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