I was irritated that I couldn't extract data from PDFs in a similar way to web pages + BeautifulSoup, so I built a library that (kind of) does just that[0]. It does a bunch of other nonsense, but the main goal is a more "human" way of interacting, e.g. `page.find('text:bold:contains("Summary").below().extract_text()`.
And since every PDF is its own bespoke nightmare, I'm also trying to build up a collection of awful-to-extract-data-from examples to serve as the foundation for a how-to library[1].
For anyone interested, I think it's probably worth actually digging into Equitable Math's "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" [0]. I just skimmed some of it based on your link, and the majority of it just reads like "stop teaching math poorly." I was looking for some real burn-down-the-establishment stuff, but it's honestly pretty prosaic. For example:
> "There is a greater focus on getting the "right" answer than understanding concepts and reasoning."
Probably most people would be on-board with the idea that concepts/reasoning are more important than blindly getting to the right answer, but "right" in quotes seems like a tell that some math-is-objective nonsense is on the way. Reading further, though, it turns out it's just talking about how word problems can be imprecise!
> "Math is taught in a linear fashion and skills are taught sequentially
without true understanding of prerequisite knowledge."
This seems like the flexibility the other commenters are gunning for, even if California isn't on board with it.
> "Rigor is expressed only in difficulty."
I immediately thought, ugh, they're just trying to dumb everything down! But if we read further:
> "Too often in math, we limit the definition of rigor to difficulty, rather than its full complexity including thoroughness;
exhaustiveness; interdisciplinary; and balancing conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application. This allows math teachers to shy away from complex problems and tasks and instead streamline teaching like we are spoon-feeding..."
A thorough, conceptual understanding is superior to a surface-level ability to step through a process without understanding? Sign me up!
I poked around for anything more aggressive, but from what I can tell that's generally the vibe of the PDF. Yes, the framing is unnecessarily antagonistic, but if we took the white supremacy dressings off of it I doubt the ideas inside would be divisive at all.
Of course, I've only skimmed that one document! But if "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction" is this inoffensive I'm not sure where they're hiding the real good stuff.
And since every PDF is its own bespoke nightmare, I'm also trying to build up a collection of awful-to-extract-data-from examples to serve as the foundation for a how-to library[1].
[0] https://jsoma.github.io/natural-pdf/
[1] https://badpdfs.com/