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>I agree that it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children. But if equity is the goal, we should be mandating that every eighth grader takes Algebra I—and then structure the entire pre-K to seventh grade student experience to ensure this is a legitimate possibility for every child. Since when does equity mean everyone gets nothing?

I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do, but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer either. Everybody knows someone else that is better at math than they are, and someone who is not as good. It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?

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> "Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?"

Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them. Some of them have doubled down on woke-speak around "equity" for so long, that they cannot backtrack and accept that merit and performance exist. Doing this would put them at odds with their current in-group and likely their only source of meaning and "friendship" with anyone.

It's the same crowd of people who just lost their very progressive DA in San Francisco during last night's recall election outcome. They keep doubling down on their policing strategy (see: no policing strategy) and being soft on crime and consequently crime has increased significantly. The same group of people that plugs their ears to reason and reality on why policing is necessary are the same group of people that are always trying to drag everyone down to their same floor level.

> Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them.

There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?

By responding with reason in writing as succintly as possible, and restating it as often as possible, and being unafraid to restate it when they respond with empty dogma.

And in the workplace, by gutting the types of roles that are just about being "thought leaders" in this direction. Technical people are afraid of those thought leaders because they don't want to get in trouble or fired for speaking against the cult. It's understandable since people need to get paid so they can provide for their families. But if companies just start dropping the negative weight that just encumbers everything and doesn't contribute code or design, it'll improve the bottom line and also gradually resolve this problem in the corporate workplace. The silver lining of a tech correction is that it may actually help make this decision more simple since companies can just start shedding the weight that is not actively making the product better.

So fire them, stop filling those types of roles, recall them in recall elections like San Francisco did last night with that terrible DA, vote in general, and let's stop associating with toxic people. It's effective if enough people do it.

> There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?

If someone were to not have read the above comments, this argument could be very easily used to support the opposing (political) stance as well. I suppose most humans are just emotion driven - though this need not be a bug.

My comment applies to everybody from every political party/religion/etc who bases their decisions on dogma rather than reason.

Dogma is not synonymous with emotion.

First, recognize that "reason" is somewhat narrower than we'd like to believe. Our own reasoning is applied when convenient and suppressed when convenient. And many times there is simply too much complexity and you must rely on wisdom instead.

The reason that "reason" often wins is because it often works. Of course, sometimes it either doesn't work, or takes a long time to work, and we can conveniently ignore it. Eventually reality catches up, but not always in a way that illustrates the cause.

The best way to make reason work is to expose people making decisions to reality, such that they benefit or lose based on the quality of their reasoning. The most unreasonable people will all of a sudden become very reasonable.

Alternatively stated, prevent people from hiding from reality. There are many places to hide, and these are often the most unreasonable places. National politics is one: your ideas probably won't happen (even if you're in Congress), and if they do, and something bad happens, there are enough other factors to make it easy to blame something else. Academia is another such place. So is extended adolescence.

You either engage in their dogma as a subversion, or you wait for them to get hit with reality a sufficient amount of times.

What is your definition of progress?

For all the flaws in reasoning that are being highlighted in this thread, progressive have very clear and concrete goals: Equity, removing discrimination, improving opportunities, raising the floor for the social safety net, closing the wealth gap, improving housing affordability, etc.

You may disagree with their methods and have criticisms. That is valid. But are you opposed to their goals or their means?

Do you have alternative goals?

I ask you because most of the internet and media that criticizes "woke ideology" does not seem to have it's own perspective. I genuinely need to understand what is the alternative that people are proposing. Because certainly "Things were just fine before we started talking about racism, and the world was already a meritocracy that we shouldn't try to fix" doesn't resonate with me either.

Many on this site complain about Woke SJWs and all their focus on ideology, but what do people seek here instead? Just pure free market libertarianism?

You don't make progress. Unless you're in a position to gain power, what you do is you have six to ten children, raise them on the homestead, and hope that in a few generations they can begin to fix some things. That, or violent revolt, but revolt is a bit harder

> and consequently crime has increased significantly

It has not. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che...

Consider why you think that it has, and whether you are also getting your information from an in-group that is primarily motivated by ideology and not reality. (Just a different one from the one you criticise)

The problem is deeper. The traditional grade-based school is not good. It pushes some kids, and stymies other kids. Slicing kids in thin same-age layers is not good, especially for teenagers who cannot form reasonable social structures and end up with gangs and a group of outcasts.

A more reasonable school, after the elementary level, should mix and match kids, so that older kids with more advanced skills could help those who hasn't still advanced as much. It should allow to take courses, much like a college does, in whatever order a kid (and their parents) find most beneficial, independent of the age, with the goal to pass a GED test by the end of the school. Even better, it should be possible to pass a basic or an advanced level of a test for a subject, independent of the age. The presence of several parallel tracks for a subject solves the issue with gifted kids and struggling kids alike.

I don't think I have all the answers, but the standard school education system was invented in Prussia in the middle of 18th century, and is pretty obviously inadequate for today; ask teachers, students, or parents. Though maybe for some parents it looks adequate because it functions as a storage facility for kids for the day. But kids could spend their time much better than that.

> A more reasonable school, after the elementary level, should mix and match kids, so that older kids with more advanced skills could help those who hasn't still advanced as much

"Zone of Proximal Development" [1]

Montessori schools do this.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

What about "flipped" classes, where students learn independently with electronic media, so at whatever speed and level they can handle, while teachers support them by reviewing their work, mentoring and tutoring?

Flipping classes is interesting, but it has problems.

Even trying to rely on outside media, it's still much more labor intensive for teachers.

And you need a more motivated student body than the typical middle school or high school student. The small quizzes you include to make sure that students consumed the flipped content beg for exploiting and cheating, even with randomization.

Finally, it's not really clear how well it works. In general, K-8th work away from teacher supervision shows no evidence of benefit, and the educational research we have on the flipped model is mostly of poor quality except for a couple of good studies of undergraduates.

Education tends to have big "trendy ideas" that have some plausibility that they'll work and excitement around them and a whole lot of administrator support and profe$$ional development services spring up around them. And then you have people endlessly debate the merits based on personal experience.

(I'm about to teach a microeconomics class where I'm going to flip 1/3rd of the lessons in a private high school environment with a relatively motivated student body; the motivation is so that I can fit more simulations into an already-very-dense AP curriculum without an infinite homework load. I've become a relatively successful middle school teacher of engineering and mathematics enrichment classes over the past couple of years and I struggle to see how I can flip much successfully-- so much of my success is around social pressures that come from interaction of students with each other and their teacher).

Thanks for this answer, it's quite illuminating.

The reason children are “sliced up” by age is because of their lack of maturity. Consequently, if you mix younger children with older, more physically developed children what will inevitably happen is a lot of bullying.

> what will inevitably happen is a lot of bullying.

It may not be inevitable. Personally I had pretty great experiences with multi-grade clubs, camps, sports teams, classes, academic competitions, after school programs, etc. (not to mention the neighborhood/real world.) The older kids were usually pretty nice, often really helpful, and provided a kind of role modeling.

Sports teams can sometimes be kind of hilariously unbalanced due to the drastic difference in sizes of some kids though. Perhaps some sports should be sliced into height or weight classes rather than age classes, but that's probably only practical for large leagues.

Anecdotally, as a parent, I've found the opposite to be more true. We have several schools that are k-8 in my city, but the majority split 6-8 into middle school. Talking to parents of the k-8 schools, bullying is almost non existent. Not true in the traditional middle school. Some kids are more or less mature than others as they mature, and it helps to have options for friends. Also, kids weren't split into single year age bands for all of the existence of humanity and then the past hundred years or so we suddenly split them up.

I wonder if keeping the older kids around the younger kids causes them to subconsciously inhibit their "wild teenager" behavior.

I wonder if that's an issue in many Montessori schools? What evidence do you have that bullying is a byproduct of mixed age classes?

