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Comment by sgslo | Hacker News Reader

Rather than running with a click-baity title, I'd encourage readers to look at the proposal, particularly the introduction: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

Don't walk away from this thread assuming the authors are trying to dumb down math education without reason.

Instead, I'd encourage you to think about a few questions:

- Does raising the average math competency of all students outweigh the possible benefits of catering to a select few?

- Is it the school's (and thus, the government's) obligation to develop a hypothetical gifted student?

- If you're a student not enrolled in an advanced course (when one exists) do you assume that you're "not a math person"?

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> Does raising the average math competency of all students outweigh the possible benefits of catering to a select few?

This assumes that advanced courses harm students not enrolled in them. I don't see why that should be the case, and would like to see some evidence for this dichotomy you presented.

If you have 3 teachers, and they A) each teach classes that are composed of 20 regular and 10 gifted students, or B) 2 of them teach classes of 30 regular students, and one teaches 30 gifted students, is B) "catering to a select few"? If so, which select few? Both regular and gifted students receive education adjusted to their abilities, so are they not both being catered to?

The DoE proposal talks around it but explains that low performers do better when high performers tutor them in small group projects, because teachers can't teach a whole class.

What it doesn't say is to let that happen but then also split into groups for ability-customized lessons.

If high performers are expected to tutor low performers, then the high performers ought to be paid a salary by the school. Otherwise, such an expectation of work cannot be expected. The teachers are being paid to do a job, they are the oned who are responsible for doing the job.

One of several examples mentioned in the proposal:

> Burris, Heubert & Levin (2006) followed students through middle schools in the district of New York. In the first three years, the students were in regular or advanced classes, in the following three years all students took the same mathematics classes comprised of advanced content. In their longitudinal study the researchers found that when all students learned together the students achieved more, took more advanced courses in high school, and passed state exams a year earlier, with achievement advantages across the achievement range, including the highest achievers (Burris, Heubert & Levin, 2006).

If having no advanced courses is best for everyone, as that study claims, then there's no need to think about those questions you raised, is there? There's no dilemma, since both gifted and ordinary students are best served by the same kind of program.

> If having no advanced courses is best for everyone, as that study claims, then there's no need to think about those questions you raised, is there?

You are correct, and that’s probably why the intro to the framework, while it mentions equity concerns on this issue, breezes past them fairly quickly and spends a lot more focus on the evidence of more universal problems with the existing tracking approach.

The framework’s position is not “tracking is segregation that enables serving more able (or white and asian) students better” but “tracking is segregation that is a pedagogical disservice to students across tracks”.

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