'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco
joannejacobs.com
joannejacobs.com
That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
Luckily, everyone in the area gets access to Running Start[1]. Doesn't address the earlier years of schooling, though.
If your children are in HS, I'd really recommend sitting downing with a HS councilor to make sure that your kids take the classes that are required by the district for HS, but aren't required for a college degree (I'm thinking of speech here, but there may be others) in the first 2 years of HS. That way they get the most benefit out of their Junior and Senior years, if they decide to go that route.
I'm honestly not sure how the GPA thing works - I know AP classes can sometimes let kids increase their GPA above 4.0 for admissions purposes. But as someone who did both Running Start and AP classes, IMO, the actual college credit was way more valuable. But I also went to school in state, so those credits transferred nicely. May be a totally different story if you're shooting for Ivys.
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1. https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/support-programs/dual-...
There are plenty of other reasons to do running start, aside from transfer credits. Access to higher level subjects you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
Personally, I traded high school PE for scuba and yoga, a full year of A&P, college calculus, and an intro year of psych.
Transfer credits had very little to do with it - it was just a more fulfilling curriculum.
My understanding is that there are been a number of reforms to WA community colleges that mean that a larger portion of community college credits transfer to public universities now. Of course, going out of state is a roll of the dice as always.
> Transfer credits had very little to do with it - it was just a more fulfilling curriculum.
Very true. I loved taking Microbiology as a HS student. Def something I wouldn't have gotten the chance to do normally. And CC offers far more advanced math than HS.
2. I think it really depends on the person's career. If they've had 7 jobs in 10 years, yeah - GPA probably isn't super relevant. But if someone's been at the same place for 10 years, maybe it's not the worst thing.
IMO, the 1 page (with large text) rule is more important. GPA should probably fall off before relevant job related stuff, but there's no harm in keeping it there if the resume has the space.
I would have done a phone screen.. but with that low of a GPA, and the judgement to put it on your resume? Pass.
A developed country is not where even the poor have cars, it's where even the rich use public transport - a quote attributed to many including LKY.
Extrapolating this to the current argument (disclaimer: not read the article), if the same system is thrust onto the rich and poor alike, it should get better over a period of time, no?
This is a complicated question, thoughts welcome.
(I say that as a husband to a public school teacher, son of a public school teacher, and father of children attending public school.)
The student body generally excels. A graduating class of 120 students might have a dozen who score 30+ on the ACT. And, of course, there is perhaps an equal number who fail to graduate.
They all go to the same school, but I wouldn't say "the same system is thrust onto the rich and poor alike." The most important system in the education of a child is not within the walls of a school. It is within the walls of their home.
It is simply true that a certain level of affluence is necessary to provide a stable learning environment * in the home *. Affluence does not guarantee that stability, but it increases the odds so dramatically that its affect should not be ignored.
and beyond that, isn't the whole point of GP's comment that the idealistic rich people are trying to / would like to leave their children in public schools? what's idealistic about sending your kids to private school instead? seems like the exact opposite to me.
so other than "pay" not making any sense, "idealism" not making sense, and randomly swapping whose (not "who's") idealism is being paid for, your reply makes perfect sense.
like, when people make comments like this, do they think that they are saying anything in particular, or is it just about the words sounding good in a certain order, like music lyrics? it's like some sort of pathos DDoS. but, hey: at least "your heart's in the right place", right?
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/square/2023/03/29/cancellatio...
If the students are prepared enough for those classes, what’s the point in keeping them in High School anyway?
I had a strange experience where I had a bunch of AP courses lined up my senior year and then moved to a place which did not have nearly any of them. In hindsight, I should have really pressed for direct enrollment to college instead of faffing around my senior year in “communication skills”, AP english, and “Economics” - all three required by the school district but mostly useless.
Not that I was taking particularly hard classes or anything so I think they were just getting a leg up on the prerequisites for later on.
Linear algebra is not hard. I had a math teacher who taught the basics of linear algebra in my middle school math class. While she was an exceptional teacher (incredibly good, we still talk over 25 years later!), I can attest that the concepts presented no great difficulty to any of the students (with the caveat that all of us were in an advanced learning program)
Now calculus, I feel that at least some high school students I've talked to really didn't "get it", even for single variable. Then again I get the feeling that most people who take calculus don't get it, which I find sad because IMHO calculus is absolutely phenomenal. For me, it was when math started really connecting to the real world and making an impact on how I saw things in my day to day.
Keep in mind that this term covers a huge range of math that can be introduced at very different levels of abstraction and generality. You might think linear algebra is mainly matrix multiplication and Gaussian elimination, someone else might think it's about the representation functor in Abelian categories.
Almost any subject in math can go really deep!
I know some kids are really exceptional and maybe ought to take this much math that young. But I think a lot do it now to get into a college.
Frankly, Multivariable and Linear Alg. is on the low end of the ability of advanced high school kids these days. The ease of deploying tensor flow has gotten a lot of kids motivated to learn linear algebra.
So I think for a high school student who knows they're heading for STEM, with room on their schedule, it can still be a good choice.
Standards change greatly with time and it is a joke to believe that applying the same standards to everyone will get a good outcome.
Anecdata: I would have loved to get the possibility to study higher math at high school level, at school. I had to dig it out on my own since the local school topped out after basic calculus, linalg, statistics. I was not alone.
Today I would estimate that top 5% could easily and happily handle multivariate, ode/pde, etc in high school given proper support and encouragement.
Top few percent learn several times faster than average. What is the point, other than ancient ideology, to slow them down and hinder their learning progress?
For example, I was one of the best students in class, yet it took me about a year to really get stochastic processes.
Taking advanced classes could be valuable even if you need to retake them.
It's also an arms race that's misplaced. STEM majors are learning math anyway, there really are diminishing returns in cramming more of it into your school curriculum. A lot of different subjects are way more useful, ideally some that do exactly not prepare yourself for a major of your choice, otherwise you end up with over-optimised education. You need some social studies and discuss current topics moving america and the world. You need to write essays about these difficult topics. You need a little bit of science and a little bit of history. And a foreign language. It's about the abstract ideals of education, afterwards you can choose the major you want.
I didn't take any advance math in HS and actually did quite average. By some miracle I was admitted a very good Electrical Engineering program. However they made me take these advance math classes before university to prove that I could handle the task.
Removing these options from HS just lowers the bar for everyone.
In contrast, high school was three years of repeating the same equation solving with some calculus sprinkled on.
We're in East Renton, which usually follows Seattle, but they have kept honor courses. In fact, honor courses are encouraged to take, open to everyone, and from what I understand, no one is rejected (possibly only for the first year). I like this approach better than 'algebra for no one'.
Yes, the better school districts are east of Seattle, and this is why all those homes are retaining their skyrocketing value.
>> Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
We're not wealthy at all, so if the Renton school system follows Seattle, we're not going to waste our child's future on crap education.
The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars (STEM, clubs, sports, arts, etc.) A student wouldn't have to be gifted in math, just apply themselves to some interest that drives them.
Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month. Playing for the school sports team, being in the band, getting involved in photography. Something positive in academics, arts, leadership, cooperation.
Paying kids would teach valuable lessons about finance and build up a reward system that would serve them later in life as they begin to associate action and achievement with positive outcomes. It should still work even if they don't have a suitable environment at home to discover this on their own.
Right now school is basically daycare. It can teach those that are properly prepared at home to pay attention, but it fails so many others.
As a poor kid in Seattle, I am now no longer poor because of a high bar.
In my high school (West Seattle High School!) we edited DNA. We spliced DNA, inserted a gene, closed it up, and made bacteria change color. It was awesome.
> The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars
Unfortunately, extrinsic motivations mess people up and don't end well long term.
Therein lines the problem.
Pay people enough $ and they'll go to the gym and get in shape, but once the $ stops they'll almost universally stop going.
Take people who have a regular gym habit, start paying them, stop paying them and most of them will stop going to the gym, adding in the extrinsic motivation will actually destroy the intrinsic motivation (and pleasure!) they once had around the activity.
With enough extrinsic only motivators, people stop feeling any actual joy in life, everything becomes a fight for an external reward.
The home environment also contributes a great deal to academic success or failure. I know of households that actively dissuade kids from pursuing academic success. If parents won't intervene in their children's education for any reason that diminishes their chance of success.
Honestly, it is part of the social contract that the government, or at least society, needs to maintain.
If you look at cultures where education is valued, where academic achievement is high, there is a very strong social contract in place that equates academic success to success later in life. China has had national exams for over a thousand years, with the same promise: Anyone who does well in school and succeeds can have their station in life elevated by doing well in school.
Rich or poor, rural or urban, everyone (or at least a large swath of people) in China has traditionally had this guarantee lying around.
Do good in school, and you will be taken care of after that. You can get a good spouse, a good job, and life will get easier.
America has actively worked to break such promises. Historically when a minority community worked together and excelled, their houses and businesses got literally burned down to the ground, or sometimes, less violently, just taken away from them.
That teaches a lesson right there, "work hard, and fuck you".
Rather recently, middle class white students in America studied hard only to find the social contract involved universities jacking up tuition fees to sky high levels, loading them down with tons of debt, and then leaving school for crap jobs and a life of constant interest payments.