None, because it’s not common. All I know is that research shows that bullying develops and evolves by age. It’s not going to be as prevalent in early age Montessori schools as it is in middle school. Let’s also not ignore that a private Montessori school is also a filter.

Do you have any cite for your research about bullying and mixed-age?

I have already told you it doesn’t exist for mixed ages because it’s not a common situation. The closest thing to it are papers noting at what ages bullying tends to occur and the nature of said bullying.

It would happen yes if the children are left on their own at that. But shouldn't we expect the school to intervene? It's not like they don't notice or they cannot know. But if the school culture says bullying is acceptable because hey that's the lead athlete and he didn't kill anybody, then yes, bullying will happen inevitably.

> But shouldn't we expect the school to intervene?

That’s a nice thing to wish, but at least in the public school system in the US, it’s no longer something that you can expect depending on the region. There are many reasons for this both including indifference and / or just being overwhelmed.

Bullying still happens among children of same age.

Children of the “same” age in school can be 11 months and 30 days apart in age. That is absolutely huge during the grade school years. In fact, month of birth is a significant factor in student athletic success. And when it comes to physical bullying, yes it’s generally the larger more physically mature kids doing the bullying.

Athletics is a pretty poor excuse for hampering a child’s education.

Athletics should be separate from schooling and run by the community (as is Europe).

"In fact, month of birth is a significant factor in student athletic success."

This was not an argument for school athletics. It was an observation that age quantization-- whether by schools or by private athletic leagues-- makes a big difference on the trajectory of athletes. In turn, you have from age quantization alone pretty big physical differences in students of the same nominal age.

Your comment is completely orthogonal to what you replied to.

Sadly sports funds large portions of some school budgets in the US. School funding is quite messed up.

Individually you feel pressure to move into the best school districts. Yet collectively it falls into racial boundaries because of decades of systemic racism.

Forced busing suddenly fixes a lot of the funding biases, but is very unpopular because fear of the other is hard to overcome.

Subject categories such as "math" are also very broad. I struggled with math in elementary school, because it was mostly about memorization. 3 + 5 = 8. 6 x 7 = 42. Learning and being able to spit out those facts as quickly and flawlessly as possible was most of what I remember about math as a young kid. I was never good at that. I still am not good at that. I got Cs and sometimes lower grades in math.

Somehow, though, I passed a test in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. Suddenly stuff started making sense, and I could see a point to it. You could actually solve an interesting problem. It wasn't just regurgitation of facts. It became more about thinking and connecting concepts and even being creative. I started getting As in math, and continue to do well in High School with geometry, trig, and calculus, but up until algebra was introduced I would certainly not have demonstrated a gifted ability in "math".

You struggled with math in elementary school because of deeply flawed teaching. Even at that early age, it's not hard to understand that "3 + 5 = 8" is not something that you'd need to literally memorize. Of course, the fact that teaching quality can vary to such an extent is itself noteworthy.

I don't think I agree. 3 + 5 = 8 isn't something you need to literally memorize, but if you don't memorize such facts of basic arithmetic you're at a disadvantage when it comes to doing homework and tests. It's easier and less error-prone to memorize 8*7 than it is to work it out manually every time you see it until it sticks.

For what it's worth, I struggled with math in elementary school and especially high school -- I failed algebra I, then passed it with a D; then I failed algebra II before passing it* with a D. It wasn't until I was forced to take a business calculus class in my 20s that it started clicking, and I assure you the quality of instruction wasn't any better at the college level than it was in high school. (I did eventually graduate with honors with a math degree.)

Agreed. It does need memorization. Anyone who don't think so can try to add and multiply in hexadecimal, what is 0xA + 0xC and what is 0x8 * 0x6? It becomes quite obvious memorization is required when you try it in any other radix other than decimal(which is memorized already).

It might be quite obvious that memorization is convenient, but 'required' means "you can't do it any other way" and that's obviously incorrect.

IDK why we'd assume that there's a different cognitive process for learning mathematics with radix 10 than with radix 16?

Mathematics_education#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_education#Methods :

> [...] Rote learning: the teaching of mathematical results, definitions and concepts by repetition and memorisation typically without meaning or supported by mathematical reasoning. A derisory term is drill and kill. In traditional education, rote learning is used to teach multiplication tables, definitions, formulas, and other aspects of mathematics.

I think they mean that it is very useful to “cache” these primitive results, but it is absolutely possible to regenerate them if one is missing or the like.

It should be understood first, and memorized later.

If you do not memorize small things that you frequently need, it will slow you down.

But if keep memorizing things without understanding, at some moment your memory will return an incorrect result, and you will be unable to notice it.

I don't plan to ever need to do math in hexadecimal without a calculator. Far as decimals go, I actually did get away with solving the multiplication problems on the fly...so no, memorization isn't necessary.

I've helped some students that are struggling in secondary math.

They tend to have a surprisingly good handle on the specific topic being studied that they're failing. I can have them tell me what to do on a problem on the whiteboard, and do all the arithmetic and simpler things for them, and they're flawless.

They also tend to have problems in arithmetic and in getting confused on simpler concepts. Context switching is expensive and they lose working memory of the higher order task, and then make silly mistakes.

Most outside tutors work to try and solidify the higher level topic even further, by drilling the heck out of it... this conceals the problem for it to reappear on next unit. (And, it ossifies the new knowledge in a way that compounds the problem for next year).

I don't like the whole "layer cake" model of teaching math that "builds" upon other math in the way we do in the US. But to some extent, it is justified in places. If you struggle with basic arithmetic and integers, algebra is much, much harder.

> it's not hard to understand that "3 + 5 = 8" is not something that you'd need to literally memorize

‘Literally memorize’ as opposed to what? Counting your fingers?

Precisely.

Our entire society is organised so that even university graduates are very rarely called upon to sum two single-digit numbers.

Adding up purchases in a shop? The till does it automatically. Admittedly, the cashier will need to be able to make up change promptly - but a customer needn't check their change.

Paying for parking? There will be a sign listing how much money you need to put in for 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours and so on.

Picking 14 items in a warehouse? You only need to count one at a time. There's a chance to speed things up by picking 2 packs of 6 plus 2 singles? Then the computer will print that on the pick list. No computer? Then the boss will print a sign with a lookup table like "14 items -> 2 six packs + 2 singles" and tape it to the shelf.

Trying to figure out whether you can get 9 people to lunch in two cars, one of which is kinda small? Add it up on your fingers, or keep your mouth shut and one of the other 8 people will figure it out.

Just don't get into board gaming :)

> Paying for parking? There will be a sign listing how much money you need to put in for 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours and so on.

Then if the maximum parking time is 3 hours, it's 10:15 and you want to know at what time you need to leave you take out a cardboard clock, set the current time, and advanced the small hand one, two, three steps. And to know whether you can afford both the parking and a coffee with the money you have on you you make two piles and keep the parking money in one pocket and the coffee money in another pocket. I got it. [I'm joking, our society is organised in such a way that you don't need to be able to read a clock or handle money.]

Sigh, just happened to me. Booked a room at 1:45 for 3 hours, and was told to leave at 4. The staff insisted so hard that it was like we are the troublesome customer who try to milk out something.

A jaw-dropping moment. Maybe school education is more important than we though.

>Booked a room at 1:45 for 3 hours, and was told to leave at 4.

If you are renting a hotel room by the hour, it is highly likely that the staff are poorly educated

>Maybe school education is more important than we though.

The arguments against schools are generally made[1] by people who do not remember how it was before compulsory education.

[1]At least in Europe.

> Then if the maximum parking time is 3 hours, it's 10:15 and you want to know at what time you need to leave you take out a cardboard clock, set the current time, and advanced the small hand one, two, three steps.

Not at all - you simply count hours using your fingers.

Come on, use the right tool for the job!

