California needs real math education, not gimmicks | Hacker News Reader

California needs real math education, not gimmicks

noahpinion.blog

297 pointsjseliger363 comments

In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole.

The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.

Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.

Quality comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN.

I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.

The only incentive that works is letting such institutions crash and burn and be replaced. Even giant monopolies can end up losing money and going under.

In the context of Education or you have an entranched monopoly, this means voting for private school vouchers.

private school vouchers seems like a great idea, but I am afraid it will mirror college situation.

most state schools will have bare bones programs, except few select, while private schools will be many levels ahead and become "elite".

do we want "ivy league" situation with K-12 education system?

The bare bones the market would create would depend on if people really want K-12 to be a glorified daycare or a useful tool for imparting knowledge. But having a financial incentive to function or go bust would mean you'd at least get better daycare services.

The solution is to do what Sweden does, which is to require all schools to accept the vouchers and charge no further tuition.

I would say yes. Most states schools provide excellent value, and I would even extend that to community colleges which provides even better value for their students.

No, private schools can reject students. This means voting for charter schools.

That’s a good thing for all the other students.

Rejecting students is a feature not a bug. If you have a student that attacks other students or teachers institutions should be able to expel them.

Then where does the rejected student go with their voucher?

Segregating misbehaving students is a feature. Rejecting them is a bug.

to some sort of educator of last resort. This might be a private school that specialized in this, or a public school that can not refuse them and is therefore full of bad students.

And how will they get to this educator of last resort? The per child transportation and tuition costs for this educator of last resort will far exceed the amount of the voucher.

I dont see how transportation would be any different. If they can take a school bus or public trasport to school A, they could take it to school B (last resort).

I don't see why the cost of an educator should be that much different at school A than B either. It might be even cheaper.

California spends 23k per K-12 student now. You should be able to pay someone 100k to guard 5 jail cells with self study students.

> I dont see how transportation would be any different. If they can take a school bus or public trasport to school A, they could take it to school B (last resort).

Because the school of last resort will have to be further away in order to consist only of misbehaving kids. You don't have to take my word for it. You can see for yourself that there are far fewer schools for troubled kids.

> I don't see why the cost of an educator should be that much different at school A than B either.

Because these educators will be dealing solely with misbehaving kids. You don't have to take my word for it. There are private schools that take these kids, and they charge more.

a.k.a. Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

Iirc in systemantics, it was phrased as "the goal of a system is to perpetuate and extend itself, not to achieve whatever it was created for"

Silly thought: so it's shoehorning evolution into organizations. Regardless of how something is made to replicate itself, it inherently does so because that's what it does. Evolution arises when changes (accidental or not, from some perspective) present opportunities for thriving. It's not a matter of will as it is a matter of fact. I suppose for organizations, regulations and oversight are necessary to prevent evolution towards fulfilling perverse incentives. A bit hard to do when we're dealing with hyacinths, though. Herbicide, anyone?

Pournelle was just another Republican and this is just another political slogan, not an "iron law".

He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.

Pitched competition between well-matched opponents is the only sure-fire antidote. It either keeps the players perpetually lean, or picks off the ones that ossify. You are simply left no choice other than to play seriously or lose.

Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.

I think a lot of the organizational dysfunction in education and more broadly comes down to a poor understanding of rule utilitarianism.

In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice.

The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection.

This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.

I think the core issue is that we expect institutions like schools to do multiple, often conflicting tasks. In the US, schools are expected to:

* Provide instruction to the median student. * Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities. * Empower gifted students to learn to their potential. * Serve as an amateur sports league. * Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program * Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings) * Screen children for abuse and neglect * Be a place children can be left while parents are at work

Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.

Yes, agree, and this dovetails with a sibling comment by a long-time teacher. I have a child in the US and have family close in age and demographics in non-US countries. The pressure of school-as-childcare is unique to me in the US because of the amount of paid time off I get, which is substantially less than my peers in Europe. In addition, the financial pressures of childcare and education in the US are quite different than Europe. I certainly earn more money in the US than I would in Europe in the same job, but the logistics of arranging childcare and the pressure of teaching my child both math and English outside of school, despite 7+ hours of school a day, are not insubstantial. As has come up elsewhere in these discussions (on HN and in the article), 15 minutes a day of worksheets has done wonders. While I appreciate what Kid has learned in school, and very much appreciate that Kid's classmates get a nutritional baseline no matter what, it is striking that I must provide this additional instruction and practice. It's this very out-of-school intervention that leads to the inequality of outcomes I so clearly see at the school my child is departing -- one in which the kids with college prof parents score top in the state and kids whose parents are English-language learners or work several (non-adjunct-instructor) jobs score in the 30th percentile. (The kids of all the PhDs, whether well-compensated or not, do fine academically.)

Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct.

For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).

I tend to agree and I think public schools, at least in the US, have the same basic challenge as most government services. The consumer/parent/voter has direct control over the inputs to the system (funding, policy, etc) as well as expectations on the output (the goals you mentioned), but doesn't actually behave as if they're at least partially responsible for those outputs. I actually think taxpayers are generally supportive of education as a goal, but they think that's achieved by shouting at the school district instead of voting as if education was their priority.

Government bureaucracy absolutely produces less than optimal incentives and priorities, but the responsibility voters have in creating those incentives seems underappreciated, especially when it comes to public schools.

> It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth.

Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them.

The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else.

So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.

and those parents reflect a rotten culture.

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long.

As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.

One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.

All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.

The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.

It works everywhere in the private sector.

Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month.

> it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling

Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.

It... really doesn't.

Sales is a great example.

In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!

Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.

But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.

Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.

Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.

That only applies to small companies.

Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.

Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.

This problem can't be.

Large companies still have plenty of incentive pay.

Currently, teachers have zero incentive to get results. I bet you'll see results that follow incentives. Of course it won't be perfect - but I bet it'll be much better than the current disaster.

People like money. Especially the people who say they aren't motivated by money :-)

I work for a large company notorious for shooting itself in the foot because someone’s personal incentives to ship a shiny new thing and get promoted causes long-term repetitional harm as older things get abandoned. We pay for performance too, and quite well at that :)

Have you thought out the perverse incentives your pay scheme would create?

Like teachers giving answers to students because higher grades / more passing means more money...

Have a third party do the testing.

What will be their incentive? Bonuses for the number of tests graded?

While that might (or might not) mitigate one perverse incentive, there are lots more. It's important for policy proposals to take unintended consequences into account. What others can you foresee and how would you mitigate them?

You really need to see more of the actual economy, because this is embarrassingly naive.

You have another comment somewhere here saying that 80% of companies close within 5 years. You may be making the other sides point...

I suspect the problem is how you can reasonably write a general spec for that which doesn't systematically doom some teachers, especially during the bootstrap phase (arguably quite a few years).

In an ideal world, our perfectly spherical students would enter the classroom "at grade level" and ready to proceed to the next level.

But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75? Or are we in a "we started back, and are going to beat them by going slower" mentality, and even getting 0.75 grade per year would be a win?

Conversely, if you're at a magnet school, you may be taking in students already a few grades above the norm on day one of class. There are kids who can absolute bury the needle on a standardized test-- "12th grade equivalent" at 5th or 6th grade. You could simply babysit them all year and still clear the bar.

I also expect there's a huge amount of dealing with Karen parents too-- I suspect an firm hand in holding back underachieving students could result in parental backlash. Too many parents would rather see the kid tossed out the moment he turns 18, even if they haven't gotten them career or independent-life ready.

> But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75?

Well, obviously, they've been making less than 1.0 grades per year so far; you'd expect them to keep going at that rate, not to suddenly double their rate.

It doesn't really work in the private sector though; it leads to destructive and short-sighted juking of the relevant metrics.

Companies wouldn't use it pervasively if it didn't work.

Pervasiveness seems to be more a function of whatever the latest workplace fad is rather than based on underlying assessments of how well it works. I've heard upper management outright say things like they're mandating return-to-office simply because everybody else is doing it.

WFH is the fad. Work In Office and pay for performance has been around since the Dawn of Man.

It's only recently that more than 50% of humans even live in an urban area (the home base of offices).

Most of human history has seen the bulk of humans living in rural areas within all manner of labor exchange schemes.

"Modern Capitalism" was founded with "work from home" as a significant factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work

    Since the phrase 'piece work' first appears in writing around the year 1549, it is likely that at about this time, the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home, rather than within the master's workshop.

Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?

I bet piece work was paid for the piece, i.e. results, not time in the seat.

I never wrote that all work was done in the office, sheesh. Besides, any organized labor project is going to need the labor on site. Piece work can only be done if no coordination or teamwork is needed.

> the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home

Sounds like speculation to me. Where are those apprentices going to get the tools? Is he just going to carry the anvil home with him? How about the forge? Even hand tools have historically been pretty costly items, up until just a few years ago.

> Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?

Not much history is taught in public schools - not my fault. But I have a cite for you:

"Chapter 2 examines the material and religious foundations of capitalism that were laid down during the so-called Dark Ages."

  -- The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark, pg. xiv

Capitalism is a heluva lot older than 1549.

> Capitalism is a heluva lot older than 1549.

Huh? No, it's not. The first step may be learning what "capitalism" means. It's a specific economic system that developed in early modernity. It's not some "natural state of man" any more than feudalism was before it.

I provided a cite. Maybe have a look at it.

I've read Stark, and he goes way out in front of the actual documents we have. The high middle ages contained elements of a market economy that eventually developed into mercantilism and thence capitalism, which is very different from your claim that capitalism is a lot older than 1549. (You also seem to be conflating mercantilism and capitalism, incidentally, but either way the result is the same.)

The opinions of Rodney Stark are neither unkown, uncontested, nor definitive.

At best they are niche and contraversial (admittedly it's the phrase "revolutionary and controversial" that most commonly appears on his book reviews).

I spoke of modern capitalism which is a well understood term, as acknowledged by bandrami.

If you wish to speculate on undocumented pre history then it's reasonable to assume that work from home predates first documentation and goes back as far in time as large works with small parts existed.

Lol

This is laughably optimistic.

There are plenty of things companies do, pretty pervasively, that have been proven both scientifically and empirically to be detrimental.

I'm interested in hearing about your success running a company scientifically.

Ah, yes; because no one is allowed to disagree with you about something they haven't personally done.

Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them. Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.

Public teacher unions are adamantly against subjective reviews, which is why I suggested an objective mechanism.

> in the vague opinion of your management tree

I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.

It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.

Let's apply this to bankers, too. They must give a checking account to anybody who shows up, and their pay can be based on how much money is in those checking accounts at the end of the fiscal year.

a teacher's job is to teach their students. a "banker" (at the sort of bank where you might open a checking account) isn't expected to grow your checking account for you. you're supposed to do that, and the bank is supposed to hold it safely. I don't understand the comparison you are trying to make.

Even sales manipulates them -- giving away way too much to lock in a longer deal this quarter because it makes this quarter's numbers look better had been a problem at places I've worked.

> because almost anyone outside of sales could game them

Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.

In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.

but it doesn’t really work in the private sector. MBOs are common for US companies and to this day i’ve got teams across other departments that haven’t met MBO at 100% for years but the higher management seems it okay. the minimum work is still done but the full goals are never realized and these departments are just stuck in a rut. but, who cares? the minimum work is done, the progress numbers still go up, just we don’t have the ideal end result, just an acceptable one.

teachers already run the line of barely enough compensation to make it worthwhile except for those who are inclined towards teaching.

teachers are expected to do too much and there are too many goals imo for the position. whether we want it to be the case or not there is a huge social and mental health aspect to their jobs, and the standards look to be wildly inconsistent even within the same city as to what a successful education means.

like would you want to put a ton of effort in on a project knowing that the very next quarter you’re going to have to basically change the entire stack you’re working with and have a completely different set of regulations and project goals? and on top of it all, you need to get your team to even take the project seriously? and to make it even more fun a bunch of your teams’ families and friends are telling the world that the language you picked is awful and evil and are trying to regulate it out of use?

how much would you want for conditions like that every single project?

> Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work.

Management methods are full of cargo cult "science".

I don't think that would make a difference.

Incentives are whack across the board in education.

At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself.

We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.

Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.

Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.

> Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.

I’m generally supportive of finding ways to better use the talent of teachers and if paying incentives is part of that, great.

But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts.

Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.

Designed incentives can look good on paper but in reality they get gamed a lot until they are insignificant or detrimental to the final outcome.

> The only thing that works is school choice.

Citation needed.

School choice only works because you can choose to not be in a school with high need kids. The public schools can’t choose their student so it’s a huge disadvantage

That's a feature not a bug and public school districts should do the same.

Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.

I don’t think the parents of the kids sent off to prison and daycare would be all to happy with that outcome. Usually schools that do that do it in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention. It doesn’t take many pissed off parents to tilt the scales in a local election.

It also makes a lot of parents happy. A lot of it comes down to political inertia and the dominance of reactionism.

If you have a system with a dedicated school for violent and behaviorally challenged kids, there would be a much larger number of angry parents reacting to the idea of integrating those students with their children.

The happy parents won’t vote in significant enough numbers to offset unhappy ones. Pissed off people vote

That's my point about inertia

DC has been doing full school choice for 20 years now. So your bold innovative goal is to "be like DCPS in the early 2000s".

That's gonna go over great in Fairfax County.

We aren't approaching any kind of end stage anywhere in anything.

As a guy said once, there are neither beginnings or endings to the wheel of time.

I think that could work but you would need to give teachers more control over the discipline and syllabus in their classrooms.

If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.

Of course there are limits on what can be achieved. But we won't know until we try. It's hard to be worse than the current system of no incentive whatsoever.

It's hard to be worse than the current system

This is hardly ever true, for any kind of system.

Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis? They're doing pretty well, like they always have, but people are remarkably willing to simply accept claims (often by parties with financial interests in making them) that they aren't.

> Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis?

Declining achievement levels, the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools, and the disparities between different racial groups.

> Declining achievement levels

Nope. Do the homework here.

> the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools

Another claim remarkably free of any data

> the disparities between different racial groups.

African American kids today score better than white kids 30 years ago did.

One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?

Sure. Assign the students at random. Some years the teacher will get a better batch than other years, but it would all even out.

Don't forget to bus the kids randomly across town (county? state?), or else your suggestion is ineffective.

That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).

Why would it be ineffective? Suppose you're a teacher at a school where the kids are all below grade level. Sounds like a much larger opportunity to get those bonuses than a school where all kids are above average.

> or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers

Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.

You claimed that the fix to getting lucky with a batch of good students (or unlucky with bad) is random assignment. Now it seems that you're claiming that getting a bad batch is a good deal as it will be easier to get them to improve...

Both can be simultaneously true.

I think you have baked into your plan an incorrect assumption: You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output. Of all the things that lead to student education performance, the quality/performance of the teacher is very low on the list. Teachers are not factory workers, where if they are more skilled, or faster, or better trained, they'll produce more widgets faster.

Most teachers can predict each of their student's year-end educational performance by the end of the first parent-teacher meeting week. Students whose parents who are not involved or where there is no culture valuing education at home are pretty much screwed, no matter how much effort is spent on them, and students whose parents are dialed in and taking an active role in their educations are going to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is even there.

Basing a teacher's bonus on student performance will have one effect: Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.

There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes". Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".

> You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output

Who needs teachers, then, if they are so ineffectual? Might as well replace them with a canned video course.

BTW, every school knows who the good teachers are and who the useless ones are. They get paid exactly the same. Do you think that's a good system?

> There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes".

Of course they are.

> Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".

Company revenue is the sum of all the contributions of its workers. A student outcome is not the sum of the other student's outcomes, and is measurable independently.

> Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.

Sure. And there are only so many of those positions available.

> Who needs teachers, then, if they are so ineffectual? Might as well replace them with a canned video course.

Replacing teachers by canned video courses does not a priori sound like a bad idea.

The central reason why this is not done is that school also serves as daycare, so you need some employees to supervise the children, i.e. removing the teachers will hardly decrease the employee count. All together, if we consider the additinal cost of creating the video courses, this measure would hardly decrease the cost of schooling. So politicians think "never change a running system" and "avoid the trouble with the teacher's unions" and leave everything as it is.

My parents and step-parents are all retired teachers so I've seen the system from both the student and teacher's sides (and now also as a parent). School is not like a factory where raw material (students) come in, teachers apply work onto the raw material, and then finished product (educated students) come out. You can measure the students, but you are not measuring teaching quality. Student success is probably close to 95% parents/culture/homelife/nutrition and 5% some result of teacher input. If you have a reliable way to isolate and measure that 5% independently, by all means, suggest it to your local school board. They would absolutely love it.

I think it’s the reverse. The baseline remedial student growth is say .8 grades per year. Therefore to get 1.0 grades of progress you would need 125% baseline effectiveness. To get the same with a 1.2 growth rate student it would only take 83%. Students also can’t be judged in isolation, remedial students adversely affect other students so that needs to be taken into account somehow.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be done but you would need a pretty sophisticated model to try to figure out who is or isn’t effective. Then once you turned on the model you would need to constantly tweek it to handle metrics based tampering.

Not necessary. Do end of year testing, the same as is done today for assessing achievement levels.

You have to eliminate 3rd factor issues that the instructor has no control over and that’s the complicated part of the problem

If you did that some years would be great and some total losses. The reason being that at each grade level there are 4-10 kids that are completely unmanageable. If you allowed random to happen some percentage of the time you would overload a class with mayhem

While I'm not completely against performance-based pay, there are some issues that would make this particular approach unworkable.

One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail.

Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment.

So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.

A proper proposal would be a lot more words than my little posting!

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be significantly better than the existing system, which has zero incentive for the teachers to get results.

> zero incentive for the teachers to get results

Except, of course, wanting to educate -- which is ostensibly the reason they got into the profession in the first place. It probably wasn't for the pay.

Every job has its drudgery, no matter how much someone wants to have that job. I would also expect teachers who love to teach also want to teach those eager to learn. This is about teaching those who are not so interested in learning.

Also, you can't say teachers are poorly paid by neglecting they only work 8 months of the year, have a gold plated medical plan, and can retire with a lifetime very generous pension.

I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.

An incentive for the teachers is better than no incentive.

I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time.

They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them, did the $10 grand bonus motivate them to get it done on time?

They were offended, saying they were professionals and would have worked just as hard without it.

I laughed, and didn't buy it. Do you?

Here's another case. There was an earthquake in LA, and one of the cloverleaf freeway interchanges fell down. They contracted out the job with a tight deadline, and a bonus of ONE MILLION BUCKS per day it was finished ahead of schedule. It was finished several weeks ahead. Ka-ching!

Money talks, BS walks.

Right but you give the incentive to the construction company, not to the food truck that feeds the workers. The teachers aren't the problem (to the extent there even is a problem, which is an embarrassingly unexamined question), the students are. So give them an incentive to stop being a problem.

Giving the teachers an incentive to find a way to incentivize the students is a perfectly reasonable approach.

How do you incentivize IQ?

Do you really think that American kids are stupider than kids in other countries?

No but unlike many peer countries we actually test all of them rather than a select few.

I think some of them are. In fact, we both know some of them are. We also both know that there are hard limits to what a person with an IQ of 100 can learn.

While I agree with the idea that people respond to incentives, you are making it out to be a lot simpler to design these schemes than is actually the case.

The examples you give are straightforward. You already have a bunch of people who know how to do a job, so you pay them to do it quickly. Basically you are giving them money to go and tell their families they are going to be working late for a while and they have to postpone their holidays. These are both examples of a simple task with a definable, specific goal. Everyone can tell when the junction is built.

With this teaching math thing, there is no finish line. The people who decide if the kids pass are... teachers. Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes. You want to adjust for how easy the task is because you don't want easy classes to get paid and difficult classes to be excluded from getting the bonus. But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.

Finally there's the problem of feedback. Incentives work when the person who is incentivized knows how things are going and knows how to change the outcome. It is not clear at all that teachers know that if they just show Billy Bob the times tables as a rhyme then he will pass his test. It is not clear at all that teachers even know whether Billy Bob understands the times tables, or is just repeating what is being said.

This is the problem with all incentive engineering schemes. I'm an engineer too and I wish it were simple. But the history of it is rife with all sorts of catastrophes.

> Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes.

Sigh. Why do people keep bringing this up? Of course you'd need an assessment test that is not under the control of the teacher. Nobody sets up an incentive program where the person being incentivized evaluates himself.

Come on. Give me a reasonable riposte.

I think you need to steelman my arguments, per HN guidelines. I didn't say that each teacher would literally mark their own work, the fair interpretation would be that another teacher or committee of teachers would do this.

Here's what I wrote:

> But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.

So how do you intend to grade the teacher's work, except by other teachers, who are in the same position?

This is just like having board members appointing CEOs out of the same pool.

In fact, it's a pretty hard problem to deal with in general, and it appears many places in society, so it's fair to ask how this would be dealt with.

If we're going to build an incentive system, we don't want it to be gamed.

My parents gave me a few bucks for As and Bs. My school also gave me some scholarship money based on my scores.

No. Children are not the bottleneck. Parents are. All the statistics we have say that children in homes where the adults value education and urge their children to learn do better, regardless of other circumstances. Unruly children are typically the result of parental neglect. There are many many examples among poor families of well-behaved children achieving a trajectory that raises them out of poverty within a generation. But it all has to do with the attitude toward education and behavior in the home.

The classic example is poor Asian immigrants that produce successful professionals within one or two generations. Strict behavioral expectations in the home, coupled with an attitude of parental sacrifice for their child's educational opportunities causes significantly better results decade over decade. But this is an attitude that often doesn't translate to many American households.

Vouchers might be one way to help, but it still requires parental involvement in creating the incentive for the child.

How would vouchers help? It's not like changing schools increases parental involvement. If that's your model the use of public money that makes sense is paying parents to be more involved.

These suggestions of "pay for results" have a complicated history. I suggest anyone interested actually search the literature on it.

Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3])

The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it).

In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future.

[1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214.

[2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall)

[4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)

> The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers.

The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out.

This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay.

We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558...

So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US.

Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind.

This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.

Why does teaching to a test not work? If the curriculum was standard and the test was well made it should work fine. All my college grades were 50-100% test based and it seemed to work fine. Maybe you break down the content into testable units or something instead of one big test but still what’s wrong with tests?

There are a bunch of reasons why teaching to the test doesn't work.

1. Because tests are a crappy way of assessing knowledge.

There are students who are amazing test takers, but don't really understand the material. There are students who are terrible test takers, like they have test anxiety, but have an incredible understanding of the material if you talk to them and they work through a problem in front of you.

2. Because it's a terrible teaching methodology.

No one wants to learn about something because it's on the test. That's horrible motivation. They want to learn about something because it explains something cool they could never understand, because it provides a new perspective, because they get to do an exciting thing, because it's a fun competition with others, etc.

When you have to teach to a test, people teach to a test. There's pressure from administration to do it because the merit-based pay isn't just for you personally, it's also for the school as a whole. When test scores don't go up your school gets punished too. So now you drill the specific problems on the test over and over again. Do test scores go up? Sure, by that 0.1 standard deviations we talked about. Does joy go up? Does understanding go up? No.

3. Because tests can only test so much.

Practically, only so many topics can be on the test. There are big topics that are important to know in every class. There's tension here: if you design a test that's in a sense fair for a machine, you pick a random page, a random paragraph and ask a specific question about that paragraph, well, ok, you have a test that tests everything. Sort of, at least at the level of memorization. But, immediately people would say this is a terrible test for a human: why does it matter that my child remember the minutia in page 32, paragraph 3, when there are 7 big topics in this course, the topics that are important to build on for next year, and my child mastered them all? And that's fair criticism.