A shit ton better than being burned out of your house, but it still shows how American society is willing to tear up social contracts so that powerful institutions can earn some extra $$$.
Housing then folds into this, it used to be American cities worked hard to expand the housing supply, they eagerly courted young families, now cities are actively hostile to anyone new coming to town.
But the fact is, maintaining that social contract pays for itself many times over with social stability, a lesson America has apparently forgotten.
Some parts of the government get this, some types of inefficient contracts (build/buy American) are in fact job creation programs, but we need to do a lot better.
Build more housing, a ton more, and force state universities to have much lower tuition by removing the obscene overhead. I rarely advocate for "just cut funding and make people figure it out", but honestly, pass a law saying State Universities aren't allowed to cut any faculty positions, then demand they cut tuition by 50%, and have their new budgets independently audited. Sure the student swimming pool may get shut down, but too bad.
Yes, let's embed the fundamentals of wage-slavery at even younger ages.
I definitely agree with this
>>> Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month.
I would love if this would work, but unfortunately there is no easy answer. In fact, MacArthur Genius Award Winner and John Bates Clark medalist Roland Fryer managed to somehow persuade entire school districts to test your very assertion at scale, and the results were not straightforward as you seem to believe [1]
Incentives dont quite work like you expect them ...
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
Bingo, that is the issue, everybody is worried about equity.
You can't have it, we need meritocracy, equity is just cruel and unusual punishment to future. It is a recipe for driving society to the lowest common denominator.
You should demand proper education or your money back.
(Side note, this is what we will get 10x with free college, and the guaranteed loans have already driven it this way a bit more)
That seems quite different. First, lots of countries have free higher education and seem to do just fine. Second, lowering price of entry is orthogonal to lowering expected performance. Your argument does not apply.
By defintion some of the highest performing students who must compete for entry.
These are not apples alike.
> (Side note, this is what we will get 10x with free college, and the guaranteed loans have already driven it this way a bit more)
But perhaps good colleges in the US just accept anyone that walks through the door and can pay the tuition?
Education at this point feels like exploitation. We tell people that they can achieve greatness, they just have to pay huge amounts to a college to be educated, when the truth is that most of the value of college is networking and status signalling, and the value of those is pretty much directly related to how prestigious the institution is.
Yes, we should set up a system that allows all people, whatever their background, to pursue a liberal arts education if they're passionate about it. But a system that makes a pretty useless and very expensive degree a barrier for entry for completely unrelated jobs is just exploitative.
If you believe that is true, then why would a country want to pay for it? After all, the world isn't limited to your strawmen.
The reason it's valuable to countries the world over, why so many want to pay for it, and why most all of them provide some level of public paid education, is it demonstrably results in a population that ends up with a higher standard of living.
Dont believe it? Simply check Google scholar.
Germany, Switzerland, Belgium all come to mind as countries with free or near-free education that while they don't graduate the same % of their population through tertiary eduction it's not for lack of available opportunity but rather many people choose not to pursue tertiary eduction.
This is actually a good thing because they are often choosing alternatives like vocational education that is more suited to their career choices.
Baristas with university degrees is the outcome of pushing everyone to get a degree and is common place in both the US, Canada and Australia as a result as all 3 have this same notion that you need a degree to get a job. Atleast in Australia and Canada you don't also get saddled with crippling debt.
Lithuania doesn't have free college https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
My bad. I assumed free college is standard in that region.
That used to be true.
Really? Says who? Because the OECD certainly doesn’t seem to think there’s any significant difference.
https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-educat...
So the mean and median is around 20% less people with tertiary educations.
When you say no significant difference, what is your threshold? 50% less people educated? 20% is a huge difference.
If I too were to play the data cherry picking game, I could point out that Norway is at 55%.
How does that prove anything?
It just disproves your unfounded assertion:
> Every free college country sends less of their people through college than the US
I really fail to see how any of this proves any causality between free college and lower or higher education rates.
But it seems you enjoy shifting goalposts, so perhaps we should end it here?
The district charter use to have a line in it saying they had to offer each kid the best education possible. My mother used that line to force the school district to send a taxi to every day to take me up to a richer part of the city with better schools. That line of the charter has since been removed as from what I can tell kids now are at the mercy of their circumstances.
There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.
So, kernel of truth behind some of these policies.
IMHO the problem is, this plan only works if the vast majority of students are high achievers. If you have 10% of the students who are high achievers and you mix everyone together, after a few years you end up with no high achievers.
America in general needs to seriously look at how we as a culture approach education, until we fix that, there isn't much the schools can do to actually improve outcomes for underprivileged students en masse.
I grew up in Sacramento in the 80's/90's, and the best schools were not in the rich/white areas. The top-performing schools were in so-so neighborhoods, and the schools were very diverse. Best of all, you could test in and enroll from anywhere. We literally had a kid in HS who drove down halfway from Tahoe each morning. It wasn't perfect, but it was much, much better than what we have now, as this article shows.
My understanding is research shows this "evens" outcomes. The worst students do better (Teacher has more time to pay attention to them), the best students do worse (can not get into the really hard stuff, get bored).
If you are in the bottom 25%, you WANT integrated classrooms of all levels.
If you are in the top 25%, you WANT an elite classroom with ramped up work and less distractions.
There is the crux.
Bad cultures exist and we dont need to celebrate them. Bad culture drags everyone down and makes society worse.
We need to ask why those bad cultures exist and take steps to remediate the underlying problems.
In Seattle, one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in all of human history, some of the public schools still have leaded drinking pipes that "may be safe" for kids to drink from.
For the vast majority of working adults in America, a job means unreliable shifts, being treated with outright cruelty by management, and pay that isn't enough to cover health insurance premiums.
Given that, why is anyone surprised that kids don't "apply themselves"? What are their parents going to say? "Work hard and you to can be in debt and barely afford to pay rent!"
(Caveat: This doesn't work if the point of your university is mostly to signal that its graduates came from a family wealthy enough to send them to your university.)
Equality of outcome can be an undesired outcome, equality of opportunity is completely different.
The only trouble is getting the opportunities to be equal - there must be no advantage that can be unfairly given to one more deserving student than another, being able or willing to send your children to summer bootcamps must be an option for all children (who qualify), not whether you pay for it with time or money, e.g.
Free college is fantastic, but once again you confuse opportunity with outcome, and not even for the same individuals - parents are unburdened by cost, but in fact the opportunities are far from equal - money does not a quality education make, yet the majority or colleges are run as for profit institutions, not places that accept students based on their merits or potentials, nor do they actually try to actively shed students who are undeserving. Party culture does not need or require an expensive room and board situation, yet it pervades nearly every 'higher' education institution, only somewhat subsiding when graduate/doctorate programs become involved, and academics are once again taken seriously.
I.e. your meritocracy does not exist precisely because universities are busy making profits not teaching students.
The moral and practical thing to do would be focusing on improving objective outcomes. Focusing on equality degrades objective outcomes in favor of moral perversion - taking away from some to make others feel better.
Imagine the child of two millionaire college professors. What will you do to equalize this child's opportunity with a child in the inner city of (pick a bad city)?
Improving objective outcomes is some Krypton level shit, "Your a black doctor and were trained to be one from birth due to the outcome we wanted." "I wanted to be an artist."
You meant at t0, the movement the baby is born to a parent optimizes education vs a baby that is born to a parent that cares much less. Impossible for government to "make sure" this happens.
There is no real way to perfect this - but if an effort is made a good result can be achieved nonetheless. The fallacy with the professor example is that they will have the time to teach their child, and that their child must necessarily be receptive to their limited tuition.
Unless they quit their job, and thus are no longer professors, a majority of their time will be spent teaching multiple students, and while one on one coaching has it's merits there is also value in classroom peer experiences. If an effort is made to provide tutoring to all the kids, it may even be in the parents interest not to provide tutoring services, if the quality is good, because that takes away from their own time spent being able to provide the most effective teaching experience they can offer.
We can't build perfect bridges, but we can sure as hell mandate they are good enough, it's some nonsense to say we shouldn't try because we can't get it perfect.
Or do you simply deny that parents educate their children? Do you believe that as long as they have the same teachers at school, who are 'paid properly', say, a farmer's son and a son of a musician will have the same knowledge and skills in animal husbandry and musical theory?
That is obvious, the discussion is about the education opportunities though, not mastering school math, which is, honestly, a joke.
(But then, of course, you realize that you've merely shifted the game of haves and have-nots to other kinds of "have" and feel the hubristic urge to socially engineer your way to equal outcomes.)
Compare "blood is thicker than water", which was rooted in the opposite conclusion, that the blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb, i.e. your relationships and social bonds outcompete genetic ties.
The failing of meritocracy is that it is tautological; those who succeed did so because they must have been successful. It can't bear scrutiny because, as it turns out, we can have neither fair nor equal grounds for competition (if we're measuring results as comparative, which is the case here), but people secretly desire unfairness as long as there's a chance they will benefit, even if they are not the beneficiary of a given instance or result. See monarchies, lotteries, CEO pay discrepancies, etc... what matters is there was an arbitrary chance you're dealt out at the top.
I went to private schools, and even kids of parents with money can wind up very unintelligent—placing them in the same classes as overachievers is good for neither. Same concept as bright kids from underprivileged families, let's bend over backward to get them in the same classes as the overachievers too.