Mentally count 5 6 7 8, sure. Why not?

Well, it would be 3, 4, 5 ,6, 7, 8 unless you have memorized the commutative property ;-)

After going around the horn a few times, I expect the student would eventually learn to take the canal :-)

Heck, why even memorize the names of the quantities...

Number line.

You need some amount of this sort of practice to build numeracy. It's great to represent things in more accessible forms but at the end of the day it's useful for citizens to instantly recognize 3+5=8.

Similarly, I got Cs in math in middle school and early highschool. Once I got to calculus something clicked. Now I have a degree in physics and am pursuing a graduate degree in applied mathematics. The math I do now is nothing like the math I was bad at in middle school.

Puberty cannot be understated in terms of its effects...

Probably both ways. Some kids backslide with academics at that age, others seem to gain traction. I didn't mention it but have considered that part of the reason that things became easier for me in the 8th grade is that I was starting to get the mental maturity to think more abstractly and deliberately.

I have a similar story, and puberty was definitely an issue. I didn't get good at math until I was old enough to buy alcohol.

This could be read as "once I needed to figure out how much alcohol per hour I was earning, I learned math".

Which means we just need to make kids play Factorio or Eve Online to instill the desire to be good at arithmetic. Granted, Eve Online would instill other behaviors that might not be so desirable...

I think we do a disservice to mathematics to call calculus "mathematics". Similarly learning alphabet and to write is not called "literature".

We could consider doing the labeling in the other direction where we keep calling calculus, real analysis, algebra, etc. mathematics but treat arithmetic more like we do learning the alphabet (a necessary stepping stone but certainly not the end goal). We could also more typically refer to arithmetic as arithmetic and not math(s), then.

So what happens when we decide "everyone is gifted" and teach all students at the level that would have been taught only to gifted students before? Seems like the obvious outcome would be a lot more students who struggle, necessitating a slower track for them. So instead of regular and gifted classes, you have regular and "non-gifted" (for lack of a better term) classes.

This is why equity is a bullshit goal.

> teach all students at the level that would have been taught only to gifted students before?

You just can't do that, no matter how much you want it. Some teachers are better than others, they can't all be elite. The teachers union wouldn't let you sack all the mediocre teachers, and even if you somehow could fire them, where would all the new elite teachers to replace the mediocre ones come from? If you just sacked the bottom 50% of teachers and doubled the class size of the better half, I think classroom conditions would certainly deteriorate.

Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?

Gifted students (at least up to middle school) don't need special teachers (an 8th grade math teacher could teach gifted 6th graders), they just need challenging material and peers to keep them motivated and study with.

> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?

The well-behaved students. Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns, regardless of their IQ. And if a dim student who scores poorly on IQ tests knows how to sit quietly and behave themself, I think good teachers will help them a lot.

> Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns

It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting, and their lack of interest / trouble focusing reflects a societal (and school) failure to make school engaging and give them the appropriate challenges and direct feedback to keep their attention. Many of the greatest human breakthroughs were made by people who were squirmy and distractible as children, who had difficulty with the formal school curriculum, or who were ostracized by their classmates for one reason or another.

Every child deserves attention from good teachers. Good teachers with enough resources can provide a significant benefit to these students and integrate them into a smoothly functioning classroom. Assigning troublesome students to weak or unsympathetic teachers is a tremendous “waste” of human talent.

Surely you had a class with a disruptive kid? They can suck the education value out of a lecture by forcing unnecessary context switches for the students who are paying attention.

It would be ideal if each class was so engaging as to enrapture each student but that just isn't realistic.

Even if you only hire "good teachers" and give them "enough resources", some of those teachers will perform better than others. And the attention of those teachers will be wasted on the students who don't want to be there; better to give it to the students who care.

School was never meant to be "engaging". It's not recreation, it's work. The problem seems to be that we've lost the value of working hard and pushing through things we find dull and uninteresting, in order to attain a greater goal. Instead we expect everything to be engaging, stimulating and entertaining. Real world success is not like that - it's work - so better get into the habit early on.

> School was never meant to be "engaging".

That's backwards. A school that doesn't engage its students has failed at its most important goals, and the very best schools have always striven to be engaging. Often this was done in unconventional ways, such as directing the youngest students to memorize their pre-set "lessons" word for word and be able to literally chant them back to the teacher. Similarly "direct" yet effective instructional methods were just as common wrt. practical exercises and problem solving. There was no space for the modern fashionable truism that "constructing" one's education from scratch, with practically no involvement from an outside educator, is the only possible source of engagement.

I guess we're circling around this question: Should schools bend to the natural tendencies of students, or should students bend to the rigours and structure of academic life?

Given that society itself doesn't bend much, I'm inclined towards the latter.

Do you think kids should have recess? If so, for what purpose?

Or, what do you think of Montessori education?

> Do you think kids should have recess? If so, for what purpose?

Sure, for the same reason that adults take coffee breaks. This doesn't seem to contradict what I said. In fact it's a very clear delineation between recreation and work. The problem is when children (or adults) behave as though they're on recess when they're supposed to be working.

> Or, what do you think of Montessori education?

I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem as though the educator/pupil ratios required to make it work are scalable.

>Montessori education

Why do people always mention this like it isn't a niche educational experience that already self-selects for the children of well-off, white parents? Montessori is almost as relevant to the public education discourse as Catholic schools imo.

> School was never meant to be "engaging".

If it aims to be effective at education, it should.

> It's not recreation, it's work.

That's very true of what a lot of schooling is, largely because it evolved from a model aimed at indoctrination of a compliant population rather than education. But, nominally at least, the goal of the modern system is not to be work as a means of indoctrinating people to work.

> The problem seems to be that we've lost the value of working hard and pushing through things we find dull and uninteresting

Or, maybe, the problem is that while it is easy to make material dull and uninteresting, that's far from optimal from an educational perspective.

> Real world success is not like that - it's work

Real world success is mostly been born on third base and constructing a narrative about the hard-work of hitting a triple.

If school is work then we need to recognize the children's own agency in school, otherwise it it literally slavery.

Forcing children to spend the majority of their lives working against their will leads to problems, especially among non-conformists.

I don't disagree with your characterization, but given children are not agents, and are subject to the whims of their parents, I think it's appropriate.

Locking a child in their room is imprisonment, yet is widely used punitively at the whim of parents. Beating children is assault, yet operant conditioning is effective and also widely practiced towards children. It's also permitted in most jurisdictions if undue harm is not caused.

> among non-conformists

Why do we need these, exactly? What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?

> What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?

This ideology sounds an awful lot like fascism to me, or maybe some kind of psychopathy.

If you start looking around at the highest-leverage contributions to humanity throughout history, a disproportionate number of them come from people who weren’t “appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self sufficiency” (typically without getting anything for their trouble beyond satisfying their own curiosity). So if all you care about is some kind of personal benefit, then someone (often a teacher) nurturing and encouraging those people has been directly responsible for a significant part of your material well being.

But many of us recognize humans as ends in themselves, rather than tools for our personal aggrandizement or slaves to the collective.

I don't think it's psychopathic or fascist to expect that individuals be able to sustain themselves. Nor do I believe it's right to enslave the collective in order to provide a cushion on which those who fail to do so may land. I don't think it just to mandate the protection of people from the full consequences of their own misfortune, failure, or inadequacy. This is the domain of (voluntary) charity.

If you take a harder look at the disproportionate contributors you mention, you'll find that they were motivated to persist at problems for very long hours, often for many years without respite, and for very little reward beyond satisfying their own impulses. None of this indicates poor work ethic, or a reluctance to take responsibility for one's own actions and their consequences.

Individuals can sustain themselves without needing to be forced to spend their entire childhoods attending educational institutions.

There is proof of this everywhere. The vast majority of humans throughout history never engaged in such a system, and plenty of contemporary humans don't either.

What is your ideology?

