California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide | Hacker News Reader

California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide

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317 pointsmoultano686 comments

I'm perpetually perplexed at why some people seem to think that lowering the standards is going to help anyone. Do they not realise the source of all scientific and technical advancement is really the result of a minority of high achievers, and that by trying to "flatten" this inequality and effectively make everyone equally stupid, they are also going to be affected negatively?

applies social justice principles to math lessons

The inmates aren't running the asylum anymore; they're running the government. All I hope is that this cancerous ideology (I'll resist the prop65 joke...) doesn't grow any further than it already has. The decline is certainly sad to see and already rather visible.

What if you invert your thesis. Sooner doesn’t necessarily imply “higher standard”:

1 - American school teach the alphabet before grade 1, and push kids to read early. German schools don’t even teach the alphabet until grade 1' yet by the end of that year the reading level of the kids is the same as US kids at the end of grade 1, or better. German Pädagogin justify this by saying there is some neural development issue — I think that is likely bull. But what I do recognize is that instead of being pushed to read before the kids are ready, the kids instead learn other valuable life skills. I happened to learn to read at age 5 (not in Germany nor USA) but that didn’t make me “better” than other kids; they did other things.

2 - kids who have parents who can afford tutors and such can push the kids through the prescribed steps sooner. Kids whose parents each have two jobs to get food on the table, well, they simply can’t. So the former define “higher standards” because they chose their parents well?

3 - To combine the two: if we can open up opportunities for all the kids aren’t we likely to end up with a larger pool of well educated people who will end up being the inventors, leaders, poets etc of the future? How many ramanujans are we leaving behind?

I’m not saying “throw out all the standards” but rather quite the opposite. I think your unidimensional absolutism is narrow and inadequate.

Your comment changed my mind about the debate in California:

> Sooner doesn’t necessarily imply “higher standard”

To be clear: I don't know enough detail about the proposal in California to judge it, but the idea that most children might be better off learning certain subjects at a later age, when they are more mature, cannot be dismissed a priori, without facts, based on ideological arguments.

Your comment reminds me of this passage from an old article about Finland's educational system, widely considered to be one of the best in the world:

> Children [in Finland] spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori [a Finnish teacher]. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

Text in brackets is mine. I highly recommend reading the whole article:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-s...

Exactly.

The thing is that you have to adjust curriculum to the developmental stage of the INDIVIDUAL child. Teaching someone too early only wastes the time, resources and money of that teaching. Too late and you lose future options.

I didn't learn to read until 1st grade but many of my peers learned in kindergarten. Individuals do NOT all reach the same learning readiness phase at the same time or same age (two different things).

BTW this "teacher's credential 101".

Systems like Montessori focus on this dynamic and thus have fairly open-ended schedules for things. Falling behind is defined by not meeting ANY learning goals but being on schedule is meeting enough learning goals.

Naturally customization of education like this does not fit well into a "School as a Factory; Child as a manufactured Part" model or the efficiency metrics that factories typically have that are similarly applied to public schools in the US (standardized testing is akin to process control; you do want some type of testing but it has to be structured with more nuance because children are not factory parts with narrow distributions of variance).

At this point, home schooling probably can't be worse. But more focus on customization of education is pretty essential. US Schools are 80%-90% focused on the bottom 10%-20% of IQ based on actual school budgets and funding. And for those not in that bottom group, it's all 100% uniformity and low budgets. One size can never fit all.

Wealthy parents will still define higher standards, because they will send their kids to private schools where more advanced math is taught (e.g. Phillips Exeter Academy teaches calculus to all students and offers linear algebra, statistics, and discrete math to advanced students.[1]).

Instead of opening up opportunities for all the kids, this will ensure that no poor student can compete because the courses won't even be available.

1: https://www.exeter.edu/mathematics-beyond-core-courses

It is so ironic that you mention Germany,where kids are split (at age 10, 12?) into hauptschule (lower ability), realschule (medium ability), and gymnasium (higher ability).

To think ramanujans of this world would benefit from lower standards is also having no idea or never knowing one in real life.

I learned how to read in Spanish, and very shortly thereafter I moved to an English country.

Totally different. You just cant compare a phonetic language to one like English.

My daughter is now learning how to read in the best school in my city and its taking her over year compared to me. We started at roughly the same age, but she and her classmates are struggling through hours of practice.

“Thats a sharp e honey”

“That letter is silent, baby”

“You’ll never sound that out, that words just messed up”

EDIT - punctuation and mistypes

We began algebra in 5th grade in India. In much humbler circumstances.

Luckily, our teachers made it clear that math was about effort, not skills, talents, or parents.

We were all expected to practice a lot of math, including algebra, until we figured it out.

And it worked - the ‘gifted’ students needed less practice, everyone else needed more practice. But by 6th grade, everybody passed algebra and figured out the basics. By 9th grade, when we were doing pre-Calc, it was unthinkable that someone in our class couldn’t do algebra.

Applying ‘Social Justice’ to math is simply the continued dumbing down of California. To what end, I can’t figure out.

To combine the two: if we can open up opportunities for all the kids aren’t we likely to end up with...

Well, maybe, but you're hiding a lot in that "if we can". You're assuming that this possibility is brought to fruition, and using the shiny abstract potential of that optimization to argue against real-world actual practices, and this is apples versus oranges.

In fact, I have approximately zero confidence that your "if we can" could ever come to pass. Consider the crazy levels of funding that's already pumped into education with no discernible benefit, and the extremely powerful lobbies that work night and day to maintain the status quo (modulo the increases in funding).

In a perfect world without competition for scarce resources we might be able to do what you envision. But starting the project from the current political realities, it's not in the realm of possibility. So let's not let the pipe dream interfere with some way to prevent the status quo from sliding down into even worse territory.

> kids who have parents who can afford tutors and such can push the kids through the prescribed steps sooner. Kids whose parents each have two jobs to get food on the table, well, they simply can’t. So the former define “higher standards” because they chose their parents well?

Yes. Kids born in rich families will do better, kids born to better parents will do better and that is a good thing. A lot of scientific research in early years did not come from government funded labs but rich people working on their passions. Note that privileged people will define "higher standards" always no matter what laws you pass and how you twist the public education system. But these sort of social justice solutions damage the very poor people who cant afford kumon.

The German System is also groups children based on their performance, not their age

That is the largest problem with American schooling, is we try to keep all kids in a chronological age based system, instead of a skills based system.

> German Pädagogin justify this by saying there is some neural development issue — I think that is likely bull.

Why would that be bull? Kids brains develops over time.

This comment would make sense if the debate was over whether or not students should be forced to take algebra in 8th grade. But it's actually about whether students should be allowed to take algebra in 8th grade.

ad 1) that's caused simply by phonemic orthography of German. English orthography is hell compared to that, it's not surprising that they need to start to learn it earlier.

1. userbinator was discussing the impact of exceptional people on society, and you're citing average behaviors of a people in one narrow educational sphere. Nikola Tesla has zero relationship with the middle of any curve.

2. Children are quite literally extensions of their parents. Their intelligence, beliefs, genetics, et cetera are a product of their nature (100% parental) and nurture (varies, but usually significantly attributed to their parents). Giving your child tutoring is no more cheating than when you pick up a book for yourself. Your children are you.

3. userbinator was in no way criticizing the opening up of opportunities to achieve equality by elevating all people to genius status. He, and most people here, are critical of handicapping the gifted/lucky/affluent/whatever in order to achieve parity at a lower level. The fact is it doesn't matter if you learn AI programming because you're so gifted the knowledge just flows into you easily, or if your parents spent $1mm a year teaching it to you. We need AI programmers, and having none because you thought it was unfair for people to get that education when others can't is nuts.

> I happened to learn to read at age 5 (not in Germany nor USA) but that didn’t make me “better” than other kids; they did other things.

My experience is the opposite. Because I learned to read early, I was able to absorb a huge amount of information previously inaccessible to me. There was simply no comparison - I was far better in every subject that required either knowing some information or processing it. The only exceptions were the subjects where body skill was important (art, PE, etc.) - in these areas I had some competition, I others there was nobody. I believe our chances balanced more or less in the second year of high school.

>2 - kids who have parents who can afford tutors and such can push the kids through the prescribed steps sooner.

Personally I was lucky my dad was running a computer repair business from the 80's onward. Growing up with a computer and a mountain of pirated educational software prepped me more than anything else my parents could have done. They lucked out that I particularly enjoyed learning.

If you're going to compare America vs Germany I'm willing to bet you're going to run into Simpsons paradox.

If there was a mixed program where you could either choose to have your children under Equitable Math or Common Core (the current standard which is adopted by the majority of US states), that would risk Equitable Math being framed as the way to fall behind. That's why the central contention is not about improving Common Core, but rather about whether all children should always be at the same level.

Sometimes children benefit from a delay, and other children benefit by moving ahead; but all children deserve the opportunity to advance according to their individual math ambition and ability. Under Equitable Math, all children must be at the same level up until the last year.

This is a huge win for private schools and after-school programs such as RSM.

That would be a political goal (not having Equitable Math get framed) that is implemented by putting a cost, or at least a reduction of service, onto every child.

Besides everyone knows what the real problem is: teachers not having decent levels at a bunch of subjects themselves, and not willing to improve. This is about saving money on the back of children, not about being equitable. Whilst there should be some allowance for high achievers and (very) low achievers that no teacher has much influence over, the average achievement of students is very much a property of the teacher, not so much of the students.

This is about cheaper and less capable (not just in subject knowledge either) teachers, at any cost to children.

Let's cut the bullshit and get straight to the heart here. Are black people, in your opinion, predisposed to be bad at math? If yes, then i guess your opinion is at least logically consistent. If no, then why are they (according to the article at least) underachieving?

If black kids aren't being served by the current curriculum, then I think it's reasonable to assume that some white kids aren't either.

I suggest that certain kids are being served poorly by the current system. If those kids were served better we could lift the floor, which would enable the high achievers to reach even further.

If you have 100 high achievers it's much more likely that one of them will produce a breakthrough than if you have 10.

Regardless of which side of the race-intelligence debate you're on, this will only widen the inequality. If you want blacks to achieve more, you should be investing more in their education. Not making things easier for everyone because then they will just continue to underachieve while those who can afford private schooling and such continue to excel.

I engaged in math competitions and such as a kid, I hope we can put this into the realm of "higher achievement".

I dont think minimum standards or curriculum moving accross grades have all that much to do with what competitive higher top does. The higher top require way more knowledge then what standards require. And more importantly, it requires more depth and speed.

High achievers are expected to know so much more then standards and to apply it in much higher variety of situations to compete.

In my experience, high achievers become interested in topics only covered in higher grades sooner or later anyways. And once they do, they pursue them only out of interest and intrinsic motivation, and that tends to boost their motivation. So I don't think this affects high achievers all that much either way.

Almost by definition, school (and everything else) is designed for the top of the bell curve.

Now, maybe school plan design can move the median ability up or down, and I don't have an opinion on if this change here does that, and if so, in what direction. I do think it doesn't affect the high end much either way.

Sure, that works for resourceful high achievers. There's probably a lot of kids who wouldn't go looking for interesting stuff simply because they don't have access to their own computer, or there's no teacher who's noticed that they are interested in stuff and has extra time to throw a few bones their way. Basically self starters who haven't been ignited yet.

The mass universal education system was designed to control and brainwash masses. The massive "free and universal" education movement launched by US was meant for this sort of end games and I am not surprised at all.

Having said that as a priviledged parent I merely chuckle at this social justice wanking as my kid goes to a private school and is tutored by me. She will be more successful than the "equity" kids from California if eveyrthing else remains the same.

> All I hope is that this cancerous ideology doesn't grow any further than it already has.

Give me one reason why you think your hope is valid. Everywhere I look this attitude seems to grow stronger and even discussing it becomes socially awkward, at least in some circles.

The situation sounds very similar to what happened in Argentina. About 30 years ago, Argentina's education level was good. In the name of social justice , high school standards were significantly lowered by the populist/socialist ruling party. Low grades started to be considered 'stigmatizing' for the students. The effect is that now there are some children that finish high school without being able to read fluently.

Don't be like Argentina.

