Why We Must Rethink the High School Math Curriculum for the AI Era

More than 60% of rising ninth graders in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will repeat Algebra I after the city placed every eighth grader in the course during the past school year, according to education advocate Ted Dintersmith and researcher Beth Simone Noveck. The consequences were immediate, with weeping students, angry parents, and roiling debate about the rollout, teacher support, and tracking.

Dintersmith and Noveck argue that the U.S. math sequence—Algebra I, Geometry/Trig, Algebra II, pre-Calculus, and the much-desired Calculus—was laid out in 1893 by the Committee of Ten, a working group of educators. That system was designed when respected professions like surveyors, engineers, astronomers, and munitions officers needed humans able to execute rote math procedures quickly and accurately by hand, such as factoring ($x^3 – 6x^2 + 11x – 6$), computing square roots, and solving systems of linear equations.

The authors state that these rote math tasks are now performed flawlessly by smartphones and AI, while education systems have not reached the realization that mainframes made those skill sets obsolete—much like the talented Black women who performed rote math by hand for the Apollo space missions, showcased in the book and movie Hidden Figures, recognized by 1970.

The Gap Between School Math and Real-World Numeracy

Current educational standards prioritize tasks that computers can execute, which Dintersmith and Noveck claim pushes aside the math that matters. They identify several critical areas of math missing from most curricula:

• Understanding the probability behind a medical diagnosis.
• The long-term impact of compound interest.
• The risks of online gambling.
• The statistics behind “studies show” headlines.
• The algorithms that determine what we read, watch, and believe.
• Estimating market sizes, devising statistics to track an organization’s progress, predicting revenue growth, optimizing scarce resources, deploying proprietary algorithms, and making sound decisions in careers.

This misalignment has measurable consequences for the U.S. population. According to the text, only about a third of U.S. adults have the numeracy skills needed to navigate real-world financial and health decisions, while most—by some estimates, more than 90%—report some degree of math anxiety.

AI’s Role in Curriculum Design and Community Feedback

Dintersmith and Noveck suggest that AI can be used to give us powerful new tools for listening, making it practical for communities to contribute their expertise and experience. They note that we test kids at such a massive scale that the only way to keep costs in check is to rely on exams expressly designed to be graded by a computer, and if a computer can grade it, a computer can do it.

To resolve this, the authors propose using AI to synthesize thousands of perspectives, identify common ground, surface disagreements, and explore alternatives. They cite Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which recently engaged more than 10,000 families, educators, students, and community members to shape its AI strategy, surfacing broad support for AI literacy alongside concerns about academic integrity and the pace of adoption.

Noveck, who is the director of The Governance Lab at Northeastern University, points to their own Unlocking Literacy initiative at Northeastern University, where they ran a national engagement on literacy using AI to enable participation in multiple languages and from people with different literacy levels, then synthesized what communities told us.

Proposed Shifts in Mathematical Education

The authors call for shifting the focus from “How can we do obsolete things better?” to “What mathematical capabilities will students need to thrive in an AI-driven world?” Dintersmith, author of “Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math that Schools Won’t Teach You” (2026), features a simple eight-question math quiz on the website for his new book, Aftermath, using practice questions from The Nation’s Report Card Grade 8 exam, the PSAT, SAT, ACT, and a state-mandated exam.

The goal of the quiz—starting by asking community members, especially school boards and local legislators, to take this 12-minute, no-devices quiz—is to reflect on whether these questions should define the futures of every kid coming through our school system. Dintersmith and Noveck argue that if a young adult enters the real world with skills inferior to what a set of AI agents does for $20/month, they will struggle to find any decent career path.

By leveraging AI to gather thousands of perspectives from students, parents, teachers, employers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, the authors suggest districts can make curriculum decisions that reflect today’s realities rather than yesterday’s assumptions, preparing a generation to do what only humans can: reason, create, judge, and solve the problems that matter most.