> The vast majority of humans throughout history never engaged in such a system

It's true, in previous eras children were put straight to work as soon as they were useful. This has been true in every agrarian society across all cultures. Society increased in complexity to the point that it's quite hard to become an independent adult if you go straight to work as a young child, hence the need for an education. However the goal has always been the same: condition yourself (skills, mindset, habits, behaviour, etc.) as required to become a functional, independent contributor to society.

What is new and unusual is the idea that children should have a "childhood" of recreation, protected from the realities of work and life.

Attending an educational institution as a child is much preferable to working on a farm, or in a mine, don't you think?

I don’t know, it is entirely different to sort of become an addict of a specific problem until you solve it vs the day-to-day’s life work addict.

There are plenty of geniuses who did terribly in work/academia, etc, or who were literally outcasts from society.

Children are agents. And children / adults aren't a binary thing, they progress along a spectrum and if we never give them the ability to make their own choices how on earth do we expect them to be independent adults?

Why do we need non-conformists? I don't care about what you need or what society needs. You lack compassion for the individual.

They aren't hurting anyone by choosing a different life path. They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.

> Children are agents

Not really? They don't get to make their own decisions about any meaningful aspect of their lives, and can be lawfully imprisoned, punished, and controlled by their parents. Children have just a few more rights than pets. This has been true for all of history.

> And children / adults aren't a binary thing

Yes, they are. Off the top of my head: once you are legally able to make and be held responsible for your own decisions, can't be punitively confined against your will without due process, are able to enter into legal agreements, and do not need a guardian, you are an adult. Until then, you are a child. These things normally happen around the age of majority, which is 18 in most places [1].

I'm not suggesting that children never be given the opportunity to make their own choices, quite the opposite in fact. I'm suggesting that children be conditioned to the realities of work and life from an early age. The capability to tolerate dull, monotonous, boring work is essential to accomplish just about anything. This is the skill of delaying gratification, and its importance can hardly be overstated.

> They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.

Just how much education do you think is optional to "survive in the world just fine"? Literacy? Numeracy?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shawn

> Why do we need these, exactly? What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?

What the fuck is wrong with you?

In loud stage whisper: He's a 'libertarian'

Doesn't sound libertarian at all. Most libertarians hate the modern education system and hate the fact that we treat children like slaves.

Libertarians are all about individuals making their own choices regardless of whether or not that's the optimal outcome for society as a whole.

This dude is the opposite, a total collectivist.

We're on a forum called "Hacker News". Would you consider hackers to fit better into the conformist or non-conformist category?

Most hackers nowadays are extremely conformist, particularly within the SV startup culture from which Hacker News originates.

So, you're saying that school is an unpaid bullshit job and ought to remain that way? Why do you think that's acceptable? It's almost as if you want today's kids to suffer the same way that we had to when we were their age.

The teacher only has so much attention to give for a class of 20+ students. And if a student doesn’t get enough attention they tend to ask for more.

> It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting

Murder, rape, and eating your children is natural. That's not a good justification. Perhaps there is a way to help children rise above these base instincts instead of giving into them?

You think 6-year-olds not paying attention to a boring classroom is comparable to rape and cannibalism?

No, I think "it's natural" is a bad defense of both.

Trying to prevent small children from squirming and getting distracted when they are bored and don’t have enough active outlet for their energy is pretty well impossible. Even harder if the kids don’t get enough sleep, aren’t eating enough or healthily enough, have to deal with strong emotional challenges at home, etc. Kids are on varied biological rhythms, and some times a kid is in a place where they simply do not have the physical capacity to sit and focus.

You don't need to make sure kids stay 100% still and focused 100% of the time. But you should reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. You should build up a work ethic and the ability to be productive.

The idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible, or that we should excuse harmful behavior if the kid was bored / upset, is just silly. It only sets the kids up to fail; to live a life where they can't focus on tasks and they lash out whenever they are in a bad mood.

> you should reward good behavior and punish bad behavior

In general, you should not impose external rewards and punishments in education, to the extent possible. They block students’ focus, creativity, and problem solving, and undermine learning, literally interfering with memory formation.

This is a subject of incredible amounts of research in psychology and education, and has been demonstrated over and over in a wide variety of contexts.

> idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible

Nobody ever suggested this. Only that class should be engaging and teachers should try to earn students’ attention instead of demanding it under threat.

> excuse harmful behavior [...] sets the kids up to fail

Nobody ever suggested “excusing harmful behavior”.

The proposal was that students who are wiggly or have trouble focusing should be thrown out of class because it is a “waste” for good teachers to teach them. I think this would be harmful, would be failing those students, and misses the point of education.

What sets kids up to fail is being treated as though they are worthless or being told so. Having access to good teachers does not “set kids up to fail”.

> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?

Both “gifted” (well prepared) and “remedial” (poorly prepared) students benefit dramatically from expert teaching. The well prepared students can continue to progress very quickly through challenging material. The poorly prepared students can get help finding and correcting their weaknesses and misconceptions, and practicing underdeveloped prerequisite skills.

The ideal is for everyone to get significant weekly 1:1 attention from a dedicated tutor/coach, who can help the student to deliberately practice. This significantly outperforms even the best classroom, and students with direct coaching improve probably 2–3 times faster than students without. Essentially all world-class performers in competitive events (sport, music, chess, math contests, ...) have significant amounts of 1:1 coaching.

Unfortunately as a society we don’t have the budget/manpower to provide hours per week of skilled tutoring for every student for every subject. So we try our best to balance available resources with students’/society’s needs.

It’s disingenuous to try to call it well prepared vs poorly prepared. Some people are just naturally more academically gifted

Take almost any “academically gifted” student and start looking into their biography, and you’ll find a shitload of preparation. As a general rule (to which, sure, you can find rare exceptions if you really hunt) the more “gifted” the student, the more hands-on help and attention from experts they had. Even for those without significant expert help, the “gifted” students are the ones who spent a ton more time thinking about the subject than their peers for whatever reason. The international math olympiad winners I took courses with in college were incredibly well prepared, and while clever and hard working, are by no means superhuman.

Preparation is not the only relevant factor that goes into what gets called academic “giftedness”, but it’s the vast majority of it.

It’s similar for other fields. Nobody can compete in sport at a world-class level nowadays without significant amounts of excellent coaching. Etc.

For instance, the reason my kid learned to read before he was 4 and most of his peers did not is because we spent many hundreds of hours reading books together aloud, and maybe 50 hours over 6 months on direct instruction in reading per se. Not because he’s biologically any different than his peers. The reason he’s really good at making stuff out of Legos is that he really likes it and spends hours per week doing it, not because he’s some kind of Lego prodigy. He’s not particularly skilled at drawing or dancing or playing the guitar or sewing, because those are things he did not practice very much yet.

Passion for a subject can indeed propel you far ahead of your peers in that subject, but intelligence is what allows passion to continue and grow. No matter how much time you spend preparing the dumb kids they will struggle with difficult(or often easy) subjects and get frustrated - because of this passion will never develop, and it’s entirely reasonable to not become passionate about something you’re not capable of doing well at. I was a very smart kid, although very far from a genius. My parents were young earth creationists who knew nothing about science or computers and shielded me from science because of themes like evolution. The town I grew up in was in poor rural TX, so my teachers barely knew more. I certainly wasn’t well prepared to understand science, but yet I developed a passion for that and computer programming and became a voracious reader of everything I could find on it in the school library, acquiring knowledge far beyond my grade level. The less smart but wealthier and better prepared kids I knew growing up never caught up to me.

> developed a passion for that and computer programming and became a voracious reader of everything I could find on it in the school library, acquiring knowledge far beyond my grade level

This is a huge amount of “preparation”, as far as I am concerned. It’s not as effective as working with an expert tutor/coach, but it still adds up over time. (And good job preparing yourself without much help!)