However, regarding math, if there are cognitive research studies that justify delaying some topics, I don't consider that as negative.

I only got into algebra late. Some people just have more advantages earlier. Why is this concept so hard to understand?

because most people are morons. The same who advocate that males and females are completely 'equal'. They are not. And you can rage all you want, there are and there will always be evolutionary differences. Deal with it, idiots. Discriminating != pretending differences don't exist.

>they are also going to be affected negatively

No. "they" are going to lead fine lives, revered as warriors against social injustice, and living in the most exclusive corners of the state. As is typical, the next generation will pay the price.

For what it's worth, it drives me crazy too. The only reason we live such comfortable lives, that we can dedicate so much effort and money to such considerations, is due to the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

This is the problem. It's also horrifically bad for the future economy. For comparison, the rest of the world - at least the parts that want to catch up aren't running this slowly. Also - I think the lack of basic Science + Math education is part of the reason we see things like vaccine hesitancy - but that's just a guess.

My daughter in grade 4 (Israel) is currently learning basic algebra tenets, notably associative, commutative, and distributive properties in basic equations, in addition to basic solve for variable questions. SIN, COSIGN, TANGENT and friends start in grade 6.

The associative property is not remotely a basic algebra tenet (it's widely used, but it's a much more basic form of symbolic math).

It's spelled "SINE, COSINE, and TANGENT".

I’m Danish and not at all interested in the politics of it, but there can be a case for teaching algebra late. We do it in Denmark, because it’s the subject children have the hardest time learning, and having too many of them fail too early kills their interest in math. We still teach algebra in grade 7-9, but we’ve gone through the social experiments of teaching it at different ages, and have lost entire generations because it was taught too soon.

I don’t think social justice or equality should play a part of the argument, but it’s always hard to tell where the legislation ends and the propaganda begins these days, and I’m honestly no interested enough to read the 800 page document this article is about.

I will say, however, that I think we’re going to have problems teaching math until we reform the school system to be suited for the modern world instead of the early 1900’s “assembly line” society. It makes no sense to place children in classes based on their age, and certainly not for all subjects.

The result is always going to be that both slow and brilliant students get fucked over, in a myriad of ways, especially if they are a mix of good and bad at different subjects.

Why exactly is it that you aren’t taught courses like math, or history or language according to your ability instead of your age?

There was an informal study done in the early 20th century, where a superintendent decided he didn’t think math was that useful and told the 4 poorest elementary schools in his district to stop teaching it. (He chose the poorest schools because he knew the parents wouldn’t put up as much of a fuss as at the wealthier schools.) They still taught how to count, read clocks, and make change, but besides that they had no formal math instruction. They used the extra time to read as a class IIRC.

The result was that, despite lacking 6 years of formal math education, the students in that district were only one year behind the other students when they went to junior high. That is, they were able to recover all six years of missed elementary school math education in one year of junior high. And in the superintendent’s opinion, those students were better at critical thinking and were able to solve some problems their better-educated counterparts were not. I can find the link if anyone is interested.

Basically, it seems like kid’s brains are just not able to efficiently learn math. I know I could learn math concepts now that would have taken me much longer in highschool. I kind of wish we would just let kids be kids for more of their lives

> The result was that, despite lacking 6 years of formal math education, the students in that district were only one year behind the other students when they went to junior high.

If it is anything like German math education back when I was in school a lot of the early things are simplified to an insane extreme and either have to be revisited later or are completely replaced with a better approach. I think we went through half a dozen ways on how to multiply and divide numbers when only one mattered in the end. If you learned the basics from your parents you could even expect to be penalized since you had to use the useless methods described in the curriculum for the first few years and could get penalized for correctly identifying an equation with a negative result.

> Basically, it seems like kid’s brains are just not able to efficiently learn math

Or it may be related to a really bad curriculum that tries to be "age appropriate" by teaching mostly useless crap.

"formal math education"? That only starts in college/university. Everything before that has been highly informal in my experience. We didn't even learn something as fundamental as first-order logic during school!

If you spent the math classes on getting the basics right, the rest could be formalized and then deepened in college. The saved time could be used to go to college earlier.

Let's see that link, por favor

I was one of those kids, that didn't do good at math compared to other subjects. I was still close to a top student, albeit a lazy one. maybe that affected my math ability. it was only in college, ie in the States, that my math scores average high B's and A's n those scores were in calculus etc, math required for CS.

Only one year behind? What a great deal!

> Why exactly is it that you aren’t taught courses like math, or history or language according to your ability instead of your age?

That's exactly the question. Under Equitable Math, all children must always be at the same level up until the senior year, and Algebra will not be offered in middle school. Some children are ready for Algebra in middle school, and some aren't.

This is the most critical point of contention, and why the debate is not over whether the Common Core, which already emphasizes "deep" comprehension over rote memorization, ought be reformed to go even "deeper".

> I’m honestly no interested enough to read the 800 page document this article is about.

It's notable that the entire Common Core specification for math can be read in a single day. It is meant to be a coordinating document for many parties, and not just metaphorical lawyers.

> Under Equitable Math, all children must always be at the same level up until the senior year

Are they really advocating putting all kids in the same math class regardless of ability? That seems completely insane to me. For some fraction of the class, literally handing them a textbook and telling them to go nuts would be better in every way. At the other end, some of those kids feel awful for holding the class back.

Could someone help me understand what the big picture is here? How does this actually help the under-privileged students in any way? Are they expecting that this will level the playing field for college admissions and the job market?

Didn't common core also state that a child solving 4x5 by computing 5x4 fails the task and in turn hindering deeper comprehension.

Or do I confuse this with something else?

I am a big proponent of getting rid of the age-segregation as is it is now and widening the age range, but I'd like to see a citation on Denmark teaching Algebra later and the data on this. I read turn-of-the century math books that are years ahead in rigor and subject matter, and that seemed to fare well. There was a lot of stigmatizing of AP classes by the great "equalizers", but let the kids who can excel, excel. I am not at all a believer the "leave no child behind" philosophy. Even college-educated kids we hire now seem to be behind the group just 5 to 10 years younger in common sense, math, writing, history, and problem-solving skills, at least in the interviews I have given over the past 15 to 20 years. The odd superstar shows once in a while, but they will always thrive in any situation. Personally, I grew up with a lot against me, but I pushed and was pretty much self-taught, and I like to think I did good. I don't believe in trying to administer or legislate intelligence. Instant facts from Google does not equate to knowledge and wisdom.

> citation on Denmark teaching Algebra later and the data on this

https://www.webmatematik.dk/lektioner/7-9-klasse/algebra

https://matematik.gyldendal.dk/til_laeren/01-om-portalen/06-...

We’re not the best inspiration for how to run your school system though, we have had several huge reforms since the 1995, and the most recent major reform is failing miserably compared to what they are doing in other Scandinavian countries. Which is ironic because the reform was created to catch up, and then ended up failing more than what we had before.

Most it has to due with how our government isn’t willing to commit the necessary resources to run it. We actually have major, major, issues with that in all parts of our public sector right now. So bad with nurses that we’re cancelling operations and seeing delays on our emergency service phone lines on a national scale which are outside of what is legally required.

I think Finland has the best recipe for a modern school system for the west. They did the opposite of us, where instead of making children go to school for longer hours (thus needing more resources), they make children go to school less hours, but focus the resources better.

I would say practical reasons. How would you structure those lessons? You'd need a lot more resources to be able to tailor everyone's path like that.

It would be great though. I loved going to school for the first 4 years when we were ~30 people in the whole school (spread over 1-4th graders) - the teachers were able to address individual needs. Then I went to fifth grade where were were 35 people in the class. It just went downhill from there.

Middle and high school already have separated classes, no?

I once took a computer-repair class at a local school district adult school. It was self paced, and despite being bored as hell during high school, I crushed the repair course at like 4x the normal speed. Because I could. There was literally no one to stop me.

Knowledge/skill assessment is more complex than dictation. It's like a O(n) operation that necessarily looks at each student versus the O(log n) of dictating stuff to a class that asks some questions.

The more evaluation and feedback are in the process, the more individualized it gets, the more burdensome and expensive it gets, generally. That's not to say we can't improve our teaching methods to automate some mechanisms for feedback and pace adjustment in the future, though...

Education is due for a genuine upset. I think there are a bunch of ways technology could make general education significantly more effective, given the technology was designed for that. (Current device / OS / app design norms are mostly in service of consumerism, which assumes no one ever wants to learn anything unless someone paid for them to hear it. So, not that stuff.)

Educational technology has existed for many decades now, built by academia and industry alike. It seems to largely have played a very minor role if even that in the successful advancement of the rate of educating children. If you think you have methods that could significantly improve that, you’d have a great impact on the world. I’d love to hear these bunch of ways.

Largely because American's believe they understand the educational process (largely based on their own anecdotes) better than experts.

The particular reason people struggle with algebra is because it is one of the first fundamentally abstractionist topics taught in schools. There is a huge cognitive development and experiential component.

Delaying teaching algebra makes cognitive developmental sense, but it is also inherently intertwined with with race, class, and gender for a bunch of reasons that get a lot of people really angry.

only possible with online/remote education

This is one of those issues that I can't understand the opposing argument. It's just an issue I find so objectionable that I cannot understand why anyone would be imposing this. Literally holding kids back.

The only defense I hear is that kids don't really benefit from advanced classes and they'll be fine anyway. But gifted children will not necessarily be fine. Most of the smartest people I know struggled in school just, but most were fortunately saved by advanced placement classes that put them in classes where they can learn at a faster pace than the rest of the children. Were they forced to stay in what to them amounted to remedial classes, they would grow to resent education and actually underperform.

The utter disregard the people pushing these policies have for children is appalling. Hopefully this is just a weird time in our countries history where that we'll look back on and think how absurd the policies were.

In what I'm sure is a complete coincidence, the proportion of "very intelligent" or "disharmonic intelligence profile" or "savant syndrome" kids in youth services/youth care has gone up significantly. They now outnumber kids that committed crimes.

They're replacing advanced placement classes ... with straightjackets.

The argument is that African American students perform poorly in these subjects on average, and it impacts their grades and thus impacts their college admissions.

So the only way to even the playing field is to eliminate difficult subjects in high school, so that everyone gets near-perfect grades.

And that's a completely racist argument. The irony in the people pushing these ideas is astounding. They've basically taken an easy political out and instead of doing the hard work and realizing that African Americans can meet the same standards they've basically just said "nah they're too stupid so we'll lower our standards to make their grades look better."

My parents introduced it to me at home around 4th-5th grade? So I was ~9-10yo? Not sure why delaying it will help, if anything the earlier the better. Everything I hear about "equity in education" seems to be making it worse, but more equally I guess.

Like another poster already mentioned, reminds me of the Harrison Bergeron story by Vonnegut - seems like we are rapidly approaching that point.

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

To be fair, the basics of algebra are already taught in first grade (or whenever you learn arithmetic). Kids at that age won't have questions such as

x + 3 = 7

Instead, they will get questions such as

__ + 3 = 7

They might not formally learn it, but they'll learn the patterns that they will eventually apply in algebra.

And if we were any good at teaching math we would just naturally go with it from there, "algebra" wouldn't even be a subject, it would just be something you do by default as teachers first replaced _ with x (hopefully before you even got too used to _), and then started making the equations gradually more complex.

"Solving linear equations with multiple variables", "solving quadratic equations", "solving polynomials", etc. Those are things you really need to teach as a distinct concept. Algebra is just the language, introduced in a pedagogically sound way you wouldn't even realize you were learning it.

My parents introduced algebra to me in third grade. It took me a long time in third grade to get it, so much so that I was a little bit afraid of algebra though certainly I didn't admit it to my parents.

Fast forward a few years in school when the teacher introduced algebra in class (maybe sixth grade?), everything suddenly clicked, and I pretty much got the highest grade for several months straight because I learned this material before, albeit not well, but still way ahead of everyone else.

I think this could be a middle ground: introduce the material earlier, but with no expectation that the pupil must grasp it immediately; then review or reintroduce the material again at a later date.

That's how I learned a lot of things. My dad would mention what atoms are and that kind of thing, and I'd read about them in magazines, so them when it came to school it wasn't so big a leap to add a bit of rigour.