A pure meritocracy wouldn't prioritize curing rare diseases or ending poverty, and might not reduce suffering as much as a more equitable society, even if that equitable society has less raw talent and education, so obviously there's an optimal point.
That optimal point may be a function of the current state of tech, as more and more of the stuff people need education for is done by AI.
It's not like they're ever going to have zero high achievers, even without school at all there's always going to be a few genuises.
On the other hand, the better AI gets, the less anyone outside the top 1% actually needs math, because AI may be able to do most of what an average person could learn without unrealistic amount of effort way beyond their motivation.
Still, there was a whole system of special schools, both for high and low achievers. I have went to a “math/physics” grade school from the start, and subsequently changed schools two times, each time through hard entrance exams, to finally end up in the most challenging/prestigious school in the country.
It's completely mind boggling to me that a communist country has such a system, but a capitalist country is trying to bring everyone to common denominator.
In Ontario (Canada), schools are funded by the province. Schools doing worse can access addition funding and other resources. In 2020 teachers earned an average of $103,000/year including benefits. In Toronto, which has a high cost of living, the average was $108,000.
That's not to say that school quality doesn't vary, often by household income. Poorer people often have language issues (immigrants) and can't afford to pay for extra help for their kids, or don't have free time to work with them. The system is still stacked against them, but not nearly as badly.
The American "I got mine" method of school funding seems like the worst possible choice.
LA Unified is currently ~16,000/student/year.
It looks to me like SF actually gets significantly more money per student than people in the suburbs.
California too, yet California has one of the most corrupted education systems. Case in point, the Bay Area schools couldn’t even afford school buses
Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many private schools. If I have the means, why would I not send my kids to such schools and therefore fuck up the funding of the public schools? Not that I want to, but it furiates me that the school administrators really hurt the kids who need public education the most in the name of equity. It also saddens me that the constituents are okay with such administrators.
That's the problem. We're dealing with the critical theory definition of equity, which they define as the intentional redistribution of opportunity and resources along identity group lines to correct for present and historical injustices, as well as opportunities those groups have already had.
Critical theory and social justice adopts a distorted view of reality. Leave it to a school in San Francisco to show everyone what happens in real life when administrators adopt a policy based on that distorted view of reality -- inequality is only increased.
In fact, I'd classify critical theory alongside Marxism for adopting a false belief that some top-down forced redistribution of resources/wealth/opportunity/means of production/etc. is the way to true justice. That kind of belief backfires spectacularly when policy makers adopt it IRL.
Also, among those who aren’t willfully ignorant, it’s well known that increasing resources increases inequality. The classic example is height: when resources are low everyone is short. But when resources are plentiful then those with the genes for height tower above those without.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Those who were short didn't fare worse in absolute terms. They only look worse off by comparison.
Essentially, if something is a zero-sum game (e.g. there are only so many jobs around, if you get a job someone else won't), then even if someone isn't doing worse absolutely, they can still do worse overall relatively speaking.
Which isn't to say that we should be giving short people stilts and cutting the legs off tall people, but it's worth recognising that these topics are complex, and even if we're only talking about absolute benefits, people can still lose out relatively speaking.
My obligation is to my children. I'm happy to entrust them to a system if I have faith in it, or the people running it. If I don't...it would be downright irresponsible.
In reality, the political leaders in charge of this societal reordering will themselves become the next upper class, and you can bet with certainty they'll give their own kids the best education and opportunities they can (which will be better than what they offer the masses).
I get really scared when I hear anyone promise utopia. Literally every large-scale society that did turned into a hellscape after a while, and the idea itself never worked.
There was always someone who didn't buy into the idea, and they were blamed for why it didn't work. "If only those people were gone, then this would work and we'd be happy."
So millions die or are sent to the gulag or whatever it's called, and the idea is still not working.
China no longer promises its citizens a utopia. All they promise is a country that is powerful on the world stage. They're getting there, but it's still happening via exploitation. And the back alleys of Beijing still ring with abject poverty.
You're conveniently ignoring the cultural revolution, which caused an ideological purity spiral resulting in millions dead.
China only began to prosper when they relaxed their economic policies and began to allow property/business ownership and international trade (especially with the West) back in.
Also: the way they lifted all those people out of poverty was basically by freeing them to lift themselves out of poverty, by adopting an essentially capitalist system. You could say: they simply stopped holding people in poverty.
This wonderful world already exists in the US. Poor people have access to Medicaid / Emergency Rooms. The debate about food insecurity is whether or not poor people can afford fresh vegetables (because living on rice, cheap meats and canned peas/beans is not nutritious enough). About living in the street - if you are living on the street when you can get a job as a limo driver for $30 / hour just by walking in then maybe is your fault???
Wow, this is a joke isn't it?
Marx is literally the godfather of critical theory, the Frankfurt school, post strcturalism and the rest of the fashionable nonsense cannon that parts of the left seem obsessed with.
What parents commenters are doing is laundering agency through a testing regime. It's part of the process of the absolution of responsibility of consequence.
As an aside, it's clear that parent commenters aren't mature enough to be approached socratically. I regret their schools taught them to read and write. They clearly don't want to learn.
Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of this (at least not from a quick look at the account's recent posts in other threads), so this should be easy to fix. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to using HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
You've done this in other threads too, unfortunately (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35469483 was particularly bad). We have to ban accounts that post like this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Teachers becoming disciplinarians is where they become authoritarian, exploitive arbiters of ones future earning potential.
Definitely. Let's start stack ranking[0] in kindergarten and expel (and make that stick nationwide!) the bottom 10% every year.[1]
By the time students get to high school, we'll have best schools in the world!
Those who have been expelled had already reached their intellectual peak, especially those in primary school. amirite? /s
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
[1] Please use this is a "clear indicator of intent to parody" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The Nordic countries have the best schools in the world.
Private schools are banned.
Well except for Sweden. They introduced vouchers in the 90s and as soon as they did, their rankings started rolling like dung down a hill.
One advantage of the private schools is they can kick out students they cannot manage easily, while the public schools have to keep everyone. Some recent strutural changes in the public shools are said to have declined their quality, enough so that many government ministers, even of the left wing, are sending their children to the private schools.
I guess it's one of those Nordic myths -- like high minimum wage (there is none in Denmark).
they did that before too :) couldnt possibly expect the politicians to send their kids to the same filthy schools as the plebs now could we? :)
it doesn't cost more for a teacher to open up an algebra book and teach from that instead of from the pre-algebra book. unless there are scheduling difficulties which somehow prevent one classroom's worth of students from being crammed into the same room in the same slot, the imagined lack of money isn't going to impact the contents of the curriculum.
this isn't like when we thought we needed to cram schools full of computers and they were going to cost money. one math class is an expensive as another to teach. we don't even need new textbooks. hell, we probably don't even need textbooks, just have them do exercises online or something.
On the contrary, I'm sure that a teacher who understands algebra well enough to teach it competently costs much more than the other kind, on account of being so rare.
Education is a collective action problem. Parents care more about their own child's education than the education of other children. This should not be surprising, and it cannot be changed.
There are people who don't understand sociology and are only vaguely aware of pathological cultural factors (or possibly, though they are aware of them, wish to deny their existence) and demand that these problems be solved with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is only able to crudely affect these, and only in the most totalitarian of regimes. Mao or Stalin might have been able to rid their countries of pathological cultural factors (of course, instead of doing such they were more concerned with ridding themselves of potential rivals). California cannot at this point in time do any such thing.
So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
The question really becomes not if we're spending enough, but what it is that we happen to be buying. How much of any given $1 you spend in taxes purchases textbooks, or pays teacher paychecks? Hell, how much on air conditioning in the summer so kids can concentrate on something other than the sweat dribbling down their foreheads?
How much is spent on the office building downtown that has nothing to do with teaching directly, but with people who manage the teachers? And with people who manage those managers?
> So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
If the only equality you can figure out how to manage is hammering down all the nails that stick out, what good is equality?
> If the only equality you can figure out how to manage is hammering down all the nails that stick out, what good is equality?
I have not said that, but opportunities should be well thought out and available to each child. I am also convinced that there is a balance to strike here, classes should be diverse to not entrench inequality too much. Of course young mozart just needs more musical education, young warhol more art and young einstein more math.
Public spending per pupil is quite high, when federal and state funding are both considered. Public students aren't being underfunded. The money's just not buying what you think it buys. Is that difficult to believe?
> I have not said that,
I don't know how to parse your first comment other than that. I don't want to live in the same country as someone who would deny my children the education I would provide for them, so that they can be turned into imbeciles in public schools. This is a deeply important issue for me. I will never allow mine to go near a public school.
There is no balance to strike. Let those who wish to do so, go their own way.
Mao did rid of the meritocracy-based education system, replacing it with an identity-based system. That is, if you were born with the right identity (blue-collar worker, peasant (not farmer, mind you), and soldier), then you get to go to a university without even any test. If you were born with the wrong identity (the right, the anti-revolutionary, the farmer or any family who has property, the "rich", the "bad"), then you can't go to any college. The results? Just look at China in the 70s. What a fucking hell hole.