The wealthier kids in your town who spent their time on whatever else were less well prepared than you (academically; they might have been better prepared for schmoozing or playing sports or whatever).

But if you had wanted to be a child prodigy or world-class competitor in something as a teenager, you likely would have needed significant expert help.

> No matter how much time you spend preparing the dumb kids they will struggle

If the kids are dramatically struggling, they are likely significantly under-prepared for the work they are expected to do. But it is not true that no matter how much time you spend you cannot make a difference. Kids testing in the 10th percentile can if tutored 1:1 for a year or two surpass the 80th percentile kids taught in an ordinary class. Regular 1:1 tutoring is extraordinarily much better than other methods of instruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

This is a fundamental aspect of human life that most people do not understand. My kids all walked long before their first birthdays. Why? For the same reason my lower back hurt so much before they turned 1. I held their hands and we practiced walking for hours upon hours.

Mozart wrote his first symphony at 8. He was also playing piano for courteseans at age 3. All at the behest of his father, to support the family. If you, you personally, played piano professionally for the next ~5 years, do you think you could write a quick and dirty symphony? Of course you could.

Anyways I find this basic truth to be incredibly liberating and hopeful. There really aren't any superhumans, just people who've spent more time playing guitar, learning about + coding , racing motorcycles etc. (there are but statistically irrelevant to me)

> For the same reason my lower back hurt so much before they turned 1. I held their hands and we practiced walking for hours upon hours.

I’m sorry to call you out on this but that is very much not a good thing to do. The mind is much more plastic so one can probably start teaching very advanced subject to their child soon, but the body does need plenty of support strength before it will be able to hold itself up, and holding hands is shown to not be too good for the child. Nonetheless, not ideal is far from harmful, so don’t worry, I’m sure they are wonderful children.

For any parents who want to help their small kids’ balance, let me recommend holding them by the hips for a few minutes at a time starting from about 5 months, instead of holding them by the armpits.

If you hold them from the top they will be passively stable, but if you hold them from the bottom they will need to actively stabilize themselves using their back/abdominal muscles. If you start with just 1 joint they need to stabilize, they figure it out reasonably quickly. (Babies start out surprisingly strong; what they completely lack is coordination.)

After about a month of that, you can carry them around on your shoulders and they will be able to hold up their torso and stay upright. This is great core strength/balance training, while also being a lot more convenient than any other way of transporting a baby, for a moderately healthy parent.

> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?

What outcome are you seeking from schooling? The answer to that determines which student needs the better teacher, in order to achieve the desired outcome.

>Seems like the obvious outcome would be a lot more students who struggle, necessitating a slower track for them.

That is not obvious to me. It is a known psychological phenomenon that children will meet external expectations, high or low. In sports it's commonly referred to as playing up or down to your opponent. Other countries have much higher standards and have not seen an explosion in children struggling. What is most likely to happen is... nothing. The percentage of kids exceeding and struggling will stay largely the same.

> So what happens when we decide "everyone is gifted"

This doesn't seem to be much of a problem in countries like Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, etc. which have much tougher cirricula for their average students than the average American public school. And before someone makes the funding argument, the US pays about double the cost of education that Japan does for dismal results.

Equity isn’t a bullshit goal.

As is typical, the concept get confused because one assumes that gifted programs correctly track students based primarily on ability, whereas in my personal experience and looking at the data, they primarily track students based on socioeconomic status.

It’s not about denying that some students have the ability to excel in subjects in comparison to their peers. The question is whether or not the current system actually achieves it’s stated goals.

Equity of opportunity is acceptable. Equity of outcome is a bullshit goal.

Equality of outcome is not the goal of equity. That’s a straw man argument created by its detractors.

People point out disparities as evidence that there aren’t equal opportunities in society.

The conservative position is simply to assert that equality of opportunity exists cuz America, and if you question that you are a communist who just wants everyone to be the same.

I disagree its a strawman argument. Its a clear delineation. Trying to get all kids to successfully complete gifted programs is a very challenging if not impossible goal. Not all kids will be successful in gifted programs. However, Equality of opportunity states that any kids its appropriate for have access. Its an important distinction. Now, its arguable that certain sub-cultures within America make success in school or gifted programming challenging (parents who don't trust schools, parents who don't engage in school for various reasons).

I don’t have a problem with gifted programs in principle, but it’s also fair to ask how they are working in practice.

People in this thread are up in arms about the principle, but the reason that they are being challenged is based on how they operate in practice.

Do all children have equal access? Nominally, maybe. But that’s de facto not the case.

no, they closed the gifted programs in the urban school system I attended, at that time, right after Music Education. The emphasis went to "no child left behind" whatever that is, sports programs, armed guards (yes), and at high school, loans and grants for college admission. Advanced placement ? most gifted kids and almost every single girl from my neighborhood, disappeared in a blink at grade 8.

not only is it entirely fair to ask how they work in practice, but we must do so. Do all children have equal access? maybe is your answer. The solution to get more access isn't to eliminate it. Its to educate parents in groups who "should" be in it but aren't.

Sure, larger socioeconomic problems will definitely turn up in statistics, because it turns out that being gifted heavily relies on parental model, and many many other things. Even a very motivated child will fail to partake in such a problem if he/she has serious problems at home, e.g. being beaten, having to work to support the family, etc.

But I feel it is very unfair, outright evil to take away an opportunity from gifted people (both from privileged families and a few from very bad families that would have been lifted up by said programs!! The aforementioned example could perhaps break the cycle and get a much much better life than any of his/her relatives) on the basis that the statistics on the enrolled will be biased. It is not the task of such a small-scale program to solve a huge, complex problem that probably can only be solved in decades if ever.

I'm all for equity of opportunity. However, the people California has chosen to set our curriculum are explicitly working toward equality of outcome.

They say they don't believe that any children are more talented than any other children, and are advocating eliminating standard "advanced" courses, such as calculus, from the high school curriculum. The only classes that would be available in their proposal are the current remedial math track.

I think you've confused "straw man argument created by its detractors" with "the actual concrete plan being established by its proponents".

The (successful) proponents of equity based teaching are so far outside the mainstream that it's an honest mistake. (I made it, and now I'm furious.)

I’m not intimately familiar with all of the details of what is being advocated in California. All I can speak to is my perspective on what equity is and how I think it should be applied.

People who disagree with the basic concepts around equity tend to view the entire discourse as a monolith, but people are actually allowed to have different opinions on what is actually equitable and what isn’t.

Personally I wouldn’t support doing away with advanced math courses either. But just because someone does that in the name of equity, doesn’t mean I think equity itself is bad. I’m able to separate the two.

> Equality of outcome is not the goal of equity.

They actually say that it is - have you seen the famous comic where the three guys are watching the baseball game but the short guy can't see through the fence? They literally are saying the equity of outcome is the beginning and the end of their goals.

There's different versions of that meme, so please make sure you know which one you're arguing about.

Edit: a long take on all the variations, by the meme's originator! https://medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-mem...

We clearly have different interpretations of that metaphor.

The point is to demonstrate agency over the systems we create. What’s the flip side of that scenario? People aren’t given stools to stand on and tall people get to watch while short people don’t? Who built the fence? Why is it that height? Why aren’t there bleachers?

Is just sitting there doing nothing equality of opportunity somehow?

That cartoon literally ends with the resolution of all three heads being at the same height. It's depicting the equality of their outcomes. And it's hailing it as the goal to be achieved. The point isn't that stools are handed out demonstrating agency, but that they're handed out with the goal of outcome equality.

I think the outcome is that they all get to watch the game. I guess you can call that "equality of outcomes".

I think reading "head height" as the outcome, is a very short-sighted interpretation.

Like anything else, interpretation has nuance and you could read it both ways. On HN we're supposed to address "the strongest possible interpretation" in our comments, so I would try to apply that principle here as well...

What’s the parallel of that metaphor wherein only equality of opportunity is sought, though?