My takeaway from your anecdote is completely different: when exactly a school introduces concepts doesn't matter as much as the stimulation a child can receive outside school.

In my experience, kids whose parents help teach concepts and don't just leave things up to school generally end up with an advantage. Kids love learning from their parents and other loved ones, but school is generally regarded as sort of a chore even if it does bring friends and playtime. A great many parents simply don't have the time or energy left after their day job to support their children the same way others can. Kids whose parents often read to (and with) have a noticeable advantage in many school settings, and you can't substitute that for all students by just cramming in more reading time in their busy school schedules.

Kids have a finite time they spend in school. You can shuffle the time they spend around all you want, but in the end every kid requires a certain amount of time to grasp a certain context. That time may differ when kids get older or younger, but the required time spent on learning won't suddenly change.

Not all students are like you. I went to a low-ranked university my first year before transferring out. I met freshmen who really struggled with basic concepts, like what a vector is. I'm not sure they would ever get it even with all the tutoring in the world.

They would in my opinion. I was a tutor in high school and college for algebra. I worked with people some people who struggled. They all eventually got it if they wanted to get it, which they generally did to not get held back :p. You just have to work with them and truly understand what they are not understanding. The big issue is concepts are not learnable in isolation. You said vectors are basic, but are they? They were initially just abstractions to model sets of physics problems. Without the context, its pretty difficult to understand them IMO, especially things like dot products. "oh, i multiply two vectors and I get a number? what? Oh and that number can be described as the multiplication of magnitudes of the vectors multiplied by the cosine of their angle? Oh how do I get the magnitude? What's cosine again? etc." It goes forever and generally you'll find that people will struggle with basic things because they never had an opportunity to sit down and genuinely internalize those ideas.

Everything builds on other concepts and people's misunderstandings generally came from not truly understanding the basics. Its hard to personalize education at scale though.

I tutored a 20 year old CS major who could not understand the equation to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius. Nice guy, talented guitar player. Was not meant to be a programmer.

From what I can see, most states don't teach algebra until 9th grade. Also most states are learning math better then California, so maybe it works? Of course, that might not be the cause, but just copying better performing states seems to be a safe way to try and fix California's problem.

Not from California, but I took algebra in 7th grade - it was the advanced math course in my public middle school. It was a much-welcomed safe haven from the other classes - the middle schoolers here were actually SMART. In that class I sat next to a guy who taught me how to program the TI-84. We would spend all class programming, making games, and just learning.

Now, over a decade later, I am a professional software engineer. Sitting next to that guy in my 7th grade algebra class set my life on a course that turned out to be great. It makes me sad to know that future students won't be able to have such opportunities to be surrounded by similarly smart people. In the rest of my middle school classes the disrespect, distracting behavior, bullying, etc. were totally out of control - now I guess students won't know anything different.

I think this is a TERRIBLE decision, pushed by radical leftists that are completely out of touch with regular people. I wonder how much farther California and its cities will fall before people wake up.

The fact that you were successful because the guy who sat next to you in class knew how to unlock the programming mode of your calculator is incidental. Why didn't your teacher do it? Congratulations on escaping the system that disadvantaged you. The best thing about programming is that it defines a notation for doing mathematics that doesn't trigger people who went to public schools. Be careful about calling yourself a professional software engineer. In many places you can be sent to jail for claiming any two out of the three words in that title.

These superficial debates are in my eyes futile since they presuppose: "We ought to have a strict curriculum for a certain narrow age group."

After what we have learned the last 30-50 years from cognitive sciences one has to wonder what schools are actually for, nowadays. There are most certainly not optimized for "learning" by any means. Imho to put it blatantly schools are reduced to be a effective stronghold for indoctrination. They justify their power by using "science, technology, art, literature, history, social community, cultural exchange ...". Of course sheer by its power and scope we certainly "learn" something there. And you also happen to find great teachers in that system but its certainly not its main purpose.

Going back historically, schools still remain inherently (and shockingly so) medieval institutions. Interestingly "school" originally stems from the greek word of σχολή (/skʰo.lɛ̌ː/) which simply means "free time, leisure" which got hijacked by the church with "monastic schools" and today "school" means quite the opposite.

Throughout its (western) history with changing society they were succesful adaptions made (Prussian system, Humboldt's Ideal, Montessori pedagogy) skyrocketing literacy, expolding number of scientists etc.

But today the educational system is massively outpaced by the societal changes and by failing simply regresses to its medieval core of indoctrination ("preparation for the labor market").

No scientific literacy (aka critical thinking, controversial debates), no "learning" grounded on cognitive sciences, no hearing and tending to the needs of our young which they can perfectly articulate.

> There are most certainly not optimized for "learning" by any means.

They're daycare so their parents can be productive members of society. Learning is incidental.

Hijacking is an interesting term to use. Leisure got transformed into the university system by the early Church which brought about the various technological revolutions in the West.

Resources were so scarce communities could only afford to send a select few to learn to read and write and spend time on the highest levels of human thought, i.e. questions of the meaning of existence and epistemology.

For the majority of parents, schools are "free daycare".

>After what we have learned the last 30-50 years from cognitive sciences one has to wonder what schools are actually for, nowadays. There are most certainly not optimized for "learning" by any means.

They're daycares and increasingly being used to spread propaganda.

This idea that ANYONE will be helped by giving them a free pass needs to stop. No minority will have an improved life by saying they are too mentally deficient to learn hard things. This is a political game where politicians refuse to recognize that fixing this is not an easy slap a bill in place an everything will be better. I think what they're hoping is that they can "fix" the numbers to show higher achievement by lowering standards and get voted back into office. We'll certainly be feeling the negative effects of these sorts of policies in a few decades if this bullshit continues.

I am not from US so don't interpret my comment trough US blue vs red or similar lenses. My observations is that students learn at different speed, the issue with a teacher that is forced to teach a class of 25 students is very obvious, at each step some student will fall behind, then if he is behind he will have more trouble comprehending the next topic and in the end you get a student that does not know the basic rules of signs when multiplying. I know such a person that failed his national exam, he did not know how to multiply negative integers , but this person had the ambition to get his dream job so he found a tutor and he learned and then he got a good grade. The difference was that you had a tutor with 1 or maybe 2 students at a time and that the student wanted to learn.

When I am doing homework with my son or check is lessons I always wonder what is happening with students that parents don't have the time or the skill to do math,physics,programming together with the child. Some will hire private tutors but to few.

Seems to me that either you get fewer students to a teacher, or have less dense material to work with so the teacher can have the time to check each student and figure-out what exactly is unclear. And you ofcourse you need good teachers,

"the issue with a teacher that is forced to teach a class of 25 students is very obvious"

It's not obvious to the authors of the California Math Framework, who believe that:

- we should sort kids into classes purely by age, and that any other method of sorting is inequitable

- every child should be taught grade-level material (no matter how far behind, or far ahead, they may be)

- teachers are capable of successfully teaching mixed ability classes (irrespective of how the min/max) using 'differentiated instruction'

> classes purely by age, and that any other method of sorting is inequitable

It's just "strange" that this is only done for academics, but never for athletics.

The fact that academic results can be thought of in "equitable" terms, but not athletic results (aka, you must be able to run 100m in X seconds), points to some systemic, cultural bias in thinking that everyone is just as smart, and that genetics don't play a role in intelligence.

>we should sort kids into classes purely by age, and that any other method of sorting is inequitable

Can you maybe explain to a non US person why a system merit based is not used(or if it was used in the past was dropped) , I understand there are limitation with this system, I will describe next:

1 there is national/state level exam with super strong security to prevent cheating

2 highschool/universities will be placed on a list with all the classes they offer

3 candidates will fill an ordered list with their preferences. In practice this means you put on the top the "good" high schools and the classes/profiles that interest you , like if you hate Math you will avoid science/math stuff and go to art/literature/languages profiles. How I personally ordered the schools was by checking the results of their students at the national exams.

The result is that students that are very smart or that are OK smart but worked hard are concentrated on 3 hghschools in my region. This seems OK sincee the kid that is a really jerk, never liked school or failed the exam will be at a different highschool and not drag down the working hard students.

> My observations is that students learn at different speed

The pejorative used for structuring curriculum and resources based on this observation is "tracking" and aside from special needs and other narrow exceptions it is thought to be a great historical injustice that has largely been eliminated from public schooling in the US. Now we look forward to ending the injustice unequal funding due to differential tax bases among communities has created. Doubtless ending this remaining vestige of inequity will herald a new age of public education excellence in the US.

Or something.

So in my country Romania, we have national exams, then the children will fill a list of high-schools+ profile pair(HighScoolA - Informatics, HighSchoolB -Informatics, HighSchyoolA -Science ....) so mostly you get in same class children that had very similar results at the national exam.

But there still is the children learn at different speed or some are left behind, at least in my son case I feel in Math they move too fast, there was the same when I was in high school too.

Well that's stupid. If anything they should introduce it sooner. There's tons of research that show the sooner it's introduced the better they are able to digest that (as in it becomes more second nature and are later able to reason with it and build off that knowledge better).

It's hard to introduce Algebra much earlier than 8th grade - the students just don't have the mathematical maturity for it. What you can do though is challenge and expose them to slightly more complex applications of ordinary math (often stated via increasingly elaborate "word problems") that make the introduction of algebra a lot more natural when the students are finally up for it. You tend to see this approach in the various "Singapore Math", "Russian Math", what have you.

So much dialogue is around how to pace and sequence the traditional math curriculum (geometry, trig, precalc, calc). Are those still the most important things to teach? And do they need to be taught and tested through working through the same calculations framed in the same narrow scenarios? When's the last time you solved a quadratic equation or did integration by parts in the real world? The concepts may be important, but is chugging through trigonometric identities really helping kids?

I use the concept of a derivative often, and I'm glad it enriches my understanding of the world even if I calculate derivatives almost never. But there are so many other useful math concepts which might be better to communicate than just doing exercises around techniques (e.g. can you apply the quotient rule correctly).

Concepts I wish we emphasized instead:

- stats: uncertainty, confidence intervals. (In)dependence of variables. Correlation.

- discrete math: enough to communicate the concept of structure being preserved. Enough combinatorics to understand why some families of structures might be huge. Basic concepts around graphs.

These ideas don't necessarily need to be sequenced. You can deal with plenty of integrals while learning stats, but you don't have to.

What if our concept of woke math involved introducing posets and relations and cases where comparison isn't possible? What if we stopped talking about high school math as a single ladder and consider it more as a landscape to explore? By desequentualizing topics, maybe upper class hs students can actually catch up by taking more than one math class at a time?

Show me an American university that doesn't spend the first two years of a STEM major's life on the three-semester calculus sequence, linear algebra, and ordinary differential equations, and I will then come up with a secondary school math curriculum targeting admission to such a program.

Can you really learn stats without calculus first? How would you explain continuous probability to students? If you're talking about descriptive stats and the parts that do not require calculus, then high school will teach them. As for geometry, isn't it the only course that teaches kids rigorous proof? It helps students build math maturity and is a segway into other type of proofs used in discrete maths.

The central point of contention is not whether the Common Core, which already emphasizes depth over rote learning, ought go even deeper. The contention is also not over whether we ought have more combinatorics or Linear Algebra in the curriculum, and nor whether schools ought be able to pursue CS or Statistics programs — they are already free to do so, although schools across the entire nation have largely failed to persuade universities as to the reliability of their programs, and thus they rarely count for credits earned or requirements met.

Instead, the central question is whether all students ought be in the same class up until the senior year, regardless of their individual ambitions or abilities in math.

For context, Californian math classrooms may have ratios of 1 teacher to 40 students, and classroom sizes are not penalized past middle school. This is the context under which teachers must somehow address cohort variability, the same context under which we might somehow expect an Algebra teacher have units planned for those who are ready for Geometry. This is not a realistic assumption of teacher competency.

Equitable Math would be a huge win for private schools and after-school programs such as RSM.

