SFUSD's delay of algebra 1 has created a nightmare of workarounds
sfexaminer.com
sfexaminer.com
On an anecdotal basis, I went to an elite university in the US (mostly based on luck I think because I was a mediocre student) and there was an implicit expectation was that students seriously pursuing STEM would be starting their curriculum with multivariable calc or linear algebra as a freshmen since the single variable calc requirement would have been knocked out AP/IB credits. I've seen many of my international cohorts going even beyond. I genuinely worry that school systems such as SFUSD is doing a great disservice to its students and the society.
It's not that surprising, though, given that they've admitted their goal is equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. That's the only way to achieve the former.
If you know that the school's focus isn't on providing the best education possible to your kids, pull them out of that school immediately. If it is a public school (as it is in this case), complain to the school board, vote them out of office if they don't listen and support local efforts to expand school choice to rescue as many kids as possible from that failing public school system that has proven itself incapable of performing its primary function. Even if you get the school board to reverse insane decisions like banning algebra from middle schools, I still wouldn't trust any school system that would even consider doing such things to properly educate kids. I think it beyond a reasonable doubt that the dysfunction in the SF school district is much deeper than just this algebra ban.
Hard to do when you are poor, as many in SF are. SF seems like a rich city on the outside because it has an insane number of rich people but it also has dirt poor people who can’t do anything else.
And IN youth services, something like half of kids don't even go to school, and aren't homeschooled, so let's just forget asking about the quality of education.
The purpose of the state here is to sabotage your kids to their own benefit (in this case: make the education system easier to administrate, to underpay teachers, and above all else protect the power and jobs the system has). They will actively fight, to the point of using violence against you and your kids, if you reject the school system. Be very careful with doing this.
And if you do, you're probably better off pretending you're a fundamentalist christian, or better yet, muslim or hindu or ... objecting to sex ed classes. Seriously.
This is with parents and kids rejecting the school system being big exceptions. If ever 10% of kids become homeschooled, it will get a lot worse.
You'd think this wouldn't happen. Statistics are very clear, for example, that a LOT more kids are abused at school than at home. This is 100% the fault of the school system (failure to prevent personnel from plus failure to supervise kids, and please do not: school do traumatize kids, as everyone kind of knows and research confirms. It's just not something talked about), and has an obvious result: actions by youth services to make kids go to school increases child abuse, rather than decrease it. Likewise, it reduces schooling. You would think this strange if you assume their purpose is to protect kids, rather than their real purpose: to protect schools and the state from kids. If they actually intended to protect kids, obviously, they'd refuse to interfere in these cases.
And for the love of God, DO NOT ask help from youth services under any circumstances, but above all, don't ask them to help with your kid being traumatized or bullied at school. They will 100% blame the kid, refuse do take any action whatsoever in school, and most definitely will not make teachers pay attention and prevent bullying in the playground or anything like that.
We do a disservice to students in the US by treating Algebra/Calc as advanced math. Typically, American schools judge student math aptitude prior to algebra based on rote memorization of multiplication tables. Potentially with the added benefit of more rote memorization problems if one is in the honors curriculum. Aptitude for this type of problem does not directly translate into aptitude for higher math.
There is nothing particularly advanced about Algebra or Calculus. At most, it's a question of how much time one is willing and able to put into the subject. The fact that most American students do not exit high school with a functional knowledge of single variable calculus is purely an artifact of our curriculum priorities.
Does anyone have a recommendation here?
- Enrichment, visual, and speedy stuff to build intuition
- Proofy stuff to build rigor and reasoning ability
- Rote stuff to build arithmetic and symbolic manipulation skills
Ideally, it would be balanced this way from kindergarten to mid-undergrad. In practice, most students rotate through these.
You do not build intuition about things without having some amount of those things in your head which is memorization.
It’s a bit late for me now at 38, or at least it feels that way. I never took college math so HS-level algebra and geometry is my current level of understanding and sometimes it really hampers my programming ability.
For instance: this one teaches geometric proofs without mentioning the formalism, just letting you "unlock" the tools from a few "axiom" starter tools.
I stopped after discrete math and analysis-lite class but I wish I took more algorithm and higher level math classes to be better at my craft. It's also hard to take classes when you have competing priorities when you're 30+. I don't know your current situation but I feel like you can totally do it since you have renewed determination for learning.
It was only when I got into programming and it taught me math is actually much more than just meaningless letters and numbers that I finally came around to appreciating it. Programming taught me math is the language spoken by the universe, anything in this universe could be explained with math and it was truly a mindblowing paradigm shift.
Math education needs a complete redo from the ground up, it teaches nothing of value and only serves to mass-produce math-haters to the detriment of us all.
My eastern European Calc II professor once complained when the class wasn't immediately grasping Riemann Sums, "This is grade school calculus!"
Ended in shouting and tears. Every. Single. Time.
Plane Geometry track, on the other hand, was incredibly difficult for me to grasp in university.
Some school admins went nuts about letting a student take calculus in 10th grade because they didn't think it was doable. But I tested out of everything else. I was the first person in the history of the school to do this, only because I came from internationally having completed a trig course in 9th grade. In the US they wouldn't have allowed that in the first place, but here I was, having already done it, because I was given the opportunity outside the US.
I never saw myself having any special learning abilities, I was just moving onto the next thing to learn. I'm not any sort of prodigy, I just hated team sports and liked science and math, and spent lots of my extracurricular time learning about it.* I only moved faster in math because I put so many hours into studying it outside of school, not because I had any innate talent for it. It also made it more fun, because by learning ahead of class, I was learning for myself with much less pressure than learning for some stupid exam.
This "no child left behind" stuff is pure nonsense in the way they are implementing it.
*You see, I was previously growing up in Asia, where STEM is what the "cool kids" do.
As a practical matter though, I think that most people working in STEM fields — including engineers — would benefit more from learning statistics instead of calculus.
Funnily all my college math professors and their TAs were notoriously bad at arithmetic. They regularly joked that arithmetic isn’t real math so not a big deal.
My physics professor was an arithmetic magician though. The way he could take a ridiculously complex equation covering the whole blackboard and guesstimate the solution in his head was a marvel to behold.
Maybe. Or maybe it's useless but skill at it is a good measure of how conscientious those students were in high school (e.g. the extent to which they bothered to do their homework). Or any number of other possible explanations.
Memorizing is a directed effort to remember something. Remembering something as a side effect of some other task is not memorization.
On a tangent, I also feel like college math curriculum kinda don't make sense sometimes because you're hit with more computational heavy classes like calc and stats courses and then they break everything down and rebuild you with proof-based and analysis course at the beginning of your junior year.
I propose this often, and it inspires massive pushback every time.
Just give the teachers a $1,000 bonus for every such kid. Give the teachers a free hand in how to go about it. It'll be the cheapest and most effective boost to education you've ever seen.
1. Doing fine, no need to even pay attention to these kids. Now your top performers don't grow as much. 2. On the edge - where most attention will go 3. Meh - maybe a small percentage jump into category 2, where they will be cared about 4. Let them rot - most of the kids at the bottom will just be let to rot
In my career in public schools, I never noticed any efforts by the teachers to grow the top quartile. Or anyone else, for that matter. I attended 4 public schools in different locales. I was pretty much ignored by all the teachers.
I remember first grade. The teacher would set us up in a circle, each student reading one sentence. I found this very dull, and so read the rest of the book while the other students would grind out the sentences. The teacher then asked what the students guessed the next chapter was about. I of course piped up and dumped a summary of the rest of the book. The teacher was not amused, and curtly told me I was not allowed to read ahead of the class.