As a for Stalin or Soviet, they never gave up their elite education. In fact, elite officers had to be elite students as well. Those who are good at STEM could even get a little leniency when they made the so-called political mistakes.
Edit:- They get homework they need to turn in. Early on I had to spend sometime with my daughter to help her cope. But once she had her concepts down its been pretty smooth sailing.
Families in Palo Alto recently won a lawsuit against PAUSD, [1] which was denying students credit for courses taken at other institutions (mainly community colleges, IIRC). In Menlo Park, we deal with similar issues; I recently wondered to myself how much I could have taught my kids in all the hours that I have spent talking to the school/district about allowing students to receive advanced learning. Other parents with less time and more money opt for private schools. Those with less time and no more money simply resign themselves to the situation. It is shocking how hostile schools are to what used to be common sense: letting (or, gasp, even encouraging) all students to learn.
1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/03/judge-rules-h...
It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!!
For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake. The kids need 1-on-1 tutoring help.
Cut off the head of the problem—the school administration that continues to support our archaic system-and spend the money you will save on tutoring the kids. Or switch to mastery education. Fix the PROBLEM.
As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time.
What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school.
Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math.
> What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult.
As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.
Useful to whom? I've been coding for 30 years and the most complicated math ever I used was for calculating distance between two lat/lon points and even that I looked up.
Is it useful to an average worker sitting in front of a PC? I do not believe so.
I apologize if I didn't make myself clear: I hate academical math. I love math, especially once I realized how truly relevant it is to quite literally everything around me.
It was computer programming, long after and outside my academical times, that taught me what math really was about. Suddenly, all those numbers and letters had actual meanings and values to them, I learned I could manipulate them to store and mean literally anything. It was a mindblowing paradigm shift in my way of understanding and thinking everything.
All the teachers and textbooks in the world failed to teach me the true value and purpose of math, and I loathe them for wasting my time with their absolute failure.
Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught.
My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.
I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math.
It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in.
People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone.
Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD.
And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up.
Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool.
I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics.
And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it.
I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration.
Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.
Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them.
This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it.
It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … …
You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life.
The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun.
We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.
The current math curriculum is about giving people a strong base for using math outside mathematics itself, in case they want to study physics or some other science, or engineering. Mathematicians do not generally give a shit about the computational aspect (it’s not what math is about, generally speaking) which you spend most of your time doing in math curricula until you’re at the point where further studying math suggests you are interested in math itself.
The vast majority of people who struggle in math IME have at least one of two problems: one is they struggle with it and put up some mental barrier of being “bad at math”, the other is they fell behind at some point and the curriculum kept chugging along with no chance for the student to catch up (which just makes the subsequent material fail to stick and confusing). This has nothing to do with some nefarious mathematicians’ agenda and everything to do with the school system not allowing students to progress at different rates based on proficiency.
Interesting take, completely opposite of my educational experience.
I have a terrible memory for remembering random things so I always did badly in subjects that are all about memorization (like history). Math was my refuge where I excelled, as it didn't require to memorize anything. Everything could be derived by logic; I could solve all problems on the spot during tests instead of having to hope I memorized the right answers earlier.
All other classes were of the form: (1) teacher presents a bunch of facts; (2) I'm supposed to memorize them all; (3) then I need to regurgitate a random sampling of them back during the test. I hated that so much. Math was the exception to that pattern, so I loved it.
This is the most powerful tool for making your life easier
Therefore, there was nothing logical about academical math and it didn't help me think logically about anything.
Or using derivatives to find optimal material amount needed? Which would be tricky to memorize 100%
Like how could you even manage thru a lot of years and exams purely on memory?
You gotta understand somewhat this stuff.
Just because you dont know how to reinvent derivatives and integrals then it doesnt mean that there is no logic involved
Sure I was, but what does "x + 4 = 13 - 2x" actually mean?
That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. WTF is the point of it all? The answer is there is no point, other than scoring adequately on tests so teachers can collect their paychecks and schools their funding.
>You gotta understand somewhat this stuff.
I was never taught to understand, I was only ever taught to do. That is meaningless and, as far as I've experienced, still irrelevant in my life to this very day.
Practice of math and logic.
>That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math.
Isnt this beautiful?
Math doesnt need context, especially cultural context.
We dont need examples with apples, cars or money to do the math.
Sure, they are helpful for kids, but at some point they are so used to abstract concepts that theres no need for that.
So not only logic is being practiced, but also abstract thinking.
>still irrelevant in my life to this very day.
We dont do math just to apply some random ass formulas. As ive said it improves logical and abstract thinking. Both of them can make significant impact on someones life.
It can be seen everywhere in real life, especially during arguments.
It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge).
Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.
Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).
It’s a compounding problem and each time we assign blame to one (1) thing, we’re leaving other causes untreated and not making the problem better at all.
There are plenty of kids with great parents who are surrounded by awful peers at school and media that glorifies being uneducated. Then you leave 2 bad kids in a class of good kids, and you’ll get endless distractions that cause the others to give up and resent school. You address just one cause and you have countless others. You need to go after a load of issues and it’s honestly more complicated than we want to admit.
It really is a task for the society compared to the individual, otherwise you will never ever ever have a fair system. Success in schools should not be so dependent on the parents. What about single parents? Do you just accept that it will be miserable for them to get their kids trough school? Parents without a lot of education will also have a problem of helping their kids. And what about those kids? Will you just leave them behind? It's not their fault they are born in the wrong family. This is just a take I would just really not agree with.
That’s the current theory and it fails. The reality is that public eduction is education at (massive) scale. There is no amount of available resources to create, say, a personalized learning environment with dedicated teachers for individual students - when you’re dealing with millions, or tens of millions of students. Parental involvement is so critical because that is the individualized focus that is needed by kids.
There is no way for you to create a public system that overcomes the success that comes out of parents who are involved and invested in their child’s education. No way.
I do not see such evidence, maybe it fails in san francisco but that can have thousands of reasons. Everything I've read here points me to the fact that the public education is not good/comprehensive enough and too inflexible. I am honestly a bit shocked what i've read here, this is definitely not my experience with public education, like not at all. San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there. There is no excuse why public education should not excel. I bet every major politician has his kids on a private school and also every other decision maker.
> There is no way for you to create a public system that overcomes the success that comes out of parents who are involved and invested in their child’s education
This is not exactly what I said. It is probably impossible in practice to eliminate this advantage. But while impossible to eliminate, you can try to minimise it and you should. It's the only fair thing to do because kids can't choose their parents. I would go further, it's the only ethical thing to do.
Well … yeah. It’s education at scale. Anything at scale will be inflexible by definition.
> San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there.
And there’s a lot of funding. The median per student funding in the SF school board is something on the order of 2 or 3 times the median US funding (a quick Google shows ~$22k vs $7k) and when compared to global averages, it’s through the roof. It’s not the level of funding. It’s not even the administration and curriculum either (remember, our bar is very low - we just want kids that can read when they graduate).
The way I figure, optimizing public education is a last-mile problem. There is value in taking kids from a B to an A, or providing a more enriching educational experience. So don’t think I’m arguing against more funding and better management. But this isn’t going to solve the core issue - parental neglect (and it is neglect if a kid graduates high school illiterate). At scale, the state cannot make up for that kind of neglect. In fact, that’s a big reason why you see the divide growing - everything that is tried, just ends up marginally improving or marginally deteriorating educational experience of kids who are already doing reasonably well.
> But while impossible to eliminate, you can try to minimise it and you should.
And my argument is, we’ve largely hit the limit on this kind of optimization. Spending more, and/or changing the curriculum with the same cohort of teachers, isn’t going to give you anything better than trivial (at best) improvements.
Maybe agree to disagree because I don't see that.
> ~$22k
wow...this is honestly insane. I wonder how many full-time teacher positions per class this could afford. What's the most comprehensive schools education you can get there? In germany there's been the recent rise of all-day options at schools (school until 4pm covering lessons, homework and studying for exams and optional topics like school orchestra or more intense sports). 22k should pay for that and this would help overworked or overwhelmed parents. My girlfriend and her sister was raised by a single mother and went to one when it was still the exception (roughly ~40% are enrolling at all day schools right now, but it really started nation wide ~2002). It was quite different to my experience at a "normal" school class. She liked it.
I struggle to imagine how you can raise two daughters, work a full time job in a competitive housing market (so you can't really reduce your hours because the rent is high) while finding the time to invest enough time into the education of your children. At least the amount of time my parents have put in would be straight up impossible (one was working full time, the other reduced to 50% so afternoons there was always one present at home).
We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling.
Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless.
I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.
In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.
why pay students to tutor? make tutoring younger kids part of the curriculum. teaching a skill is the best way to practice and internalize the skill for yourself.
montessori is already doing this very effectively.
There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.
There is a difference between "parents always matter to a child's education" and "let's stop trying to improve schools cause what's the point". The latter is basically the same as "schools are pointless, why have them in the first place?". If you believe that, look at some countries that don't have schools...
I think every school should have the possibility to put your kid in an all-day school, I can't imagine the strain on single parents or parents where both have to work a lot otherwise.
Of course it's not possible to eliminate parents as an important factor of the success of your kid, but you can help.
