California Bans Calculus from High School Because of Racism | Hacker News Reader

California Bans Calculus from High School Because of Racism

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24 pointsgrejlkjlsrth17 comments

The headline is misleading and the blog's author is clearly pushing an agenda, but for at least the last 5-6 years serious, educated people have been asking if calculus really should be the peak high school math.

Some argue that probability and statistics would be better, or any of linear algebra, graph theory, logic, and various discrete math topics.

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/calculus-is-the-pea...

https://www.salon.com/2020/09/26/teaching-data-science-inste...

Indeed this headline is editorialized against HN guidelines. The original headline is:

"To Promote Equality, California Proposes a Ban on Advanced Math Classes"

and it seems, at least upon quick inspection, to be factually accurate (although the article content itself is far from neutral).

@dang if you get a moment this headline could benefit from reverting to the source headline.

EDIT: Actually after digging another layer down in the linked sources, I'm not sure even the "proposes a ban" is factually substantiated though it's hard to tell for sure without going one layer yet deeper and scanning through a 300 page report.

> although the article content itself is far from neutral

Can we admit how pernicious it is that the school system itself is manifestly captured by ideological motives and that simply criticizing that is impossible to be "neutral" by any standard people that agree with the program would define?

I guess I'm saying: how do you voice criticism in a neutral way when the program being criticized frames itself as basic human decency.

This is the same logic that lies at the center of something like the Patriot Act. Capture language and you've perniciously twisted language so as to be unimpeachable. This is Pandora's Box.

I only meant to comment on the article's neutrality with regard to evaluating the meta aspect of the headline quality. I personally think that the kinds of measures proposed here are counterproductive (I am, among other things, a mathematics educator) — but my opinion on that isn't really relevant to the question of helping keep HN submissions at the desired level of quality.

I get what you're saying. I think there's an issue though, that neutrality is hard to come by for lots of reasons and especially nowadays when preference falsification is prevalent because critique of DEI/CRT is social suicide in certain sociopolitical milieu.

So naturally you're only going to find critique on the other side. As the CRT folk are keen to say - you can't be neutral - pick a side!

> Can we admit how pernicious it is that the school system itself is manifestly captured by ideological motives

Sure: https://www.theroot.com/we-found-the-textbooks-of-senators-w...

Some calculus is great for understanding concepts like rate of change and how you can measure something that has curves in it. All that being said, the domain of mathematics is so much larger than calculus but all of my high-school math curriculum was geared towards integrals.

Sure, a little. Limits, Riemann sums, derivatives: the basics needed to understand how they model change over time.

> Mathematics pathways must open mathematics to all students, eliminating option-limiting tracking.

A lot of people are down on this idea, but what about the argument that these schools are failing to educate half of their students by tracking them into low-expectation classes?

If you decide in the 6th grade that a student is not going to make it academically, you're perpetuating a cycle of failure.

Dividing students into tracks and providing different resources to each track is a great way to provide a separate-but-not-equal experience based on race or class.

The proposal itself [1] claims that dividing students into classes based on ability harms, instead of improves, the gifted students' outcomes.

Which raises the question - what would improve their outcomes? Assuming that more advanced math classes help learn more advanced math, it would seem the separation itself is what does the harm. Would an entire school dedicated to gifted students avoid this harm? There are (or were [2]) such schools - it would be interesting to see if there are comparable studies on how well gifted students that attended such schools did, compared to those that did not.

[1] 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). - https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-school-board...

Headline is totally misleading. CA has not "banned" anything. The Board of Education is discussing some policies which may be misguided, and may or may not be implemented, none of which are "bans."

Unintended side effect - continued decrease in funding of pubic education.

My experience - niece and nephew went to non-secular school grades 6-12. Almost half of each senior class took calc. Not because they were smarter, but because they were of middle-class families that enforced educational aspirations and expectations. Almost all parents I spoke to chose this school not for spiritual reasons but to remove their child from their perceived mediocrity of public schools.

This school also offered scholarship, based on need only, to local inner-city children. None of these children had been in an 'exceptional' track in public school. But the scholarship kids all excelled and did well academically.

> None of these children had been in an 'exceptional' track in public school. But the scholarship kids all excelled and did well academically.

This implies that splitting students into slow and exceptional tracks is not based on ability, and it hobbles some students that could otherwise succeed. It is support for California's effort to dismantle those tracks.

"The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided."

Well, I kind of agree with that in a perverse sense - half my UK school year started it at the end of 5th form (age 15-16) (in 1984), which was a massive help for those moving to do A-level Maths in the 6th form.

I don't believe it.

California did mess with good curriculum decades ago when it dropped phonics, but not for any sort of racial reasons, but for untested education tinkering ones.

> we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents

It's absurd to diminish talent (never mind maintain that it doesn't exist), this is used to marginalize accomplished people (like minorities) and frankly it's hard to see this than anything other than a tactic of bullying and dogmatic ideology.

> "Teachers can support discussions that center mathematical reasoning rather than issues of status and bias by intentionally defining what it means to do and learn mathematics together in ways that include and highlight the languages, identities, and practices of historically marginalized communities."

This part beggars belief. It seems to declare that they'd like to maintain the pretense of teaching math by redefining math to mean critical race theory topics.

This is so sad. It's hard to fathom what's going on in these policymakers' heads. It's like there is a famine and you put forth the option of euthanasia. It's unthinkable.

Math is what helps us better understand reality and bring discovery that benefits everyone, yet, here we are discouraging students from being interested in advanced mathematics. It's an appeal to lowest common denominator.

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