Nurtured, my adze.
Things have probably gotten worse since. For example, Seattle got rid of all their gifted tracks.
This is also fundamentally a better way to run a country. It really doesn't matter whether the bottom student in the school does or doesn't learn how to add two three-digit numbers by the time he graduates high school. But the top student learning more advanced topics could actually matter.
Private industry uses monetary incentives all the time. They do it because it works.
The carrot is placed exactly where we want it - results.
> you’ve given them an impossible task
I don't buy that for a minute. It's amazing how people find ways to accomplish impossible tasks when the right motivation is given.
You're making an assumption that the issue is that the teachers aren't putting in the effort.
Children are not simple input/output machines you program. A food insecure child with illiterate parents is going to require individualized and intensive resources, where a child who has Doctors for parents will generally show up to school with the knowledge they need.
Gamification of schools is a really great way to get teachers to completely ignore the development of most of the class to focus on one or two kids.
It's amazing that after the widely documented failure of NCLB, people are still promoting these 'work harder' systems.
Not at all. I'm looking at we aren't getting the desired results. We've tried everything but the obvious - pay for results.
> Gamification of schools is a really great way to get teachers to completely ignore the development of most of the class
Quite the opposite. The bonus is per student.
> It's amazing that after the widely documented failure of NCLB, people are still promoting these 'work harder' systems.
NCLB was nothing like I proposed. It's also not about working harder. It's about results.
What you're proposing is not "obvious" to anyone who actually studies education.
>Quite the opposite. The bonus is per student.
How familiar are you with education? Children develop at different paces but are grouped by age, at least until high school. Teachers don't just teach to get the kids to the next grade, or at least they shouldn't. Under what you are proposing, it doesn't make sense for a teacher to spend any time on a kid who is already going to go on to the next grade. There is no incentive to challenge them with harder books, or harder math problems.
Like, we literally already tried this with NCLB. The ended in the most obvious way possible. Teachers taught to get test results, standards were lowered to make it easier to move to the next grade, children who were excelling were ignored by their teachers who had to focus on children who were lagging.
The whole concept behind 'pay for results' is that you think teachers are not putting the effort they could in.
>NCLB was nothing like I proposed.
I encourage you to do some reading on this topic. You're literally just describing a positive incentive based NCLB. You have the same operating theory that the designers of NCLB had.
>It's also not about working harder. It's about results.
This is a meaningless statement.
I did. The NCLB Act has precisely ZERO monetary incentives for teachers. It has nothing in common with my proposal.
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/no-child-left-behind-...
It was obviously written and enacted by people who have no idea how incentives actually work.
They had negative monetary incentives for teachers and schools
>It was obviously written and enacted by people who have no idea how incentives actually work.
It was written by people who don't believe in public education. It's the literal concept you are pushing whether you recognize that or not.
Please provide a reference for negative monetary incentives for teachers.
> It's the literal concept you are pushing
What I'm "pushing" is aligning incentives with the desired results. A system that works every time it's tried.
Besides, if the public schools try my proposal, in no instance will the teachers or schools be worse off. There's literally nothing to lose by trying it.
Again, if you are interested, you should learn, literally, the basic of the subject on which you are speaking
https://www.nber.org/digest/feb15/impact-school-performance-...
You are at this point "debating" the foundation of NCLB, of which it doesn't seem like you know anything about.
> The bonus is per student.
Something something about Goodhart's Law and cobras...
But seriously, think about the second order effects of a powerful incentive like this.
At best, you will likely turn schools into test prep centers where average and advanced students are further ignored (an effect NCLB is already criticized for). Worse is that students able to pass the assessments will realize they are a valuable asset worth $1000 per class by simply failing their pretest and passing their posttest and will figure out ways to trade this with teachers for a cut of the profit or for a grade. Given that trading these test scores is purely positive sum for both students and teachers and that both students and teachers are poor, I think you will see a highly efficient market emerge. And why would schools or states care? They are all making more money!
All of your criticisms of the bonus pay proposal can be easily addressed, as the other ones in this thread.
For example, test the kids once a year at the end of the academic year. There goes the incentive to fail the pretest.
The advanced students can go into the gifted track, which can be operated differently.
> And why would schools or states care?
They don't care now. Proof: Seattle got rid of their gifted programs.
Think about this from the perspective of behavioral economics. Teaching is a profession with a high degree of intrinsic motivation given how stressful it is and how little it pays. Paying for performance on some test primarily rewards people who will game the test because that has a better cost/benefit ratio than heroically catching up kids who are performing several grade levels behind and have a difficult home life. Pay for performance tends to damage morale and increases attrition of intrinsically motivated workers (the kind you really want). This is what happens in controlled psychology experiments and it's what happened with NCLB.
How are you going to game this test:
1234
+5678
-----
?????
> it's what happened with NCLB
Once more, NCLB did *NOT* pay teachers for performance.
Plenty of ways. Teacher takes test for student, teacher re-scores test after student is finsihed, student is placed in an IEP that gives them unlimited time and "reading assistance" for test, failing students are placed in small classes and the class size of average students is expanded, failing students are moved from normal schoolwork to test prep, test questions are leaked/sold (we're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry here, right?).
I didn't make up any of these. This is already happening, and it has nothing to do with positive/negative incentive. It's about test-based education and the natural consequence of trying to control a complex system using a simple metric. It's why education theorists are loathed by teachers--because they swoop in with grand theories of how to fix everything without understanding the system and what is and isn't broken.
It's like an outsider thinking a reasonable way to pay a coder is by how many lines of code they write and how many bugs they fix. Or a civil engineer by how many bridges and roads they produce. Because outsiders don't understand the complexity of the system they think the solution must be simple. Since you seem invested in this idea I suggest you go get some input from teachers and see what they say. My guess is you will learn that the problems with public education is multifactorial and that there isn't a simple fix.
It is also insulting to teachers, as if they could have been doing a great job getting the kids to grade level, but chose not to because they weren't financially incentivized enough to do their job.
That's why you assign the kids to teachers at random, and an independent 3rd party does the assessment.
> It is also insulting to teachers
Only the incompetent ones. The competent ones will be happy to collect those thousand dollar checks.
P.S. Write me a check for $1,000, and I'll cheerfully endure your insults.
It may not be the same people though. If teaching in the US was a well-paid and highly respected profession it would presumably retain the most qualified teachers instead of driving them away due to having to find a living wage elsewhere.
This sounds like a way of funneling the best teachers into the already best schools in the richest areas, and making it impossible to employ good teachers in poorer regions -- unless you have a plan to fix this (I realise you've only given a tiny explanation).
That way, the best teachers would want to teach the low performers, because that's where the max bonuses would be.
I will admit I'm in the UK, not the US, but we only do huge standardised tests every 3 years or so, as they are very disruptive.
BTW, there's nothing secret about Asian students' performance. It's just that even the poor families would know to pool the limited resources to educate their kids.
>US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping.
This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]:
- Asian (556)
- White (531)
- Hispanic (481)
- Black (448)
- Mixed Race (501)
Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten.
The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi...
I'll even retract my point that the US maths education system isn't failing as a whole. When two demographics (30% of the country and growing) are being left behind by the system, then the system is failing as a whole. I really hope to see this change in the future.
What is “the system”? you mean to say the school is racist or unfair to black kids..hispanic kids? who is responsible in your opinion?
[1]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...
Your figure is apparently only for "current operations (e.g., staff, materials)" from 2018-19. But that doesn't reflect the already-absurd and ever-growing true cost of California's broken education system. And it isn't directly comparable to your figure for PAUSD's total budget.
"Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding noted above, total per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $15,654 in 2017-18 and $16,085 in 2018-19"[0]
"K-12 per-pupil funding [in 2022-23] totals $15,261 Proposition 98 General Fund—its highest level ever—and $20,855 per pupil when accounting for all funding sources."[1]
[0]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2018-19/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati... (p. 2)
[1]: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2022-23/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... (p. 3)
[2]: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... (pp. 11-16)
> States contribute a total of $357.0 billion to K-12 public education or $7,058 per student.
> Local governments contribute $347.4 billion total or $6,868 per student.
I’m assuming the “system” here is talking about the national education system, since that seems to be the topic of the immediately preceding posts. California and SFUD might be different.
The result is that one third of students (22,000) are now in private schools, the remainder (50,000) are in public schools. A lot of SF parents move out of the city 1) for a bigger house and 2) more reliable schooling solution 3) access to GATE programs.
There is a lot of value in being walking distance from your child's elementary school. In SF there is no guarantee where in the city your child will go to school.
None of which you can take for granted in the lower socioeconomic areas.
Maintaining government benefits quickly becomes a full time job because of arcane requirements written by uncaring people. Those in poverty might find themselves disincentivized from seeking higher paying work due to the “welfare cliff” where once the make over X amount, benefits start to go away. In some cases, if they suddenly make nothing (as if they’ve just lost a job or had hours cut), healthcare benefits are yanked away just when they need it most.
It’s very easy to see this as a moral failing, but if you’ve not lived through this situation, you cannot possibly understand the toll that poverty takes on you both physically and mentally. The truth, like with most things, is more complicated.
IF their parents filed a bunch of paperwork--which presupposes the time, literacy and desire to do so. Children don't get to choose their parents.
This is one of the reasons why making school lunches a standard part of school (they're not "free" as they're just part of the budget) is so important.
People dunk on the public schools, but, if there was anything that the webcam schooling of Covid lockdowns showed us, it's that the home lives of a LOT of children in lower socioeconomic areas are really terrible (and also how bad the home lives of a lot of children who nominally aren't in lower socioeconomic areas--but that's a totally different discussion). The fact that public schools tended to provide an oasis in the middle of that chaos became terribly apparent.
Teenagers aren't really aware of how not learning fucks their chances
I've learned math mostly outside the school.
2. These countries pretty much all (to varying degrees) have a strong social democratic movement that has been able to set policy during the 20th century, resulting in fairly uniform (compared with USA) support for universal education, healthcare, and other things Americans can’t take for granted.
There is huge variation within Europe for sure, but western/northern european countries do largely cluster together when looked at the world as a whole.
America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too fine grained to reduce it to generalities (with a few exceptions such as heavily nationally influenced/consistent things like health care insurance, defence spending, Wall St/banking policies, etc).
Some people try to minimize it all to “class” like they found some Pandora’s box for all of life’s problems but that’s just as often flawed as any other generalization.
He must have taken the wrong graph.
Edit: Anyway, 503 is pretty average for Europeans, so it means that Americans are pretty average at math, as you'd expect for a large country. So it is still proof that Americans aren't bad, they are typical.
EDIT:: Nevermind I'm a dumbass. that graph is for reading and literacy.... guess I know how I'd score...
Similar to critiques of the GDP as a metric for success.
It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.
Now, would I like it to be way above average? Sure, and I'm willing to make the public investment to make that happen. But starting from the premise of "we're failing miserably" is going to lead to the wrong conclusions.
What conclusions would those be?
> It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.
If you'd prefer you could compare whatever nation you'd like with individual US states. You have plenty of US states to pick and choose from.
Regardless, I don't see this sort of statistics rigour when comparing the US to "Europe" as a whole, in spite of the heterogeneous nature of the whole continent (some countries even have regions where people speak entirely different languages) and the fact that the population of "Europe" is well over twice that of the US.
But I guess the point might just be to shut down discussions to avoid conclusions and introspection.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/achievement-g...
> Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 130 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
https://www.jbhe.com/features/53_SAT.html
This chart visualizes that point: SAT scores of whites in the poorest segment exceed those of blacks from all but the richest segment, and Asians exceed them no matter their income:
https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/singleton_2...
Your own source mentions not only the correlation between income and SAT scores, but it also points out a link between quality of the education services provided to some communities and social pressure. It's also telling that the outliers are explained in a way that boils down to "they succeed in spite of everything we throw at them".
What? OP's argument was purely race-based. OP made absolutely no point other than underlining race-based correlations. If you remove all race-based remarks from OP's post, nothing is left.
> It never discounted the possibility of other race-related factors (...)
In your own words, you describe OP's post as focusing on "race-related factors", and even then you try to accuse those who point that out of "projecting racist views"?
Are you serious?
1. I'm pointing out that poverty and racial factors often confound each other. The comment I was replying to made it seem like racial effects disappear when you control for income. If you care about racial equality, then I would think it's in your favor to argue against someone who says racial effects don't exist.
2. It's not racist to point out that certain outcomes correlate with race.
At a pretty sudden level focusing on education alone is the fault not the solution. When teachers actually get to be teachers it seems US schools do just fine or better than most of the world (not simply comparing to subsets of small homogenous European countries).
You wrote this down yourself, and you still didn't get it?
Some of it is definitely because of the lack of a support system at home (poverty, absent fathers...). But I think a lot of it boils down to culture. And if we're to look at it based on race, White Blacks and Hispanics could all improve.
There's a lot of families where school is seen as unimportant, and where education isn't as valued as it could be.
One easy factor to distinguish is the percentage of immigrants in the Asian population."Around six-in-ten Asian Americans (57%), including 71% of Asian American adults, were born in another country"[1]. The background of a lot of these immigrants made them well-qualified to succeed despite their American socio-economic status on arrival [2].
If you compare that to black people in America, many of who's ancestors were brought here in unsavory ways, only "One-in-ten Black people in the U.S. are immigrants". There's no comparison of the ingress of black people in this country when compared to Asian populations, and consequently we don't see the same US immigrant selectivity boosting the numbers of an already disadvantaged race in the same way.
This is not to say that culture has no effect, since I doubt the high participation rate of Asian children in after-school tutoring necessarily hurts those children [5], but it may represent a smaller part of the overall picture than most people think. Choosing minority races from opposite sides of the success spectrum and underlining some of their differences in a data-driven way may help us better understand and combat the problem of equity.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-a...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/04/authors-discu...
[3] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/aap-aap0000069.pd... (A more in-depth research paper from the authors of the referenced book in [2])
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/27/key-finding...
[5] https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai21-367... ("Third, even conditional on income and parental education, private tutoring centers tend to locate in areas with many immigrant and Asian-American families")
Immigration filtering explains a lot, but the general trend holds even for subgroups that aren’t subject to those filters.
Some Asian groups, like Vietnamese, came to the US as refugees, not skilled workers. In 1980, poverty rates among Vietnamese people were among the highest off any ethnic group. Today, Vietnamese have similar income levels to non-Hispanic whites.
Moreover, the kids of poor Asians have much more income mobility than the kids of similarly placed whites. Asian children who grow up in the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20%, compared to an 11% chance for white kids. These poor Asians are typically in America as a result of family reunification. Thus, neither the kids nor the parents are subject to filters such as H1B job requirements.
How do you escape the conclusion that culture makes the difference?
Hence, some scholar coined the term "white-adjacent" so they can conveniently cherry-pick and ignore Asians when it's convenient. [0] [1]
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/critical-race-theory-has-no-idea-wh...
[1] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...