As I understood it (not a parent and it was not available when I was at school): You have all-day classes and "normal" classes at school. The kids in all-day classes stay together during the day and the kids in the other class go home, it is not an optional add-on. My niece is attending all-day school with a musical focus and likes it very much. All day classes differ between schools and classes, with school on 3-5 afternoons until 4 pm. Supervision is given for homework and studying for exams.
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"?
Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be?
The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years.
And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.
If schools were bad, but modern society can't function without them, which would you pick? If you say it can't function without them, then are they good regardless because you want it to continue to function?
Like, no matter how bad they are? Or do you draw some line or another? "It's ok if they make kids dumb and compulsive consumers, but they can't go torturing them!"
Asking questions like this seems to be more about dogma and status quo than anything else.
Even regardless of collapse, I still much prefer living (and having gone to school) in a country that has schools. At no point did it seem to me what the point of school is to make people dumb. That wasn't the US and wherever yours was, your experience may be different, but I really don't understand the level of cynicism triggered here by every discussion involving schools. Access to education has brought lots of people out of poverty and I'm rather sure the vast majority of children much prefer school to hard work in the fields. I also think it's pretty clear thay on the scale of centuries schools around the world have improved tremendously. On the scale of decades and centuries, physical violence and bullying has decreased a lot, both by teachers and children, while creativity and understanding play a more important role in lessons today than was ever the case in compulsory education systems.
Sure. And if schools had anything to do with education, maybe they could do that here too. But you're also commenting in a thread where there is a link to credible (uncontested, uncontroversially attested) reports that the schools are shutting down education. Purportedly to help make everyone equal.
It's arguable what the cause of this is, the reasoning behind the decisions, etc. But that's what it says. They've started teaching less math. Not teaching it differently. Not teaching it at a different age. They just don't.
It would almost be a relief if you were to dispute the reports themselves, and claimed it was some weird conspiracy theory. This would be more compatible with the attitude that you're expressing.
In the US, schools and education started with little overlap, and have less year to year.
To my mind, the outrage is somewhat exaggerated. You could call it "outrage fetishism about culture war issues". Also an opportunity for "smart people" to feel good about "how they managed to learn things despite having to go to school" and how much better they think they could organize the school system, or how much smarter they would have been if no schools had existed.
Yes, maybe the stated reasons for trying this reform were stupid and maybe it should have been obvious to people it wouldn't work. But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else. That can go a very long way given some time. And yes, that leaves us with an imperfect school system. Very different from arguing against having schools at all, a position far more outrageous to my mind than any "woke nonsense" I've been subjected to so far.
And they'll start it again eventually. Maybe in a different district or a different state. This isn't the kind of thing they give up on easily or quickly, and they're not the sort to learn from their own failed experiments.
> and how much better they think they could organize the school system
No one could organize it. I couldn't. It's beyond any reform, beyond fixing. It is an intractable problem. Well, if you assume that its purpose is education.
If we examine its true, unspoken purpose, it is working far better than it ever has, and improves year to year. It is a mechanism for the government to raise children from the earliest age on up through adulthood, with parents have as little influence on that process as can be cheaply afforded.
My wife and I homeschool.
> But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else.
No, they're willing to tone things down to avoid any PR backlash, and try again later when maybe those concerned are less attentive. All they have to do is be willing to try as many times as it takes, until they get lucky with the news cycle or the like.
I mean, from your perspective... why would they care if it didn't work? Do you imagine that the government (or any of its agencies or subdivisions as the case may be) loves these children? That it would grieve if a few thousand of them were permanently undereducated or miseducated by this? Would this committee cry itself to sleep every night regretting what it did wrong?
If it can't do these things, if it can't have regret or remorse of some sort when it does bad things, how can you imagine that it would ever stop doing bad things when those bad things cause it no inconvenience or problem?
>a position far more outrageous to my mind
I'd never say that about anything. There's nothing that I hold so sacred that I'd say "it's just outrageous that you want to get rid of X" or "are you mad that you'd say we should have Y?"
For me, I'd make good arguments outlining why there should be X, or that there should be a Y. And if you failed to agree, I'd try to understand what logic (or failure thereof) caused you remain unpersuaded.
When someone says something like this phrase though, all I can figure is that the status quo is important to them for irrational reasons. I've yet to hear a better hypothesis.
> Would this committee cry itself to sleep
It's possible to have working political systems achieving meaningful goals without anyone involved having to cry themselves to sleep. There's a lot of people who care about improving things (including those who implemented these policies). They really think they can make education better and they're really trying. Now, there will be disagreement about what the goals are and how to achieve any given goal. Over time, a democracy is very good at distilling these disagreements into policies that almost always aren't terrible (as opposed to "occasionally excellent" or something like that). The best way to get what you want is to take part in that process. I'm pretty sure trying to pretend "there's no such thing as society" and that you're living in an anarchy bites you in the back eventually (not that I think you're doing that).
> I'd never say [outrageous]
Maybe that word means something else to you than to me (I learned English in school). I would call a large part of this discussion and these comments here "public outrage". There is public outrage about a reform that made a few schools worse. The outrage lead to a change of policy. This is good and how a democratic process generally works. I also see "outrageous" as a spectrum, where you can of course discuss outrageous things but extraordinary claims (or proposals) require extraordinary evidence (or arguments). Arguing against schools is such an instance in my mind, comparable to arguing against medicine or rule if law (I assume at the very least 98% of people in my country would agree).
I'm aware of US education systems being called broken a lot. We call ours broken too but that only drives efforts to improve it, not giving up. My outside perspective is that the system you have is certainly preferable to no schools at all, that it's definitely possible to improve it, and that it will improve (over decades to centuries) assuming human civilization doesn't (partially) collapse.
Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?
wrt who has failed on them iirc countries like Finland figured how to largely lift the dependency from home, family, parents.
"You won't, but one of the smart kids might." [1]
Dumb kids can turn into smart kids, so they need math too.
[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...
Along the way, everybody has a chance to get a feel for math in the world, which I would say is on par with a certain base in the humanities; we should strive for every citizen to have it, even if it’s not strictly needed for survival in the job market.
Trigonometry, calculus, vectors, complex numbers, group theory, matrices? Fun, but not something I expect to be used often enough to justify making it mandatory part of everyone's education.
Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching).
In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.
I would add, "and how to teach it." to that.
My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.
I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.
So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. It gives one the impression that San Francisco's issues are other than with the reform.
If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade, it's not getting even halfway decent results. If they're better than the results in San Francisco, all you can learn from that is that Berkeley has extreme problems with student quality, and quality is even lower in San Francisco (or rather, the part of San Francisco that's being measured).
High school in the US ends at 12th grade -- how do they teach physics without calculus?
My high school offered more than most, I was able to take multi variable calculus which served me well in college.
i've reviewed multiple resumes from people in cali for east coast jobs and noticed fresh grads who went to great schools wrote down 'advanced math' on their resume and i thought it was so strange for it to be that vague that i definitely overlooked quite a few of them because other people named courses more clearly
I assume you are reviewing the resumes of college grads. Writing "advanced math" still seems weird to me.
In this case, the comment you were replying to referred to the high school curriculum in the town of Berkeley, not the eponymous university located in the same town.
My daughter's story is tragic. I think it basically came down to teachers just not giving a shit about the outcomes and presenting rote lessons. So when my daughter came home for help (my undergrad is in physics) I would try to explain how to solve a blazingly obvious problem (e.g. solve for x where 2x + 3 = 2y, and y is 4) she would lose her marbles, telling me that's not what her teacher said, and best I could figure, she had been taught some weird path through something geometric, and there was no way I was going to figure that out. So, my knowledge of math was completely invalidated, despite my having a more advanced math education than her teacher. This went on for a couple years and she finally failed a course.
She fixed the grade over the next quarter and we incidentally moved to another school district for my job. She excelled and got an A in pre-calc as a junior. But the new school district enrolled her in calculus and then decided they didn't have enough students to justify the section, so they cancelled it and rolled everyone into other courses. They decided my daughter had only taken 3 years of math so they had her take Algebra 2. After getting an A in pre-calc, they had her take Algebra 2. The next year she enrolled in college and they decided that she had to take a math class, but she would be best served by taking pre-calc again! What. The. Literal. Fuck!
My mom, the math teacher who wrote the Texas curriculum, and adores the whole Berkeley math education scene, leaned in to help her (mostly just to recover from the crushed self esteem) and near the end of the semester my mom called to tell me my daughter should not be pressed to do any more math. She hates it, feels terrible about herself whenever she thinks about it, and it would be best to never think about it again.
She's now a philosophy major, finishing junior year at a top college with a 3.9, straight As last quarter, and as long as we don't equatr logic to math, she can rock logic all day long
Fuck every math department. Every fucking math teacher, professor, and administrator who buys into this math reform shit can fuck right off.
Ok. So, my son. What of him? He was ahead a year when we went to that other school district. And they wouldn't have been able to keep him up with his peer group. So 18 months before the pandemic we pulled him out for home school, my mom taught him, and got him through 3 years of math in 1 year. He started high school in pre-calc.
Same parents, same grandparents. He just happened to avoid common core entirely by virtue of circumstances and is now going to UCSC as a math major, having finished every math class at Foothill Community College a semester before graduating high school.