So now, tests become about the big things. Which makes sense, that's what you need for the future. But that interacts with 1 and 2. So now you drill the big topics over and over again. It becomes a game about memorizations.

4. Because we start teaching test taking skills instead of material

Many people are not good test takers. And that's fine! The goal of tests is not to test if you're a good test taker. It's to test if you know the material. We specifically design tests to avoid testing how good you are at taking tests.

Well, when the stakes are so high at Mr/Ms's Smith's retirement fund is on the line, and St. Margaret's operating funds for next year are on the line, people teach test taking. This is miserable for students. You basically teach it by taking a lot of tests over and over. And then of course teaching test taking strategies.

5. Because it makes losers and winners.

If a teacher and school knows that Jimmy isn't going to make it to grade level, will they work with Jimmy so he can do his best. Maybe catch up a little this year? Maybe find an alternative teaching style. Maybe there's a 10% chance that it will work out for Jimmy and he'll go on to university and do amazing things. No. Teaching to the test and merit based pay means that teachers will dump Jimmy. Even if they don't want to do that, the administration makes them. Jimmy is a liability, sure, but it's worse. All the time spent on Jimmy becomes a liability too. Better to just discard him to the scrap heap, he's unlikely to pass the test anyway. We'll double down on our efforts to help Bob instead. He's middling, he has a 70% chance to pass the test. If we double down maybe we increase that to 90%. That's much better for us. This is terrible for students and it feels really bad as a teacher too.

There's much more that is wrong, this is just a short summary.

It doesn't teach people to become educated, curious, smart, interesting, kind, well-rounded. To ask interesting questions. To want to learn. It forces teachers to turn people into widgets and to discard them like widgets.

We have already seen that such incentives produce the wrong effect. At the whole-school level, what we see from incentives like this is that the system gets gamed such that the standard is lowered so that pay milestones are achieved, as opposed to the actual results of educating the children.

Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs.

Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.

That seems like more of an incentive to get a job at an already high-performing school than it is to do a better job of teaching.

My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.

This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.

My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop.

Money talks.

My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read"

There are worse problems to have!

We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing.

We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter.

The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick.

(Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)

I don't think you can parent without some level of bribing but note that research has been done suggesting that extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation.

One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end.

https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...

Sadly, the link you provided shows how much nonsense there is in this space. They provide two sources of "evidence". Both of them are total junk.

For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.”

That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children.

The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do.

Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.

That was just a Google result that I scanned and found reasonable, so I have no great desire to defend it strongly, but:

The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.

It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it.

> Kohn (1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight, stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ- uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together, these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence).

> A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace. In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2

> And, without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that: There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation.

> Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance- contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain, Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.

> that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.

To be clear, originally you said "extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation". "Incentives can hurt" is a totally different statement; but I assume you still mean the original.

A short digression. As a scientist I think we should teach critical reading skills when it comes to science. This study has a bunch of things going against it:

1. It is published in an economics venue. This means the reviewers were economists, not psychologists. They had no clue about rewards, children, etc. They are experts in evaluating the model, not in what you want to know about, which is the part about humans.

2. You are relying on something in the paper that isn't the key contribution. You're relying on a short survey in the intro. No reviewer carefully read this and proposed updates. And even if they did, they were not the deciding factor in acceptance. Even if the intro was one-sided and mostly junk, if the model was amazing, the paper would be published. Papers are not evaluated based on their intros.

3. The paper is almost 25 years old, surveying material that is more than 25 years old. Science changes. A lot. The conclusions here could be totally different from the conclusions in a paper today because we have so much more evidence, higher quality studies, and better conceptual frameworks.

4. The authors have a particular goal: they want to show that there's a conflict between internal and external goals. This taints everything. They don't want to present an even-handed review, they literally want to make their case to a reader. I'm not saying this in some "conspiracy" sense. When I write a paper I want to argue my view, and put my view's worldview at the center, because I want to win people over.

All of this means that you should not be reading this paper in this way. It's the wrong paper, from the wrong time, with the wrong thesis, and you're looking in the wrong section.

We can do better!

Here is a review from 2020. https://msofc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2020-Intrinsic-...

Let's compare with the points above.

1. It is published in Contemporary Educational Psychology. You can bet the reviewers here know the material, know the latest studies on child learning, etc.

2. The key contribution of the paper is a survey. This is what they are being evaluated for. You missed a paper? Nope, your survey is bad we don't accept you. You didn't fairly represent what that paper said, we don't accept you. etc. The paper is being evaluated by what you are looking for.

3. The survey is fairly current, 4-5 years is ok. You would expect a survey every that many years, or at least once per decade or so.

4. The authors might have biases, but not in this paper. This paper's goal is to present the state of the art. And reviewers aren't looking at the paper based on how well did their argue their point, they're looking at it based on how well they represented the state of the art.

All of this means that this paper should be read to find what you want to know. It's the right kind of paper, from the right time, with the idea of looking at the field and answering these kinds of questions, and we're looking in the main body of the paper.

Now, let's turn to the paper itself.

What it says is that extrinsic motivation is no longer seen as so alien from intrinsic motivation. That in the past 20 years there's a new framework that talks about internalizing extrinsic motivation.

https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jeltal/article/downl...

The story is the same if you look at the paper above on language learning. The two types of motivation are not seen as opposites anymore.

You can keep reading by looking for "survey intrinsic extrinsic motivation teaching" and you'll find many more post 2020 papers. They all say the same thing. The field has changed. The two aren't opposites. Both are useful.

Both your papers seem to support my position, that extrinsic motivation can be harmful.

The summary on Wikipedia suggests that there was some arguments about whether this effect was real or not but the consensus is currently that it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory#Deb...

> Through the debate, consensus seems to have emerged that crowding out reliably occurs if the following conditions are met:[33][dubious – discuss]

> * Rewards are offered in the context of pre-existing intrinsic motivation (e.g. in a pro-social setting or for interesting tasks).[34]

> * Rewards are known in advance and expected.[35]

> * Rewards are tangible.[36]

Learning is a kid’s job.

A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen.

Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway.

I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc.

Pay the damn kids, I say.

I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations.

I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern.

Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state.

I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.

Merit scholarships were already out of fashion by the time I was applying for colleges (circa 2010). Especially at more selective schools (those with lower admission rates), merit scholarships have been displaced in favor of diversity scholarships, which I suppose reflects the changing priorities of those schools.

Scholarships also just possibly dried up after the great recession. My wife and I both graduated from same state with similar GPA, though I was 2010, she 2012. We qualified for the exact same scholarship. Mine covered 100% of my tuition, hers 75%.

> I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.

True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores".

Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!

Careful, you’re not allowed to utter the “C” word here in relation to educational outcomes.

(The word is “Culture”)

I find this site more open to constructive debate than elsewhere.

Thanks for specifying which c word you meant, as the only one in the post you replied to was Chinese.

Your phrasing is crude but there is truth in it. In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture, and it would be far more feasible for the government to pick up the slack and level the playing field (affordable quality education, abolish legacy admissions, etc.). Any amount of public school infrastructure and funding doesn't inherently get people to learn; students play a part in their own success. Of course, changing culture is much easier said than done.

I agree if only black people would change.

> In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture

African-American communities could be a lot better off if they had been able to take advantage of the same veterans benefits programs that white veterans were able to take advantage of, if they had been able to get home loans on the same terms that white counterparts were able to, if Black professionals had been able find work outside of Black operated businesses, and so on.

But yeah, Black people are real lazy if you just ignore hundreds of years of history. Black people ain't lazy, they just don't have the same opportunities as everyone else because when they walk into an interview with a white manager, there's a real good chance that manager is thinking something like, "In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture".

You're not addressing what I said. I recognize that African-Ammericans are generally very disadvantaged by a multitude of factors that they had no control over. However, a drastic change in culture that embraces education could improve outcomes signficantly, and ample government support could boost this to the point of actual equality being viable in a few generations. I don't remember if it was Kenyan, Nairobi, or other immigrants, but I remember reading about certain African-American immigrants being focused on education and doing fairly well (don't remember how well), like the Chinese immigrants mentioned upthread.

I addressed the fact that you're conflating over a hundred years of systematic disenfranchisement with an some imagined flaw in Black culture. I've taught black kids and I've taught white kids, and there is not a cultural difference between them that explains why one group generally succeeds in life, while the other generally flounders.

> I remember reading about certain African-American immigrants being focused on education and doing fairly well

From the Harvard Business Review: "In the United States, where 13.7% of the population is foreign-born, immigrants represent 20.2% of the self-employed workforce and 25% of startup founders". So, this pattern shows up for immigrant communities in general, it is not evidence that Africans off the boat from Africa have a different culture that makes them more likely to succeed than their American counterparts that have lived in America for generations.

The idea that a historically disenfranchised group is unsuccessful due to certain "cultural values" does not hold water. It's just a way to ignore history, and in turn ignore and excuse existing biases.

How well are the schools in Baltimore doing with all that money thrown at them?

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/baltimorecityma...

How did the Chinese immigrants become so prosperous so quickly if not for their cultural values around hard work and education? It's not as if there was affirmative action for them at the time because they were disenfranchised or something.

Education matters. Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well. There may be some subconscious biases in hiring, but it's not significant.

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/01/20/a-grow...

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/01/20/househ...

I'm not ignoring history. I recognize that African-Americans have been heavily disenfranchised and discriminated against. I'm trying to find a way forward from here. If African-Americans achieve similar educational attainment, I think it's fair to say that we'll be on the path to achieving equality. As they become more successful, fewer people will have undue stereotypes about them. Now the problem becomes initiating the process of betterment. The government should pitch in, but that will do little good without a change in culture. Plants can't grow without light, even if there's plenty of water and nutrients.

> How did the Chinese immigrants become so prosperous so quickly if not for their cultural values around hard work and education?

> Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well.

You keep attributing immigrant success rates to "cultural values" when they should be attributed to the self-selection process of emigration.

If it is as you say, that a sample of immigrants is representative of their native population and their "cultural values", then you should see comparable poverty rates and earning rates in immigrants' native populations, adjusted for local economies. You do not see that. Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking, otherwise they would not undergo the immense challenge of immigration in the first place. This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".

The fact of the matter is that those black immigrants have good educations and are doing well in the US, even if there is perhaps some bias in hiring. I'm talking about outcome here. So shift the culture of African-Americans here to focus on attaining good education, throw in government support and enforce race-blind policies (possibly favor poorer candidates that are acceptable), and I think there will be a similar outcome: within a few generations, equality should generally be reachable. I think that shift in culture is necessary and isn't widespread in African-American communities today.

> Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking

Yeah. So have the African-American populace at large match that.

> This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".

I don't know what the financial situation of those expats are and how hard it is to live in Berlin or Paris, but if it is difficult then hard work is necessary, no? Whether that would be American cultural values is trickier to answer because of the diversity here.

You're fine with comparing African Americans to African immigrants, so let's now compare White Americans to African immigrants: most Americans are not highly skilled, while many African immigrants are. In your words, we should "have the American populace at large match that".

Seems like you're trying to get me to say something wrong. Anyways, I see nothing wrong with encouraging skilled work all around. I'm sure there are plenty of things to innovate on. For example, reducing dangerous manual labor or mitigating global warming. Maybe one day we'll be so advanced that few people will need to do work.

> Seems like you're trying to get me to say something wrong.

Listen, if you honestly thought that saying half the stuff you said was right, then I don't know where to start. Imagine landing an interview for a job that will significantly effect where you can afford to live, what you can provide for your kids, and your ability to retire. Now imagine that your hiring manager is making value judgements about you personally, that are based on unfounded opinions he has about how your "culture", and you're passed over for a candidate that comes from a "culture" that he holds in higher regard. This is a real life scenario for millions of Americans, every single day.