1) CRT, originally developed in the 1970s, generally assumes a black-white dichotomy. Insofar as it addresses Hispanics and Asians, it does so by putting them in the “black” column—victims of oppression in a system of “white supremacy.” But that’s plainly not true. If you look at the statistics, the closest comparison to the experience of poor Latino and Asian immigrants is poor white immigrants like Italians. They are achieving economic parity with whites within a couple of generations. They don’t face persistent multi-generational gaps like black and indigenous people do.
2) Asians (and to a lesser extent Latinos) broadly do not share the political premise of CRT: that our economic and political systems are tainted by “white supremacy” and must be fundamentally changed. That flows partly from culture. Animosity between different ethnic and cultural groups is widespread in Asia and Latin America. Generally speaking, it’s perceived as bad manners, not an existential threat to prosperity. My parents never talked to me about racism growing up, and I suspect that’s pretty typical in Asian and Latino families. By contrast, I think such conversations is very common among black Americans. That attitude is reinforced by the economics. The experience of the overwhelming majority of the kids of Asian and Latino immigrants is closing the gap with whites as compared to their parents. The notion, fundamental to CRT, that non-whites can only make progress through coordinated changes to the system isn’t compatible with their lives experience.
Can you point to CRT works that do this? I'd like to read them.
Lesson 14:
> It presents a false narrative that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have overcome racism and prejudice. It glosses over the violence, harm, and legalized racism that AAPIs have endured, for example, the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles, the annexation of Hawaii, shooting of Southeast Asian schoolchildren in Stockton.
Lesson 16:
>Chinese Americans are Americans and have played a key role in building this country. Had it not been for this workforce, one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century (the first transcontinental railroad and others that followed), would not have been achieved within the allotted timeline.
It's a projection of how CRT views black history, where ethnic identity is defined in terms of historical discrimination. Meanwhile, do kids of German, Italian, or Irish descent in California learn about the intense racism their ancestors faced when they came here? Of course not.
What's especially galling is that German, Italian, and Irish Americans are at least the descendants of people who faced intense discrimination when they got to America. Meanwhile, virtually all Asian Americans are descended from people who came here after 1950, and mostly after 1990. California is teaching Asian kids to identify with historically discriminated people who aren't even their ancestors.
Especially for Asians, a lot of them came to America fleeing persecutions in their home countries... from other Asians! I'm thinking Vietnamese refugees fighting against the communist regime and people from Hong Kong fleeing the Chinese Communist Party at home.
The CRT worldview makes slavery the central event of history, and oppression by whites the central theme. That’s what’s going on in the Nikole Hannah-Jones quote above. How do those folks perceive immigrant groups that come here and tell their kids to shut up and work hard? I think that leads straight to the idea that Asians are complicit in “upholding white supremacy.” And even white people like John Oliver get in on that narrative.
Of course from our perspective we are just raising our kids according to our culture. In broad strokes, both east and south Asian cultures tend to be deferential to authority and emphasize an internal locus of control. If you ask my mom why bangladesh is poor, she’ll point to corruption and other moral failings, not British colonialism. Whether that is accurate or not, that’s completely at odds with the CRT worldview, which emphasizes an external locus of control—blaming oppression by whites for everything.
It is easy to make a case that Nikole Hannah-Jones essentializes the transatlantic slave trade. But it is unreasonable to generalize from Hannah-Jones to a whole field of study without evidence.
The ship has sailed on trying to limit “CRT” to its original academic meaning. People needed a word to refer to the ideology that had suddenly become prominent in public discourse, and “CRT” won. See: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...
"Woke" is also an appropriated term. But it's original meaning is actually pretty close to its current meaning; I remember a Lexicon Valley episode where one of McWhorter's academic guests observed that "woke" is what you'd call your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving who thought the flouride in your toothpaste was a government mind control system.
Maybe that course is an outlier, but it does serve as a counterexample to the narrative that "CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools". But, if they are teaching CRT (even by name) in some schools, how close is the CRT they teach to the original academic theories? Given my personal experience at how badly schools can mangle things – I still remember the bizarre errors in my high school computing studies textbook, and the interactions I had with teachers in which I tried to explain why the textbook was wrong, and they couldn't understand anything I was saying – it wouldn't surprise me if high school CRT had little in common with the scholarly version.
But if that's true – wouldn't it just show that critics are not the only people appropriating the term "CRT"? In which case, if people on "both sides" are appropriating "CRT", how is its appropriation any worse than that of "woke"? If you'll accept the appropriation of the latter, why refuse it for the former? With "scare quotes", if need be.
I don't think CRT should be taught to grade schoolers. It's complicated and all you can give students who barely understand civics is a bunch of fortune cookies.
Neither slide contains much content, so they don't really tell us how Rancho San Juan High School (Salinas, CA) has been teaching Critical Race Theory – but they are evidence that they have been teaching it.
Were they teaching it accurately? We don't have enough information to say. But, it wouldn't surprise me that, even if the original scholarly theories have some legitimacy, a high school tasked with teaching them would mangle them into something else entirely.
There would be a more compelling argument here if either of those slides said something outré. But neither does, so I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.
Okay, that was my whole point though – "CRT" has been appropriated to mean something different from the original academic theory – and not just by the "anti-CRT" crowd, by "pro-CRT" folks too. So why not just accept that "CRT" now has two meanings, the original scholarly meaning, and a colloquial meaning, and they are different, even though the later grew out of (distortions of) the former?
The appropriation of "CRT" isn't really any different than the appropriation of "woke", which you seemed more okay with.
This is your comment to which I was responding:
> I'd be much more amenable to that if the people "appropriating" terms like CRT weren't doing so to tar actual CRT theorists, but they are, so I'm not at all amenable to it in this case.
And then you said (my emphasis):
> I don't dispute that there are misguided K-8 schools that have been teaching CRT, or what they think CRT is
Doesn't your statement support the idea that "CRT" has evolved in popular usage to mean something different from the original academic theory, and that evolution hasn't purely been due to CRT critics, people who promote/teach "what they think CRT is" have also played a role in that evolution? And hence, that evolution can't be solely blamed on people trying to "tar actual CRT theorists"? Which undermines your argument for resisting it.
When you look at statistics that say the US is lower in this or that, remember that America takes in millions of dirt poor immigrants each year, and their circumstances skew the numbers. However they get assimilated and integrated, and a generation later their kids are going to the Ivy League and starting businesses.
Also you can still go to community college/a state school to get a BS? Or join the Army or something, take a low risk MOS, get them to fund your bachelors. The US is way less class prohibitive and has far more class mobility than the EU as a whole so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
On the "Education Access" pillar, the Netherlands scored highest, while the US ranks 40th. So I don't think your conclusion is accurate.
It's a lot easier to get in to college in the US than in most of Europe, but it costs a whole lot more (like requiring a degree in the first place, it's a kind of social gatekeeping). I think nowadays like 60% of high school grads attend some amount of college, but only about half of those get an actual degree.
Just last year, Germany has accepted more than a million Ukrainian immigrants – at a population of under 100 million. Yes, exceptional circumstances, but there have been a lot of these in the past decade (consider e.g. the Syrian war). And the number the US accepted in the same year? Just short of 2000. Yes, two thousand, not two millions – at four times the population.
Looking at the statistics, the balance is something like half a million in net(!) arrivals per year in the last decade. (I couldn't find comparable numbers for the US, but granted green cards seems like a reasonable proxy, and that's also less than a million per year, and that's not even accounting for people moving away.) And if you look at the larger EU, the "more than any other developed nation" claim completely falls apart.
