Schooling and mathematics education are inherently political. The goals of schooling have served a variety of competing goals of which social efficiency, social mobility, and democratic equality have had focused attention in the United States (Apple, 1992; Labaree, 1997). It has been well documented that students’ experiences of schooling vary widely with respect to race and social class (Anyon, 1980; Berry, Pinter & McClain, 2013) with students of color receiving limited opportunities to engage with tasks that extend beyond computation and procedural exercises (Berry, Pinter & McClain, 2013). Moreover, the discipline of mathematics itself is not a static, neutral, and value-free domain (Bishop, 1988; Fasheh, 2012; Joseph, 1987; Vithal & Skovsmose, 1997).
The historical and modern functions of schooling, along with the discipline of mathematics, combine to make mathematics teaching and mathematics teacher education a political act (Felton-Koestler & Koestler, 2017). One way that mathematics teaching is political is that teachers decide whose mathematics is privileged in the classroom (Gutiérrez, 2012) and how that mathematics is positioned (Gutstein & Peterson, 2006). Another way that mathematics teacher educators' (MTE) practice is political is that MTEs provide frameworks for prospective teachers to understand mathematics teaching and learning. These frameworks may perpetuate the dominant methods of mathematics instruction (Lortie, 1975) or "prepare teachers to challenge and disrupt the status quo" (Felton-Koestler & Koestler, 2017, p. 67). The later frameworks can help teachers to see how the systems of schooling affect students differently (Gutiérrez, 2013), combat deficit narratives of marginalized students and their communities, and make available ways to notice and build on marginalized students’ brilliance (Leonard & Martin, 2013) in an effort to build more socially just teaching practices.