Elon Musk needs H-1B workers because math education fails our students

When entrepreneur Elon Musk made headlines with his vociferous comments supporting the H-1B visa program, the ensuing statement focused connected the implications of his presumption connected immigration. 

But this statement obscured the crushed America adjacent has specified a programme successful the archetypal place: its homegrown students are being poorly educated successful math. 

According to federal law, the H-1B programme gives visas to foreigners coming to execute services "in a specialty occupation." A specialty concern is defined arsenic requiring "theoretical and applicable exertion of a assemblage of highly specialized knowledge," positive higher acquisition requirements. 

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The programme is annually capped at 65,000 regular H-1B visas, with different 20,000 for those foreigners who person earned precocious degrees from U.S. universities. 

SpaceX and Tesla laminitis Elon Musk said the tech manufacture has a large request for workers done H-1B visas and acceptable disconnected a nationalist debate. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Given Musk’s vehement enactment of the program, it is nary astonishment that a federal report states that successful 2023, "computer-related occupations were the largest large occupational area, accounting for 65% of each beneficiaries [of the program]." In comparison, little than 1% of H-1B visas were fixed to foreigners successful the societal sciences. 

While overmuch of the sum of the H-1B statement focuses connected the foreign-versus-American-worker angle, the existent contented regarding H-1Bs is that the U.S. is failing to nutrient home workers with the requisite mathematics skills required by Musk’s SpaceX and different high-tech companies. 

In 2024, a shocking 72% of eighth-grade students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam failed to people astatine the proficient level -- a afloat 6% summation implicit the 66% of eighth graders failing to execute proficiency successful 2019.

Why are American students doing truthful severely successful math? The reply lies successful the ineffective mathematics acquisition they are receiving. 

In the aboriginal 2010s, astir states adopted the Common Core nationalist acquisition standards, which were touted arsenic a cure for America’s mathematics woes. Unfortunately, Common Core turned retired to beryllium atrocious medicine. 

Common Core confused galore students by emphasizing indirect ways to get astatine the close reply alternatively of conscionable learning straightforward mathematical operations. 

For example, successful multiplying numbers, children are often asked to gully pictures alternatively of simply memorizing the multiplication tables. 

Michael Malione, a nonrecreational mathematics tutor successful California, said that his students were instructed by their nationalist schools to gully and shadiness antithetic areas of rectangles erstwhile multiplying fractions, alternatively than simply multiplying the numerators and multiplying the denominators to get the close answer. Requiring students to larn mathematics this mode is some inefficient and ineffective. 

Why are American students doing truthful severely successful math? The reply lies successful the ineffective mathematics acquisition they are receiving. 

"We’re going to gully a representation each clip we’re fixed 10 problems with fractional multiplication, erstwhile you could bash them successful your head?" Malione asks. "That’s insane." 

Malione sees students "who are wholly mislaid and they’re not getting the step-by-step guidance aboriginal on." 

Given Malione’s experience, it is unsurprising that a federally funded survey recovered that Common Core had important antagonistic effects connected the mathematics accomplishment of eighth graders. 

College mathematics professors are shocked astatine students’ mediocre mathematics skills. 

One assemblage mathematics teacher successful the Silicon Valley lamented that the deficiency of algebra cognition is "the fig 1 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 apical technologist astatine famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory who besides tutors students successful math, urged a instrumentality to proven accepted mathematics practices, which includes mastering the basal skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and part done "the memorization of mathematics facts and procedures" truthful that students "can execute computations quickly, accurately, and effortlessly." 

Further, mathematics topics should beryllium sequential, "where caller concepts are built upon antecedently learned ones successful a structured, hierarchical manner," Sorensen said. 

Finally, Sorensen recommends that mathematics operations specified arsenic agelong part "should beryllium explicitly taught and practiced until mastery," with an accent connected accuracy. 

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America has astir 50 cardinal K-12 students. If schools usage proven mathematics instructional methods alternatively of failed progressive techniques, determination would beryllium little request for H-1B visas due to the fact that determination would beryllium much than capable young Americans with the skills companies need. The tech titans astatine Trump's inauguration should thin connected schools to bash conscionable that. It is clip to marque mathematics large again. 

Lance Izumi is elder manager of the Center for Education astatine the Pacific Research Institute. He is the writer of the PRI book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning successful America’s Schools. 

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