The US also gets to cherry-pick immigrants based on skill to a much larger extent than the EU does due to geography alone (requesting asylum generally requires physical presence, and the EU's land and sea borders are a lot easier to cross).
One number I've found puts the estimated number of unlawful entries to the US per year at under 100k, for a total population of around 10 million. The EU sees around 2.5 million immigrants, vs. around 1.5 million emigrants, per year.
GPs claim of "millions of dirt-poor immigrants per year" skewing the numbers doesn't seem realistic to me.
It's an entirely made-up "crisis", but a reliably effective one politically.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-border-crossings-us...
How about if we look at immigration into the US as a whole vs immigration to the EU as a whole? What do the numbers look like, then?
I never came across any of the sort.
What I come across frequently is the extension of the American exceptionalism mindset that leads some US natives to believe they are exceptional at math in spite of evidence failing to support their exceptionalism views.
> America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too (...)
I also see this all too often: the follow-up to the exceptionalism mindset failing to support their beliefs in a rational basis, and proceeding to cherry-pick subsets that suit their exceptionalism views.
It's like claiming that Americans are all tall athletic and exceptional basketball players, and supporting that exceptionalism view by pointing out that Michael Jordan and LeBron James are US citizens. Meanwhile, ignoring that the average us citizen might have more in common with Danny DeVito.
The US population is over 330M people, and its an unrivaled economic and technological powerhouse. Of course you can find hundreds of exceptional individuals. But being able to find a champion among the masses is not the point of a statement like "Americans are good at math". Baselines matter a lot, and even you admit that the US does not look great by attempting to cherry pick your way out of that.
Most other societies also don’t tend to have every group at average, but some groups above average and others lower.
If you break other societies with higher average scores down by groups along fault lines in those societies, the top groups in those societies will also be doing much better than the bottom groups, and considering they have higher average scores, the top groups will likely be doing better than the top groups in the US.
There are cities in Europe with histories spanning thousands of years, but were apart until only 30 years ago. There are countries with multiple ethnicities, multiple official languages.
Wait, what? That is exactly what it means. If the groups that are least likely to get external support (ie a tutor, prep, whatever) are under-performing that implies the _standalone_ system is broken. Sure, it is not so broken that it can't be patched with outside aid, but that is true of many things we consider "a failure."
This is akin to saying "Of course my car can get across the country. All I need is the occasional tow-truck, you know, for when it overheats."
Is there reasonable evidence to show that whites and asians receive "external support" at a rate high enough to convincingly explain a 50 to 100 point disparity on this test?
I only skimmed it (read the abstract, checked the graphs, reviewed what stuck out as I scrolled), but quick take aways:
(1) The # of private tutoring centers has tripled to 10k since 1997!
(2) The utilization of the _new_ tutoring centers is primarily by the wealthy (which obviously skews white). In fact, utilization of private tutors by low income folks has gone down in the same period.
(3) They have a section summarizing how Asian-American utilization of tutoring center is high. They even summarize/mention other work that implies tutor usage as primary factor for the high test scores of Asian American students.
I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the second-half of that last point, but finding information from a credible source (Harvard/BU/Brown) wasn't hard.
Edit: Yes, look at page 34 in that report, it says that white kids scored 25 higher than average, so 503. Where did you get those numbers from, those are wrong.
Black students of African heritage, unless the group is very specifically selected (Nigerian-Americans come to mind, with their extremely high average education levels), tend to come out on the bottom in all racially mixed societies in the world. Even the Finnish educational system, touted as one of the best in the world, struggles to educate Somali immigrants to Finnish levels.
The very opposite tends to be true about East Asians and Ashkenazi Jewish students. I am not aware of a single educational system worldwide where either of those groups would be considered under-achieving and needing government or private help.
The standard American answer is that the root cause is systemic racism. I don't believe that; the phenomenon is too widespread and there are other ethnicities that face vicious open racism in their countries, while being extremely successful. Some of the most successful groups in the world are actually direct survivors of genocidal campaigns or lost wars; all that murder didn't break them.
It's unfair that some people develop skills easily when others don't. When equity is the goal this is what happens.
My habits and attitude improved somewhat during undergrad (I figured out in junior year that you can actually read those books you buy!), but as a kid I was a horrible student. I took all honors/AP classes because the normal ones were so boring and slow, not because I had tiger parents.
From all of this, I'm forced to conclude that either everyone just likes to complain and actually math is easy, or some people find it easy and some do not, and I was very fortunate to be one of the former.
And look at that society: it's a sub-saharan "shit-hole" that has ruined its own future because of its borrowed obsession with "social justice" (and the political vermin that exploit them); which thinks squeezing out its best talent who then achieve wonderful things outside is something to be "proud" of.
There is enough reason to hate British colonialism, but it is under them that Indians bagged the first Nobel Prizes in Asia. Now, even those universities that produced them are being destroyed due to idiotic tribal dogfighting. Worse, unlike the US case, all this caste-propaganda doesn't even have much historical evidence to begin with!
Such potential wasted.
Science is about creating theory that has predictive power, and the malice hypothesis in my experience has predicted future outcomes far better than stupidity.
It’s not “mind boggling” if you do a deep dive into the “ethnic studies” curricula that so many teachers and administrators are graduating from these days. It’s a completely parallel value system complete with revisionist history. It’s like the Wahhabist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
It's truly disheartening to see the San Francisco school district's actions resemble something straight out of Orwell's 1984. As someone who has lived in this city for years, it's painful to witness the gradual decline and the rise of corruption overshadowing the progressive spirit that once defined it. Instead of addressing the root cause of poor math education, the district has opted for obfuscation and dishonesty.
It's a classic case of doublethink, where they attempt to hold two contradictory beliefs: that they're doing what's best for the students while simultaneously suppressing their educational growth. Much like the Party in 1984, they seem to prioritize maintaining a facade over genuinely improving education. I wish we could challenge this dystopian approach and hope to meaningfully improve the situation, but at this point, I am not even sure how one would go about doing that.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. ...
I think we need something better than winner-takes-all for all elected positions, because it forces you to pick 'the lesser of two evils', knowing that a vote for the person you like the most is really just a 'protest vote'
It's the best way to ensure equal outcomes. Perhaps equal outcomes is just a nasty goal.
Why should a cruel person with tons of advantages and no motivation experience the same as a smart, kind, hard working person? If you’re not for that you can see equal outcomes are a bad goal.
there is no other way, though. if you desire equal outcomes, you have to shackle the best.
i believe Kurt Vonnegot wrote about this...
I think statistics is a better subject to learn early and often. Way more useful across disciplines.
Anyway I think we know that high performing math countries teach math totally different than we do and they produce way better engineers, so why don’t we do what they do?
I mean seriously I work in tech and all the engineers are foreign educated.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/mat...
Do you actually mean "pushing them up", or is this code for "filter out underperformers"?
This goes to the root of the issue. What is the whole point of a school? Is it to help students learn and improve? Or is it to serve as a series of challenges to eliminate and filter out people based on arbitrary people?
If the goal is to lift up people, you need to pick them up from down where they are at.
That is simply socialism 101 as portrayed in Rush' "The Trees":
There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas
The trouble with the maples
And they're quite convinced they're right
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade?
There is trouble in the forest
And the creatures all have fled
As the maples scream, "oppression"
And the oaks just shake their heads
So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
"The oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light"
Now there's no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet
Axe
And saw
I'm inclined to think the concern (that we will run out of supply of people that can do math or something) is overblown. There are plenty of underemployed engineering and science students that took more advanced mathematics classes than the CS kids.