I was doing algebra and Russian math word problems in 4th grade (maybe earlier, it's been a while). What exactly is the logic of pushing back mathematical training to later grades? [1]

1: https://www.edhelper.com/geography/Russia_Math1.htm

" . . . as a means of promoting equity" and "The intent of the state mathematics framework, its designers say, is to maintain rigor while also helping remedy California’s achievement gaps for Black, Latino and low-income students, which remain some of the largest in the nation.

It's Harrison Bergeron Math.

This isn't that different from 2nd and 3rd grade math in the US. There's no algebra in your link, but either way, you're confusing algebraic concepts, which are typically introduced in grade school even in the US and Algebra 1, which is just a conveniently named part of the overall math curriculum, not one that introduces Algebraic concepts for the first time.

Second grade in Poland I remember problems like this when learning addition and subtraction:

3 + ? = 10

10 - ? = 3

Good for you. I met kids in 4th grade who struggled with their multiplication tables. What do you do for them?

And Mozart was writing concertos at 5. Prodigies existing shouldn't define how we educate people.

We have observed that physical distancing children hurt a lot of children. It was a sacrifical experiment to try to save the elderly and weak.

When the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory and spread across the globe in a matter of months, we knew even then that children are not really at risk of dying from sars-cov-2.

Seems like the correct course of action for the times is to take education out of the hands of government.

I do not believe children should be left behind, but the dumbing down of society isn't going to work. Seems like a segment ripe for complete market disruption.

My 5th grader is learning algebra and we support him at home.

Naturally we will continue to look for resources for him outside of public indoctrination. Perhaps we will see countless real schools being formed across the nation.

I learned almost all I know from the Internet over my 36 years. If more injection mandates occur, especially for children in my region, I will pull my children out of government school.

In 2020 we did distance learning and my children thrived while so many another's back tracked regarding test scores.

Our children thrived because my wife and I work from home. They thrived because life at home, while not structured like school, is an on going homeschool-like experience.

I'm so grateful to have been able to see my children thrive in these times.

We have had a lot of set backs as a society but we will continue to rebuild, repair, and grow!

When the virus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory and spread across the globe in a matter of months,

If this is what gets "taught" around the dinner table at home ... then in such a house, all STEM education will be moot.

Sounds like your child would have been fine in any system.

The irony is that this is probably going to exacerbate social injustice. Cupertino kids are going to be taking extracurricular math through RSM or Kumon in elementary school, and then the Cupertino school district (in the article) says that they have no intention to comply with the recommendations. SF kids aren't going to be exposed to algebra until 9th grade and then get a rude awakening in college when they realize all the cool courses have pre-reqs.

I've heard a good argument that algebra specifically should be moved the other way: teach it in elementary school, when kids are first exposed to arithmetic. There's a really natural progression from addition/subtraction/zero and multiplication/division/one to inverses and identities, and from addition/multiplication to distribution and associativity. My 3-year-old understands that if he has 5 raspberries on his fingers and he takes away one, he has 4, and then if he grabs another one and puts it on his finger, he has 5 again. Not a huge leap from there to the concept of equations, inverse operations, and solving for unknowns.

I've heard a good argument that algebra specifically should be moved the other way: teach it in elementary school, when kids are first exposed to arithmetic.

I think the core problem here is trying to teach all kids math in the same way. Not all kids are equally capable of learning math.

Some smart kids can learn algebra in elementary school. There are plenty of students capable of going through the standard curriculum and finishing calculus by the time they are 13 or 14. For these students, the faster the better. Go into even a "good" second-grade math class and you will find some of these students, acing tests and completely bored with everything taught in class.

On the other hand, some students will never be able to have a good understanding of pre-calculus. It doesn't matter if they take it when they are 17 or in college, they will never really get it. Or at least, there is no known teaching method capable of doing it.

How can you possibly design an education program that takes this into account? You just can't teach all 15-year-olds the same math curriculum without wasting the time of many of the students, either it's too hard or too easy.

It's notable that Cupertino has some remarkable public schools, with high schools that have about half of their math faculty as Calculus teachers, and half of the students incoming from junior high are on track to finish Calculus by their junior year. Some students continue their math education at local colleges.

Part of the success is most certainly the student culture, which pushes far harder than the faculty. It's one thing for a school to offer opportunity for advanced math (and in that sense Khan Academy already offers this); it's quite another for peer pressure to demand it.

Seems like it's already part of the California standard for 1st grade: https://www.ixl.com/standards/california/math/grade-1

E.g. "Find the missing number: _ + 1 = 5". Same thing with subtraction.

Based upon my experience with my 6 year old (in a public California elementary school), they actually seem to teach math in a huge variety of ways in 1st grade. Word problems, number problems, relationships between plus and minus, and boatloads of ways to solve any given problem.

I think they introduced it in Kindergarten too. But it was way beyond her at the time.

> Not a huge leap from there to the concept of equations, inverse operations, and solving for unknowns.

Unfortunately, for a child it typically is a huge leap.

There are certain abstractions that young children simply cannot do. The ability to do certain abstractions is distributed along a bell curve (edit: of age), and maybe your child is on the very far left of that curve, but most kids won’t be able to handle the abstractions you speak of until at least a little later.

To be fair, that “later” is definitely not 8th or 9th grade (much earlier), but it’s also not immediately after learning basic arithmetic.

I hate to be that guy, but... it's not irony.

In this case, it's design. Increasing social injustice is the whole point, because that ensures increased political power for those who campaign on social justice.

This is not going to work well unless they massively improve math instruction in the lower grades. In fact they seem to be taking the opposite approach, where "equity" just means setting every student up for failure equally.

Many American K-12 education administrators dream of making schools into diploma mills: 100% graduation rates, 100% test scores, 100% meaningless and unaccountable. "Racial justice" is just their latest leverage to move closer to this goal.

This is really making the public school system more unequal. Since this is just a "recommendation", the good public schools like Cupertino or Piedmont will ignore it, and keep teaching children algebra. The bad public schools that are having trouble hiring algebra teachers will use this as an excuse to stop teaching algebra.

There's more value in flexibility than catering to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of money to do so, unfortunately it gets leeched out before ever reaching the classroom. People learn at a different pace. Algebra should be available as early as 7th grade, and can be deferred to 9th for those with different aptitudes.

The reason many minorities and POC lag behind has nothing to do with race. Like many issues in the US there are effective ways to address this, none of which survive the compromises and competing desires of bureaucracy.

Like many readers of HN, I've taken a lot of math over the years--at least 25 semester long courses at the university level. So I have well informed opinions about what works and what doesn't work for me; schools, on the other hand, have to educate everyone. This, perhaps, accounts for the wide range of opinions being expressed here.

I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn't working very well. According to the scores on the PSIA math test given internationally to 15 year olds, the US ranks behind 21 other nations [1], well below the international average. Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working? Instead of dreaming up new approaches that have no quality research justification, just teach math in a manner that is already known to be significantly better.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/highschool-08.html

>I think that we can agree that the whatever they are doing in the United States isn't working very well. According to the scores on the PSIA math test given internationally to 15 year olds, the US ranks behind 21 other nations [1], well below the international average.

Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. (<https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...>) Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.

Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.

The real problem will never be solved because it will never be named. I will probably get flagged, dead just for writing this. Whites and Asians in America perform far better on PSIA than the international average; the American Asians better than Asia, the whites better than Europe, mostly.

No, the inconvenient truth of the matter is that american blacks (and Hispanics? Not sure) drag down the scores. This score, and every score that we have yet devised. Every measure of intelligence that we can think of, every control for income and parents, every statistical trick to attempt some socially acceptable explanation, it all comes up the same way: they're just not as smart. The natural attempt to handwave this as some kind of systemic racism is thwarted by the existence of those poor Asians who perform better than whites; this is another inconvenience and is why Asians are being quietly dropped from "PoC" initiatives and measurements. Californian education reform is all a song and dance to desperately ignore this fact. When you have a group of people who are less smart, and the goal is that they achieve the same level as everyone else, what can you do? Well, you can give them more class time and free tutoring, but no one will support an initiative where some students take extra classes. There simply is no solution apart from lowering the ceiling. And since the governing bodies refuse to stop measuring everything by race, they also refuse to simply segregate based on ability, since this would show too many blacks in the lower performing classes.

This problem will literally never be solved under the current mode of thinking. It can't be, because those in charge are adamant about rejecting reality. No solution can be had if the problem cannot be identified. They will continue lowering the ceiling, and they may eventually lower it enough to get an equitable result. But those pesky private schools and tutors will still be around ruining their plans, and if there ever still exists a high educational standard out there somewhere, it's the tutored and the private schooled who will pass that bar. And at that point then it actually will be because of privilege.

> Why not pick, say, the top four countries, (recently South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and adopt their methods that are working?

The critically important part of their method is funding of schools being independent from wealth of the kids’ parents.

I’m not sure US can adopt that; American voters view that method as communism.

The article does a great job of covering what people think about these changes, but a terrible job of covering what on earth the changes actually are. I felt like I was trying to solve a mystery where every paragraph buried in the opinions were small clues about what they're actually talking about.

The program is called Equitable Math and it frames current mathematics pedagogy as a mechanism by which White Supremacy is sustained.¹ Note that in a very long multi-part document on White Supremacy, there is absolutely zero mention of Asians, despite that they are somewhere between 15.5% to 17% of the state population.²

Program goals includes the de-emphasis of Algebra for middle school and Calculus for high school. Under Equitable Math, all students must take the same level of courses up until the senior year.

[1]: https://equitablemath.org

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Americans_in_California

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.

[0]: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

I read the first stride of [1]. This is going to be divisive.

The recommendations are quite sane--seek student understanding over the correct answer, use examples students can relate to, etc. It's basically a few dozen pages of very sensible (perhaps even cliche) guidelines.

But throughout it's couched language claiming the opposite is white supremacy. Eg. grades stress getting the correct answer over comprehension, and are part of a White supremacist model.

I can allready see how the debate is going to end up, with each side talking past each other. The reformers will claim that the only reason you're opposed to it is because you support White supremacy. The traditionalists will say it's using race as a cudgel to silence opposition.

Is moving away from Calculus in high school such a bad idea?

I took AP Calculus in high school and studied physics in undergrad so I've done a lot of calculus, but it honestly seems like a pretty niche subject when I think about it. It's hard to think of any times that it's applicable in my life any more. Some of the concepts are very beautiful, but a lot of things like the rote solving of integrals to get to a closed form solution can get pretty tedious and can be done by computers these days anyway.

At the same time, I didn't take any statistics or computer science in high school and really only had my first introduction to programming in college. Both of these seem like topics that should be prioritized above calculus for most high school students.

It's all rather ironic because the only places in the world that seem to have this antipathy to mathematics are predominately "white" and anglophone. The rest of the world just gets on with it. There's nothing "whiter" than running scared away from mathematics.

I immigrated from India after high school and we had already studied advanced calculus and other subjects by high school. Basic Calculus was introduced in grade 9 onwards if I remember right. When I immigrated for university to Canada, I was teaching algebra, trig, calculus etc to university students 1 year above me.

All these delaying important subjects is going to let immigrants from other countries like India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc excel while Canadians and Americans to fall behind. This is a stupid idea.

Dude, you have no damned idea what you're talking about.

You are extrapolating from N=1 to a state of 36,000,000 people. Your experience is not the guiding star for state-wide policy.

Also consider this... the people who work on this stuff, have spend years and years on this stuff. Perhaps... they... know what they are talking about?

As someone with a kid, introducing subjects before kids are ready for it is counterproductive. It can cause confidence issues later, and doesn't help them learn earlier. By way of a small example, try to teach a 3 month old how to walk. Good luck, you aren't doing anything useful.

Now back to the immigrant thing, by now you surely must have realize you are in the upper X percentile of your peers from India. There are many many many, in fact most, Indians, who cannot do what you can do. Not even close. Basing educational policy on what you found easy with your Xth percentile intelligence is not going to be a great idea.

I am sorry but I don't think you have any idea of what you are talking about. No, I am not N=1, nor was I upper X percentile of my peers in India.

CBSE and ICSE boards, 2 of the major boards of education in India had calculus in grade 11 and 12. This wasn't me being exceptional, it was standard practice and millions of us learnt it. The millions of kids in India in CBSE and ICSE board education is much higher than CA's population.