I don't even know you're drawing these conclusions from what I'm saying.

Here:

Result I'm looking for: Decent baseline of financial stability among African-Americans

Objective: Get educational attainment and good employment up

Major factors I think are necessary (for relatively quick results, anyways):

- culture shifts towards focusing on education

- government funds public schools in terms of materials, transportation, teachers, etc.

- reduce college tuition somehow

- race-blind hiring/whatever policies

I'm just trying to justify why I think the culture is important. There is evidence that culture is important. Furthermore, I'm saying that there's currently a lack of that education-focused culture and that's why e.g. Baltimore isn't doing too great even with all the funding.

So you should at most have an issue with

- culture shift necessary (which embodies "current culture not working")

I don't see where your evidence that culture isn't an important factor here is. Also, I'm not here to talk about historic grievances and bias and all that. I'm trying to discuss a way out, not bemoan the current circumstances or hope the world magically changes overnight.

> I don't even know [how] you're drawing these conclusions from what I'm saying.

That is abundantly clear. Here it is in a nutshell: *if* you accept that "culture is important," *then* you cannot have "race-blind hiring/whatever policies," *because* you have already accepted that one culture values hard work more than another culture.

When you reject that "culture is important," then you can hire individuals based on their merits, instead of the opinions you have about their culture. Making decisions about individuals based on opinions you have about their culture is the definition of racism.

When did I say to consider culture in hiring people? You're just putting words into my mouth. I'm saying culture is an important factor in getting African-Americans to be employed at good jobs, not that companies should consider a candidate's culture. If people start growing crops in hydroponic systems, end consumers won't care as long as the results are good. Wouldn't it be great if more and more African-Americans get quality education and it becomes less and less tenable for companies to have racist (perhaps unintentionally) hiring policies in the face of skilled work?

Cultural problems within the poorer communities in the US cannot be solved completely internally. Because sadly many of the problems come from systemic racism forcing people into a box of sorts. Escaping that requires overcoming a mountain of challenges. My SO taught in some of these schools, and the circumstances in these communities is tragic.

It's a bit like telling prisoners they can all leave if they'd just try harder, meanwhile the outside world has been pouring concrete around the outside for decades.

I don't mean to say that changing a culture/mindset is at all easy. It's just that if the culture were to start changing, I think we would see significant progress in terms of elevating African-Americans to decent socioeconomic standing. The other day there was another HN thread about charter schools, where some people discussed what to do about chronic trouble kids (for lack of a better term). The fact that home life is a major factor in how kids develop means that bad households generally produce bad kids, but good households generally produce good kids.

If there was some magical way to change the culture of many African-American communities instantly, and if the government bolstered schools, healthcare, and whatnot, that would really be something. I don't think all that money will be very effective if the culture isn't changed, though. And affirmative action is too late, too little in the education journey.

I recognize this is like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill right now, but that's the only feasible way out that I see.

If we did that, the money would mostly go to the well off already. They’ve already got a system in place, they are already deeply into what their kids are studying. It doesn’t sound like much would improve.

But school districts are already segmented by wealth. So sure money would go to some families in the wealthier school districts. But also families in the poor ones.

I think you might be surprised at the distribution in wealth even within schools. Only an anecdote but I went to a public high school in somewhat of an inner city, and there was a stark contrast in financial well being across my classmates and myself. The kids from upper middle class families were the ones in AP classes and who went on to great universities, while the more median student likely came from a household that were much closer to the poverty line.

If performance had come with a financial bonus, I'd guess 90% of the recipients wouldn't notice any difference in their lives/outcomes. Maybe even a higher percentage than that.

Sounds like an excuse for parents to make their kids' lives hell. Such a policy would do a lot of damage.

This Ted talk (includes a lot of data) shows that motivation via money hurts creative problem solving.

https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y

> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to.

Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.

There is a better, older, phrase that would be great to promote over that tired saying:

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle

You are a contrarian in the best sense, thanks for sharing this!

As a true 'jack of all trades' I feel that it's my duty to share these quotes, or the full version of widely used quotes.

Great quote, thanks for sharing.

>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to.

Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.

How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.

I work for an American company remotely from Europe. I didn't leverage any educational facility from the US yet I'm contributing to the fact that the US is "leading the way" in technology. And the reason is simple: not only do they pay me more than an equivalent European company, often it's hard to find an "equivalent" European company where I can work on something I find interesting.

Now, something did originally created the conditions for why US is leading, but once that has happened it can become a self sustaining network effect, provided enough money is kept flowing

Yes. The population drop alone is going to make all this happen. Nevermind the massive black hole of citizenry who know next to nothing and are proud of it.

First of all, it's important to define what we mean by "innovation".

Is cryptocurrency "innovation"? Credit-default swaps? Leveraged buyouts? So much of what's been making absurd amounts of money in recent decades—and which gets openly called "innovative" by many people—is not better ways of doing things for people, but simply better ways of separating people from their money.

Second of all, it's important to look at who, exactly, is doing the hard work on the innovations that are pushing us forward, rather than simply making rich people richer. How many of these innovations come from people who got their education 15, 25, 40 years ago?

Third of all, it's important to question the very premise: I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a strong thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and that there have been changes in our public school system that have caused some serious problems over the past few decades...but to what extent are these problems universal? To what extent do they actually leave graduates less well prepared to be innovative?

Indeed, to what extent is innovation even a product of education, rather than culture and creativity?

Because the top end of US education is still very strong, with some of the best colleges in the world.

Strong capital markets makes the US probably the easiest place to start a company and seek funding.

The US remains a place where smart, talented individuals can succeed and make far more money than peers, attracting a pool of very talented immigrants.

> How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output (its people) is in such dire straights?

That's because it's not the people educated by the U.S. systems that are producing so much. I worked at a FANG company and within my team of 50 engineers, I was one of two people who were born in the U.S. It's not just tech either — my father is a chemical engineer and most of the engineers he works with are from other countries.

The U.S. is currently still one of the top places that the world's best talent wants to move to; whether that continues to hold true remains to be seen.

And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/

There is no incentive whatsoever without profit motive to help others repeatedly in an efficient way

Large organizations just further exacerbate this

I grew up in China and came to the same conclusion as yours! I never expect such a similarity. I've always thought that education in the US must be much better.

After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system.

Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform.

Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society.

These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?

I had the experience of going to US schools among competitive immigrants from Taiwan and HK(in the late 90's, i.e. they left while it was still under the British), and a little bit of mainland China as well.

Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city.

And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either.

I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy.

The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially.

In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.

These institutions cannot be reformed in a reasonable amount of time. The alternative has to come from elsewhere. People need a viable alternative so they can 'exit' similar to how Uber changed the taxi industry.

Indeed. And this is really the alignment problem of our time.

> once an organization surpasses a certain size

This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones.

There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.

Multiple problems with this. The most obvious one is cost: schools don't have large classes because they want to but because of budgets. The second one is that "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case and might very well be: experience in other countries shows you that parents tend to optimize for grades , test scores and "connections"; so you get grade inflation, "teaching to the test", bribery and networks and over all worse quality (just think of prejudices you have heard about some private schools).

> large classes

Irrelevant to the question at hand. There are small schools with small classes, small schools with large classes, large schools with small classes, large schools with large classes.

> "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case

No, it's intended to be a technical/neutral term to describe the person(s) making the economic (as in the science of economics) choice of which school to choose.

> parents tend to optimize for...

And other parents optimize for other priorities, see e.g. Montessori schools, St. Anne's in NYC where there are no grades. Having options allows parents to make that choice. When parents are forced to send their children to the large monopolistic public option because there are no other affordable options, they don't have a choice.

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

-- attributed to Oscar Wilde

> Unless we find a way to counteract this

Charter schools. Competition. Of course education sucks when there's no competition.

The actions that the California state education system towards Blacks and Brown kids are exactly what the most insidious racist person would do. If I hated Black and Brown kids, I would lower the education standards so low that these kids would graduate high school being unable to compete at the city, state or country level. And this is EXACTLY what is happening. Half of the Black kids in SF are graduating high school and can barely read.

Now with the gutting with math, Black and Brown kids will be even further behind on math than the rest of the demographics. It's horrifying.

Anyone who has money will avoid all this by either sending their kids to private school, which is what we did, or getting enrichment classes after school. Both of those options are unavailable to lower income kids, so the gap between the haves and the have nots will only increase at an exponential rate.

There is nothing more racist than the of lowered expectations in the guise of ruinous empathy for "the poor victims of white supremacy". You help undereducated kids by raising expectations, and pumping money into the system so that the student teacher ratio plummets in the poorest areas that need the most help. Instead SFUSD was spending millions to change the names of school instead of trying to get those kids to learn how to read.

Nothing like the subtle bigotry of lower expectations - the best way to keep "those people" in the underclass is to lower the standards.

I'm hoping the reversal of affirmative action will light a fire under this issue.

People with money homeschool, with much better results. There's even small homeschooling groups that pool resources to hire the best tutors money can buy.

Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back.

Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homeschooling literally produce better outcomes.

Not to mention the violence in public schools (which is escalating), and the abuse from teachers that the major US teaching unions ritually cover up (the teacher's unions vehemently defend predator teachers).

Teachers unions are in the business of protecting predators, financially and with predator-friendly policy like union-decided arbitration venues. [1]

[1] https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/campbell-brown-teachers-un...

> Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023

Two data points can't show something is exponential!

Also, it can't possibly be exponential because the US population is not growing exponentially.

>Also, it can't possibly be exponential because the US population is not growing exponentially

This is completely wrong. The fraction of home-schooled students could e.g have been increasing from 0.02% to 0.04% to 0.08% to 0.16% even if the overall population wasn't growing at all, and that's considered exponential growth. Clearly there are indeed problems with US maths education.

And then after another 6 doubling periods it'd get to 10%, will it? Exponential till it's not isn't exponential, it's logistic.

I had to look up "logistic" in that context.

Almost anything that is described as "exponential" isn't really exponential, if the curve is describing a real-world quantity. Real-world quantities tend to be subject to limits.

I'm an annoying pedant regarding the word "exponential", which is commonly used (especially by journalists) simply to mean "grows fast". I think it's fair to call a curve "exponential" if the relevant part of the curve approximates to exponential.

It's odd to say you're a pedant about "exponential" when you don't know what a logistic curve is!

I agree, but the number was ~13,000 in the 1970s. It's now in the millions.

So homeschooling has increased over 100x, while the number of students in any education in the US has grown by around 10-20%.

I have both of my kids enrolled in SFUSD and what you describe is exactly what's happening. Majority of “affluent” parents and immigrants are enrolling their children in Sylvan, Kumon, hiring Russian instructors, and so forth. Even school counselors will suggest this, as they also enroll their own children in such programs and subtly encourage you to do the same.

However, if a child belongs to a disadvantaged group, then they're out of luck. There's virtually no assistance available for them. While the district does offer free after-school and extra classes through SF State, these require a significant amount of paperwork which, as you probably know, necessitates full involvement from both parents. Essentially, the system is set up so that disadvantaged children don't receive the help they need.

It's a truly racist system. Yet, they can freely post on Twitter, touting how great and progressive they are.

I think a major problem is that most education "experts" (the type policy makers listen to, not practicing teachers) are upper-middle-class kids who had their parents teach them the basics of phonics and times tables. Who else would get a PhD in education?

They went to school, and found learning these things a massive waste of time, because their parents had already set them up to succeed, but they don't realise it was their parents doing all the work and it's not a waste of time or just "common sense" to the kids who didn't have the same home environment.

This is not supported by data. Across all universities, the education department represents the bottom of average SAT scores.

The bottom of the average of SAT scores of college attendees is the top 30%+ of students; Master's and PhD's are even more elite. This is like saying "the defensive line in the Cleveland Browns are the worst NFL players in the country": they're still NFL players.