I took algebra I in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. That allowed me to take geometry in 7th grade, algebra II trig in 8th grade, pre-calc in 9th grade, AP calculus in 10th grade and then IB high math in 11th and 12th grade.
I credit my public, magnet school with giving me a huge leg up in life. All of my peers were middle class, yet a focus on lifting us up, accelerating our education, and challenging us helped me become the successful person I am today.
In contrast, my life almost took a severely different and worse path in elementary school when I was sent to the principal's office often in kindergarten and second grade for distracting the class and causing disturbances.
Thankfully my first grade teacher realized the root cause -- I had already learned the material quickly and was bored and thus distracting others. So she gave me more advanced novels and books to keep me stimulated and learning. If instead I would have had a teacher force me to slow down to the rest of the class, I likely would have ended up suspended and a delinquent.
This holding everyone to the slowest standard in the name of equity is actually very inequitable. It forces children with ADHD like myself to end up as failures instead of recognizing neurodiversity and helping each child succeed in the manner best for him or her.
Math in particular is a subject where there can be such a wide divergence in age where each kid is ready to absorb topics. Having a rigid schedule where topic X is taught in grade N is always going to hurt those who are capable of moving forward faster and hurt those who need more time/maturity to get there (but may well be excellent at algebra/calculus/etc if allowed to take it when ready, not sooner).
I like the schools where kids are allowed to progress through math at their pace, faster or slower, instead of being grouped by class level. Unfortunately that basically means private schools with such an approach, I haven't found any public school in the area (California) that support this.
>Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. Achievement gaps by parental income, but not by parental education, increased over the time period, underscoring the different ways these two socioeconomic status components relate to achievement and the potential for policy to alter gaps.
Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like. Plomin for example claims that from twin studies a large part of educational attainment is heritable. I suspect the current school system will burn itself down before admitting that, however.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X221142...
In studies like the Norway study you cite this could be controlled for by adoptions. Though adoptees, of course, come with their own non-genetic baggage.
I would hope that, at the very least, IQ testing would be performed to try to match based on that.
What the remainder of your post argues is that there is no way to achieve complete equality in a school system.
But we need to be clear about what that means. Most people believe that success should be rewarded somehow. It's relatively uncommon even among socialists to argue that there should be no inequality of overall consumption opportunity. Most parents want to help their children succeed. It should naturally follow that the parents who have more resources will have more successful children. It would require a massive and likely endless society-scale project to counteract the combined parenting efforts of the whole professional class in order to achieve the questionable goal of literally equal opportunity, genetics notwithstanding. Even the Soviet Union had the nomenklatura.
The real goal should be to understand the process of education and remove all actual structural barriers while providing support to the disadvantaged in ways that are reasonably understood to be effective. Obsessing over romantic ideals that seem attractive from 10000 feet is not the way.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mncet/
TLDR:
> We show that class attainment is strongly influenced by genetics. Shared environmental factors play a modest role. Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics.
Another "social studies" pre-determined study, hopefully wont make it past review
"American IQ Test Scores Show Recent Declines, According To New Study" [1]
>American IQ test scores have dropped during a recent 13-year period, a remarkable finding that runs counter to the well-established trend of increasing IQ scores throughout much of the 20th century.
>The study found evidence of a reverse “Flynn effect” in a large U.S. sample of almost 400,000 individuals tested between 2006 and 2018 in several ability areas. The Flynn effect refers to the well-replicated finding that IQ scores increased consistently through much of the 20th century, with increases ranging from three to five IQ points per decade.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/03/23/amer...
I think the only practical solution is widely-known resources and alternative curricula for low-income families so that they too can get a decent education. Hopefully people are working on these, because otherwise these smart low-income kids are wasting their potential. And when kids apply to college they need a usable metric to be compared, which their “official” high-school transcripts are not, so otherwise admission is just upper-income or lottery.
An upside to over-lenient grading, at least students can half-ass “school” while they take these alternative classes that are actually teaching them.
And the middle class end up fucked. Too rich to get extra help. Too poor to afford private. Like walking in the middle of the road... splat.
Me: You seem to not care at all about public schools dumbing down the curriculum. It could happen here too.
Wife: Why should I? This doesn’t affect us. We’ve already decided our kids are going to private school.
Me: Sure. Just sucks for smart but poor kids.
Wife: Good for us. Weaker competition for our kids.
If this nonsense comes to our school district, even if we send our kids to private, I'd vote against it to help public school kids excel.
I support public education for many reasons, but one of the more selfish reasons is so that I have interesting people to talk to in life. Talking with miseducated, or uneducated dumbasses is one of the most soul crushing things I experience on a semi-frequent basis.
Being able to give your children a world where everyone is intelligent, articulate, and emotionally stable is a priceless gift, and quality public education is a key part of that.
But living in a west coast city, it's quickly becoming apparent that public schools are no longer a good option. I'm not going to put my foot down and send my kids anyway to prove a point. I'll just fork over the money for private school.
She doesn't believe that er kids would outperform regardless of that?
This creates its own issues, like public schools not sending misbehaving kids to specially-designed schools, and public schools losing money because students are sent to charter and private schools instead. And the private schools still require more money than the tax dollars provide. Furthermore, issues arise when the public schools suck and charter/private schools are the only decent options: these schools can be openly religious, skip over parts of the standard curriculum, and get to pick and choose who gets admitted.
Though, I don't even think giving all the tax money to public schools will help them at this point...
Hearing about kids being set back in math makes me very personally angry because I always felt that my college CS studies would have been so much easier had I been equipped with the proper math fundamentals. This shit takes a long time to train and you really can do powerful things with it.
Most of the people I know who have STEM degrees don't use their college math. The math that they need is programmed into their CAD terminals. The ones who still use math in their jobs, somehow got interested in math, in spite of school math.
Turning math into a competition sucked the soul out of it. Both of my kids got 8th grade math, and top ACT/SAT scores. My daughter skipped pre-calculus with no ill effect. Both are interested in math, but have no interest in taking more math classes.
I breezed through school math, through college and grad school. Whoop-de-doo. Two things made math come alive for me: Proofs, and computers. But proofs are nearly gone from the school math curriculum, and the schools still haven't embraced computers.
I'd actually like to see a refactoring of school math, loosely into 4 disciplines, that are introduced in a cycle, perhaps even starting in 1st grade:
1. Arithmetic -- manual symbol manipulation, up to and including calculus.
2. Computation -- use of computers to explore and solve math problems.
3. Working with data -- self explanatory.
4. Theory -- things like sets, proofs, etc.
I believe this would actually be more representative of how people actually use math in their lives. Many people will use computation and data, even if they struggle through arithmetic and develop no interest in theory. On the other hand, full exposure to all of the disciplines would adequately prepare someone for academic math study.
I don't believe in banning anything. Some kids need to be allowed to get "ahead" so they don't get bored and lose interest, or simply because solving those school math problems can be a fun escape -- as it was for me -- from an otherwise stressful adolescence.
I work in STEM and don't think I've every needed the "Theory" category.
Any kind of computation beyond a calculator is beyond what most people use, and involves half a Computer Science degree.
Working with data is nice and probably somewhat useful to white collar people, but most of them are going to use a half dozen Excel commands to get there. Most people don't really have a use for learning R or anything like that.
Arithmetic is basically the only thing most people are going to use, and even calculus is beyond what most people actually use. Single variable algebra is about the extent of what's useful to the vast majority of people.
I'm doubtful any extension of math classes is going to go well. People forget the things they don't use, and the swaths of adults that only remember simple arithmetic and basic algebra are telling a story that the rest isn't useful.
https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...
