Page 14 n THE ASIAN REPORTER U.S.A. October 2, 2023 Americans have poor math skills. It’s a threat to U.S. standing in the global economy, employers say. Continued from page 12 lysts say those fields have or will develop labor shortages. But most American students aren’t prepared for those jobs. In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems worldwide. Students in China scored the highest. Only one in five college-bound American high school students is prepared for college-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council. One result: Students from other countries are preparing to lead these fields. Only one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American, the National Foundation for American Policy reports. The rest come from abroad. Most will leave the U.S. when they finish their programs. In the U.S., poor math skills could mean lower salaries for today’s kids. A Stanford economist has estimated that, if U.S. pandemic math declines are not reversed, students now in kindergarten through grade 12 will earn from 2% to 9% less over their careers, depending on what state they live in, than their predecessors educated just before the start of the pandemic. But it also means the country’s pro- ductivity and competitiveness could slide. “Math just underpins everything,” said Megan Schrauben, executive director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s MiSTEM initiative, which tries to get more students into STEM. “It’s extremely important for the future prosperity of our students and communities, but also our entire state.” In Massachusetts, employers are antici- pating a shortage over the next five years of 11,000 workers in the life sciences alone. “It’s not a small problem,” said Edward Lambert Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “We’re just not starting students, particularly students of color and from lower-resourced families, on career paths related to math and computer science and those things in which we need to stay competitive, or starting them early enough.” The Bridge to Calculus program at Northeastern, where Kevin Tran spent his summer, is one response to that. The 113 participating students were paid $15 an hour, most of it from Boston and its public schools, said the program’s coordinator, Bindu Veetel. The university provided the classroom space and some of the teachers. The students’ days began at 7:30am, when teacher Jeremy Howland had them run exercises in their heads. “Bada-bing,” Howland said whenever they were right. Students learned to apply that knowledge in coding, data analysis, robo- tics, and elementary electrical engineering classes. It’s not just a good deed what North- eastern is doing. Some of the graduates of Bridge to Calculus end up enrolling there and proceeding to its highly ranked com- puter science and engineering programs, which — like those at other U.S. univer- sities — struggle to attract homegrown talent. These American high school students said they get why their classmates don’t like math. “It’s a struggle. It’s constant thinking,” said Steven Ramos, 16, who said he plans to become a computer or electrical engineer instead of following his brother and other relatives into construction work. But with time, the answers come into focus, said Wintana Tewolde, also 16, who wants to be a doctor. “It’s not easy to understand, but once you do, you see it.” Peter St. Louis-Severe, 17, said math, to him, is fun. “It’s the only subject I can truly understand, because most of the time it MATH METRICS. Boston Latin Academy student Lila Conley, 16, works on a pre-calculus problem during the Bridge to Calculus summer program at Northeastern University in Boston. (AP Photo/Reba Saldanha) has only one answer,” said St. Louis-Severe, who hopes to be a mechanical or chemical engineer. Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back. What employers really want “is trainability, the aptitude of people being able to learn the systems and solve problems,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA, an information technology trade association. Other countries, he said, “are dying for the way our kids learn creativity.” Back in class, the students fielded Howland’s questions about polynomial functions. And after an occasional stumble, they got all the exercises right. “Bada-bing,” their teacher happily responded. The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Hawai‘i economists say Lahaina locals could be priced out Continued from page 7 quarters, the report said. In the weeks after the fire, Maui lost more than $13 million per day in visitor spending. With businesses lacking customers, layoffs resulted. In July, the unemployment rate on Maui was only 2.6%. But it will soar above 11% in the next three months, the economists predicted. It’s not expected to dip below 4% until late 2026. There have been about 12,000 new unemployment insurance claims filed since the disaster — about 11,300 more than before the fire. The U.S. Department of Labor extended the application filing deadline for Disaster Unemployment Assistance (DUA) by one month, through October 16, Hawai‘i’s Department of Labor and Industrial Relations announced. “Individuals that do not qualify for regular unemployment insurance may be eligible for DUA benefits,” Green said. Officials are now beckoning tourists to come to Maui. The report said the planned October 8 reopening of West Maui resort areas will restart tourism in the region, with a gradual recovery. By the end of this year, Maui visitor arrivals are expected to be roughly half of the 2022 level, rising to 80% by the end of 2024. Selsky reported from Salem, Oregon. Lahaina’s fire-stricken Filipino residents are key to tourism and local culture. Will they stay? Continued from page 8 The Rev. Efren Tomas, pastor of Christ the King Church in Kahului, worries about the mental health of survivors. He has been counselling groups of Filipinos staying in hotels, even celebrating mass in a hotel reception room. “For Filipinos, it’s very hard for them to go into one-on-one counselling,” he said. “They want to gather in a group. I think they get strength from each other.” Many longtime Lahaina residents, including Native Hawaiians, told The AP they worry that whatever is built from the ashes of Lahaina won’t include Filipinos and other ethnic groups who made it the working class community it was. “The new Lahaina should be the old Lahaina,” said Alicia Kalepa, who lives in a Hawaiian homestead where most of the houses survived the fire. “Mixed culture.” Gilbert Keith-Agaran, a state senator from Maui who is stepping down to focus on litigation work involving the fires, said he won’t be surprised if many Filipinos leave for places such as Las Vegas, an affordable destination for Hawai‘i resi- dents who no longer can afford to live here. “I think it’s hard to take the Filipinos out of the fabric of our community,” said Keith-Agaran, whose father came from Ilocos Norte in 1946 for plantation work. “We intermarried a lot with others who are here.” Melen Magbual Agcolicol was 13 when she arrived on Maui from the Philippines more than four decades ago with her family. Since then, she has become a community advocate and is president of Binhi at Ani, “Seed and Harvest,” which operates Maui’s only Filipino community center. ASTHMA IS ON THE RISE. Help us find a cure. 1-800-LUNG-USA Her group unveiled a fund called Tulong for Lahaina, or Help for Lahaina. The idea is to provide grants to Filipinos who lost homes, shops, or loved ones. “The starting over is so difficult. How are you going to start over? Number one, you don’t have a job,” she said. “Number two, your sanity. Your sanity is not normal until you think that you can accept what happened to you.” Rosales’ three sons don’t want her to sell her property, but she is finding it difficult to think about the future. She can’t sleep or eat, can’t stop crying. Residents are just starting to be allowed to return to the burned areas. Rosales wants to go back. She wants to comb through the rubble of her American dream, hoping to find a piece of her jewelry collection, a gold bracelet, or a watch, luxuries she would never have been able to afford in the Philippines. “Even if it’s black,” she said, “I want to take it as a remembrance.” She touched the delicate gold hoops dangling from her ears. She put them on the morning she left her house to go to work. Associated Press writer Bobby Caina Calvan contributed. Department of Consumer & Business Services Oregon Division of Financial Regulation The Division of Financial Regulation of the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services is the state agency that regulates insurance companies, insurance agents and agencies. Consumer advocacy: Consumers with insurance complaints or questions may contact the division’s Consumer Advocacy Unit at 1-888-877-4894 (toll-free in Oregon). Insurance company regulation: The Division of Financial Regulation licenses and monitors insurance companies and agents doing business in Oregon to ensure they meet their financial obligations and comply with state laws and rules governing fair treatment of policyholders. Consumers affected by the wild fires: Consumers that after talking with their insurance company have questions, need more information or want to present a complaint may contact the Consumer Advocacy Unit at 1-888-877-4894 (toll free). dcbs.oregon.gov Wondering when our next issue is published? Sign up for e-alerts at !