Essentially no mathematician buys into this stuff. In general professional mathematicians and mathematics educators are little involved in the processes that design curricula in public schools. They are simply not included. No one feels more threatened by expertise than education school professors.
https://www.greatschools.org/california/berkeley/25-Berkeley...
Slightly above average in California is a failing grade by US standards. (California schools are 43rd in the nation.)
Imagine a school with a 10 for equity, but a 6 for test scores and 5 for college readiness. It will get the same 7 rating as Berkeley High. Which would you rather send your kids to?
* College Readiness, 8/10: This school is above the state average in key measures of college and career readiness.
* Test Scores, 9/10: Test scores at this school are far above the state average, suggesting that most students at this school are performing at or above grade level.
* Equity, 4/10: Underserved students at this school may be falling behind other students in the state, and this school may have significant achievement gaps.
https://www.sfusd.edu/departments/mathematics-department-pag...
https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd-math-core-course-sequence-...
And the district position statement:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uije_05H3BtVyp55oQZ7NCa2k58...
It has a “guiding principle”:
> Students’ academic success in mathematics must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs.
That’s amazing! While it may be laudable to hope that a math education program could be so strong that socioeconomic status and race make no difference, the rest of this is absurd. There are people with special needs who are at a disadvantage in math. The only way that their special needs would not predict the distribution of their academic success would be to have an implausibly amazing special needs education program, to redefine success, or to hold everyone else back.
and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The idea that you can achieve cosmic justice should be abolished. There's no such thing.
I think abandoning cosmic justice is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is educational outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status and that problem cannot be solved by the school district (unless you could institute a kind of boarding school). That said, these administrators have arrived at a solution ("equitable" education) and are now gaming the metrics to achieve it at the cost of everything else. Worse still they race to pat themselves on the back on having "solved racism".
I think it has been shown over and over again that good educational outcomes start with parents (or more broadly community outside of school) and one group has had that community dismantled over and over again over several generations. In short, while I think it's a noble goal, it cannot be achieved by the school system and SF should have a more pragmatic approach even if the performance by race makes you uncomfortable.
No, outcomes are tied to the culture of the parents. Parents involvement/care is the greatest predictor of child success. This doesn't mean that the parents are educated or wealthy, it's that they have a mindset that the best thing they can do for the success of THEIR child (not society) is prioritize education.
> it's that they have a mindset that the best thing they can do for the success of THEIR child (not society) is prioritize education.
Parents with that mindset but who don’t have a safe home or don’t have reliable food or who both work two jobs may have a very difficult time prioritizing education.
Family life matters to the growth and development of children. 64% of Black children live in single parent homes vs. 16% of Asian kids. How does this effect math results? Black children are more likely to live near highways with higher rates of air pollution and asthma. Do Black children sleep poorly and have poorer memory formation?
Black and hispanic children who are more like to be poor may have chronic background stress from poverty: food and shelter insecurity. They may have inadequate access to health care. They miss routine screenings for vision, hearing and dyslexia. Chronic absenteeism and tardiness abounds. Are these the problems?
Identifying and correcting the root cause of divergent math outcomes is likely to be a multi-faceted and complex endeavor involving families, finances and health. It is worth doing. Everyone deserves the best possible education outcome.
Unfortunately, with scant evidence, math educators have somehow convinced themselves the root cause of the problem is entirely the math curriculum and the equitable solution is to deprive advanced kids of opportunity. Madness.
the result? parents moving kids to private school. at the school nearest me they kindergarten enrollment is dropping. they are likely going to only have a a single class in a couple years
california is making it very clear the public school system is not going to help your children succeed beyond a base level. it seems to have the completely opposite goals of when i was in public school in california
It's still there in high school fwiw: https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/curriculum/high-school/mathem...
This is about dropping algebra I in 8th grade which is where you need to take it in order to prep for AP exams and the SAT basically. Algebra I (8th), trig/Geometry 9th, Algebra II 10th, pre-calc/ calculus 11th, AP calc 12th.
Anyway, these are all basically memorization and it is more important to teach mathematical reasoning and understanding skills vs pattern matching.
I mean ChatGPT LLMs score a 5 on AP calc now for god sakes. However, it scores a 2 on ap English language comprehension and literature. Oh the irony.
https://www.thestar.com/business/technology/2023/03/14/chatg...
At a bare minimum, the basics of algebra (and to a lesser extent precalc, such as understanding limits and differentials) foster a type of abstract thinking and skills that pretty much anyone can benefit from.
To illustrate my point of the uselessness of our conventional mathematical training. ChatGPT gets a 700 out of 800 on the SAT Math section, but ask ChatGPT a reasoning question that requires math... it can't do it. That shows you just how useless the SAT actually is except for training kids to pattern match.
On the other hand, GPT 3.5 is painfully bad at basic arithmetic. Apparently it can add long numbers, but you actually need to explain the addition algorithm and give it some examples. Then it can walk through the process step by step, just like an elementary school student.
In a lot of cases, I suspect ChatGPT 4 is pulling from a tiny corner of the training distribution. It has seen most of the web, and it doesn't need to see things often to talk about them. I've seen it successfully summarize the contents of obscure personal blogs, or of a very minor news story that was current for a week in 2009.
So it wouldn't surprise me if GPT 4 performs well on tasks that are mentioned on a half dozen obscure web pages, or something like that.
Everything else you've listed can be acquired as a dishwasher or a line cook.
Anyways, the classes always seemed to me to tend more towards shut up and calculate than they did building a robust understanding and perhaps most important of it all: a mathematical intuition. I always found it profoundly stupid that there were never any essay questions in math, I expect those who elect to teach the subject are often wont to expediency (which would explain the number of coaches in the department) rather than an inclination towards the subject itself.
I wonder if you could get a professor to do anything more than plug and chug, and that's a skill we've long ago delegated to glass. Not only do I want to explain these things in my mother tongue, I expect to know why some variable is in some such place, and how a cube of some other variable is related to the problem at hand. Calculation is banal.
Students who didn't show an interest in higher maths courses either took slower versions of the earlier courses where they could get more time with the material, or more business oriented maths such as basic statistics and accounting.
AP Calculus was the closest I experienced to "shut up and calculate", if only because our teacher somehow managed to get behind the lesson plan in our first week and we ended up doing homework for lessons the night before the class where she would actually explain it. That was the second most brutal experience of my academic career, only after the semester in college where I was taking a macro economics course taught by a Polish grad student and a micro econ course taught by a Greek grad student; neither of them pronounced things (especially, and perhaps obviously, the greek letters in equations) the same way, and it turned into a nightmare keeping things straight.
as someone who went through the public school system in California during a time where classroom sizes hovered between 35-50 students under a single teacher, I have a hard time thinking that won't bring at least some benefits to those that aren't being put into private schools.
Don't get me wrong, as a delinquent/mischievous/criminal youth I loved it; the dating pool was huge, parties everywhere, drugs abound -- but I never received any kind of decent scholastic education until college.
No, it doesn’t.
There was a proposed 2022 ballot initiative that would have done that with about 2/3 of the state funding, but it got less than 1/3 of the signatures required to be placed on the ballot.
Now, I'm not talking about race here - this is from my perspective in the UK.
Ultimately we need to split the education system up. Putting the next Einstein and a violent, disinterested drug dealer in the same school, let alone the same class, is a recipe for disaster. And no amount of giving the idiots targets will fix them, but it will make life hell for people who actually want to learn.
This one-size-fits-all, optimising for mediocrity attitude is evident in the move towards mixed sets. The idea is that by putting the intelligent kids and the violent, intentional failures in one class the intelligent kids encourage the others to improve. But in practice they're vastly outnumbered, so they just get relentlessly bullied and don't learn anything. I know, because it's happened to me.
And it's evident in the way schools handle behaviour. I was kicked in the head at school, twice, by a load of thugs. I'm still very slowly recovering from the post concussion syndrome. At this rate, I am likely to fail my exams and not get into what used to be my backup uni. It was an entirely preventable incident if only: - The school had entry requirements (it's meant to be a specialist technical school, but thanks to our enlightened government new grammar schools are banned.) - The school was able to expell them before it happened, what with them spending the whole time messing about and attacking my friend - The school had temporarily suspended more than the single person who punched my friend in the face when the whole group was there - The police, with it's restorative justice, letting under-18s get away with anything, policies, had actually done something the first time
But they didn't, and now my life is ruined, and they got away with it. Because of a series of brain dead policies that are disconnected from reality and pushed by people similarly disconnected from reality.
The school system should have separate schools for high achievers to allow them to succeed without violence and with the fast pace and high expectations they deserve. If people want to go to those schools they can put the work in, behave, and pay attention. It's time to stop feel-good policies about second chances and equity and optimise for success and meritocracy.
and that is the crux of the problem --- the best school would be one which would help students explore what they are interested, find what best suits them, and then best prepare them to be successful at that.
I disagree w/ separation though --- this really should be achievable in a single building/system.
One of the best programs ever for fostering educational success was the one California had where land-grant colleges were required to accept the student with the highest GPA from each high school who applied and provide a full scholarship (so if the top 3 students got a better deal, then the student w/ the 4th highest GPA was guaranteed to be able to apply to a land-grant college and be accepted, and get full tuition and room and board). This was dismantled after college students began protesting the Vietnam War and draft.