Your misunderstanding is a great example of why we need better statistics education.

62% of recent high school graduates attend college (Bureau of Labor Statistics). 1 in 1,282 high school football players joins the NFL (0.078%). Your math is wrong by almost two orders of magnitude.

Attending college does not make one "elite" and equating the likelihood of getting a degree in education with the likelihood of joining the NFL is nonsensical.

That doesn’t necessarily negate their point. What % of students attend a four year college that requires the SAT? If a student attends junior college they wouldn’t need an SAT (among other pathways to college that don’t require it).

They didn’t source their statistic so it could just be made up but I think the general point that those that achieve an EdD were above average students seems likely.

I think we significantly overestimate how much school actually matters compared to family milieus. My wife and I highly value education, so regardless of when the school says children should learn algebra, I am already tutoring my 6 year old in basic algebra. If school did nothing other than be a daycare for my kids so we could work, they'd probably still be better educated than most kids going through public school because my wife and I will make sure of that because we teach our kids a lot on our own (and we're not hiring tutors or after school programs). If schools were more rigorous then it would save us time from having to do a lot of the educating ourselves, but it won't change family values.

This. I strongly suspect that the biggest problem in school for children from good families isn't the schooling but rather the presence of children from bad families.

My sister is a primary teacher and the things I've heard make it clear that the system tries to make up for bad parenting but it's and uphill struggle.

You are correct that in our world currently and maybe even in the past, the kids never truly learned math in school. I studied in the top university in my Indian province with 50 million people, and most of my undergrad colleagues truly didn’t understand what differentiation and integration actually meant.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The kids are supposed to learn things in school, we just need to pull our heads out of our assess and acknowledge that almost all current learning systems suck and try to reset from the ground up.

School doesn’t matter when school is made useless. Almost a tautology.

This is a recipe for an ignorant underclass from which one can never escape. What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education? Functioning public school is supposed to solve that problem.

Public libraries were invented a long, long time ago. These days, the internet is even better than the public libraries used to be.

> What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education?

What do they do in the current system? Get stuck in a class that can’t move faster than the average student?

I think even moving as fast as the average student is a generous assessment. My dad was a math teacher at a public high school in Southern California. At the end of his career he was the math dept chair. He retired recently but he was constantly battling administration who wanted them to focus on bringing up the bottom of the class. It was a battle that partially led to his retirement. The admins just wanted the test scores to go up and they saw focusing on the bottom as the easiest way.

Yes. However, public schools should provide opportunities for children to break free from this destructive cycle.

And it is not about “family” values. What the single grandma can do? Or single mom having drug issues can do? And these two examples are 100% real world examples.

But that’s sort of the point I’m making- schools can’t fix drug-addicted parents and that’s probably going to make much more of a difference in a child’s educational attainment than how good their teacher is at teaching math. Unless schools are going to do more than just teach academic subjects. They will basically have to function as reliable, disciplining parents.

How do you teach your 6 year old algebra?

I'll give her simple problems like "x + 5 = 0, what must `x` be to make this true?" (First had to teach her the number line and negative numbers) or "2*y = 6, what is y?" (Taught her multiplication as a copy-then-add operation, ie she knows that 2*3 means to make 3 copies of 2 and then add them all together. She hasn’t yet learned the times table)

California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution.

It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy.

I can only hope that in 5-10 years a new set of voters shift focus to education being a top priority.

More and more I get the feeling California doesn't care about the homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare. There are just a ton of grifters who make a lot of noise on the topics, but don't push for policies that would actually improve things. Or push for them in a way that is just more red tape that hinders actual results. Education is in the same bucket. Lots of noise from lots of people with bad ideas or bad implementations of ok ideas.

The homelessness industrial complex is quite profitable.

government bureacracy learned from the Military industrial complex (and Pentagon) how to leech $$$ from the government and keep problems alive to keep $$$ flowing

Exactly why none of these problems ever get fixed. There's too much money in the status quo; if they actually fixed the problems a lot of people would have to find some other way to earn an income.

they likely dedicate good amount of money, but overall corrupted and inefficient system doesn't allow to put these money at work.

The bar for US public school education is abysmally low to begin with. One would have expected Silicon Valley to be better than that, not one of the worst in the country.

Source: Someone from the Midwest who went to a public school

> Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy

Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?

Good question, and it probably depends on what you read. Here is one report that suggests there is a correlation, but I would continue to gather data:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-a...

We seem to expect it to fix poverty. We should fix poverty, and use public education to fix dumb kids.

You fix poverty by educating children and letting them grow up in a safe area free from crime. Educated children get put on the right path in life and lift themselves out of poverty.

That's how Asian countries like Japan and Korea pulled themselves out of poverty in the matter of decades. During the 1950s and 1960s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, and by the 1980s, was considered an economic miracle.

The Soviets had a good public education system. No economic miracle.

Japan's and Korea's economic miracles came from embracing free markets. The same thing happened in Vietnam and China. Free markets => prosperity, every time.

But to have a functioning free market, you need a basic functioning legal system, so people exchanging goods and services don't get robbed.

That's correct.

It means if you try to apply a free market system to a place without law and order, you'll have about as much of a mess as you started with. So the first step is to enforce governance.

N. Korea and the Soviet Union and pre-free market China also had effective governments.

For the market to be free the legal system has to exert a lot of pressure. The natural state of markets is not free.

Korea's economic growth came from export discipline, a kind of industrial policy where the dictator threw businessmen in prison if they didn't manage to get overseas customers. (See How Asia Works.)

That's not a free market, it's more like heading from communism towards free markets and then continuing over the other end of the horseshoe.

It has the problem that everyone in the country is now working themselves to death and is obsessed with plastic surgery rather than having children.

Free markets are a spectrum, not an absolute. There's never been a perfect free market, just like there's never been a perfect apple.

Using "free" in a situation where there's literally a dictator stretches it though.

Japan didn't have this, but the chaebol/zaibatsu systems are unnatural too, and Samsung seems to own like half the Korean economy.

Free markets => prosperity is absolutely not true and the consensus view of economic historians moved on from this idea in the 60s.

In the period 1950-2000, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and China all achieved their economic miracles through heavy government intervention in markets to build new industrial capacity, what is sometimes called state capitalism. in the period 1930-1950, Germany, the USSR and the US did the same in rising out of the Great Depression through national mobilization before and during WW2. And well before that, Britain became the world's economic leader in the 19th century in part through state capitalist practices that began in the 18th (e.g. the British East India company) - the British parliament was arguably the most actively interventionist state apparatus in Europe at this time. Many have also argued that Silicon Valley itself emerged from state capitalist actions by the US in its technological and industrial competition with the USSR from 1950-1990.

Free markets certainly have an important role to play, but they usually work best after the heavy lifting has been done by huge investments and interventions on the part of government to create fertile ground for entrepreneurs. That is, the government invests heavily to kick start development, creates a legal framework in which smaller scale enterprises can contribute and reap rewards for themselves, then steps back to allow the market to do its work, adding regulation as needed to keep it running smoothly.

What gives you the impression that California prioritizes homelessness, immigrants, and medicare over education? The state spent $136 billion on k-12 education last year, making it far and away the largest spending program. Anti-homelessness programs typically get 1% that much, although recent years have been slightly more as the housing crisis worsens.

> The state spent $136 billion on k-12 education

is it state or local taxes?..

Pota-to, po-tato?

California ranks no where near the top on dollars spent per student. Rankings are worse when you account for each states cost of living.

https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

I'm not sure any part of america has working education; across the board it seems to be a huge money sink that produces poor results. Gesturing to homelessness, immigrants and healthcare is clouding the issue. Those are real, pressing issues too, and it's not a binary choice of tackling one or the other.

This is false. My children went to top rated public school and my older daughter is about the graduate a year early from Berkeley in math.

Is their success due to their public school or due to their parent(s)?

"It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education."

Can you explain what those subjects have to do with education and how one affects the other?

Tldr k-12 education budget is smaller than what taxpayers are paying for homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and expanded Medi-Cal. Cutting costs in these areas could significantly bolster our K-12 budget.

Homelessness programs take up significant budget. 636 million per year SF spends on homelessness, SFUSD’s budget is 1.28 billion. Cutting the homeless budget would allow for increased education spend.

Undocumented immigrants make up ~10% the state population and are in the lowest tax paying bucket. On average just 1304$/undocumented immigrant of yearly tax revenue. So they are taking more social services than what they bring in. If California was more active in deporting them or enforcing tax collection practices, we’d have greater educational dollars per legal resident.

Medi-Cal has 1/3rd the states population enrolled. This is significantly higher than many other states. This program takes up significant tax dollars. These tax dollars could instead be spent on public education.

Social issues and education are not separate. That's the problem. Most of the low-performing kids are from - you might not guess it - households that are in need of social support.

Yes, there are some issues that can be demarcated as not intertwined with education.

But of course homeless people can have kids, and now they are in the foster system, and that's likely worse than fixing the homelessness. And similarly, when poor kids or their parents have medical issues, which they almost surely will have, because they don't have the resources to have a healthy lifestyle, where do you think they will go? If they have to go to work to afford medication they won't continue their studies, or simply won't even apply for higher ed.

The problem that voters should address is high costs, lack of efficiency, run of the mill corruption and so on. (But for this voters would need to accept actual cities with functioning transit system, not endless suburbs and highways around a few corporate skyscrapers. They'd need to face the actual problem of resource deficit that's needed to actually make some progress in closing the education and income gap of the disadvantaged, and so on.)

Like a lot of education, California's is so tied up in so many ways that it takes books to understand.

The first issue that springs to mind is the funding. Most funds in California do not stay local, they go to Sacramento and are then distributed out. If you're thinking that is a system ripe for abuse, then you are correct. The formulas and methods for determining funding aren't easy to grok. But then you add in all the fraud from schools themselves and you get a real mess.

Further, Prop 13's starvation of property taxes has also contributed to the lack of public school funding in California. It's a bit of a winding tale there, but suffice to say, less taxes means less good schools. Then again, Prop 13 is, just, hoo boy. What a total long standing mess.

So, does California need better education. Oh heck yes. But fixing that requires dealing with things like Prop 13 and other huge political monsters barely hidden under the rug. Try finding any politician with the bravery, let alone stamina, to fix those titanic underlying issues (pun intended).

Funding is not the problem, at least not everywhere. My local school district (San Francisco) has:

- an annual operating budget of $1.2bn/year.

- ~50k K-12 students.

That's $24k per student per year.

Let's assume a teacher costs $150k/year and you want a low student:teacher ratio of 20:1.

Of the $24k, $7.5k is needed to pay 1/20th of the cost of the teacher.

You still have two thirds of the money left. Is that not enough to pay for management and facilities?

The median salary for a teacher in SF seems to be ~$70k +/- $9k [0], so about half you guess. Which, I mean, how the heck are they living anywhere near SF on that salary? Jeeze Louise...

A better breakdown of the '21-'22 budget for SFUSD seems to be here: [1]. Numbers in () are a per student number

Federal Revenue: $48,915,000 ($926)

Local Revenue: $667,062,000 ($12,631)

State Revenue: $455,213,000 ($8,620)

Instructional Expenditures: $503,371,000 ($9,532)

Student and Staff Support: $193,984,000 ($3,673)

Administration: $104,612,000 ($1,981)

Operations, Food Service, other: $103,178,000 ($1,954)

Construction: $190,399,000 ($3,605)

Student/Teacher Ratio: 19.32

Total $ per student seems to be ~$22k, the ratio is just under 20:1, and construction is just under 20%, so your guesses were pretty good!

The site has more info, but one thing to notice is that the expenditures add up to more than the revenues. As in, SFUSD is in debt at ~$6 per student.

Play with the numbers yourself (please also find another source of data). In the end, it seems SFUSD is not doing all that well if it's only paying teachers ~$70k, is still running a deficit, and has revenues of ~$1.1B per year. Something seems strange about all those numbers.