The fence is 100 feet high and requires climbing an arduous ladder to see over it. One of the people decides not to climb it.

Equity of outcome can be a worthwhile goal if that outcome is a boolean opportunity for example, as in case of the cartoon. Also, setting the boolean to the worse value for everyone is not a morally good solution in my opinion - that way noone will see the game.

> People point out disparities as evidence that there aren’t equal opportunities

That’s a very low bar if you take population level disparities and assume it’s a lack of equity causing this. You’re talking about having a deep understanding of incredibly complex systems layered on top of one another.

Equality of opportunity is never possible. We’re all born with different genetics. Anything less is just arbitrary line drawing as to what’s ok and what isn’t (ie tribalism).

> That’s a very low bar if you take population level disparities and assume it’s a lack of equity causing this

Are racial disparities socially determined or not?

Thomas Sowell has a great book on the subject called Discrimination and Disparities. There are interviews where he goes over the high-level ideas in the book if you don't have time to read it, but the basic punchline is that this: no two populations have ever been equal, and only sometimes is that because of some form of oppression or because of genetic differences. There are a multitude of cultural and environmental differences that cause disparate outcomes, and unless equality of outcome is your goal those differences shouldn't bother you.

> unless equality of outcome is your goal those differences shouldn't bother you.

I’m sorry, but this simply doesn’t follow.

The premise: that there are a multitude of things that lead to to disparities (even just random chance). If disparities are random then yes, that’s not a problem I’m going to get tussled up about.

But it’s not a matter of “it could be anything”. We have strong evidence that it is oppression, and when that is the case, that I do have reason to care about, and it’s about opportunity not outcome.

If it is actually oppression, then yes that is a valid reason to be concerned.

But let's be clear, you just claimed that the mere existence of disparities is evidence of oppression. That only follows if group outcomes would be equal in the absence of oppression, but that is a completely invalid assumption that has no basis in historical fact.

I claimed that disparities are evidence, not that they are proof.

It’s not nor us it ever been about the disparities alone, but the disparities in conjunction with the long history of racial oppression in America. People are alive today who grew up under Jim Crow. People are alive today who were threatened with violence for attending elementary school.

I didn't say you claimed it was proof. I said "evidence" and I think that as a matter of evidence it is pretty weak.

Regardless, in practice people do treat it as proof. Before I move on to the other arguments supporting oppression as an explanation I want to drive home that point: there is hardly ever a serious attempt to rule out other possible explanations for disparities, and to suggest that anything other than racism/oppression might explain those differences opens one up to accusations of racism.

Merely referencing Jim Crow is not enough. It ignores both all the ways in which Jim Crow was ineffective at its aims at the time, as well as the seismic cultural and legal changes that have occurred within the intervening years.

It also fails to account for the success of various other minorities (Jews, Nigerians, descendants of Caribbean slaves, various Asian groups) - many of whom also have faced very serious oppression (including outright attempts at elimination) in the very recent past.

None of this is to say that racism does not occur, but I have yet to see a (non-circular) causal explanation for how that can account for a significant amount of present disparities.

I'm not clear why I shouldn't care that there are differences due to oppression?

Well, for the oppressor, sure, but why should the oppressed accept it?

I didn't say you shouldn't care about differences due to oppression.

I said that there are differences due to things other than oppression, and that those aren't a problem unless you think equality of outcome should be goal

No, differences in learning ability are largely heritable. Self-identified racial groups vary in statistical distribution of their mental abilities. I think generally in the West the chief cause of differing group outcomes on mental tasks is differing learning abilities.

What does "socially determined" mean, and what are the alternatives?

The best analogy I can think of is sports.

In sports, the rules are whatever we say they are, that’s the part that’s socially determined. Lebron James is a amazing basketball player, due to a combination of his genetics and his hard work. But there’s a parallel reality wherein basketball was never invented. And people enjoy sports like horse racing or marathon running, where he would never be able to be world class given his frame. What sports are popular is based on culture and happenstance, and up to the whims of society, not genetics or hard work of individuals.

For several hundred years, America literally constructed a society where it was decided that white people were considered more valuable than black people. That had nothing to do with what individual black people did, those were just the rules of the game.

You may say “but that’s not how it is anymore”, and yes things have certainly changed. But at the same time, there are people who are alive today who weren’t allowed to attend the same schools as whites, weren’t allowed to drink from the same fountains as whites, etc.

The argument that is being made, is that society continues to favor people based upon the color of their skin. Certainly, individual talents and hard work contribute to one’s place in life, but that does not mean that the playing field is level.

Does social determination include culture? That's a greater determinant of outcomes than skin color, as the example of outcomes between African Americans and Nigerian immigrants indicates.

To be very clear about it, this is all the more impressive because Nigeria is, by and large, still a pre-industrial society. The differences in basic worldview and outlook (including attitudes towards education) brought by industrialization and modern economic development (often misattributed to "Whiteness" in divisive political rhetoric) are absolutely huge and easily overwhelm any model where "skin color" or "genetics" exogenously determine these outcomes. This is easily ascertained by looking at how individual countries in the modern West industrialized over time and went through these very changes in culture. The skin color of English lower classes did not change much from the 17th to the mid-19th century, but their culture absolutely did.

Why do we immediately assume that that's "impressive" and not "telling"? Isn't that assumption plain old American/Western exceptionalism?

Perhaps the hypotheses should be "maybe there is something in Nigerian/pre-industrial culture that allows children to thrive more than in American/industrialized culture"?

Culture is socially determined in the sense that culture is simply the collective actions and decisions that a group of people make.

Reading the intent behind that statement, though, that Nigerians have succeeded in America despite any hinderances they may have faced due to wider societies treatment of black people, that would be somewhat outside of the framework of what I am talking about.

The construction here is, do Black Americans have worse outcomes, on average, because of themselves, or because of societies treatment of them. Culture would fall into the bucket of “they are the reason for their own problems”.

Obviously Nigerians do well on average, but they are also a small fraction of the population. Pointing to Nigerians and saying that race isn’t a contributing factor is making an argument after having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument, how do Nigerians compare to the top cohort of white Americans based on ethnicity or whatever? Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?

> do Black Americans have worse outcomes […]

Black Americans do not have worse outcomes.

Specifically, given the distribution of individuals in the group "Black Americans" across all socially relevant dimensions—including culture—individual Black Americans have identical* outcomes to similarly-situated individuals of every other group in America including Whites, Asians, etc.

As you would expect in a country with equal opportunity for all, both legally and culturally.

*Black Americans actually do better than expected because there's an enormous cultural push to promote Black Americans whenever possible—college admissions, management, etc. not to mention Black Americans being so over-represented in media that most Americans think the country is around 40% Black whereas the actual number is ~13%, i.e. they're off by a factor of 3.

Rewriting "culture" as "they are the reason for their own problems” seems rather uncharitable, and unhelpful to the discussion. Why are you doing that, given that it's not adding any clarity?

> having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument

Well, why are they a statistical outlier? If you ask Nigerians, they'll tend to credit their culture. Do you have a different explanation?

> Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?

I suppose it's more possible that they should be doing much worse than they are, because of the racial barriers.

> Rewriting "culture" as "they are the reason for their own problems” seems rather uncharitable, and unhelpful to the discussion. Why are you doing that, given that it's not adding any clarity?

I was under the impression that it did add clarity, so I find your question odd.

What would be the charitable interpretation of the statement “socioeconomic disparities between black Americans and white Americans are due to their respective cultures”?

I mean, there's nothing "problematic" about having a different culture, with different values. There's also nothing surprising about the fact that different cultures and values produce people vastly differently suited to social and economic success. I don't see any issue with these facts in combination, nor do I need to reach for "marginalization" or racism to explain any of this.

No one ever suggested that it was problematic that people have different cultures, or even that it’s bad to acknowledge that black culture is different from white culture, quite the contrary.