It should be achievable in a single building/system. And it would be great to have the funding, expertise, and coherent strategy to build a school system which helps students explore what they're interested in and find what suits them, and helps students in a personalised way.
However, to execute that you would need those three things - funding, expertise, and a coherent strategy. And I think part of the problems with schools is that they're on paper meant to do all of these amazing things - they're meant to have everyone under one roof and not have problems, they're meant to be endlessly forgiving to those with rough backgrounds and have them improve as a result, regardless of how many times they hurt those around them. Their ability to expell/suspend is heavily restricted, because schools shouldn't need to expel people. Schools are built around the assumption that they're close to this perfect utopia where everyone gets on well, and if we just make a few refinements to the implementation we'll be there. But they're nowhere near perfect, and I don't think that kind of utopia is anywhere near achievable. I don't know of anywhere where that's been achieved at scale.
What has been achieved at scale is building an education system that may not be able to provide for each student individually, but which at least has separate paths for the types of students they accommodate.
The EU publishes a document of the composition of European education systems (https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/d78...). While I haven't got first-hand experience of any of them (besides the UK one), I have spoken to people about it. The German system in particular appears to be quite well designed (though I may be wrong - this is from conversations with one person.) There are multiple tracks you can go down, which cater to different students. People can transfer between the tracks, generally at age 16, if they want to go to (state-paid-for) university.
What is clear is that single-track education systems are a rarity. If anyone here has first-hand experience I'd be interested in what you think of it.
> One of the best programs ever for fostering educational success was the one California had where land-grant colleges were required to accept the student with the highest GPA from each high school who applied and provide a full scholarship (so if the top 3 students got a better deal, then the student w/ the 4th highest GPA was guaranteed to be able to apply to a land-grant college and be accepted, and get full tuition and room and board). This was dismantled after college students began protesting the Vietnam War and draft.
That sounds like a great system. Robust education systems that support success and scholarships to allow people to continue in those systems regardless of background are some of the best tools for equality of opportunity and social mobility. There should really be more of that kind of thing - and without any identity-based strings attached.
(and I say that as an Asian-American who was bussed in to an inner-city Indianapolis school, taking a bus which went past a school I had previously walked to)
Apparently the Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled.
What the actual fuck.
Stick kids with an IQ 120+ in the same room as the others and they will teach themselves out of curiosity (in some subjects at least), or retain more than the other kids.
If we're using the classic fence example where each person gets a box just tall enough to see over the fence, then what were trying to do here is dig a fuckng hole for the taller (smarter) kids to stand in.
This might be a good time to bring up Lockhart's Lament, which imagines what artistic education would look like if we treated it like math.
https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament
Nobody with decision-making power in a school district likes the answer which this paper proposes: very small class sizes.
Let me ask this: what problem are you trying to solve?
That sounds like a math question! Get 'im, boys!
The essay's thesis is that math is an unusually useful art form that we typically teach by diktat. Students are asked to memorize formulas, but they would learn more effectively (and have more fun) if teachers could work closely with them to derive and understand the solutions. Or better yet, encourage and guide them to find their own interesting formulas and patterns.
https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing#geome...
I would highly recommend anyone w/ a child taking geometry to get a 3D printer and:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make
(I am currently working through the matching book on Calculus)
If it is (for the sake of argument) a quarter of the budget, then I ask would 33% more funding be able to shrink class sizes to a degree that would meet your approval?
If instead it were half the budget, would a 100% increase in funding not be able to shrink the class sizes enough?
Does anyone know what the actual percentage of staffers vs teachers is, or what proportion of funding goes to each? Not just payroll, but also the office buildings for staffers vs school buildings for classrooms, etc.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-12-15/la-ed-schoo...
Probably over half.
I downloaded the 2020 data for SFUSD from https://transparentcalifornia.com/. According to those data, only 45% of SFUSD's spend on pay & benefits goes to people whose job category contains the string 'eacher'.
Another 4.5% do to people whose job title contains the string 'incipal'.
That’s the worst part. It just shows either complete ignorance and incompetence or deception. “Look how failure rates have decreased. We all deserve a bonus!”
They knew exactly what they were doing if they went about bragging about it.
Is there anything that will get these people to realize that maybe they are working with a hypothesis that is fundamentally flawed?
It doesn't take a large amount of thinking to imagine what might have more predictive power in explaining what's going on here.
"The word algebra comes from the Arabic: الجبر, romanized: al-jabr, lit. 'reunion of broken parts,[1] bonesetting[2]' from the title of the early 9th century book ʿIlm al-jabr wa l-muqābala "The Science of Restoring and Balancing" by the Persian mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...
However, the SF policy that was truly evil to the poor was randomized school selection. Tell a poor kid in western addition they need to go to school in pacific heights. Tell the pacific heights kids they need to go to school in western addition. So what happens? The poor kids miss school (a lot) since their parents are working crappy jobs for rich people and can't do bus commutes each day. The pacific heights parents just enroll in private school. So tons of schools in SF just close. Awesome work SF. I am confident if you do the exact opposite in all SF policies you would have a great city.
One day I mentioned this to my parents. They didn't understand/believe it at first. But the next time I mentioned it they understood and instead of feeling proud they were clearly upset. Then a few months later I wrote a poem that impressed the school teachers and at that point they moved me to the "fast" class and I never tutored again until college.
Why couldn't I have done both? Would I have learned more if I had been forever in the slow class but tutoring half of that time ? That seems better than where it we are headed -- where everyone is in the metaphorical slow class and the advanced kids likely become numb and disinterested.
This is exactly what’s going on right now in SFUSD, and it’s so blatantly bad I honestly believe they are white supremacists in charge of the curriculum. What we are seeing is true systematic racism. How do they expect these kids to compete intellectually when they have lived an entire lifetime with lowered expectations?
This elimination of curriculum, and testing requirements, particularly as application criteria at elite colleges, is allowing for more under-performing students to gain entry to elite school while doing away with merit based, race blind enrollment. We are seeing systematic anti-racism. You have anti-racists in charge of the curriculum. This is what it looks like. Don't get it twisted.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-c...
Decades of EXCLUSIVELY PROGRESSIVE policies have lead to this end result. There aren’t any Republican boogeymen you can blame for this damage these policies have created.
It is because these brown groups were never performing at near the level of say Whites or Asians, that these policies are implemented. Eliminate any courses of distinction or difficulty, eliminate high standards that produce any outcomes of disparate performance. Flatten the overall strata of students by getting rid of opportunities of out-performance and differentiation.
And then, filters of credentialism at elite or high level institutions drop standardized tests as qualification for enrollment. What results? Massive increase in brown student admittance [0], particularly from low-quality schools into high quality universities. Who loses the most? Whites and Asians who would have had opportunity through advanced course selection and standardized test over-performance. But both the courses and the tests are being eliminated.
Does any of this help brown students become smarter? Of course not. But "Browns hurt the most, Whites supremacists victorious" is absurd. Look beyond the first level.
[0] https://www.takimag.com/article/low-grade-fever/
"Last week, millions of college acceptances and rejections were sent out to high school seniors. While the 2023 data won’t be available for some time, using 2022 numbers we can now begin to assess the impact of 2020’s dual body blows to higher education: the “racial reckoning” and the Covid-excused Not So Great Reset in which standards were lowered and policies made lazier and stupider."
> There aren’t any Republican boogeymen you can blame for this damage these policies have created.
Kind of a non-sequitur, this is obviously a massive left wing disaster, but the mainstream right is at least guilty of being so milquetoast in not hammering this nonsense harder, and many of them make the silly mistake like you of only ever saying a thing is bad if it harms Browns. No one ever sticks up for the Whites or Asians. The overall policy is an egalitarian disaster that aims to limit outperformers from advancing or being elevated above the broad masses of lowest-common-denominator "education". It's a leveling-policy. Democratization of education in the worst way.
My childhood school had 99% pass rates on standardized state tests and we literally never prepped for it. Time wasn't wasted studying directly for the state tests because there was no further score on which to grow. If a school of students is unable to meet the trivial ability required to pass the state tests then they have significantly worse problems than wasting time studying specifically for state tests.
As time passes, it looks more and more like policy in SFUSD is being set by various individuals whom, for their own reasons, think that "math education" is bad and that it must be avoided for "reasons", probably that they say involving "promoting equity".
But I also think the public school system has many one size fits all policies that no one questions.
Many people advocate for smaller class sizes so teachers can spend more time with each student, but this is very expensive so if tends to come with compromises.
I did very well in HS including advanced math but class size had nothing to do with it. I did well because I ignored the instructor and just did homework and studied in every class; often to the annoyance of the instructor.
In college this effect was even worse since class size is a key metric for US News college rankings work. Small class sizes mean college costs more. If college costs even $10 more per class-hour then you loose about an hour of time to study (per hour of class/instruction!) if you're working to afford college.
But weed-out classes are often taught via large lectures while easier electives tend to be smaller class sizes so it'd be difficult to observe this in metrics.
If you A/B tested large very small class sizes would you see an improvement? Probably, but you would never see the effects for an individual student. I keep wondering why offering different size classes isn't the solution? I think a lot of students would prefer the hands off approach of large classes while some really need smaller class sizes.
