Comment by robg

Anecdata (I wanted to be a teacher earlier on until I actually met a few and heard their stories):

Teachers are generally pretty progressive (both in the political and innovation senses), but the legislation (like Common Core), state & district educational standards, and school boards move more slowly. And in the US, the primary schools are largely funded and overseen by local parents (municipal and state), so the school priorities and cultures partially reflect local priorities.

There's often debate between what individual teachers want to teach (a product of their individual preferences and backgrounds and values) vs what the administration forces them to teach (as a reflection of the political and business realities of their particular school). There's often a personality difference between the two classes too (educators vs admin types), with the former often being (at a stereotype) starry-eyed idealists and the latter being grounded management types with an eye on the numbers of finance and politics; on top of that, there is also often a labor vs mgmt (not quite "owners") divide, with individual teachers being pretty much powerless to teachers' unions being really strong in some districts. Long story short, teachers can't unilaterally change the curricula they teach.

The power struggles affect everything from math (new math, math wars, whether to test it, etc.) to social studies (CRT, Native studies, bilingualism, religious studies) to science (evolution, climate) to business needs (cursive vs typing, algorithms or letterheads), etc.

Far from being a settled matter, our educational system is heavily political and its lack of progress is probably reflective of our divisiveness as a country, where two broad sides keep playing tug-of-war and veering towards the extremes, making tiny gains and losses back and forth.

The kids end up caught in the crossfire. The US, for all the money we pour into education, ends up rather poorly educating its children vs other developed nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

True, but hardly anyone does anything theoretical. Those who do will probably have taken a lot of extra math courses along the way. IMNSHO, you need to understand the principles of algebra and calculus, but you don't have to know how to integrate by parts, or know the formula for computing the roots of a quadratic. Statistics, otoh, is fundamental to understanding science, voting (I'm thinking of Trump's claim that it was statistically impossible for him to have lost), health, the meaning of bad test results (here I'm thinking of Bayes' Theorem--and minimal algebra is needed to solve that equation), and so forth.