What’s problematic is the degree to which people can’t even entertain the idea that racism is the primary driver of these disparities, rather than things that are specific to POC, such a culture or genetics, especially given the clear and obvious precedent that is firmly established within this country.

What is a reach, is your reaction to this suggestion.

The research substantiates this thesis though. As cited variously in grandparent threads, domestic environment and culture are the main predictive factors of academic and economic outcomes. Poor kids who study do much better than rich kids who don't.

We no longer deny people opportunities based on their race. If your SAT score is high, you'll be admitted anywhere you want. If you study hard, your score will be high. The reach is constructing the SAT, or any other similar test, as racist because the scores are not evenly distributed by race.

> What’s problematic is the degree to which people can’t even entertain the idea that racism is the primary driver of these disparities

The reason why many people cannot accept this is because many other groups experienced problems from racism as well, but they were eventually able to overcome these barriers. Moreover, the system has already changed to be more accommodating, maybe even putting most of their focus and resources on the bottom 20% of students at the expense of everyone else. Yet, we still have people stating that it’s still unfair.

I believe they are social, but I also believe it is very much not the task of a school program to solve racial disparities that are multi-generational and perhaps one of the most complex issues in the US. It is the equivalent of a hospital closing down because they can’t save everyone.

Can something be sticky to a race but not genetic?

Obviously yes.

Socioeconomic status tracks with academic ability because more well off parents are more likely to read to their kids, participate in their education, and get them help when they need it. It’s a lot like how being tall tracks with being in the NBA, it isn’t a requirement but it sure helps.

One of the hardest pills for education policy advocates to swallow is how important parental involvement is. Instead of bitching about equity, people should be hammering parents to be more involved and actively, daily, participate in their child’s education.

> people should be hammering parents to be more involved and actively, daily, participate in their child’s education.

And people shouldn't complain about the cost of gas, they should just buy EVs. The fact is, what you're asking for is really expensive. I imagine that the number of parents who would love to be reading to their kids or helping with homework but instead are working to feed and shelter them are quite high. In the US, I'd guess it's the millions or even tens of millions.

My parents' involvement in my schooling was when I'd get good grades, they'd take me out for ice cream.

(People in those days didn't eat candy, cookies and desserts every day like today.)

>Socioeconomic status tracks with academic ability...

Wow. Wrong answer.

Socioeconomic status tracks with academic ability because wealthy people are smarter then poor people and their offspring do better because academic ability is genetic!

Gifted programs track students, accidental or not, based on prerequisites. If the circumstances required to allow a student to excel at study are not met, it doesn't matter what they look like or what their economic status is.

Among the prerequisites for excelling at study are a stable home life and parents (or guardians) that value education. If the kids don't have that, they aren't going to do well.

Historically, at least in the United States, one of the means of selecting for "parents who value education" was those parents scraping everything they had to move to a school district that provided a better education.

In other countries, this was sometimes achieved by scoring students into tiered schools. The higher your score, the better the school you got to go to. High-achieving students landed in a peer group of like-minded students that were fellow high-achievers and school was difficult.

Granted, that last solution was more typical of Asian education than Western education, and in some parts of Asia (China, for example) they have slipped into the location-based schooling to worse results.

Aiming for equity with the assumption that we just need to teach harder is foolish. Aiming for equity in the form of outcomes is equally foolish, because again, various outcomes have various hard prerequisites that, if missing, no amount of effort can overcome.

Solving for the prerequisites, not by attempting to ignore them, but by finding ways to help supply them can be far more productive in the long run. But it really starts with the values of the parents.

I think your point comes down to whether or not you believe we’re all blank slates. If yes, then what you says makes sense. If no, then we would expect ability to somewhat dictate socioeconomic status.

Ability does affect socioeconomic status, I’m not disputing that.

The question in a school context, though, is whether socioeconomic status for children determines ability.

As I stated in my original list, what I observed was that gifted classes were filled with children from high social status backgrounds. They certainly didn’t create the conditions for their socioeconomic status, their inherited it.

What's your point? That if a rich parent teaches their kid to read, the fair solution is for the school to unteach the kid, to level the playing field?

I would imagine that the people who are pushing for more equitable systems would argue that would should give people who lack that kind of parental support more help.

Why should a child suffer simply because they were born into a less supportive family environment?

No child should suffer, and I think everyone can very easily agree on that point. But children born into a less supportive family environment are going to suffer for it. So maybe we should focus more energy on figuring out why less supportive family environments exist in the first place, and work on fixing those issues?

I don't know. I'm no expert and definitely don't have the answers.

What if equal access to educational opportunities is a contribution to the problem of less supportive families? Hence why we are having this conversation.

Are you saying we need to genetically level the playing field? It makes logical sense but it’s not a world I want to live in.

I certainly don’t believe in genetically engineering away differences, to answer your question directly.

But it begs the question, do you believe that racial disparities are primarily due to social factors or genetic ones? Because the whole point of equity is that advocates are arguing that it’s due to social factors, and that we should seek to change that.

Equity is a bullshit copout because actual equality is hard. Infinite can kicking while the actual socioeconomic problems go unsolved.

What if socioeconomic status is heavily correlated with ability?

We know IQ is highly predictive of socioeconomic status. We know that IQ is almost entirely heritable barring things like nutrient deficiencies and disease.

So why would it be surprising to see that kids of higher economic status people are themselves more able than kids of impoverished people?

The state I occupy doesn't allow accelerated programs for students to help them advance to a higher level math than originally projected, they only allow it for students to catch up. This is the opposite of what the previous state I lived in which allowed motivated students to advance, but they're also turning gifted programs into lotteries versus achievement.

My daughter is in the high school math club, so she frequently talks with math teachers and they reveal what state or county school districts are intending for future high school students. Earlier this week, a teacher was ranting to the club about new guideline goals that either the state/county was pushing, that all (most) incoming 9th graders take Algebra 1.

I understand they're attempting to narrow the achievement bandwidth in public schools on the basis of race, but this appears to be creating societal inefficiencies and decreasing equity overall. Sort of like, how someone could have a PhD in physics and working as a middle school science teacher, they'd effectively be underemployed or underutilized in society due to lack of demand for particle physicists; however, unlike limited particle physicist positions, in the students case, they don't have to be limited or underachieving in classes. Further, the additional problem this push for public school equity is decreasing equity, without imposing the same limitations on private school, homeschool, or charter school students, this mechanism is increasing the divide between the haves and have-nots. Either lens you evaluate this from, either equity or utilitarian perspective, this is a poorly executed plan that isn't going to achieve success in equity; unless, equity strictly means racial categories and doesn't include wealth/income inequality.

> Earlier this week, a teacher was ranting to the club about new guideline goals that either the state/county was pushing, that all (most) incoming 9th graders take Algebra 1.

I hate to say it, but Algebra 1 by 9th grade is NOT a very high bar. In my area, the majority of students should be studying algebra no later than this. IMO, if most of the students aren't making it this far, something is wrong in the system.

Maybe the bottom 20% shouldn't, but talking about algebra 1 in 9th grade like it's a stretch goal is a danger sign to me.

> Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?

America keeps conflating equity for equality.

The conflation is a very recent intellectual phenomena.

I think it is part of an intentional replacement, the conflation is only temporary in order to muddy the waters and diminish opposition.

Why intellectual? It seems more political to me (both in the sense of wanting to change policy and wanting to acquire power)

Certainly true - but the advocacy of the philosophical distinction and its promotion originates from various intellectuals. I wish it would go back to where it came from, but I see that we may be stuck with it for quite a while.

> but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer

The most advanced students will find one way or another to educate themselves. I think our school systems should focus on the middle: the students who could realize their full potential if they are sufficiently challenged. They are the group that do not always get STEM naturally but can eventually get it if pushed enough with the right material and exercises. Watering down curriculum means the students in the middle would lose the chance to truly grow, or their parents resort to tutoring and we get back to the discussion of how social-economic status matters in education.