You can check out the syllabus for grade 11 for ICSE board:

https://www.cisce.org/pdf/ISC-Class-XII-Syllabus-2016/17.%20...

Very basic differential calculus was introduced in grade 9/10 and then by grade 11, we were performing decently advanced differential calculus. In grade 11, integration calculus was also introduced and it went on to pretty advanced level by grade 12.

Calculus was also used in our Physics classes, so it was pretty much needed.

> try to teach a 3 month old how to walk

That's a ridiculous comparison.

In Soviet Union algebra and geometry were taught from 5th to 11th grade to every kid in the country. And 10th & 11th grade algebra text-book was edited by Kolmogorov himself [0]. No surprise that _Russian School of Mathematics_ [1] after-school program is becoming very popular in the USA.

[0] Search for "algebra" in https://www.kolmogorov.com/Books.html

[1] https://www.russianschool.com/

One more nail in the public education system. This will amplify the inequality through middle class folks hiring tutors and such or just opting for private schools where the curriculum is “modified”.

Here's a revolutionary idea that pretty much all of the world adopts, if students are having trouble with a topic, get them to do more of it, instead of running away from it.

I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it till the next time you have to do it, how about you do a little bit of everything every year from grade 8-12. Problem solved.

For e.g. in India you learn geometry, algebra, etc. every year from grade 6 to grade 12. i.e. You have a single subject called "Math" that teaches grade appropriate concepts in all the topics in math. Trains the mind gradually over 7 years instead of one big dump. In undergrad in USA, I cruised through most of my freshmen math classes because I had learnt most of it in high school.

This policy has nothing to do with the topic of algebra. This is code for advanced math, because algebra is typically considered advanced for < 9th grade children. Since the organizations feel ashamed that they're failing certain demographics as evidenced by being under-represented in the advanced classes, they're just scrapping the advanced classes for everyone. Truly disgraceful

Not being sarcastic, I think you misunderstood the political environment of the US right now. The media and the bureaucrats are not seeking truths but narratives. And doing more is immediately labeled racism because well, you don't appreciate the hardship and systemic racism that the oppressed have to endure.

As for why shooting basketball 10,000 times day is considered heroic hardworking while doing 10 math exercises a day is considered being privileged and cramming and prepping and Asian? Well, that beats me too.

You can't get people to 'do more of something' if they don't show up for class, and fundamentally don't care because none of their peers do.

'Regular Teaching' works 100% well everywhere around the world where students show up ready to learn.

This is 100% a community/parent/student issue.

More conscientiousness, community participation, stable / 2 parent / married homes, 'Some Kind of Health Insurance', steady jobs, low crime, no druggie/prison parents, not living in fear, no gangs, no gang culture, other students who have normal levels of academic (and other) interests.

And they'll do fine.

Big reforms in Healthcare, Justice and for Economic Stability / Jobs would go a long way, but it will also take community participation.

It's not the curriculum or teachers. They work fine everywhere else, they work fine in Cali.

Kids that have something resembling what we might think of as a 'normal childhood' will do 'mostly fine'.

I'm British. For the lulz I decided to complete the US "GED": "The General Educational Development (GED) tests are a group of four subject tests which, when passed, provide certification that the test taker has United States or Canadian high school-level academic skills." (Wikipedia)

I had not looked at what it encompassed before I signed up. I was given a huge book to study from. I glanced at it briefly each day for two weeks and then sat for the exams.

I got 99% in all subjects. Apparently that was the maximum possible as the score went from 0-99% for reasons I didn't bother to explore.

It was disturbingly easy. And bear in mind that I was thrown out of my British secondary school at 16 because my exam scores were the worst on record at my school, allegedly.

How many people that are good at math and love science / engineering decide to go into politics? I'm just talking without evidence but my guess is politics self selects for ambitious people that are completely inept when it comes to mathematics and critical thinking in general.

Tell us a little bit about your Indian high school experience. Who were your peers? Who were their parents, where were they from, how wealthy were they? How wealthy was you? Did the school have competitive entry? Did kids get kicked out for failing or doing poorly?

Same thing in France. There's just one subject - Mathematics.

Things are just spread out from 6th grade to 12th grade and specialization only happens during the last 2 years of high school.

I mean, most of that sequence builds upon itself, except geometry.

This isn't that different in the US. Algebra 1 to Algebra 2 to Precalculus to Calculus is a sequence that's taught over many years and there's no big dump. Geometry is the only exception from that sequence (unless you're counting Statistics or Computer Science, which are generally optional). Most students that are applying to competitive colleges are generally going to take a math course every year - there's no big dump that you seem to be envisioning.

"I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it till the next time you have to do it, how about you do a little bit of everything every year from grade 8-12. Problem solved."

In my experience, each year built off of the previous and implicitly provided a refresher.

There are lots of stories like this. Lot of selection bias. That is, wealthier and/or smarter people who come to the US.

I’ve taken though linear, diffeq, and discrete. Rarely use them. It’s a massive waste for most people.

They should be concentrating on what I would call “home economics”. That is, economics of the home. Edu on budget balancing, taxes, cost of things so you don’t eat out so much, cost of repair so you learn to fix things, etc.

I’ve never heard of anywhere in the US doing just one year of math. My family currently in high school are required to do math all 4 years.

> I always find it hilarious that the pre college education in US is so messed up. Instead of doing Algebra 1, Algebra 2, calculus, geometry as one subject that you do in a year and then completely forgetting about it for the rest of the high school, how about you do a little bit of everything every year from grade 8-12. Problem solved.

I don't understand. US high school kids only do math one year out of the 4? And nothing else math related during the other 3 years?

I mean, instead of doing a little bit of math spread across all the years so you know, they don't forget everything?

Does this go for other subjects as well?

NY State does this, or at least did back when I was in high school. It was called “integrated math.”

what about this info ?

Literacy Rate of India 2021 - To know development in a society, Literacy is another proper indicator of economic development. For purpose of census, a person in age limit of seven and above, who can both write and read with understanding in any of the language is considered as a literate in India. ... Although India has raised its current literacy rate of 74.04% (2021) from 12% at the time of Independence in 1947, its still lag behind the world average literacy rate of 84%. Compared with other nations, Republic of India has the largest illiterate population.

"Yet for all the sound and fury, the proposed framework, about 800-pages long, is little more than a set of suggestions. Its designers are revising it now and will subject it to 60 more days of public review. Once it’s approved in July, districts may adopt as much or as little of the framework as they choose — and can disregard it completely without any penalty."

Sounds like a huge waste of taxpayers money, the silver lining is that sensible schools can disregard this bad idea altogether.

Everything about this movement is rotten.

SFUSD claims their reforms pushing algebra to 9th grade decreased the algebra re-take rate from 40% to 7%. However, the drop in re-take rate was actually caused primarily by the removal of the requirement to pass a curriculum exam. Quite simply, if “knowing algebra” is removed as a requirement to pass algebra, more people will pass algebra.

More at https://www.familiesforsanfrancisco.com/updates/inequity-in-...

They should certainly correct, but it’s weird to stop entirely. It seems like a failure on the part of administration to create a more equitable program.

I grew up in a diverse city where all the advanced schools and classes were filled with white kids, and it was incredibly obvious that it was due to socioeconomic factors.

Kids in my classes were going to expensive tutors and had parents in high paying jobs that could be around to help them.

My neighbor on the other hand was an immigrant taking care of younger siblings after school and eventually working to help his mom when he was old enough. No time or money for tutoring, or even homework for that matter. I was in the same boat for a long time but was fortunate enough to not need to study as much as my peers, some who had enormous amounts of help. As an adult I still can’t afford the amount of tutoring they were getting, some even paid someone to write college admission essays.

It’s 20 years later and it’s all the same, if not worse, and I still get mad about it.

I'm going to be controversial and say this has a marginal impact on educational outcomes. Probably skewed towards better as I'm assuming they've done their homework.

Look, kids who love math and nerd out in their spare time will still be tearing into calc in uni.

Those who don't will still pick up enough to hit the trades or JOB.

The kids who don't need advanced maths might actually get more out of what they do learn as it's delivered at a higher age.

Ok who knows maybe it has marginally lower outcomes over all. No one knows and the people in this thread decrying the end of exceptionalism are deluding themselves into thinking life outcomes are extremely sensitive to high school educational content. I don't think that's verifiable.

Getting people to school and keeping them from dropping out is likely a better first order optimization to overall outcomes. Kids are still going to get their calcs in uni and the universities will still be pumping out overly-educated overly-indebted young adults...

I think we should really hold off on addition and reading until the post graduate level.

Once we take this to it's logical conclusion and reset the achievment bar to absolute zero, it will be impossible for there to be any inequality.

All classess straight through undergrad could be limited to a combination of nap time and snack time.

The funny thing is that the actual logical conclusion is that parents with money will pay to have their kids sent to private schools that do teach the "advanced" stuff, and poor folks won't be able to afford it, so you end up with the same (or worse) inequality.

Grades are assigned through a weighed lottery system.

Please stop giving these people ideas...

With such an overwhelmingly negative response in the comments on these things, you have to wonder who actually supports this stuff and how is it possible that such a small group yields so much power

Social media bias. If you are happy with your work, you spend your time working. If you love your family, you spend time with them. If you have a rewarding hobby, you enjoy pursuing it. If you are a bitter miserable loser with nothing else to do, you spend your day shitposting on Twitter.

Hacker news is not representative of the State of California.

Beginning algebra is more of a language learning exercise. There's not much content; it's more about notation and manipulation, which will be used later. Looked at that way, it's helpful to get that done reasonably early.

Calculus? I wonder how that's taught today. I had way too much stuff about summing infinite series, which you don't really do very often. I think calculus should be taught in conjunction with Newtonian physics, so you see how it predicts what happens in simple physical situations. This provides motivation.

If you are high income, then this won’t affect you at all. Your kids will be doing calculus and algebra early because they enjoy it and are probably good at it. It’ll just be outside of school.

Only if the parents are also highly conscientious and heavily invested in their children, which is not given. I've encountered a number of people in my career who are being under-utilized, because no one pushed them in their education. Not everyone has internal motivation or parental structure, unfortunately.

Like many other things California (and SF in particular) is doing, this is cruelty disguised as compassion.

Let's take away the opportunities to get ahead early, because it may disrupt some egalitarian principles that are totally absent in the real world. As someone who majored in mathematics and was involved in educating K-12 students for many years, I find this to be completely ignorant of the reality behind school districts like those in the Bay Area, where affluent kids take Russian math after school to compensate for the inadequacies in their school's mathematics curriculum.

This is basically what we're dealing with here in California: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

"The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math."

On page 8, the authors claim that one way white supremacy manifests itself is when "students are required to show their work in standardized, prescribed ways". This is literally the definition of mathematical notation, and the use of standardized notation is fundamental to being able to communicate with other mathematicians.

I took my first algebra class in 7th grade (early 90s, Maryland). I remember struggling initially (in part because we had moved from another state the summer before, and my prior math class didn't quite prepare me for it), but an hour or two of my dad explaining it to me at home made things "click" and I was fine after that. The class was a good size (probably around 30 kids), so it's not like this was a tiny accelerated-learning class (it wasn't the "standard" class, though; it was definitely the "honors" level or something like that).

By the end of high school, I'd taken the equivalent of two semesters of university-level calculus, which allowed me to skip those classes when I went to college, and take more challenging courses. It's hard to imagine students who first take algebra in 9th grade progressing to anything beyond the most basic of calculus (at best) before graduating from high school.

Judging by other responses here, I'm not even a particularly special or advanced case, with some kids being introduced to basic algebra many years before I was. Which makes sense. If you can teach a kid "1 + 1 = ?", then at some point shortly after, you can start to teach "1 + ? = 2". Bam: basic algebra.

It just sounds like instead of getting students to stretch, we're pushing the gifted kids down to the lowest common denominator. It makes me assume that school administrators just want to avoid conflict with parents and hurt feelings among kids when they bucket students between remedial/standard/honors classes. We're sacrificing education for temporary good feelings.

This state has lost its mind. When I have kids, they are going to private schools or if I can't afford that home school. Seems like the aim of California schools is to create politically radical students, who can't do math. Perfect for our times!