Solution: Private tutors to fill the gap. The kids who couldn’t afford it, kept falling behind. It got so bad that at some point school teachers would teach completely different subjects to their own students, but in private tuitions outside the school. Seems that is the way forward if nothing changes.
That’s more than what I paid for university.
But I'm not, and the reasons why are complex.
First of all, algebra is hard. And not every kid can learn it in the eighth grade. Furthermore, not every teacher qualified to teach eighth grade stuff is qualified to teach algebra. What the studies have shown is that teaching algebra to everyone in grade 8 leads to worse math outcomes.
And if you agree to teach some of the kids algebra in eighth grade, you're back in the sticky wicket of tracking and "gifted kids". Show me a gifted classroom and I'll show you a classroom full of mainly rich whites and Asians -- who are depriving the poorer and more socially disadvantaged students of valuable resources.
The whole point of public education is democratic access -- to all -- of sufficient educational resources and service for basic functioning as an adult citizen, NOT educating every child to the maximum of their potential. It's kind of like how capitalism is really good if and only if you want to get as rich as possible and have the means to do so, and under social democracy you will be less rich, but the tradeoff is there are far fewer economic losers. In light of this, leaving algebra until ninth grade was the best choice for the San Francisco school system for equitable availability of education to all, given the resources and framework they have to work with.
> And if you agree to teach some of the kids algebra in eighth grade, you're back in the sticky wicket of tracking and "gifted kids". Show me a gifted classroom and I'll show you a classroom full of mainly rich whites and Asians -- who are depriving the poorer and more socially disadvantaged students of valuable resources.
If you're worried about resources, put the best teachers in with the "typical" kids, and give them smaller classes than the "gifted" kids. I took 8th grade algebra in 7th grade at my public school, and my kid is going to get that next year too; if we had to wait for 9th grade, it would be an amazing waste of resources, because we'd be so bored and tempted to cause trouble. I don't know that my parents would have been able to put me in private school to get the math I needed (they were able to convince the school system to let me into to algebra a year early), but I have the means to do it for my kid, but this school system is setup to meet kids where they are.
I suspect this change is just another thing driving parents with means out of SFUSD, which only further reduces the resources they have.
Irrespective of what one thinks the purpose of public education to be, the effect of this equity mindset is to hurt poorer but capable kids thus having the opposite effect of less equity. Richer parents are already bypassing these restrictions by opting for private school, moving out of the district to other public schools, or getting additional instruction outside regular schooling.
What the commenter is actually arguing for is holding back poor, mostly Asian kids so that they aren’t ahead of poor black and brown kids. All the while rich kids are entrenched ahead of both.
What I think would work better is food safety, tutoring starting at early grade levels, and safe and quiet places to study.
Ohhh, if wishes were horses, my friend.
Have you ever worked at a place where the mission statement contained things like "a commitment to excellence" and yet most everybody around you (quite possibly including yourself) was decidedly mediocre, employing practices (like doctrinaire Scrum) that precluded excellence and were intended to manage mediocre workers?
California's education system, like nearly all USA education systems, is based on the Prussian model, which was devised by Industrial Revolution magnates as a way to mass-train children into future workers for their factories. Any pretense to excellence, or education to the highest level, is aspirational at best, a fig leaf at worst.
Are you sure about that? If anything, I would expect the Prussians to worry about training future soldiers and good Royal subjects. Especially since Prussia introduced mandatory public schooling in 1717; that's long before industrialisation hit the country. (Even in Britain, Wikipedia has the Industrial Revolution start about 1760.)
But on the other hand, I was always amazed by how much skipping just a week or two of school a year could impact one’s education. It’s very difficult to catch up (in Central European schools at least). A bout of pneumonia could negatively impact your whole life if you miss a week of school and you don’t have the time or teaching to catch up. Education can be very rushed, maybe it shouldn’t be. Pupils should be given time to catch up when various life events happen to them. And if this means a more spaced out curriculum, so be it.
In high school (USA) I was tracked into a two year remedial math course following an abysmal performance in pre-calc, so after 1 year of that I spent the summer taking an online course and tested back onto the normal track.
The Summer break is often derided as a time when students forget everything, but without it I likely would not have ended up studying mathematics in college.
Where I was growing up in the 90s, some teachers would stay after work in their classrooms mostly out of the goodness of their hearts and help pupils who fell behind. Not all teachers would do this and sometimes your school wouldn't have a teacher helping kids in a certain discipline, so you would go to your friends' schools if they had that. Sometimes money was involved, which created conflicts of interest. Commercial tutoring schools popped up in the region later that formalized and democratized the process a little bit. The internet was there in the late 90s already, but obviously things like Khan Academy arrived much later.
I appreciate that kids these days have more resources and it's not an "every kid for themselves" as it was in my childhood. But I still think it would be best if the tempo at schools was reduced so there's time to catch up. Spaced out learning is more effective in terms of retention anyways. It just takes more time.
The earlier you start the slower you can go, starting in grade 5-6 is spaced out.
Regardless, education was rushed in my childhood (90s and 00s) and it was the norm in Europe. I don’t think that was good, it was very stressful and if a kid had to miss school for a few weeks because of a life event, it was very difficult to catch up.
So “school issues” easily end up being implementations of ideologies, rather than of services provided.
People aren’t asking “are my kids learning” because they don’t have kids. And neither do their friends and coworkers.
>Persons under 18 years, San Francisco County, California percent 14.0[0]
Meanwhile US total is %22[1]
This[2] article claims SF has the least amount of kids in the US, although it does not share an exact source.
[0]https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocou...
[1]https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US
[2]https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/fewest-kids-maps-1719...
California schools didn’t go from top ten to the 43’rd in the US by gutting the wealthy districts.
Seems like standardized testing and goals is killing things about as predicted.
In Singapore, the default stream sees students taking basic algebra at age 11 (5th grade), simultaneous and quadratic equations at age 14 (8th grade), and single-variable calculus at age 16 (10th grade). By 17-18 (11-12th grades), students have done first-order ordinary differential equations, volumes of revolution, functions, vectors, and students have the option to take college-level linear algebra or discrete mathematics.
What is wrong with the US?
“Basic Algebra” is what we call 7th-8th grade (age 11-13) math.
“Simultaneous and quadratic equations” is what we call Algebra which is 9th grade (age 14-15) with logs and exponentials thrown in.
Most places do a split year of Geometry and Trig in 10th grade.
Single variable calculus and first order blah blah is Calc 1 for 11th graders.
Volumes, vectors, integrals, infinite series, taylor expansions is Calc 2 for 12th graders.
> What is wrong with the US?
For a developed country, they can be frustratingly archaic.
"With both gaps, SFUSD evidenced greater inequities than state averages in 2015, and that relative underperformance worsened by 2019. The district’s anti-tracking public relations campaign, by focusing on metrics such as grades and course enrollments, diverts attention from the harsh reality that SFUSD is headed in the wrong direction on equity."
The kids (and parents) who really want to excel in STEM will just be doing after school competitive math anyway and probably are already so just like they don't provide competitive soccer/football/baseball/fencing/piano coaching (which also could be used to get into elite schools); the school district maybe doesn't need to provide anything beyond the equivalent to getting some fresh air. Perhaps even the lack of rigor, might increase the market size/volume for rigorous after-school offerings.
The difference between then and now is staggering. The mentality is if you can't make people smarter just lower the standards.
The reality is perhaps the top 15% of the US population by IQ should be receiving a college education. The rest is just credentialism and a waste of societal resources.
WTF is the point of waiting until 9th grade? That's disgusting.