[0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho...

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I...

Some quick thoughts:

1. You can find the latest operating budget (for 2023-2024) here[0]. It's $1.28bn.

2. The student ratio and cost per teacher assumptions I have were meant to be generous, to illustrate how, even with generous assumptions, it's hard to explain why $24k/student isn't enough.

3. If you do want to look at actual teacher costs for SFUSD, don't forget to sum salaries, benefits and pensions. If you want to look at total compensation for a specific teacher, Google 'transparent california', which has a searchable database for past years.

4. Cost of living changes don't affect everyone equally. Due to rent control, people who signed a rental contract 10-15 years ago (like many SFUSD teachers) aren't paying the same as folks who moved more recently.

[0] https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...

I feel like the facts are a little thin. It is not really true that "For decades, American math curriculum has followed a standard sequence: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus." That may have been the local condition in some places. The high school in my city does not have and has never had any named math course except calculus and statistics. Everything else is just "math". Common core math does not follow the given progression, either. 8th grade common core math has elements of algebra, geometry, and statistics and probability.

My school system had a similar progression, though trig was on its own and you either took basic calc (essentially just limits and differentials) or AP calc, or a statistics-lite course that was basically "business math" for kids who weren't on a college track but might try for an associates degree or maybe community college. Though, arithmetic and algebra 1 were just called "math" (all pre-common-core, of course).

This was at a somewhat rural school in the Midwest, for what it is worth.

For me, New England, early 10s the algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, precalc, calc was the exact pattern.

Edit: despite the name, pre calc was basically entirely trigonometry.

Same in NY.

And in rural Ohio, in the '90s.

And Illinois, early 2000s

Same in PA. I was a math major before switching to CS and this course order has defined mathematics in the US for 3 decades.

Pretty much everyone I know has gone thru this exact sequence of math courses, including myself.

In the Texas in the 90s the math courses were: algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus.

I can confirm. We had all of that at the small, rural Texas school I attended. My class of 17 produced two successful computer scientists, a college professor, and a Navy nuclear engineer, each of whom all went through that very curriculum.

Learning trigonometry so late makes zero sense. It should go geometry, trigonometry, then algebra, and so on.

you can't do that much trig without knowing basic algebra.

Same in SC.

My math curriculum in the 1970s/80s followed exactly that progression.

Same in the 90s in San Jose.

That sequence was exactly what I had in northern Virginia in the early 2000s. If you think back, did your "math" teach approximately that same sequence?

The CA and NY Common Core does follow that sequence even if the names don't match up exactly, and even if there's a sprinkling of geometry, statistics, or algebra mixed together in early math.

Data Science is a form of statistics. Algebra II is a pre-requisite for statistics. How is replacing a pre-requisite with a more advanced class is a good idea?

Simple, you teach a very low level spreadsheets course but label is "Data Science". Voila!

How is data science not just statistics, rebranded?

When I studied statistics in university we studied clustering, regression, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, visualisations, charting, general linear models... how is this different from data science?

Is it just because we have more computing power, so we rebranded it? Instead of doing frequentist analyses because those are easy to do with smaller computers, now we do more Bayesian stats, on bigger computers, and therefore call it data science?

From the one data science course I took: compared to a traditional stats class, there is a bit more focus on data acquisition and pre processing, and more usage of our of the box tools, a bit less on some of theory (I don’t recall hearing about type I and type II errors).

Of course, since it was a professional course there is probably the assumption that students already know these things…

statistics assumes you have data prepared and ready to work on.

data science is more practical in a sense, you learn more to prepare real-life data for analysis.

also statistics coursework doesn't cover ML part (at least the stats course that I took)

I’ve periodically looked into it the differences and mostly it seems to come down to priorities. Statistics prioritizes mathematical rigor all the way through the process from collection to analysis. ML / Data science has more algorithmic concerns. Even the theoretical aspects of the two fields emphasize that distinction.

"data science" -- science warping onto itself, forgetting that it's primary mission is to match data with reality.

It’s “data science” only in name. (Btw I hate the term data science; most practitioners of this profession practice pseudoscientific bullshit or worse.) From TFA:

> The core issue of the CMF’s “data science” section is that it claims to be discussing data science while it is actually discussing data literacy.

> ...

> The CMF is replete with statements like “high-school data-science class students can learn to clean data sets – removing any data that is incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, or incorrect in some other way [...] High school students can also learn to download and upload data, and develop the more sophisticated “data moves” that are important to learn if students are tackling real data sets.''

It’s more of an Excel class with some basic math sprinkled in.

I went to high school in China, and the Math problems in the US from the same level are literal jokes to us. At the end of the semester, my teacher doesn't have anything else planned for the last class, so just for fun he would find these problems and share with the class :"Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with". I remember all of the problems are so dumb that the whole class would had a good laugh reading through them.

At that time I thought the whole Math education in the US is a joke, until I came here for graduate school and realized how brutally challenging the Math is in higher educations.

My 2 cents is that the majority demographics in the US don't give a damn about Math, or any kind of formal education. Most people, even the uneducated, are living a comfortable enough life, so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. As a result, these type of education are only reserved by the elite. While in a lot of developing countries, education is the only way for a normal people to not end up being extremely poor for the rest of his/her lives.

> "Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with"

That's some top grade propaganda to indoctrinate children there, just like with the authorities suppressing news about the knife attacks on Chinese kindergartens and instead reporting extensively on school shootings in the US to show how safe China is compared to the US. Gotta love the CCP

> so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education.

Is there really a point in grinding to learn calc 4 if you aren’t going to use it? Is the typical Chinese citizen in the workforce going to even use calc to begin with?

Well, "Yes Prime Minister" already figured it out. The whole education system is more for the welfare of bureaucracies and teachers/unions instead of students'. And that was some 40 years ago.

Teachers make very little money. Society has deemed them worth almost nothing despite the fact that they're pivotal in shaping minds; the future of america, and that they do very hard, frustrating work taking care of our spawn in a country where parents treat school like daycare instead of a place to learn.

They wouldn't need a union to collectively bargain if they were taken care of properly. On the flipside, I acknowledge that it is unfortunate that teaching seems to be a drip pan to collect people who do not succeed in primary careers, and that should probably stop also.

Teachers appear to earn an average of $79k in California[0], and are eligible for a pension[1] that probably boosts their earnings to the equivalent of a six-figure job. Also, they get summers and holidays off. Not silicon valley engineer money, but not bad.

[0]: https://www.niche.com/blog/teacher-salaries-in-america/ [1]: https://www.calstrs.com/retirement-benefits

True, but it's also true that average cost of living in California is quite high, brought up by insane CoL along the coast.

> Also, they get summers and holidays off.

Please don't perpetuate this. Any half decent teacher is going to spend summer looking at curriculum, block/lesson planning, in meetings, organizing their classroom, doing continuing education and training, etc. Sure, it's not as much work and it's more flexible during the summer, but it's by no means time off. Also, they work a lot more than 40 hrs/week during the school year. Also, they have a lot less flexibility about when they get time off. Also (in secondary/postsecondary), they have exams immediately prior to Christmas. (And yes, I bet you get Christmas off too.) And so on.

> Any half decent teacher is going to spend summer looking at curriculum, block/lesson planning, in meetings, organizing their classroom, doing continuing education and training, etc.

But the unions ensure that the NOT half decent teachers get paid the same, and they’re taking all that time as vacation. With such an incentive structure, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are a lot of NOT half decent teachers, and they get a lot of time off.

The two are probably the opposite sides of the same coin. If it was a prestigious and well paid profession, a career flame-out would not be able to land a job teaching.

A bureaucracy tries to keep itself alive. That's part of its goal. But "Yes, Prime Minister" is a British series, so unions are small, and not well off; they've got some political influence, and form a jumping board for future politicians, but that too is the nature of "middle field", as it's known in Dutch: the sector between citizens and government. Teachers' welfare also can't be the point, since more and more people avoid becoming teacher altogether. It's too much work for a pretty modest income.

Education involves a lot of money. It's the interference of individuals that want some of that that deteriorates it.

The teaching unions have pretty broad coverage, even more so when Yes PM was written.

See also: A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart (2002): <https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....>

Thank you for sharing this. I had not read it before and it beautifully put to words the feelings I developed while getting my math degree.

Somehow I stumble upon that paper once every few years, and I enjoy reading it every time.

I can confidently say only 6 out of 16 years of math education (elementary through undergrad math degree) were "good". Contrarily for example, most science classes were good in my experience.

Math is down there with the worst average teachers. I learned more from YouTube than the textbook+teacher for some classes (Hello Professor Leonard anyone?). Without some YouTube professors I probably would have failed several classes.

My gripes: Most teachers suck, no one teaches you how to actually study math along the way, the word problems/applications need to stop being almost always about physics ffs, too many classes have inadequate or poor technology, the big picture concepts/threads are lost by most math teachers, and some textbooks are AWFUL, the eTextbook push has made some even worse (too many examples of why to list), and finally there needs to be sometime in those 16 years where foundations and philosophical issues are broached at least passingly.

The good math classes are amazing, and that's what kept me interested. But I just had to vent about the wasted potential. I'm not giving a nuanced opinion, I'm pointing out some glaring issues. Also if you get a teacher who says they regularly attend some national conference for math educators to structure their class, transfer out.

I think standardized tests are ideal. Make them very hard and don't be afraid to fail most of your students and have them repeat grades. Testing should not account for anything about a student other than physical disability needs.

The effects of these measures are seen decades after enactment. From what I have observed, the politicization of education and having metrics other than academic tests has gotten so bad, it should be discussed as a matter of national security. Relying on immigrants to fill in the gap and hoping they'll choose to remain in the US(despite societal hostility growing) is not a sustainable strategy.

This is the one area China, India and Russia can run circles around the US easily.

> other than physical disability needs.

And mental, unless you wanted to likely fail many people with various kinds of dyslexia and many other issues.

If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot.

Yeah, mental too, so long as it impedes learning.

> If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot.

Depends. If a child has terrible parents for example, testing shouldn't accomodate for that. Same thing if family income and other issues are a factor. I think you are talking about learning accomodation and that's probably fine but tests should measure ability.

I inclided physical disability only because I couldn't think of how mental disability could be accomodated for in a test. But dyslexia is a good one, carefully crafting questions and answers for dyslexic kids makes sense.

For my school, kids taking algebra 1 in 9th grade were the remedial students. To force everyone into this track and pace… ugh.

The strangest thing to me is that American education professors wield power in setting educational standards, when their own field is completely allergic to any serious empirical work on what works. I guess to a state legislator a “professor of mathematics education” sounds like the kind of person who should know about these things?

California math standards resemble New York reading standards in their lack of engagement with studies of what works. There are too many examples like this. We would all be better off if education professors stayed completely out of the business of setting state standards.

This is incredibly sad. What does Dr. Boaler have to gain from crippling math education?

Money from consulting fees. https://twitter.com/minilek/status/1509678967472549889

Wow, this Boaler character is a piece of work [1][2].

[1] https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...

[2] https://stanfordreview.org/boaler-professor/

algebra until highschool? some students can take it as early as 5th/6th grade. ludicrous.

Depends on definitions mostly. You’ll likely start doing things like simple linear equations, including algebraic notation before formally doing “algebra 1”

Resounding agreement. I know kindergartners who can solve “z = x + y, solve for x” forms of problems, but some people call that “algebra”.

What I really mean is a lot of introduction to y = mx + b as a linear function

Almost all of them can:

“7 = [ ] + 3” where you write 4 in the box is a standard problem when learning to add, in nearly every workbook.

We unteach that skill between early elementary school and middle school through poor pedagogy.

The standard path is optimized for college admissions discrimination. It is prep for the SAT and calculus. What is not taught is effective problem solving. Instead we are basically teaching rote pattern matching. The proof of this claim is that chat gpt aces the SAT in math but fails on any advanced test like the IIT exams. Chat gpt even fails advanced AP English and literature exams. A place a priori you’d expect an LLM to do well.