Less facetiously: A/B tests are great at lots of things. But these results really shouldn't surprise anyone. The idea that you will improve things for one group of students by making things worse for another group is really not only silly, it cost real kids a year of potential progress. An A/B test would cost some percentage of kids that year, which is better than hurting the whole group, but A/B testing on something that obviously would hurt their future does not seem fair to those hurt by the proposed changes.
Even ignoring the consent and ethical issues, doing something double-blind in a government ran system impacting statistically significant number of children simply can't be done. You can't maintain the blinding.
'Automatic rollbacks' are, frankly, absurd. How do you 'roll back' a child in 8th grade that failed algebra? Your quick iteration turns into dozens of cohorts to be tracked and managed.
A question to ask is it better for a kid to score 90% in algebra and it takes 2 more years or is it better that they score 50% and then move on to calculus. That would be a good A/B test to compare their lifetime earnings. My hypothesis is that calculus is a pretty useless skill and basic maths is more important in life.
There could be ways of doing A/B tests if the standardized tests are the same between states that have different curriculums.
It was 45 mins of math.
Questions ranging from simple algebra to probability theory to physics. And I was applying for an embedded systems position.
Boy was I glad that I was good at that kind of math.
Doing a 45min test on maths seems overkill to me.
Alright, you want kids to have racially equal-ish academic progress? Make it the parents' problem.
I don't mean that parents should tutor their kids but rather pressure them and expect them to be #1. Unless your kid is mentally challenged then it is the parents' expectation and lack of discipline and parenting skills that is the problem.
Even facing racist teachers and kids a child can come out on top and prove them wrong. It is not a school teachers's job to discipline a child, morivate them or teach them perseverance. It is also not their job to reward and celebrate a child's achievements.
How then can you make parents do a good job at parenting when it comes to academics? Most people care about money so reward parents of academically performing kids with tax credits. This way you won't raise taxes or add fees but especially for poor parents having an extra grand or two on their tax refund is huge motivator. And if it really is the kids fault then they get the same amount of tax burden as usual.
And what if they get abusive? Well they'll get abusive anyways if they are so terrible anyways.and you can say that abour teachers and standardized tests as well.
My wife set up a tutor from our hometown (a north-eastern corner of India) and I did a Zoom setup complete with a separate camera mount that streams my kid's table (where she writes) (we are in Bangalore). The teacher on the other end is earning much better than the local counterpart for an hour a day, five days a week. And we have a good teacher to work with. In fact, a few other teachers have approached us by now.
The recent Pandemic has taught everyone that it is indeed possible to learn from anywhere in the world and stay anywhere (almost). A few families had had their kids enrolled in schools (USA, UK, Australia) which were (I think) meant and started for home-schooled kids, and those that do not want to be in physical classes, etc. but accelerated for everyone during the Pandemic. So, an Indian kid might just be sitting at her home learning from teachers across the globe speaking native languages - English, French, and what not.
San Francisco has never really gone whole hog in trying innovative programs with underachieving programs for minority youth. This trick of trying to drag down high performers to disguise the other failures is typical of the district.
Does that mean that they ignore the feedback of the study, because of ... ideology?
(it's linked in the article as the decision to push math back a year). But I'm having trouble understanding why not exposing students to a subject earlier would be better for their development with that subject.
Are they supposed to absorb the knowledge for that between 8th-9th grade somehow without knowing what it is?
The part that boggles my mind is that these kids wont even see polynomials until high school! I'm pretty sure we were learning that stuff in 5th grade.
I honestly thought memorization had been disproven to be effective eons ago.
but without teaching the fundamentals like algebra and polynomials, which is foundational to understanding statistics (and how one would use it to model something to perform data analysis)?!
It's like trying to teach english by teaching novel writing, but without teaching any grammar.
https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/50/1/159
>We find no evidence of a positive mean impact of acceleration in any specification and significant negative effects on performance in both Algebra I and the traditional followup course, Geometry. Accelerating algebra to middle school appears benign or beneficial for higherperforming students but unambiguously harmful to the lowest performers. We consider whether the effects reflect the reliance on less-qualified teachers and conclude that this mechanism explains only a small fraction of the result.
Anecdata, fwliw: I learned multiplication and division in preschool, and I still loathed math to the point of neglecting it later (maybe because of how hellish math kept on being through 1st and 2nd grade overseas). I didn't even fully understand fractions when I took the SAT. (I'm just lucky my reading/writing were stellar. ;) (So that I could go on to fail both calc 1 and 2 when taking CS in uni. Made it through the second time though, mwahaha!)
SFUSD does not appear to be run by intelligent people, however. I don't say that as some Internet slur. I mean that as a descriptive term. Should you disagree, it is worth watching this 2 min video of a meeting from one of their committees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdekUXyAAzI
Yikes.
Nope, and it's compounded by the fact the vast majority of academical math is irrelevant to life unless and until you make your way into a path of life that requires some of it.
Math education is fundamentally flawed because it attempts to teach irrelevant factoids in a manner that explicitly avoids teaching the hows and whys. No wonder most people end up hating the subject.
> Nope
It happens all the time. You think people are born being great at Mario Kart?
Must-dos fall under those dictated by our surroundings (eg: life, work, etc.) and those dictated by ourselves (eg: it's fun, it's for a greater purpose, etc.).
Math education falls under neither.
and it's fun _because_ it's evolutionarily important to learn new things, and thus natural selection for humans have made learning (and mastery) "fun". Mastering mario cart takes lots of learning.
Maths isn't fun only because the kids aren't learning in class, and isn't gaining mastery. It's taught poorly - maths can certainly be fun.
>It's taught poorly - maths can certainly be fun.
My point exactly. Math is fun and valuable, but academical math is terrible; it teaches nothing of importance and most people end up hating math because of how irrelevant and worthless the way it is taught is.
The system is designed to be inclusive and promote equality of opportunity. In practice this means classes with uninterested and preternaturally disruptive kids who spoil it for kids who actually want to learn.
Is there any link to an English version of these syllabi?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-math-tutors-education-t...
Plus a ban only extends to within a country so people in other countries will go right ahead with their tuition. Competition is global and such bans, beyond dismantling the tuition "business" and putting up hurdles in front of parent's craze for the rat-race, don't do much. Nobody is talking about the root cause, which is the fear of unemployment due to scarcity of opportunities.
All the while, the very well-off will continue to manage perfectly with plenty of workarounds available to them, as usual. All these bans would do to create another class of have's and have not's.
https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/equity-in-th...
I don’t get this idea that everyone should finish at the same time ?
why not let kids test into algebra in 8th grade and take pre-algebra when they are ready ?
Meanwhile, kids who don't test out look worse at the end of 12th grade. In theory, yes, we should let kids finish at the same time. But required school is over at the 12th grade mark, which is also around the time colleges are looking at you. Most kids won't do non-required schooling to get to the same level as the other kids.
That'll just create students who think they're great... until they experience the real world.
I'm finding the statistics in the second article linked to in this sentence difficult to read (because I'm not smart). Can someone tell me if this is because the top achievers are doing better, or that the bottom achievers are doing worse?
If it's the former, then this could be considered a good thing. You could certainly look at it and say "well we haven't made things _worse_ for the people who weren't doing well, but we have made things better for those who were already doing well". I get that wasn't the goal, but it's another way to look at things that could be interesting, because then you could take that apart and see if there's anything to learn there.
/s
We were told that she could not test out of the standard path. She literally had to do 1s and 2s multiplication tables worksheets alongside students who are learning this material. She is allowed, during free time, to do Khan Academy, where she is several grade levels ahead. However, she is so loaded down with busywork that even though it's now April, she still hasn't yet finished all of the multiplication and division worksheets. As a result, there has been very little free time during which she could actually learn anything.
The most frustrating thing is that we're not even looking for the teacher to provide advanced instruction — just to let her go off and do KA on her own.
It should be part of the core curriculum. I wonder how the contemporary education establishment would react to it.
Progressive nuts embracing equality over everything else have taken over.
London Breed et al. are the problem solving equivalent of giving up.
It's easy to succeed when you can't fail.
I grew up with rote memorization of math concepts and applying that through memorized math tables. That doesn't work for my spectrumy dyscalculic brain. If I had more advanced math education that started with elements of computer programming & interaction (actually, even at the "basic" level too), I'd wager I'd actually be relatively good at math today, with a much better lower level understanding of concepts. Instead, I'm effectively helpless when it comes to math.
[1]https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/12/uc-berkeley-stanford-pro...
It mentions Prof. Nelson's criticism among others.
7th grade (age 12/13): Pre-Algebra
8th grade: Algebra
9th grade: Geometry
10th grade: Algebra 2 / Trigonometry
11th grade: Pre-Calculus
12th grade: Calculus 1
In contrast, a relative got into the special ed group for smart kids.
During orientation, the moderator said that it is just as silly to put kids in the top 2% in a classroom with everyone else as it is to keep the kids who can't tie their shoes on their own in that same classroom.
Ugh, I couldn't imagine being a high achieving student and having to be lumped in with people who don't give a shit about their education.
I remember asking one of my teachers for a reference when I was transferring and she replied that if I hadn't been in her class she would have thought herself an utter failure because of how little attention the other students paid. Without doing much work I regularly set the curve. I'm not brilliant, but I did study some.