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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Is it not a bigger problem that the majority of students cannot handle the math and science that currently exists?

One of the problems of lower socioeconomic class students is that a whole host of STEM fields are blocked because they lack the math and computer knowledge coming out of high school.

You need to hit calculus senior year or getting into STEM is gonna suck hard. I had friends in engineering school who first hit calculus in college, were failing so dropped the class, but kept attending the class. They understood it was the gate.

Without the math, the only jobs in reach are "softer" fields: social work, criminal justice, nursing, etc. This has an attendant depressing effect on the uppermost level of their salary.

Accelerating math will benefit a few high flyers, but actually devoting resource to better teaching the math that is there will benefit a broader section of students.

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> Is it not a bigger problem that the majority of students cannot handle the math and science that currently exists

No, its the same problem; while most of the attention here is focussed on “equity” mentions because everyone wants to fight the culture war, one of the key underpinnings of the reform is research showing that the status quo tracked approach adversely impact learning for students across the various tracks.

> You need to hit calculus senior year or getting into STEM is gonna suck hard.

The new plan is designed to enable students who choose to to hit Calculus senior year, as well as abandoning tracking and providing more math options in the last two years of high school; bt abandoning tracking which effectively locks people out of reach calculus on High School before they start, it should make it more, not less, possible for people to reach that goal, if it fits their goals.

> one of the key underpinnings of the reform is research showing that the status quo tracked approach adversely impact learning for students across the various tracks.

And so they're rearranging the deck chairs. Again. And ignoring the obvious elephants in the room. Again.

I wish people would start to recognize:

1) Math is hard to learn and requires time and work

2) Math is hard to teach and requires time and work

3) Math builds so falling out gets harder to correct with time

4) College admissions provides a non-negotiable time constraint

The problem is that if you accept those propositions, you have to start allocating more teachers, spending more to get better teachers, and spending more time with smaller class sizes to keep students from falling out.

To be fair, THIS ISN'T LIMITED TO MATH. I find it ironic that everybody is so upset about math when "good at writing/bad at writing" also tracks from this age and nobody seems to get upset over something that is possibly way more important to overall success in life.

> Is it not a bigger problem that the majority of students cannot handle the math and science that currently exists?

Of course not. Dumb people exist because their parents were still smart enough to breed — a much lower bar than being smart enough to do bleeding edge 19th century science.

> Accelerating math will benefit a few high flyers, but actually devoting resource to better teaching the math that is there will benefit a broader section of students.

Barely. There is loads of educational research; we’re already dribbling on the asymptote.

Not that I endorse not taking math, but many of my classmates who work in IB/PE/Consulting never really progressed past calculus, and they do seem to be doing all right for themselves. I think schools should be as rigorous as possible, but STEM isn’t the only path to success.

| I think schools should be as rigorous as possible, but STEM isn’t the only path to success.

While that's true in a very realistic sense, i take issue with it because our modern economy is based in large part upon technology and theory developed by STEM workers. If you don't have people doing the hard work of pushing civilization forward, then there's nothing for the managers to manage. If America wants to remain a dominant force in the global economy, we have to be doing the things we were, educationally, in the mid-century period.

But this stuff is hard and makes your brain hurt, which is why we've experienced the "financialization" of the economy. It's just too easy to make money by moving money around these days.

Are the Moving-Money-Around types really mostly people who struggled with math in high-school, though? When I was in college, investment banking/quantitative analysis/predictive analytics were marketed as lucrative career paths for people with solid math-based degrees who didn't want to get their hands dirty with engineering. Granted, they may not have to remember anything past calculus, but that's a little different.

Fair enough. I've never worked at Goldman or anything, and I know people personally who do quant stuff for a living with math/physics degrees. It's been no surprise to me that trying to explain to them why rising economic inequality is a bad thing is like talking to a brick wall. As Upton Sinclair put it, "It's very difficult to explain something to a man whose paycheck depends on him not understanding it."

This quote is quite apropos, as the very thing that has allowed the proliferation of jobs in finance is the middle class largely not being in control of their financial destiny: all the money is floating (or perhaps being sucked) up. So I need to add another qualification: doing such a job is similarly low on the totem pole in terms of societal good. The goal isnt to provide a good or service as such, only to make more money (whether for the managers or their shareholders, who are, again, largely affluent to begin with.)

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