Maybe a bigger tent coalition is needed to restore sanity on basic things, such as "kids should be allowed to learn so they can function in a technological society"?
Neither major party is the coalition I'm talking about. It doesn't exist yet. But I can dream.
I get why the 2 party system evolved at the federal level, but there's no reason why we couldn't have more parties at the local level. That's exactly what happens in Canada, for example.
This is too absurd to even be a non-sequitur.
And frankly, if Dems control this state "100%" then one has to ask why? Why has the GOP given up so much ground (remember, California has only sent two people to the nations highest office/POTUS, Nixon and Reagan, who were both Republicans. Historically a GOP that occupied up to 40+ percent of registered voters is now less than 25%, most of them going to Independent not Dem. This was in my lifetime, and I was GOP for a long time.
They lost ground due to the Dems being the least stupid and unhinged of the two major parties. Not because the Dems are great, just less incoherent and insanely clownish assjockeys.
Hmm! Let's review the logic...
1. Insane things are happening to math education in California
2. Democrats control California 100%
3. Therefore, Democrats are causing the insane things in California
4. Therefore, Democrats are not always and everywhere the coalition to restore sanity, but sometimes make things more insane
The logic seems pretty basic and sound to me. I suspect even children will be able to follow it, provided California Democrats allow them to take logic.
Ha ha ha. No.
The CMF is a product of the CA DoE, an organization ultimately led by either elected officials (the state superintendent) or appointees of elected officials (the state board, appointed by the Governor). And since it's education in California, I don't even have to look to know that those leaders are 100% Democrats. Because Hell will freeze over before today's California lets anyone but a Democrat touch education policy.
Nevertheless, I did confirm that the obvious is true with a couple Google searches. All CA School Board members were appointed by Democratic governors Brown or Newsom, and the superintendent has been a Democrat since the 90s, although the office is officially "nonpartisan" (whatever that means).
Your unwillingness to follow a simple, obvious logical point doesn't make that point weak.
It's uninteresting to have a "debate" with someone whose primary tactic is disingenuous ignorance in the service of protecting a favored in-group, so I'll stop here. Bye.
They’re talking about integrated math where students all learn the same concepts at the same time, but students that can handle more complex work still get it. Some math concepts will actually be introduced earlier than they were previously, and the curriculum is shifting to include more applied math like statistics rather than calculus being the end-all.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-21/why-cali...
Feel free to apologize and change my mind, but I have you flagged as a liar and the conversation will proceed accordingly.
Playing dumb won't help you here, liar.
And nice edit, but it's not up to you to decide whether misquoting me is legitimate because you feel a word I said isn't relevant to your point. Quite obviously it was relevant, as I elaborated.
You're dishonest for the sake of rhetoric and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Misquoting isn't something you get to do because of how you feel about the statements involved. It's dishonest.
And it's not about how I feel. It's objectively wrong.
I should have singled out the word “attacks” because thats the bone i’m picking… no one is attacking anything, that’s reductive language that insinuates hostility towards algebra and creates this divisive rhetoric. It’s simply a curriculum change, maybe it’s a bad one… but it’s not completely illogical and I’m interested to see how it goes.
Sorry if I was unclear, I can assure you I have no interest in making you look bad because I have no idea who you are.
Update: “early” doesn’t change that for me, it’s not “attacks on early algebra” it’s a curriculum change
“revolting liar” also seems really extreme and personal for this simple disagreement
We're done here. You're a revolting liar and always will be.
This is a failing approach. Math is built incrementally: you don't do "more complex work" for the heck of it, you progress incrementally by building upon what you've learned previously, throughout the K-12 curriculum. Having the students march in lockstep and literally "learn the same concepts at the same time" is a recipe for severe, enduring, unaddressed gaps in foundational math understanding, of the sort that is critically relevant to all subsequent work in STEM including statistics and data science.