Let's say you are an extremist of any sort of ideology. Generally people that are obsessed with such ideologies are also obsessed with the idea of spreading it via indoctrination. So whereas a normal well adjusted human would design an education curriculum for improving the lives of the students an ideologically obsessed person will design it to promote their ideology at all other cost.

we have two kids: 4 and 7 and live in the Bay Area. And at this point every other parents we know of with kids of similar age are either private school, homeschool or are moving/have moved to Texas/Florida.

I remember in 2nd or 3rd grade sitting with my classmates on the floor and the teacher wrote something like 4 + ? = 7 on the board.

Without even mentioning the word variable, algebra, or any other terms, they began teaching us about these concepts.

They started with a problem where the answer is so easy everyone can get it. No formalization to start with, just, here's a simple example that you can immediately relate to. Only after doing this do you need to learn and understand the formalization and theory of the concepts.

I find the same is true in programming. Often to learn something new, it's better to copy and run a code snippet that does the new thing. Only after running it, seeing the result, seeing it work is the formalization and theory needed. Then you just rinse and repeat to get better and better at it.

As an aside: I think had the teacher asked us for a name as well instead of using the ?, we could have even started learning about using variables earlier. By our own laziness as kids, someone would likely have gotten tired of writing out "my number that I'm trying to find" + 3 = 7 and thought about shortening it by some degree. It would have felt empowering to have that insight come from a class mate, and if not, the teacher could always introduce it on their own.

ETA

I also had a college professor who started each new unit by explicitly motivating why we were going to learn, what we were going to learn, and how it related to what we just learned.

That context was a huge help in learning the material.

It's the principle of experiential learning. Pushing back such a basic concept of math would only disadvantage society.

I have some concerns.

What are the psychological effects of daily reminders of inequality, equity, and systems of white supremacy. Could this grow resentment, hostility, and/or entitlement?

How is delaying mathematics equitable? How does this represent equity in a global economy?

How does equity and social justice in education respond to individual talent, aptitude, mental health, physical health, and/or socioeconomic status?

My cousin who lives in California told me the other day that her son was a couple of years behind in math compared to where she was in high school back in Bangladesh in the 1990s. This is a nice suburb of Sacramento.

The way math is taught in primary school is a disaster. Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician’s Lament" puts it better than I could, and is worth reading in full (it's hard to find just one quote to provide here): https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.....

Maybe one section that's relevant here is the one on "pseudo-mathematics":

> The cultural problem is a self-perpetuating monster: students learn about math from their teachers, and teachers learn about it from their teachers, so this lack of understanding and appreciation for mathematics in our culture replicates itself indefinitely. Worse, the perpetuation of this “pseudo-mathematics,” this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values. Those who have become adept at it derive a great deal of self-esteem from their success. The last thing they want to hear is that math is really about raw creativity and aesthetic sensitivity. Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions.

Many people on this website did well at the pseudo-mathematics taught in schools and think of themselves as being improved by learning it. If this (pseudo-)math is what distinguishes the "smart kids" from the rest, our "smart kids" will be harmed by delaying it. But what if the pseudo-math and the concept of "smart kid" it creates is actually harmful, both to the practice of real math and to the kids' own sense of self-worth?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

An old short story about enforced equality. Intelligent people had noise makers on ears to keep them from concentrating. Beautiful people were made to look like clowns.

No one could stand out, no one could excel.

These efforts feel misguided. Black and Latino people aren't bad at math because of the language used in math education (most of the language seems neutral from what I remembered), it's because they are largely poor, due to structural racism or they are first generation immigrants who didn't come to work in tech or something. They're just poor and unfortunately it's hard to really do anything when you're poor in America.

My parents immigrated from Romania and were part of the Florida Romanian community. Many were poor, didn't really have a great support system, and didnt really get America. Many of the kids in that community just dropped out or didn't do well in school and that's largely because of a poor home life and just not having access to anything. All the countries that have great education systems also have great support systems for families.

Algebra isn't hard (though it is time consuming imo), you can pass all the tests with memorization since it's applying a few patterns over and over again. Delaying it isn't going to make people better at it.

> These efforts feel misguided. Black and Latino people aren't bad at math because of the language used in math education

Language issues are actually a likely challenge for some Latino students.

The PC model that unequal outcomes would disappear if you simply addressed poverty, fought putative structural discrimination via affirmative action, etc. has been repeatedly applied and disproven at massive scale dozens of times since the 60s. It's a nice story but it doesn't seem to reflect reality at all. I don't think the model of "it's because the way math is phrased is racist" is a better model - in fact, it's strictly worse - but it's the obvious next step in tacking more epicycles onto the progression of theories that have been palatable to post-WW2 progressives (who mostly dominate things like school policy).

When I pulled my kids out of traditional school we started introducing concepts of Algebra and Geometry to them immediately (2st and 4th grades). It takes extra work, but they understand everything just fine. The problem isn't that the kids can't understand it. The problem is our education system is broken and no longer has the ability to teach children anything other than what might be on a standardized test. This is literally every subject, not just math. Writing, history, spelling, science, even physical education has suffered the same decline. The whole of the education system is a shell of its former self, and is more concerned with providing child care rather than instruction.

> ...is more concerned with providing child care rather than instruction.

Which could actually be a reasonable design for school.

If public schools can't teach advanced topics, they could still handle the basics, provide childcare, and help to socialize kids.

And then tutors (backed by a voucher system), parents, and the internet can do the teaching of advanced topics.

> it pushes Algebra 1 back to 9th grade, de-emphasizes calculus

> San Francisco Unified School District touted the effort as a success, asserting that algebra failure rates fell and the number of students taking advanced math rose as a result of the change

> "There’s a huge problem with math instruction right now. The way things are set up, it’s not giving everybody a chance to learn math at the highest levels"

This really feels like they lowered the bar and are now excited that more people are able to jump over it.

Also, that last quote is infuriating. Nobody will have a chance to learn math at the highest level now, at least not in high school.

Rather than lift those who struggle, let's drag down those doing well, or so it seems.

As someone who's never been in an American school, what does algebra entail in the US curriculum usually? Is this the first time "solve for x" is introduced? How broad is the amount of teaching that happens in algebra?

It seems to me, there are 2 different things going on.

The “equitable math” is clearly a crime against children.

But another thing is, basic maths is a life skill. Schools aim for an ambitious curriculum, but many people leave school and can’t add, or don’t understand fractions (i don’t know about the US but certainly true in the UK and Poland). These are all people who passed through many years of maths teaching, algebra and all, and can’t add 1/2 to 1/3.

At some level, we have to do something about this. People make life decisions based on their [lack of] understanding of maths, and it’s rarely algebra and calculus we’re talking about.

I guess one benefit of this approach is it costs nearly nothing. The better approach would be providing qualified tutors for free to struggling students, or to make current math classes smaller, or to add TAs to existing classes. But all of that costs money. You could also argue that a more holistic approach could help. Things like better meals at schools, better transportation options to and from schools or a wider range of class times. Again, all expensive options compared to simply limiting options and forcing students into fewer buckets.

The costs come later in a form of a generally less competent society.

In an advanced program, I was introduced to algebra in the 3rd grade with something like this: https://www.borenson.com/

We were solving more complex polynomials in 5th grade. By 8th grade, we were already through trigonometry and some were taking entry level calculus.

To me, the concept that you won't be introduced to algebra as a class until 9th grade is frightening.

Even in regular classes by the 5th grade they were introducing the concepts of algebra to the rest of the class.

I can't help but think that the majority of students algebra problems in high school come from the fact algebra is taught extremely poorly at the college level. Which is where their teachers learned how to teach.

In an Ivy League PhD physics class more than half of the students thought that equality was something between a mechanical operation, e.g. 1 + 3 = 4 means you add 1 + 3 and the result is 4, or assignment, e.g. x = 3 means that for everything that follows you can replace x by 3.

The idea that it's a binary predicate was something that only people who had done logic or something adjacent at undergrad even understood. Viz. the type of = is (* x *) -> Bool, or in words an equality just returns true if there exists a way to transform one input of the equality to the other and false otherwise.

The confusing part is that for an equation like x + 2 = 3 you're given the predicate for the of set/tuple defined by abstraction using that predicate, e.g. the set {x | x + 2 = 3 and x in R} or the tuple (x | x^2 = 0) if we care about repeated answers. Something that is not at all obvious from just being given x + 2 = 3, which without a lot of implicit context is a well formed sentence of algebra with no intrinsic meaning.

If all algebra problems were reduced to something like "List all members of the set {x | x^2 - 3 = 9 and x is real}" then we have solved a huge part of the problem.

"A key sticking point in the approval process has been the framework’s recommendation that teachers refrain from labeling students as “naturally talented” in math. This has led to accusations from parents and educators that it holds back “gifted” students."

Along with NYC mayor deBlasio seeking to terminate that city's gifted and talented education programs as well as Virginia's recent approach to "equity" by decontenting gifted education. The examples demonstrate the illiberal trends we are seeing in the U.S. wherein novel concepts like "equity" replace "equality" and merit is seen as racist.

See https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/nyc-schools-will-re...

These days when I need to vote for a representative or a school board administrator, I read their website and if I see words "equity" or "social justice" there, I cross that candidate out of my list.

The podcast "Nice White Parents" makes a good case that gifted programs in NYC were essentially used to create two separate-and-unequal systems of education for black and white students inside the public schools.

If you don't want to call that a "racist" system we can call it an unequal system or a caste system; but the trend you're seeing is an effort to fix that system.

The people who were (unknowingly?) on the PLUS side of the equation, they're going to complain loudly as it gets leveled out.

The reasoning given in the framework seems sensible enough:

> Even for the highest-achieving students, pressures to use mathematics courses as social capital for advancement can often undercut efforts to promote learning with understanding. This often results in what some deem a “rush to calculus,” which has not helped students. Bressoud (2017) studied the mathematics pathways of students moving from calculus to college. He found that out of the 800,000 students who take calculus in high school, roughly 250,000 or 31.25 percent of students move ‘backwards’ and take precalculus, college algebra, or remedial mathematics. Roughly 150,000 students take other courses such as Business Calculus, Statistics, or no mathematics course at all. Another 250,000, retake Calculus 1 and of these students about 60 percent of them earn an A or B and 40 percent earn a C or lower. Only 150,000 or 19 percent of students go on to Calculus II. This signals that the approach that is so prevalent in schools––of rushing students to calculus, without depth of understanding––is not helping their long term mathematics preparation.

This basically lines up with my experience. I was in accelerated math and took AP Calc AB in High School. I got an A, but only by memorizing the symbol manipulation rules: I could't have explained why they worked. I don't think I could have even explained what calculus was for—and I was too busy trying to maximize my grades in 5 other AP classes to bother finding out. I got into my first choice of college and was sufficiently dissatisfied with math that I didn't take any classes in it until I was required to do so after I declared a major in Computer Science. I took Calc II and Linear algebra and got Cs in both.

> applies social justice principles to math lessons.

... huh? Does anyone know what this looks like?

They teach that math is subjective. Objectivity is the corner stone of white supremacy.

> "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."

https://equitablemath.org/

https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-accord...

I'm curious to see how this will turn out as other countries are not buying into this nonsense. In an increasingly competitive world this is a recipe for disaster.

There are more white children living in poverty than black children: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/44-children-in-... If we want to help the most children we can, we should remove race from the equation.

> Most American high schools teach algebra I in ninth grade, geometry in 10th grade and algebra II in 11th grade – something Boaler calls “the geometry sandwich.

It’s an exceedingly dumb setup. In my highschool it was optional in grade 9 and like another commenter said only 2 years of ANY math was required. Despite passing a placement test in 6th grade they made we wait till 8th grade to join the 9th grade “advanced” math class which taught algebra. My school did not even offer calculus for any grade which made it more or less impossible to even apply for any of the top us universities

Quote source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/mat...

So much of the discussion is around how to pace/sequence the same traditional list of topics (geometry, trig, precalc, calc) but maybe we should be considering that these might not be the most important concepts anymore?

