The National Council of Teachers of Math issued an official statement about data science. It is a Joint Position of NCTM, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Statistical Association, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Computer Science Teachers Association.
It is a short document, and you should read the whole thing, but here are two quotes:
Data science bridges disciplines and thus should be introduced and taught across the curriculum in K-12 schools to help develop informed users of data.
All subjects in school should recognize the contribution of data to their discipline and take curricular approaches that integrate data with disciplinary lessons where appropriate.
This is not a call for a separate Data Science course, and certainly not a call for data science to replace disciplinary courses. The idea is to integrate investigative lessons within the teaching of the various disciplines. Doing this is the responsibility not just of math teachers, but also of science teachers, social studies teachers, and computer science teachers. The reason for that is that “Data science draws on concepts from mathematics, statistics, computing, as well as content knowledge of the domain within which a problem is situated.”
I very much agree with this approach, which makes it possible to use data explorations within math courses without eliminating the crucial math content that is required for pursuing work in any of the STEM fields. Integrating data into the math curriculum will of necessity take the place of something, thus the need to prune the traditional curriculum. The key is to spend less time on complicated manipulations, and more time on meaningful and conceptual work. I suggested guidelines for how to do this in my article on Big Picture Planning.
I have written before on this and closely related topics:
- What Belongs in Algebra 2
- Functions from Tables
- Math as Literacy (← Find more relevant links at the end of that post.)
Henri's Math Education Blog 