Yes we should learn the chain rule and derivatives/slope but arguably developing statistical, mathematical and even computational reasoning/thinking is a better foundation.

U.S. high school math scores lag significantly behind other countries, even though scores in reading and science are above average

How much of this math gap is because other countries focus heavily on test prep and exam performance?

Optimizing for test scores is an American phenomenon. AFAIK schools in most of the rest of the developed world are not worrying about these metrics. (They do worry about how many pupils go on to graduate college, for example.)

(Although of course nobody on here likely knows anything about more than a handful of countries’ systems at most.)

This is blatantly wrong.

https://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132416889/chinese-top-in-test...

I mean, I did say developed world, but the link you're giving me is about China. I guess it's up to debate whether you consider that a developed country, but the IMF for example doesn't.

Being more concrete, test in Europe scores are generally not a factor in university admissions* or school funding.

I love being told I'm blatantly wrong about the world by confident Americans on the internet but, like, I did go through three of the systems in Europe for a total of 18 years and not once did the topic of test scores even come up.

*: How could they be? How do you use Swiss Matura grades to apply to an Italian university?

I've gone to school in the US, Germany, and Australia. Tests were a major factor in all three places.

But if you'd like to restrict candidates to the IMF's "developed" list, then other countries with well-documented testing cultures include Japan, South Korea, and the UK.

I mean, there are tests, sure. But at German schools for example, what do they really determine? Not your chance to get into university. For one thing, they're not standardized, except for Matura (AFAIK?). They don't influence the school's funding. Mostly not even whether parents send their kids to this school - you just go to whatever school is near you, as they're all pretty good.

They are signal for your teachers and parents. Matura might influence your choice of German schools, but that's about the only one, and even then, it's not really an important factor these days, is it?

>Optimizing for test scores is an American phenomenon.

Completely false. Look at the culture around standardised testing in places like Japan and South Korea. I'm Australian and optimizing for test scores is absolutely a thing here too, though I admit probably less so than the US.

To people where math (to some higher level) is kind of okish, this seems bad. But in my experience, most people coming out of school ( and I'm 50+ so going back decades now) don't really have a useful working knowledge of mathematical ideas. For many they just end up hating it, instantly forgetting everything they learned through pain when they leave school, and never want anything to do with math again. I'm all for people trying new ideas to teach math, also changing the way we assess it. As long as there is a path that preserves "academic math"

California: one of the richest regions on Earth, with the highest taxes in the US, and math education worse than third-world countries.

Since we are talking about education, there is no such thing as "third world", for 32 years at least.

I know of no better way to promote inequity than to gatekeep knowledge so that only those with abundant resources can access it.

I am just confronting this now. My daughter is 6, and I'm trying to teach her math and reading. She's excelling at reading. The thing about math is, I have to teach her math the way the standards specify. The problem is…

The common core math is just strange. I find it confusing, and I did a full tour at an engineering college.

Math is a “procedure”. That's why programs like MatLab/MathCad can solve equations-- they just have a set of rules that solve problems. Learning math is the process of internalizing these rules.

The common core stuff seems to be the opposite of this. I want to build with my daughter a set of skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, exponents etc, eventually moving on to trig, linear algebra and calc) she can build on. But common core hopelessly confuses even simple things like adition.

Please look into Beast Academy (online without books) and work through it with your daughter. Read the comics to her and go through the exercises together as needed.

I'll second this.

Beast is the only thing I've come across that feels to me like it's actually teaching math.

Thank you, I will look into this.

Khan Academy worked well for our kid, who started at that age. She worked through 1-2 grades per year and is now in their Algebra series. The main complaint I have is that there is no concept of 'practice' or 'drilling'. You just learn something and go straight to the quiz.

There are two problems with this. The first is that it doesn't get kids used to doing practice, which is critical for learning more advanced skills.

The second is that the quizzes use a lot of multiple choice (particularly in the younger grades, where kids are not assumed to be literate). Getting a handful of multiple choice questions correct is not a good indicator of having mastered a topic. Once I realized this, I told my kid she had to get all of the questions correct on the quiz 3 times in a row in order to move on.

The problem is thinking that 5 or 10 or 20 people can decide what is good for millions of kids. Let parents work with teachers and schools to figure out what works for their kids.

The government should shut down all public funded schools. If some people need financial aid to ensure education, provide that aid directly in the form of money or school vouchers.

Schools will spring up with varied teaching philosophies and approaches. Parents can evaluate the available options and enroll their kids wherever they like.

Eventually the best approaches will win out, and even specialisations might emerge. Maybe everyone actually doesn't need to learn arithmetic. But others do. So they would choose the appropriate school and courses.

I don't believe that "education resources" are lacking at all, if a student has access to the internet they have instant access to anything they would learn k-16. In terms of exercise, everybody has their own personal/public gym, with all the most advanced equipment (possibly interspersed with suboptimal equipment but an advanced personal gym nonetheless) that they do not use, because they either aren't athletes or don't care about exercise for health/spiritual fulfillment. Any work on making the gym better is wasted it isn't being used.

How can we solve this problem? Advertisement.

Perhaps instead of giving talks at conferences to people who couldn't care less about what you are saying and even if they did care they are "too busy" to engage with the ideas; you give talks to elementary schoolers instead. Elementary school, classrooms or auditoriums, or a monthly lecture series over the course of a year.

There aren't many other effective ways to show students that real people actually care about STEM, this one has the bonus of making use of the education of people who went from say EE to IT support, teachers cannot reasonably be expected to explain to children how electricity works better than that guy who lives a block down from you who has a stack of breadboards up to the ceiling, and just showing a video lacks the spontaneity needed to keep children engaged as you change focus.

What exactly is stopping you from repeating that talk you gave at strangeloop, rustconf, usenix, fosdem or gophercon to that school within walking distance? At the very least can you walk into the principal's office, look them dead in the eye; give them a firm handshake and tell them that you want to get involved with the kids' education.

How many STEM degrees holders are in California? A hundred thousand? How many elementary schools? <6,000. Even including middle and highschools the total is <10,000. The more people who participate the more it will show children that STEM is a real part of their life right now.

If you are a Californian, tell me how many STEM related talks, given by a community speaker, did you attend during your k-12 schooling? Now tell me how many times your teacher put on some random movie.

For me the answers are 0 and 100+

It really just looks like another form of the Reagan economics of 'starve the beast' in the end.

Kill the public education. Enrich the privatized education. How ironic

Education interventions are historically some of the least effective endeavors of any public works project.

Countless attempts to spend beacoup bucks to bridge racial gaps in educational attainment and IQ have been made and none have ever worked.

Given the bet available evidence, not much education is necessary to bring out the potential of a population in terms of attainment and IQ scoring.

The California educational public system is made to hamstring those that need it in order to prop up those that don’t.

Great article! Though the author despises phrases like Woke Math, his description of the failings of the California Math Framework is exactly what critics are referring to when using phrases like Woke Math.

It's all so tiresome.

If they underpay the teachers, then they don't need it. And people will be better off avoiding teaching as a career

I've taught high school and college for more than 2 decades. Please ignore me while I rant.

Before we can fix public education, we need to admit that humans are inherently unequal. Not everyone is at the top of the class in math. It is a teacher's job to bring the kids at the bottom up as high as we can, but some of them will not get it on their first try. That is nature.

Then we need to motivate them. Stop grouping kids into math classes based on what grade they are in. That does not match the workplaces we are preparing them for. Instead, we need to group them by interests. Let me teach a class of kids who truly love cars. I'll bring an old engine in and start teaching them arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Let me teach a class of kids who want to be streamers and YouTubers. I'll use DSLRs and Premiere Pro to teach them arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. They will learn the same math as the future mechanics, but they will not use the same examples.

Let me teach a class of kids who love money to do the accounting for the auto shop kids.

The only problem with grouping them by ability is that most (85%) of public school students have the intellectual curiosity of tomatoes. They love only app games and music. They are vegetables. The fix to that is to kick them out and let them try to earn a living until they (the ones that survive) come home and beg for a chance to learn enough to earn a living. Then they will pay attention in class.

We need to incentivize the learning of these public schools students while we kick their inflated egos out from under them. They think they are smart enough to be the CEO of Intel. We need to call them on that. Let's see them earn their lunch money replacing the shocks on cars, creating marketing videos for Fiverr clients, or keeping track of the accounting for the other classes. I'll teach them what they need to know.

Above all, do not let anyone supervise a teacher who is not qualified to teach that subject. Public schools prepare principals to run high schools in 4 steps: First, have them teach kindergarten for a year. Second, be an elementary school principal for a year. Third, be a junior high principal for a year. Fourth, be a high school principal. Imagine if the head of OpenAI started doing tech support for Microsoft Word, then because a supervisor over Word Tech Support, then moved to be the head of developing Microsoft Office (without being able to code) then move to be the head of OpenAI (without being able to explain what a GAN is.) Seriously. I've had public school bosses who saw no reason to ask the kids to log into the PCs in a computer class. They wanted to see me "teach" meaning talk to the kids without them touching the PCs in a computer class. They were stuck in kindergarten.

Oh wow... this article resonates with me and is bringing up some stuff for me as a parent.

My son was in the 8th grade the first year or two that CA rolled out this replace Algebra 2 with Data Science. The Piedmont school district selected this ridiculous book for the course that contained only problems, no lessons. I could go into a deep diatribe about this book, and the course design, but it did things like 'use exponents and exponent notation without introducing what exponents are and how they work... un-flipping believable.

I scheduled a parent-teacher meeting to discuss my concerns about the course design and book... and was assured by the assistant principal that the course was designed by experts and the book was carefully selected and was written by professors with expertise in math education. I. got. nowhere.

Here are vents/beefs with our education system today, as it pertains to math & science:

- What the heck happened to using a nice print book? It is understood that people learn better from reading and working with print books. Even in the 'every kid has a phone', screens everywhere, age... I have found this to be true for my kids and other parents have found the same. kids do better at math/science/history working out of a good physical book. Somehow, we can afford iPad's for every kid but we can't afford books?

- the 8th grade math book above was 80 USD for a hard copy, which I bought so I could tutor my son at home... absolutely deplorable. Not only was the book's content garbage... but the paper and print quality was also garbage. Somehow, I can buy a beautiful hardback textbook on an esoteric math topic for as little 50 USD... meanwhile, a 8th grade textbook is reaming the state coffers. We have so much economic capture and profiteering in K-12 education and it is disgusting... all K-12 content should be creative commons licensed and book cost should cover printing costs and meager profit and that's it (think www.openintro.org).

- We have some very special idiots in our public education system and they are "trying out education theories" on our kids, and we are letting them. There was nothing wrong with the math education 20 years ago, or even 40 years ago. Math is hard, that is okay... not everyone has to be a math genius. Learning math well takes time, being kind & compassionate to ourselves / our kids, and appreciating the grind a little bit. Even if there was something wrong with our classical math education, we could look at other countries who are kicking our ass in math education and see what they're doing... hints: teachers are treated/paid better, they use print textbooks with lots of carefully constructed lessons (graphics) and worked examples, gradual introduction of ideas in class with ample time for discussion, lots of spaced repetition, and lots of exercises starting with "very easy", to build confidence and enjoyment of progress/understanding, and moving gradually to more challenging.

This 8th grade books I refer to above was doing absolutely crazy stuff like throwing a couple problems out on average and standard deviation (again, with no lessons in book... just problems) and then, two problems later, asking them interpret box plots (again, without a lesson on box plots)... insanity. Kids in the class were so lost and disheartened; they all felt stupid. I had to keep telling my son, "you're not stupid... this book is completely ridiculous. The people who wrote this book, and the people who selected this book for your class, are out of touch with reality."