More people should know stats, and this doesn't need to be strictly sequenced with those other concepts. Yes, integrals show up with continuous distributions, but we don't need to really care that much. But if we had a population that understood confidence intervals, (in)dependence, correlation etc at a conceptual level, would we fall for fewer dubious claims?

Discrete math, like enough combinatorics to understand why some families of things that sound simple are huge? Or enough to communicate the idea of a homomorphism?

What if our concept of "woke" math introduced posets, and the idea that things can be literally incomparable?

Statistics is based on probability and probability is based on set theory and a concept of measure. Discrete probability may do away without calculus. But it needs some basic understanding of algebra. Concept of probability, imo, is very hard to understand. And then you have conditional probability, which fooled even high ranking mathematicians. Allegedly Paul Erdos didn’t get it until a computer simulation was presented to him [0]. I think venturing into statistics may be left for later. I would agree though that combinatorics can be taught earlier and give a good understanding or discrete probability. I don’t see thought how it can be successfully without algebra and calculus.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2014/11/monty-hall-erdos-limited-minds...

Not sure why you're being downvotes. Stats and discrete math are sorely underrepresented in high school math education. The harm of this continuing will be extremely high going forward.

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Most of the comments in here are way way off base.

First off, I believe in and trust the policy experts. If they are saying that algebra for everyone as a compulsory subject in grade 9 isn't helpful, it's quite possible they know what they are talking about.

A lot of the comments in here are varities of "if you don't try harder then you wont win" basically. The problem... is that really how teaching kids work? How do you know that is how it works? Your N=1 personal experience is not really the right evidence for running a state-wide policy. Additionally, some of you are probably 99th percentile intelligence, and really what worked for you won't work for, say, the other 99% of people.

Secondly, education is a complex issue. Schools are being expected to pick up the slack from every single societal problem, all the while Oh So Smart People endlessly shit on them. I'm not even joking about every single societal problem... here are some things schools are expected to pick up for: - Food poverty: Feeding kids at school because they didn't eat at home - Food quality: Feeding kids RIGHT with GOOD food - Parental availability: Hard to read to your kids when you are working tons of hours or extra jobs. Schools are expected to paper over this deficit. - Redlining/poverty: Schools are expected to raise kids up out of poverty, with practically no other help, and a lot of un-help (police at schools arent helping) - Gun violence: Kids are expected to do active shooter drills, nuff said. That's messed up.

One thing to remember about people who are from other places like India and such, if you are here and commenting here, perhaps your school isn't a representative sample of everyone where you were from. Here in the US, it's common for private school to kick out kids who don't academically perform, which means you have a self selection effect. So pointing out that "private schools do X why can't everyone do X" is useless, because the schools have, by definition, selected those students that can do X and everyone else was dropped on the floor.

Public school is just state sponsored daycare so parents can work full-time and be productive first. Then a means of socializing children so they can be minimally functional in society and also work and be productive. Lastly to produce individuals that can think for themselves.

What age is ninth grade? We were doing Algebra by eleven.

The difference between education across the world and USA is that you treat algebra as one subject and therefore don't do it every year. In India, you had to do algebra starting grade 6 all the way to grade 12. The more complex the theory, the later you learn it. Makes sense to have that kind of gradual learning imho.

In a US public school, I was doing very basic algebra— math with variables— in 6th grade, which is around age 11. The class called 'Algebra' in the US school system, which this article references, is a subset of what Algebra actually is on a whole. Very basic algebra before high school (which starts at grade 9, or age 14/15) is often called pre-algebra.

In Canada, ninth grade was around 14-15 years old, depending on the month you were born. I think the US has a similar timescale for primary/secondary schooling.

So was I. I was introduced to it in 7th grade (India) and I was 12~13.

Edit: fixed age range

I think around 13 years old.

The article talks about changing "Algebra 1" to the 9th grade, so, as an outsider I have to ask: Is "Algebra 1" the codename for an intermediate or advanced algebra class (and before that basic algebra is just taught in a general "Math" class)? Or is "Algebra 1" literally the first time the students are presented with the concepts of algebra?

I was curious and followed some of the links in the article, some of the PDFs seem to imply that the first concepts of algebra are in fact introduced in grade 6 (which wouldn't be too bad). But I couldn't find a definitive answer (I got bored by too many policy documents and couldn't find an actual curriculum document).

On that schedule, traditionally it would be arithmetic to grade 6, Pre-Algebra in grades 7 and 8, then Algebra I in 9th.

People who absolutely hate math are driving these bad ideas, thinly veiled as justice or some other high-minded nonsense.

Many of them carefully plotted their way through college, doing as much as they can to avoid math.

Of course the kids are bored when it's taught with this attitude.

FYI, this was already done in San Francisco. There is a twitter thread where someone FOIAed SF unified school district stats to confirm their claims that this change would be beneficial if extended to the state as a whole. Here is what they found:

1. Enrollment in AP Calculus decreased and enrollment in AP stats increased:

    AP Calc BC -27%
    AP Calc AB -12%
    AP Stats +30%

The number of african americans taking AP calculus declined by 54%.

2. The percentage of students who met CAASPP standards dropped from 53% to 49%

https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1400948830397341698

The problem is that the US, and California in particular, has no shortage of brilliant engineers from all over the world willing to come and work there and to do research.

As such, there is no incentive to make the best of home-grown talent. There is no skin in the game.

So monumentally stupid. I am a California kid and taking algebra in 7th grade was honestly a pivotal experience in my academic life. I got ny butt kicked for the first few exams and after getting a C- I was devastated. I cried a bit to my parents and teacher and resolved myself to grind super hard on the next test. I pretty much learned all the study habits I have now from that one exam and it was frankly a great learning experience. I definitely was capable of doing algebra at 7th grade and I think we should be accelerating student's learning in public school frankly I felt I wasted a few good years of my potential stuck in school.

It just boggles that these people, when confronted with poor math scores think, "we need more instruction about pronouns, etc…" Talk about non-sequiturs.

This is the left-wing version of discouraging the teaching of evolution. Unfortunately in California these irrational folks have a big influence.

From my own experience, I would have been more enthusiastic with less homework, less rote problem solving (of dozens per night) and more visualization. Unfortunately animation/video wasn't really a thing until recently, but might help in the future.

From what I gather.. their performance analysis showed that 10th graders taught algebra performed better than 9th graders taught algebra...

This is obviously not a reasonable metric due to many factors such as age, brain development, maturity and additional adjacent curriculum.

I don't get it though.. algebra is just variables right? Aren't we teaching programming to elementary schoolers? I know I'd written my first MMO bot by 9th grade...

Perhaps programming is a more 'tangible' way for children to experience algebra, rather than paper abstractions?

This isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of algebra in 8th grade. It's parents who are too unconcerned about their kid's education and obsessed with sports, after school activities, working 60 hours a week to buy "stuff". It's also schools that won't look at far more successful schools in Europe and Asia and how they reach higher standards. The "invented here" education ideas are stupid. If you want to succeed the look at successful programs.

i think a better approach would be more things like after school robotics programs and outreach to try and recruit historically underrepresented groups into them.

not only do they provide additional space for engagement in a healthy environment, they also provide something that was always important for me when i was younger, longer goals or projects that learning lands in the critical path for.

problem sets are pretty boring, especially grade school calculations, i always needed a carrot to do boring things.

This is bullshit. Not everyone has to be better in math, just like not everyone is better in music or language or biology. In fact for English learners they should spend first few years in just getting them to level in English. Fix the fundamentals and rest will follow. This is the opposite.

Delaying is not going to do thing for kids who are not into math, but will screw others who are into it.

Just imagine if Ramanujam has to wait till 9th grade to learn math.

I have got another bright idea: let's rename elementary mathematics to algebra. Anyone who can do addition, passes the course. This is going to be great for the metrics California measures. I am sure that nothing can go wrong here.

Seriously speaking, this is going to increase the social divide between the families who rely on the public schools, and the families who are educated enough to teach their own children or can hire the tutors.

Xi Jinping laughing his butt off.

They should stop lowering expectations for students. There isn't any reason that they can't start teaching it in 6th grade.

The program was also to allow Statistics and Data Science as alternatives, which tbh is probably more relevant for a lot of people.

9th grade? This seems ludicrously late to me. I had algebra introduced in third grade (8-9 years old) and had a far easier time throughout school as a result. I've since gone on to have an interest in mathematics in my adult life. What reason could there possibly be for delaying its introduction until so late in one's school life?

I really wish we could get past this idea that all the kids have to do the same thing at the same time, always. Teachers have individual relationships with their pupils, and can introduce them to ideas when they're ready. We don't have to treat schools like factories, with students on conveyer belts from one grade to the next.

By "promoting equity" they're just compelling more of the able parents to send their kids to private schools.

If racism is actually causing blacks and Hispanics to not make it into advanced classes then why are Asians making it in?

They are clearly excelling at math just to be racist.

Also my brother's Chinese wife is on faculty at an Ivy League school and she was explicitly informed that when discussing diversity issues, she is white.

The mind boggles

The very long multi-part document on white supremacy in mathematics does not mention Asians even once, despite that they are somewhere between 15.5% to 17% of the state population.

> If racism is actually causing blacks and Hispanics to not make it into advanced classes then why are Asians making it in?

Because immigration policy and conditions highly selects Asians for educational achievement.

Hispanic immigrants are basically selected inversely, whereas blacks are overwhelmingly not immigrants or early-generation Americans.

https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-programs/it-takes-more-than-...

US admits only the top 1% of Asians with its immigration policies. Same for most other countries. If average rural Chinese folks could immigrate to US, we'd see a more "equitable" picture.

JKR was really spot on with the Dolores Umbridge character. For those who didn't read HP, the plot was that their ministry of education sent Umbridge to the (only) school with the only goal: prevent students from learning certain subjects. I feel like this Umbridge character is the inspiration for the radical left.

"... and applies social justice principles to math lessons."

I wish the article gave some examples and explanations for this.

Why not stream the classes so that the intelligent fast learners learn algebra early and the slow learners pick it up towards the end of their time at school if at all? That way nobody is inconvenienced by disruption from those that don't get it, and those that don't get it don't get hurt feelings.

I went to a high school in Mississippi, and, despite the school being good for that state, I still didn't get to take Algebra 1 until 9th grade. I made up for that by cramming Algebra 2 and Geometry into 10th grade.

That was annoying. If I was able to take Algebra in 7th or 8th grade, I could have gone further in high school.

Seems to even more dumbing down the populace starting from kids. How are we going to be competitive when every Asians from Koreans to Singaporean to Chinese to Indians kids are doing maths that majority American adult can't? I think Cali is just setting up excuse to mass import Asians in later decades.

I disagreed at first, but it makes sense. This will probably not really affect high achievers while making math a more inclusive subject to minorities whose sub-cultures don't value math much. If math appreciation contributes to a love of learning then that's good enough for me.

Normally I wouldn't share my opinion on internal matters that don't concern me in any way but wow. If that's not a plan to fuck over the future generation of poor people over there, I don't what it is. No other reason to sabotage your own populace like this

With the modern science growing every year, if anything we should expand our school program, not contract. For example, teaching basics of abstract algebra, quaternions, octonions, and sedenions, statistics, maybe basic category theory. Quantum field theory in physics, etc.

Do you have a textbook in mind to teach high schoolers QFT? I'm dubious one could write such a textbook, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

I ask since I have taken a course on QFT lite. We had to spend three weeks just doing tensors, and this was after everyone was comfortable with linear algebra and calculus and so forth.

How many of the people responsible for this decision send their kids/grandkids to private school?

This makes sense to me since education is a secondary or tertiary goal of government schools. The goal for parents is childcare and for teachers it is to socially indoctrinate kids into what ever point of view they believe (e.g. CRT, Creationism, etc.)

Only those who would benefit from systematic injustice, could possibly oppose this proposal.

/s, or is it??

California has a state average IQ of 95.5.

That presumably means any kind of complex education will have problems. And adjusting to the bottom half of the distribution means that smarter or even average people suffer from this focus on the "least common denominator"! People are NOT all the same and interchangeable so the best education strategy is to tune the process to fit individuals instead.

