The ‘nuclear arms race' in extracurricular math

Boston Globe

12-05-2025

Since he didn't remember such centers existing when he was a kid, Goodman was intrigued. He says that the Kumon storefront 'sort of sat in my brain for a while. Then a decade or so later, we managed to find data on this.'
That's when Goodman, who is an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, and his colleagues Edward Kim at Bentley and Martin West at Harvard, started to track the proliferation of Kumon and two rival math-tutoring centers, Mathnasium and Sylvan, throughout the United States.
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Students in upper-middle class neighborhoods across the country have entered — as one mom put it to me — a 'math nuclear arms race,' in which disarmament often feels impossible.
Many of us with kids have marveled at the surging popularity of out-of-school math: Parents ask you under their breath if your child goes to this center or that center. Young children — in the third, fourth, and fifth grades — now spend afternoons at math classes.
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Massachusetts has given rise to its own incredibly successful competitor in the math-enrichment derby: the Russian School of Mathematics, where a weekly two-hour class for a fifth-grader will set you back about $2,500 for the academic year. It also has summer programs. RSM began in Newton in 1997 and now teaches, by its own accounting, more than 70,000 students in North America.
What explains the skyrocketing demand?
There are a number of factors, but everyone I talked to agreed on one thing: Many parents believe that getting ahead in math can give their kids an edge in college admissions. Indeed, the RSM website features alums who enrolled at Yale, Harvard, and Cornell, noting that '100K+ RSM alumni go on to attend the best universities in the world.'
And if you're interested in the small pool of highly selective schools, you're going to need all the help you can get. Over just the last couple of decades, colleges in that pool have gotten much, much harder to get into.
Consider Brown University, which accepted
This has touched off a frantic struggle among affluent, educated parents to seek out any advantage they can for their children. A friend who works in college counseling told me that math feels like the new proxy for intelligence. Plenty of parents believe that the earlier their kids can take calculus, the better. And being good at math makes it likelier that students will earn impressive scores on the SAT and both Advanced Placement calculus exams.
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Perversely, as districts like Cambridge,
Goodman, who lives in Cambridge, said that all three of his kids have done extracurricular math, 'starting with our oldest, who from an early age was super into math. And the schools weren't challenging him. For us, it was a way to keep him interested in a subject. And then the same thing for his younger siblings.'
He says they benefited a lot from taking outside math — even if they 'sometimes get aggravated by the extra homework.' He notes that 'this kind of outside parental investment is a way of just saying, 'OK. Screw it. If the school is not going to challenge my kid, then I'm going to provide the right track for my kid this way.''
But, he admits, 'I'm under no illusions that it fixes any inequalities in access to this stuff, right? The people who are able to take advantage of these things have money and knowledge. And, by the way, at least for the advanced learning part of this stuff, the model only works if there's a parent around to help with the homework.'
Indeed, in an affluent school district that eliminates advanced math, the kids who may be most hurt are those capable of doing more but whose families can't afford Russian Math.
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The centrality of math
What worries me is that a feedback loop has now kicked in. As more and more kids opt in to extracurricular math, lots of families start to feel that this sort of enrichment is essential.
None of this means that parents of third-graders are necessarily laser-focused on getting into Harvard, but the pressure trickles down. Parents of young kids understand that they inhabit a competitive landscape. So when your friends and neighbors tell you their kids do this math thing, you sign yours up for it too.
I have wondered about the centrality of math for a long time. When I was in middle school in the 1990s, math was the only class that had an advanced section. I frequently wondered why the most motivated history students couldn't take a more advanced class. Or the kids eager — and ready — to dive into harder literature.
No one I spoke with seemed to know exactly why math is treated so differently from other subjects, but several people noted that it tends to proceed in a linear way with clear right and wrong answers. Your ability to digest literature, write high-quality essays, or engage with chemistry is somewhat more subjective, making it more complicated (and perhaps more controversial) to distinguish among students.
Jon Star, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a middle school math teacher, agrees that college admissions, rather than love of math, fuels a great deal of extracurricular math enrollment. And, he says, the existence of such classes can make the lives of math teachers really hard. What should a fourth-grade teacher do, for example, when some kids in their class are multiple grade levels ahead? The children have 'seen everything already,' he says. 'That's just a potentially insurmountable challenge in that classroom.'
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Sometimes, says Star, 'kids are then unhappy in school, bored in school. And the parents go to the school and say: 'Oh, I want my kid to be able to go even faster or skip a grade or skip two grades.' And schools just may not be equipped to do that, especially middle schools and elementary schools.'
'A shallow understanding'
One place this ratcheting up of math education is having an effect is in college. Steven Strogatz, a professor of math at Cornell, says he's seeing 'absurd levels of acceleration.'
When Strogatz was in high school in Connecticut, he took calculus during his junior year. And since there were no formal courses left to take during his senior year, a few advanced kids took a course called 'Math 6.'
Now he sees students who took calculus in their freshman or sophomore year of high school. By the time they get to Cornell, they've taken multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and sometimes differential equations.' You see a lot more of that. And it might be OK for some kids, but for a lot of kids, what it means is that they have a very spindly, thin knowledge of the fundamentals.'
Strogatz has written books about math and penned a column on it for The New York Times. He wants people to both love and understand the subject. 'A lot of the AP students we see, they've taken AP calculus when they come into my class. That didn't do them much good. In many cases, they have such a shallow understanding.'
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Strogatz too believes that the quest to get accepted to a good college often encourages students to focus on math acceleration. Because young people with special circumstances — including athletes, legacies, and the children of major donors — fill a bunch of the spots in a college class, 'the kids who are trying to get in by having done the Russian School of Math, they're fighting for the remaining slots.'
Strogatz notes that his graduate students rarely end up teaching math. Instead, he points out, 'they go to work for Google. They work for Amazon or Microsoft or Apple. And get paid three times what I get paid. Or more. Or they go work for a hedge fund, and then I can't even tell you [how much they make].'
I am all for enrichment, but I'd like to see it more widely distributed. Love biology? Spanish? Literature? You should feel free to take afternoon classes in those instead of math.
But little will change until admissions offices realize they have created the wrong incentive structure. Colleges should make clear that students' brilliance cannot be measured by AP calculus — or by how early kids can zoom through the course. They should emphasize that learning is about understanding, rather than end points. And that kids should explore what they love, rather than feel compelled to spend Wednesday nights at their local math franchise.
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