What if those most advanced students don't have rich connected parents to expose them to educational opportunities?

If schooling doesn't matter for the brightest students, why does everyone think Caltech is such a great school?

Fair question. My assumption is that the US schools offer students enough exposure and resources of advanced topics, to the point that top students will find their way. For instance, libraries, vast resources on the internet, community colleges, programs with local universities, and etc.

The assumption can be challenged, of course.

Case in point, this problem on Stackexchange was from a high-school homework. I think it's advanced enough for students: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/711174/calculati...

Getting out of doing the "boring busywork" is part of the advantage of being in the gifted class too though. Just doing both sets of work isn't a solution.

It is for grad school. Nobody in academia cares if you went there for undergrad.

As someone who didn't grow up in the American school system, I am a bit surprised that Algebra I in the 8th grade is considered "gifted education". If Algebra I is about solving linear equations with unknown variables, I am pretty sure I was taught this much earlier than 8th grade as part of the standard curriculum. But maybe this means something different in the United States.

Algebra I also generally includes systems of (2 or 3) linear equations, quadratics (different equation forms, factoring, graphing, solving) and basic exponential functions (although usually just recognizing them and filling in Ce^rt).

Ah makes sense then. I remember seeing stuff like 3x+2=11 around the 4th grade, but definitely no quadratics or graphing functions until much later. Maybe the order the information is presented is just different and it doesn’t make sense to compare.

i dont think so, thats all algebra 2

That is not my experience. Systems of 2 linear equations ("intersecting lines") and quadratics were definitely part of Algebra I (and maybe even pre-Algebra).

I'm 95+% sure that basic exponentiation was also part of Algebra I.

It's actually not. It's not clear from the way the article is written, but he's talking about two different things, both of which various reform bodies have proposed eliminating. The first is "gifted and talented education" programs, which involve additional coursework and activities on top of normal schooling. I'm not going to claim I remember super well what we did at this point, but I do remember learning how to make donuts from scratch, holding mock trials, learning computer-aided design at a time the regular school system didn't even have computers yet, and taking the SAT in 6th grade. All of these happened either after school or in the summer.

The other thing is related to tracking. That is where Algebra comes in. Not all students will take it at the same time. Instead, students are segregated into separate tracks, one of which will start with Algebra in middle school and eventually end up taking Calculus by the end of high school. The other won't get to Algebra until high school and will never take Calculus at all.

These are separate phenomena, but the author here is drawing an analogy between the reasons given for eliminating both GATE programs and educational tracking systems (as in, both are seen as being racially biased).

No that's about right. People hate math here largely because it's unbearably repetitive.

> raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable

The alternate view is that we should very much do this as a meaningful challenge to K-12 math teachers. People throughout the Western world, at all levels of underlying aptitude (whatever might be meant by that), manage to learn their basic intro to algebra in junior high. It's not rocket surgery, FFS!

> It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?

I disagree with this statement, especially at the level of arithmetic and basic algebra. While math "ability" is likely a bell curve I would wager that it is centered well above Algebra I, and whether a kid at that age is "Good" or "Bad" at math is much more mindset/perception.

Is math ability centered above Algebra I among 13 year olds, though? I would wager Algebra I is well above the center of the curve in that age group.

Math, chess, and music seem to be domains in which child prodigies are not infrequently found.

> Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?

Because this sentiment is exactly opposed to a dominant philosophical framework built upon the axiom that, because all people are exactly identical, any difference in outcome is necessarily the result of hidden power structures.

The replacement of “equality” with “equity” is a dead giveaway that you’re dealing with Marxism. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are American principles, but they are fading as equality of outcome is held up as the only acceptable standard.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an outspoken Soviet dissident, famously wrote: “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”

Much greater energy and intelligence is required to advocate for equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes, and much greater worldly experience is required to value equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes. It will always be easy for politicians to set people against each other and dilute the common good by pushing Marxism. It is the path of least effort and greatest personal return for low quality leaders.

> I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do

I went to school in Eastern Europe in the eighties. We had algebra (and separately geometry) since 7-th grade. Also physics, chemistry and biology. And it was an ordinary secondary school. Some kids were struggling, also depends on how good/bad the teacher was. But majority was coping with the load alright.

If you continue reading, the author seems to agree with you…

> My greatest concern? The admirable but demonstrably false notion that school systems can fully implement an “all kids are gifted” framework that attempts to address the issue of eliminating the need for specialized gifted programming.

Algebra I is right around what they should be able to grok.

When I went to high school, the expected path from Freshman year (9th grade) to Senior year (12th grade) was Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, MATH ELECTIVE (IIRC, that last could have been Trigonometry).

My middle school didn't have 8th grade Algebra I. But another middle school that fed the high school I went to did have it. And from what I remember, it was available to honor students as well as those in gifted programs.

So I don't agree that it should be mandated, that seems a step too far, but it's probably a good option to have for those who can handle it. And the number of students who can handle it is probably greater than the number who it is being offered to currently. So I don't agree with removing it entirely either.

At the very least it would be useful to offer supplements for the mathematically interested. If it's accredited we'll run into the same conversation but at least students will have access to more interesting material.

In my experience tutoring remedial math students just had a hole somewhere or never practiced. Once both of those were addressed (with lots of hard work) they passed just fine.

> Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?

Because that would be an admission that we can't just pile 30 students in the same class and in doing so would mean that we need more teachers and nobody wants to spend the money to do that.

Algebra 1 is a low bar for 8th grade. There isn’t any reason that shouldn’t be the standard expectation

I did my school in India and algebra is started in 8th grade along with geometry and proofs

Algebra I at 8th grade would have placed you a year behind when I was in school. 7th grade was Algrebra 1, Algebra 2 was 8th, Geometry was 9th (first year of highschool). 10th grade had Trig, 11th had pre-Calc, and Calculus was the final year.

I took Algebra 1 in 9th grade, and Algebra 2 and Geometry in the 10th grade. The 9th graders in my Algebra 2 class (who took Algebra 1 in 8th grade) had holes in their algebra background because middle school algebra is taught at a lower level than high school algebra. But I wasn't behind, for I took AP Calculus in 11th grade successfully because of a strong foundation from high school level algebra classes. However, I'm struggling with placement choices for own children as we speak.

Same here. This was in the mid 90's though. Not sure what it's like these days...

“…it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children.”

a definition of exclude is “deny (someone) access to or bar (someone) from a place, group, or privilege.”

no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that? “sorry, you’re not allowed to take this class; you’re black.” it’s like everyone who writes this lives in their mom’s basement and has never gone outside and thinks if they just make the boring and tired declaration that non-black/non-brown people are evil/racist, that it absolves them of every other sin they commit, like not caring about homeless people or the fact that everything they own is made by chinese children. in reality it accomplishes nothing except complacency and it helps the people raping the world continue their work of exploiting everyone.

>> “…it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children.”

> no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that?

A test for a gifted class that measures _knowledge_ rather than the _ability to learn_ will create an "elite" class full of students whose parents had them study the advanced topics. Even if they were not "good" at it. In this case high SES -> advanced knowledge -> good test scores -> elite class that excludes Black students primarily because the entrance test results are predicted by SES.

What you don't understand is that advanced classes have limited seats available compared to students who want them.

Not really. Any teacher qualified to teach HS math should be able to teach anything up to pre-Calc. If you have more Algebra students ahead of grade level than usual, you shift a teacher away from pre-Algebra and into teaching Algebra I.

That's not what the progressive complain about. But if that is true, the obvious solution is to create more spots.

If the same people wouldn't complain about disparate failure rates, I'd even support making them open enrollment, but weeding people out based on performance. But we all know, people would just claim the classes are racist.

And do they choose who gets into the class by race?

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