Glad I'm gone from California. It's sad but I've written off all emotional attachments to the state and accepted that California's best times are a good 50 years ago.

Back when I was a kid, I was in the California state "Gifted Child" program and it was instrumental in getting me into technology as a career. That can't happen now to anyone like who I was back then. And that demographic that is defining this change in education focus will never achieve anything like I have in my career because this is aligned to the state IQ of 95.5!

This is extremely disappointing.... California is quickly becoming the worst place to grow up

So what, continue wasting student's time teaching them addition and subtraction over and over again? Why not just let students advance when they grasp the subject, instead of withholding knowledge from them for the sake of slower peers?

I always enjoy watching people experiment on themselves with this sort of social engineering when it doesn't affect me whatsoever. Even without this I would never consider sending my children to public schools anyway.

I remember when Bush started all this and it was called "No child left behind" and all my teachers were calling it "No child left intact". Weird how that changed. Why is that?

at this rate, all California schools will just give a "P" grade for "participation". Just teach algebra in 8th grade but give everyone a "P", then nobody struggles!

San Diego is already heading in that direction

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/san-diego-unified-sch...

There's more truth to this than you realize. My two middle schoolers now get a number grade for science, representing whether you are on, below, or above grade level. So as a parent if I see they have a 2.5 do I get worked up or not? They've made the grade meaningless and incomprehensible.

What are you parents in California looking to do for education nowadays?

Most commonly "algebra 1" is a 9th grade class in the US, but there are elements of algebra taught in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade.

Are they talking about moving those 6-8th grade parts to 9th grade?

What’s going to happen is that poor kids will not get a good math education, and rich kids parents will get them outside tutoring.

It’s going to have the complete opposite effect that they’re going for

I was discussing this with a group of friends from opposing political backgrounds, and the results were surprising.

The liberals were 100% for the change, and said it will achieve more equity, inclusion, etc.

The conservatives were equally supportive of the change, but for an entirely different (and probably selfish, though equally valid) reason. They argued that this would actually give their kids a leg up over the general population, because they were going to continue to take advanced math and advanced placement tests, it'll just be in a more private, exclusive, concentrated setting than before, with other highly motivated, self-selected kids, which they took as having a positive effect on their own kids. By making something that was widely available more exclusive, it's actually a net-benefit to them.

I thought it was an interesting take.

I have a better idea. Delay it indefinitely, as long as there's as much as a single kid who struggles with it! It's the only way for true equality of outcome.

This is just going to make racial differences in math achievement worse because wealthier parents are now more incentivized to put their children in private school.

I bet the same people who make these rules are the same ones who will lambast “the rich” for having the resources to actually educate their children

Are they trying to get everyone to be above average?

It's easy to do if you focus on bringing the average down. I can even show that algebraically.

Kinds say "I don't have a math brain". That might be simply true.

The implication should be I NEED TO WORK MORE. Not lets lower the level.

In other words, bye bye to Calculus until college.

So now the rich kids will just get these classes elsewhere and the poor kids now have no options because “equality”.

The problem isn't the changing in curricular standards. It's the existence of curricular standards.

This is quite pathetic. But I guess the lower the education the easier it gets to keep people under control.

tutors are the best when used wisely but the worst when they become necessacity. one size fit for for for all doesn't work, will never work. quality of teachers matters most than than anything.

readiness of the kid is as important as the quality of teachers, rest is just bunch of opinions

Very shocked that after 40 years of undermining public services, the quality of those services decline.

Mixing social justice with maths classes makes no sense. Might as well mix religion into it too.

Just move to Nevada. The differences in taxes makes private school basically free.

Wow I took algebra in 6th grade and it was easy for me. This is sad and dumb.

Ugh, maybe teach abstract algebra first like France did?

Counter argument:

Teach children what variables are as soon as you can.

what a shame. vote all those clowns out.

This is stupid.

In the 80s it was not uncommon (at least in the Jesuit schools I attended) that Algebraic concepts would be introduced to students at early as 5th grade, but definitely by junior high (7th/8th) and while I hated math (especially at the time) it wasn't something I thought I needed to be older to grok...I needed less psychotic, rigid teaching from nuns with all the compassion of Stalin, and more guidance, which other students in similar schools got in spades and had no issue with.

they should teach them Grothendieck's Dessins d'Enfants!

It is worth reading the FAQs... https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp

A few examples...(highlights mine)

>Does the draft Mathematics Framework eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs?

>No. The draft Mathematics Framework does not eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs (including programs that offer Integrated Math 1 or Algebra 1 courses to grade eight students). The draft Mathematics Framework emphasizes the importance of following the sequenced progression of topics laid out in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) and considers the latest research on the impact of skipping grades or undermining the sequences progression. Additionally, the CA CCSSM are significantly more rigorous than those from previous grade eight content standards. They address the foundations of algebra and geometry by including content that was previously part of the Algebra I course, including but not limited to a more in-depth study of linear relationships and equations, a more formal treatment of functions, and the exploration of irrational numbers.

>Does the draft Mathematics Framework remove high school calculus?

>No. The draft Mathematics Framework includes calculus in the possible high school pathways, while also presenting research that the “rush to calculus” without the depth of understanding is not helpful to students’ long-term mathematics preparation. Data shows that about one-half of all high school students who take calculus repeat the course in college or take pre-calculus in college.

In summary: everyone is looking counting how many math courses students manage to get through and presuming that taking a course = mastery which it does not. The basis of this, frankly, is similar to the common core argument - different assumptions about evidence. Parents want to see their kids taking algebra and calculus because that is (to be frank) the best evidence they have of their learning while educational researchers (not teachers, researchers) are looking at meaningful assessment data.

I teach college course to engineering students at a highly ranked research university in the US. Frankly, the majority of my students have taken more math classes by the time they get to me in their junior year than I did by the end of my masters degree. The problem is they understand very little of it. Sure, sometimes, they can execute procedures. But they do not have mastery, they do not have teh ability to apply math to meaningful situations, and they absolutely do not have the ability to use math to evaluate technical problems. They are calculators not users of math - that is the problem this seeks to address

I lived in the Bay Area until 2019 and my kids went to school in Piedmont, which is one of the top funded school districts per capita in California. The math curriculum at Piedmont junior high-school was a joke. The math book was electronic-only on a crappy chrome book and the book had no lessons, only problems. The book seriously tried to introduce the concept of exponents, and so many others, into problems without explanation. Teaching my kids math became a 10 hour a week job for me and my wife. Piedmont HS lost their physics teacher to another school that paid better and didn't replace the teacher for the entire year; a whole year of HS students, some of them seniors, whose opportunity to take a good physics course was blown. My family moved to Colorado recently... partly because of the CA education system.

Back when I was in junior high and high-school in the late 80's and early 90's... math classes had hard-bound printed math books that actually had lessons and clear examples so that it was possible to learn math concepts, on your own, even if the teacher didn't know what they were doing. Whatever happened to good books?... it is not like the subject matter has changed in the past 20-30 years. I thought it is proven that students learn better from quality printed material, with appropriate use of color, over e-screens (correct me if I'm wrong) and yet all education is going to screens.

I had great teachers in HS; both my physics teacher and math teacher had masters degrees in their respective fields. Today, there is no good financial reason to be a teacher with a Physics, Math, or Engineering degree in most CA school districts and that is, I think, a big part of the problem. If you don't have good teachers who can present a topic well and engage a class-room then students aren't going to learn the topic and progression through mathematical curricula is going to fall.

Another factor is probably demographic. This is anecdotal but I switched high schools after my freshman year from a HS in a lower middle class area in Sacramento to a pretty wealthy, upper middle-class area in Southern California and the level of the average student was quite a bit higher. The teachers were probably better overall in the SoCal HS but I don't think the teachers were that much better. But there was huge cultural difference in the student body of the two schools. At the Sacramento HS, I took geometry as a freshman and there were a lot of juniors and seniors in the class. None of them were dumb people... it is just that doing well in math and the going to a good college was not something on the average student's mind in a poor community. At the SoCal HS, most students were very interested in doing well in school, took math and science semi-seriously, and looked towards going to best college they could get into. Almost every student at the SoCal HS at least took Trig/Pre-Calculus.

Bring this all to the topic at hand... this does feel like some Kurt Vonnegut stuff and I am really disappointed. Holding back math education in mainstream public schools is going to push more parents, who can afford the time/money [read: the more affluent], to put their kids in charter schools, private schools, or supplemental education for math [e.g. Kumon]. This going to limit opportunity for the less affluent and probably increase the gap in math education across economic dividing lines. This may also pull money away from public schools over time.

This largely upon skimming seems pretty boring ideas like “it’s possible to teach math better in high school.”

It’s a trip that it’s couched in language that apparently is pissing a lot of people off (and bringing up some resentment about race in a direction that I find somewhat surprising.)

A lot of folks seem to be posting that if kids have to wait a little longer, it’ll somehow negatively impact all of the super smart 13 year olds’ ability to learn at maximum speed and adversely affect the talented and bright students that just want to learn math due to the fact that the school is somehow withholding knowledge from these poor kids!

I was a VERY gifted young student that was on to trig in 8th grade, pretty much entirely self taught with what I could find online (in the mid 2000s). It turns out that the fact that something wasn’t taught at school didn’t “hold me down” or “delay my education.”

The anger around this seems… weird. The insistence that this is actually harming 8th graders sounds like somebody who hasn’t actually asked an 8th grader if they give a shit, while pearl clutching about the status quo not being exactly maintained.

One of the smartest guys I ever met, a professional magician by trade, learned calculus in the sixth grade.

In an age where advanced applied math skills are the shortest path to six and potentially seven-figure salaries, by all means dumb down California further than it's already been dumbed down, but I have to ask questions about where all that 10 to 14% state income tax money is going besides those ridiculous six-figure pensions for retired state employees.

Maybe instead they should try Saxon math or Singapore math curricula?

You obviously have to build up mathematical skill and intuition the right way, but there is an age-appropriate way to do this. NOT doing it seems rather backward.

It’s the official shift from “we can lift everyone up” to “we need to hold everyone down”.

It wasn’t that long ago the California was touting the success of Algebra for everyone in 8th grade.

This "single standard" to me is like outlawing adjustable seats in cars.

In the UK, they start separating students into separate tracks around 8th grade. Some will excel in math and science, so give them the opportunity to really go for it and take hard classes. Others will excel in other areas.

But if everyone is lumped together in the same bucket and forced into the same mold, the average student's highest level of achievement across all subjects goes significantly down.

in this timeline, we are all Harrison Bergeron.

Looking out from this moment in history, if I wanted to prepare someone for the future, STEM wouldn't be the main focus. I know it's anathema to say. In a world where computers fold proteins and predict programmer's intentions, the value of technical knowledge is showing decay.

In the world we're hurtling toward, we don't need people who can recite the Pythagorean theorem. We need people who can cooperate with other humans, who can leverage technology to achieve their goals and who can evaluate information critically. Throw money at THOSE problems.

Personally, I think the most devastating impact of COVID will prove to be the shift of younger people's focus from the social realm to the technical/virtual. Imagine an entire generation specialized in playing Minecraft, making YouTube videos and scripting Python Discord bots... All the while, AI embeds deeper in government, gains control of resource production and perfects the mechanisms of social control.

I could not have designed a simulation with the goal of a cyberpunk outcome, better. High tech, low life. Hey, at least I know how to do long division in my apartment, alone.

This undertone exists in to pretty much all liberal polices.

For example, instead of making more energy, we have power cuts like a third world nation. We could instead build solar farms and nuclear energy, but California (and largely progressives) want shittier world for themselves. Wanna inspire people with values of perseverance and hard work? Nope, that’s not allowed. Want to eliminate homelessness? Nope, too ambitious. There isn’t a single public park in Oakland where homelessness isn’t rampant.

Basically, the entire thinking is about regression, not progression.

I only vote for Democrats because the alternative is worse. But it’s becoming harder.

> It’s the official shift from “we can lift everyone up” to “we need to hold everyone down”.

No, its based on empirical evidence that the way things were done previously holds everyone down, and they should be done differently if you want to lift everyone up.

Educational approaches are technologies, and old familiar technologies are, often, just not as good at their purpose as newer ones.

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