Students are typically (at least in my experience) exposed to "Algebra" (symbols, equations) much earlier. Memory is fading but for my kids something like 5th grade. I still have some of their scrawled equations on a white board in my office from back in those days...
Edit: they continue this confusion (at least consistently confusing) by calling the 10th grade class "Geometry" even though it's only somewhat about Geometry, and students will have met triangles and obtuse angles and whatnot years earlier. And so on through to "Pre-Calculus" which...you can guess is not much about Calculus, but the stuff they think should be taught before teaching Calculus (very scary).
Then in 9th or 10th grade you took "high school algebra" which was a big step up from 7th grade Algebra. From there you either took geometry + trig, or geometry + algebra 2 + precalc, or had the option to do all four years geometry + algebra 2 + precalc + calc. Most of these had honors and AP variations that were opt-in.
https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2021/12/san-...
Incidentally, this system has also created a big need for remedial high-school-level math courses at community colleges and even at the four-year universities, where students essentially have to relearn all the material again at an acceptable standard to continue in science/engineering upper education, which is just a huge waste of resources.
I'm pretty sure that more math, taught earlier, in smaller-sized classes, by better teachers, is always going to be better for long-term outcomes. This 'equity' business seems like a race-to-the-bottom which is bad for everyone.
Unless the entire world and every classroom hold to such a standard, than this simply widens an already uncomfortably wide Multi-Modal Distribution.
We live in a global economy and compete in one. Artificially holding your community back just takes away opportunities from them and gives them to another group.
Do you think the affluent families of the world are gonna stop teaching their kids math from a young age?
Equity at any cost is a remarkably dumb idea. And it has an obvious trivial solution. All people live in abject poverty, despair, disease.. equally. Only a sociopath would consider that a viable solution.
This reminds me of “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”
I miss you Sir Humphrey.
If you are a Stanford alum or a parent in San Francisco, please reach out to Stanford leadership to let them know about your concern. You can send an email similar the one below, to any/all of these folks:
daniel.schwartz@stanford.edu (Dean of the Graduate School of Education https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/danls)
provost@stanford.edu (Persis Drell)
president@stanford.edu (Marc Tessier-Lavigne)
tfenner@stanford.edu (Deputy General Counsel)
Subject: Concerns Regarding Stanford's Involvement in CMF and YouCubed
Dear [Recipient's Name],
My name is [Your Name], and I am a concerned parent of a school-age child living in San Francisco. I am writing to express my deep concern about Stanford's connection to the California Mathematics Framework (CMF) and YouCubed. As a prestigious institution, Stanford's involvement in the promotion of these policies and practices has a significant impact on the quality of education our children receive. I am hoping to hear from you regarding the university's stance on this matter and the actions being taken to address the concerns of parents and faculty alike.
Recently, I came across a list of Stanford faculty who have signed a statement expressing their concerns about the CMF (https://sites.google.com/view/mathindatamatters/home). The signatories come from a diverse range of STEM fields, including the medical school, business school, and political science. This demonstrates a clear disagreement among the university's own quantitative faculty about the direction of math education proposed by YouCubed and the CMF.
As a concerned parent, I would like to know who at Stanford bears responsibility and liability for the educational effects of what YouCubed is advocating for math education. Given that YouCubed is owned by Stanford and not by an individual faculty member, I believe that the university should be held accountable for the potential negative consequences of these policies on our children's education.
I would like to draw an analogy with the case of Dr. Scott Atlas, a former Stanford faculty member whose controversial views on COVID-19 led to public outcry and concern. Just as the university had to address and clarify its stance on Dr. Atlas's views, I believe it is essential for Stanford to publicly address the concerns raised by its own faculty regarding the CMF and YouCubed.
I kindly request a detailed response on this matter, as it is of utmost importance to the future of our children's education. As a leading institution in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, Stanford has a responsibility to ensure that the educational policies it supports and promotes are in the best interests of our students.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
[Your Name] [Your Contact Information]
Increase standards, but also streamline processes. Leverage ChatGPT so students learn by repetition in innovative games with cool interfaces, virtual and 3d and sound/motion interfaces, with lots of gym time. No more identity bullshit besides what is basic to become a good person like it was common to be taught throughout the world like 10 years ago. You know what, fuck this. Pause everything. REWIND.
HARD FUCKING FORK on this reality. This is bullshit, I'm rewinding the time.
Fuck that shit.
We're going back to 2011, I have unfinished business back there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg00YEETFzg
Everyone back to 2011 hardcore startup mindset with all the tech conferences w/ free food and great shows and demos, but this time code is still king, none of this talking only bullshit
same at every level of compensation in any kind of org. time to earn your keep or be replaced by chatgpt since that'll be the tyranny you fall under if you wanna front tyranny yourself like in Harrison Bergeron like my friend and I are familiar with, you see.
You mean shitty, derivative games that haven't been tested at all?
There's no good reason to use ChatGPT in education like that, and doing so is pure technology fetishism.
Related news from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364985
More family time! And higher quality of education outcomes for very cheap! It's truly the iphone moment for AI including the increasingly cheaper pipelines to train it. I remember how just a couple months ago it was still costing $50k+ to realistically get something resembling GPT-3+ performance. Now that's way less.
Wohoo!!! Innovation abounds!!! <3
Didn't work out.
Technology can't correct human flaws.
It's always the same error to think it will work, but in the end it's just a reason to reduce funds for education.
> It's astoundingly useful and you are wrong here.
It may be useful, but I'm not wrong here.
Software engineers and the like are too-frequently technology fetishists that are like the proverbial guy who has a hammer and thinks everything is a nail.
Even if "innovative games with cool interfaces" is the right way to educate kids, which is very unlikely to be true, those games aren't going to be spat out by ChatGPT.
And if they can be spat out by ChatGPT, why even bother educating most of those kids at all?
ChatGPT is a massive pipe that will allow for increase in throughput of information into curious brains for almost no cost. With increasingly more valuable answers over time. And it can already quiz you on math and teach you math.
It's amazing. I love it.
> It's amazing. I love it.
It's pretty clear you're a true believer, who takes the marketing fantasy at face value.
But it's still a fantasy. They said the same thing about the web in 1995.
Now the web is a big source of misinformation, spam and ads.
ChatGPT is new and that's why it's results are impressive at the moment but people are already exploiting it's flaws.
What a year and ads and spam will lower it's usefulness.
Unless your goal is to turn humans into mindless drones which are easily persuaded and uncritical, it's possibly the worst thing to learn from.
It's amazing for learning. ChatGPT is information learning superpowers. Give me more power please. More power please.
Sites like
are way better than the shiny new toy ChatGPT. ChatGPT will confidently tell you nonsense if it's given the wrong prompt and you have no chance to know in advance.
Irrelevant even if true.
> Even if "innovative games with cool interfaces" is the right way to educate kids, which is very unlikely to be true,
Presumably baseless personal opinion offered without even attempting to provide support.
> those games aren't going to be spat out by ChatGPT.
This is just easily demonstrated to be false already.
> And if they can be spat out by ChatGPT, why even bother educating most of those kids at all?
Dramatic Irony
Most people learn by doing stuff with their hands, not by reading a paragraph.
This is still the same dystopia and still tries to cover up the underlying problem.
You need teachers, lots of of them and well payed.
If my daughters school didn’t offer algebra in eight grade, she just wouldn’t take algebra.
I wouldn’t spent thousands of dollars so she can be a year ahead.
It seems you have a bunch of parents who view their children’s education as a carefully calibrated laboratory process, and bunch of activists who care more about groups than individuals.
And from a few months before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29324551