Heck, the gold standard educational approach is "mastery learning", which is based on not having students progress in lock-step, but everyone learning at their own pace with close-to-individualized tutoring to the greatest feasible extent. The approach you describe is trying to do the opposite! Forget about algebra, this is exactly how you get students who can't even grok fractions in 8th grade or so.
As terrible as the Republicans are, some opinion polls are showing historic numbers of voters planning to vote Republican in the midterms, including a growing number of non white voters.
[1]: Shtetl-Optimized: Exciting opportunities at Kabul University! https://archive.ph/GhNGd
The success of the radical equity crowd, and the parallel degeneration of American conservatism make good arguments for doing the opposite.
The equitarians have stuck to their principals for decades, and through propaganda and persistence begun to execute on their goals with little compromise. They've shown that compromising with the opposition is for losers when you know what you want.
Theirs is a model of political success. Don't compromise, even for harm reduction. Let them drag the useful idiots who gave them power down the self destructive path they're on, and wait for the reaction to achieve your own goals without compromise unless your offered a chance to achieve exactly what you want.
In California if you want your kid to learn algebra... or basic communication skills... you send em to a private school or teach them at home. But I still don't buy this sudden terror of algebra being removed from school. Cite the source.
I insist upon the precise nature of my claim because its precision is what makes it correct. So many in these comments imply that the changes proposed in the California Mathematics Framework (CMF) are hopelessly "complex" and impossible to understand for the layman, and so therefore we should trust the experts and not attempt to make any factual statement whatsoever about what is in the CMF. This is encouraged by the CMF itself, which is 800 pages long and does everything in its power to deny that it is anything in particular, merely generally wonderful [1]. This is smokescreening, obscurantism, credentialism, and most of all elitism. I do not accept it. It is absurd and anti-citizen democracy to insinuate that ordinary citizens are incompetent to understand and opine on math curricula.
All that said, please read this, and links therein: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6146
Select passages follow. Again, please follow the links in the original for details:
> ...the CMF encourages schools to stop offering Algebra I in middle school, while placing obstacles (such as doubling-up, compressed courses, or outside-of-school private courses) in the way of those who want to take advanced math in higher grades. When similar reforms were implemented in San Francisco, they resulted in an “inequitable patchwork scheme” of workarounds that affluent students could access but that their less privileged counterparts could not. The CMF also promotes trendy and shallow courses (such as a nearly math-free version of “data science”) as recommended alternatives to foundational mathematical courses such as Algebra and Calculus. These courses do not prepare students even for careers in data science itself!
> The CMF states that “many students, parents, and teachers encourage acceleration beginning in grade eight (or sooner) because of mistaken beliefs that Calculus is an important high school goal.” Students, parents, and teachers are not mistaken. Neither is the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), which set in 2015 a goal to double the number of African American students taking calculus by 2025. Calculus is not the only goal of K-12 math education, but it is important for students who wish to prepare for STEM in college and beyond.
See also:
[1] "Ra" -- the quality, embodied by the CMF, of aspiring to general wonderfulness while evading being pinned down with any specifics https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/
[2] The shoddy and sometimes outright fraudulent statistics supporting the CMF https://www.familiesforsanfrancisco.com/updates/inequity-in-...
Wonderful, thank you.
On the Ra thing, here is the thesis from the blog post:
> Ra is a specific kind of glitch in intuition, which can roughly be summarized as the drive to idealize vagueness and despise clarity.
Can you really tell me that this has no application to your real life and experiences?
If you truly feel it's irrelevant, spend two hours trying to figure out what exactly the CMF says and get back to me. Start here [1].
I actually read the chapter on grades 6-8 [2]. It engages in the classic Ra move of speaking out of both sides of the mouth: it criticizes early introduction of algebra content for being too challenging, causing students to fail, while claiming that its alternative proposal is actually more rigorous and challenging. Is it possible to make a curriculum more demanding while simultaneously reducing fail rates? Possibly, but it is not a claim we should accept lightly.
[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter7.doc...
Our current system is simply not working.
The trick is to introduce that slower math framework while still keeping an option for some students take algebra earlier.