> Math should be more inclusive. Math should be more engaging. I think one of the biggest mistakes both Dr. Boaler’s supporters and detractors have made in this debate is to try to slot what should be a practical, fact based argument about optimal math education into an ideological struggle invoking silly phrases like Woke Math. Dr. Boaler and her fans did not make math education worse by being too left wing in their math—whatever that even means—but by sloppy with their science and lazy with their facts. You don’t make math education better by advocating for changes based on lies, and unfortunately, that is exactly what happened here.

The assertion is that this was not leftist politics at work. Why else would Dr. Boaler advocate for what the author asserts are lies, then? The author also admits that the aim is equal outcomes and gives data showing the approach is actively worse, even on that measure. How is this not a problem of Progressivism over Liberalism?

> In response to this, science and math professors across the state have been raising alarms. In response, Dr. Boaler turned to a tactic she often relies on—trying to wrap her ideas in the context of a broader culture war, painting critics as stodgy conservatives fighting her efforts to make math more equitable and diverse. She described her critics as those resisting change. The notion that teaching this version of data science rather than Algebra II is somehow more equitable permeates the CMF in often bizarre ways.

> The CMF says data science is more equitable than other STEM fields because “data scientists work together to address uncertainty in data while avoiding bias.”

So the aim is to train people to "clean data," leading to more equity! That is, train people to use the tools to eliminate data from datasets that meets someone else's definition of bias. Why "someone else's?" Because if the people wielding the tools don't have an understanding of the underlying math (something the article opines about) they can't know whether a dataset is biased or not without someone else telling them it is and how. When someone else tells them that any data indicating X < 0.9 is biased, they can then blindly eliminate all values of X less than 0.9. Yay! "Unbiased" data! Such a manipulation would have to be done on faith rather than on understanding.

How is this not a problem of politics getting in the way of education?

The only possible alternative is that it is the adjacent hustle of big business aligned with a particular political mindset. But that only makes it mildly removed from, not entirely divorced from, Progressive policy advocacy.

The Author may have good points, but there is still a lot of value in teaching basic statistics, and I don't understand why Algebra is required to understand basic stats.

Even just learning the basic descriptive statistics and getting people fluent in reading charts can be very valuable. The fact that they may not understand the deeper nuances is fine in my opinion.

Also... I work with a lot of data analysts and data scientists, and I really question if 90%+ of them have even a faintest understanding of their calculus course material. Most took the courses, promptly forgot everything, and just learned what they needed for their job, or use tools built by people who actually know the details.

> why Algebra is required to understand basic stats

I don't understand how you can say this. Literally every statistical concept is defined via formula, and to manipulate formulas correctly (or even really understand the concept) you need basic algebra.

Going even further than that, if you have the most basic "business scenario word problem", like cells in excel that describe how many widgets are made per hour, how many are defective, the price of each one...etc. The skill that lets you combine them in a sensical way to figure out your profit or loss is literally algebra. It's used by everyone everywhere all the time. Algebra is a core skill we can't be skipping.

IMO if you don't teach stats, people are okay, they have an intuition about fractions and can reason from there. But not teaching basic algebra and putting them in the modern economy is like not teaching someone to read and putting them in a car on the road.

I struggled a lot with Algebra, I forged my teacher's signature to not retake it for the third year in a row.

I didn't really "get" it until I started programming and learning stats. That's when it all hit me, then I went back and had to relearn what the hell they were talking about during my middle school years.

Also, once I got to Highschool math, Algebra 2 and PreCalc, it was very easy to simply memorize formulas and plug and chug.

You don't need to know Algebra to know what profit and loss is. If you want to calculate a break-even point, you look up the break-even point formula and plug in the numbers, or more commonly today, find the menu in your analysis program. None of my business classmates had any idea how to manipulate the formulas. You get a "quant" to do that for you. Yes, there are bad consequences because of this, but this is the reality of most modern businesses. People are already skipping Algebra, we just kinda let people move forward anyway.

To test it, give a highschool Algebra test randomly sampled modern workers. Don't let them study for it, pop quiz. I believe almost everyone would fail horribly if you could control for cheating.

Same story for trig, I didn't really appreciate or "get it" until I got really interested in ballistics and digital signal processing many years later.

Kids like me find Algebra, by itself, too far removed and too abstract to even begin to find value in it. I really had no idea what we were talking about most of the time. Sure you can learn some patterns and "trust" that the teachers know best, but then I go home and ask my parents, one who has a Doctoral degree in medicine, and the other a Master's in finance, when the last time they calculated an integral, or used the quadratic formula, and they say freshman year of college 40 years ago... A lot of my teachers were also full of shit and power tripping a significant amount of the time, so that didn't help build any trust either.

Thankfully, I figured out the deep beauty and power of math, but I have quite a lot of catching up to do, but my mental framework now is far more organized at mapping how all the concepts relate, and why they're valuable. I can learn more now in a few months than years of study when I was in Highschool. All because I can plug the concepts into a nice modular framework, and I can experiment with ideas in code.

Almost nobody that I knew did the same though, most of my coworkers over my 15 year career don't have the patience or curiosity to dive into this stuff. It's actually really hard to find friends who geek out about math and functional programming (expect for a few corners of the Internet, including here).

Hopefully that clarifies things, if not, I'd need to know more about your confusion.

As a counterpoint, a lot of business majors seemed to think that Econ 101, let alone calc-based 410, was the hardest thing in the world.

The class is all graphs but there usually no numbers—it’s all about the intersections and regions under different curves. Usually all drawn with straight lines to keep it simple in 101.

I think the people that found it hard did not have the fluency they needed in mathematics. If you can’t rearrange some simple linear equations, then things become very difficult.

This is so true. I majored in math and economics, and even the 400-level econ classes used exclusively linear equations because the average student in those classes had no idea what an integral was. But they could calculate the area of a triangle.

Thanks for the detailed thoughts. It sounds like you had a uniquely poor experience with your math education which is too bad. Obviously you are plenty smart to handle the concepts themselves and once you had reason to apply them, you immediately "got it". I definitely don't disagree that the way the subjects are taught without context is part of the problem. I didn't really "get" calculus until I was forced to apply it to physics.

That said, specifically with respect to the content in Algebra, I wasn't really sure what we were talking about here, so I looked up the CA Common Core Algebra 1 concepts. [0]

> (1) deepen and extend understanding of linear and exponential relationships

> (2) contrast linear and exponential relationships with each other and engage in methods for analyzing, solving, and using quadratic functions

> (3) extend the laws of exponents to square and cube roots

> (4) apply linear models to data that exhibit a linear trend

This strikes me as a pretty reasonable terminal point for the general population, and I don't see how you are going to talk about anything but the most shallow statistical concepts without being comfortable with the machinery involved in the above. Perhaps you could use stats to make the content more relatable and teach both at the same time (over 2 years?), that would seem reasonable to me. But I think I would resist dropping the above concepts from the curriculum entirely in favor of a "stats light" course that literally only went into charts and basic descriptive stats.

Also, it's a bit of a cliche, but I do think it's worthwhile to teach some concepts for the sake of imparting a lesson on "how to think" and not just for the content itself. The quadratic formula feels like a good example of this. Literally nobody has reason to apply it, but the abstract reasoning skills involved in mastering it are foundational. Even if we cannot get 100% of everyone there, it's a laudable goal to me and one we should stick with.

[0] https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/ccssmathstandardau...

> I didn't really "get" it until I started programming and learning stats.

I had a similar experience. I wasn't particularly good at math and struggled a bit with algebra until I started programming.

I had something I wanted to solve, and I found out I needed to convert between one ratio to another ratio, and I couldn't figure out how. Then I realized I could just compute a percentage and use that. After all a ratio is a measure of something relative to a whole and percentage would tell you, well, the percentage of the whole, and I had memorized the formulas from going to and from percent.

So I wrote the code for this, but staring at the code it suddenly was so obvious that the division by 100 on the first line would cancel with the multiplication by 100 on the second line.

That was my eureka moment. Algebra suddenly made sense, and math in general became a whole lot easier.

Probability density functions, or probability mass functions, are functions. Guess where you learn what those are?

Programming. We should be teaching programming and it should be mandatory at the earliest possible opportunity. And if my teenager isn't doing dynamic programming as a freshman in highschool I will be sorely disappointed.

J/k. Or am I.

I learned about functions in algebra. Seems like that concept would come in handy for stats.

the way calculus is taught is so far removed from any application. i had no idea what was going on. area under curved and x approaches infinity is all i remember.

As someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

The "advice" coming from these professors of education to state governments should be what is giving you a giant red flag. Reducing quality of education by lowering standards, and lying about the data, shows that it is not driven by science.

My opinion on this: the "education" establishment in the US is driven by people looking for consulting fees, as shown by someone in this post linking to Dr Boaler's absurd consulting fees.

Math standards are being dropped in the US, and the fight is coming from your colleagues. Reading is taught incorrectly and has been for decades as shown by dropping phonics based education and using "whole word association". Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead of American education, and the professors and educators are debating on if they should make American students unable to take Algebra in middle school, despite numerous countries learning algebra years before that.

Aren't those absurd consulting fees determined by taking a small fee and dividing it by a very small number of nominal hours worked?

$40,000 billed at $5,000 an hour for 8 hours worked is not what I would call a small fee no matter how you split it. That's a very large fee divided by a very small number of hours worked.

> Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead

My Chinese gf learned how to analyze simple electric circuits (Ohm's law, reading schematics, etc.) in middle school and was tested on it for high school entrance, even though she was an arts/humanities student. The standards here in NC for middle school science seem to only require knowing that circuits must be closed and insulators/conductors. That would be an (elective) HS or AP physics class. Also, there seems to be one set of standards and one test for all students in middle school and pre-university students. Instead of "detracking" by going down to the lowest common denominator, there are high expectations for all students.

In the UK and many other countries, what we call "advanced" AP Calculus BC is just "A-Level Math" and is the expected minimum for studying STEM fields in university. In America you can get into university (even a prestigious one) and start off at "College Algebra." People from other countries are shocked that law, medicine, etc. are graduate degrees requiring a different-field undergrad, because of how little a high school diploma actually means in America.

There is a massive state of under-education in America, and shockingly, it's become more and more popular to call education and degrees worthless. There's a lot to criticize about the out-of-pocket costs of college, but the education itself is invaluable. And weakening high school degrees even further is the last thing we need.

> In America you can get into university (even a prestigious one) and start off at "College Algebra."

It may be possible to get into any given University and start off with college algebra, although I'm not entirely sure about that. However is certainly not the case that you can get into any program at any University and start off at college algebra.

Admission requirements for majors are determined by departments responsible for those majors, and they can and do set their own standards for what is acceptable when declaring that major.

For example anything remotely related to Stem at any of the UC schools is going to expect that you have, prior to entering the program, already completed at least the equivalent of Calculus BC, and usually linear algebra as well, in order to be accepted into the program. If you're starting off at college algebra in one of those schools you will never complete the math sequence necessary to start one of these programs and still graduate within 4 years.

True for some universities. My university (Top 30 overall, public) does not consider intended majors as part of undergrad admissions, supposedly. Now, it would be practically challenging for a physics major to start at algebra and get up to calculus soon enough to start the physics classes, but no one would stop you. A few majors require an application in the second year, but those are specialities like journalism, business, library science, not regular STEM majors (except CS as of recently).

As someone with a brain, anytime someone uses an appeal to authority as a blithe dismissal of a substantial article, it's a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

Ultimately, K-12 education in the US is generally not great. This probably means any expert in the field is not a good educator.

I've been absolutely enraged at the approach to mathematics instruction my children (who have just finished 2nd and 5th grade) have had to-date. It is an absolutely mind-bogglingly inflexible system that seems designed to frustrate anyone gifted enough genetically or fortunate enough environmentally (e.g. parental/mentor instruction) to be beyond the concepts taught at a given level.

Did yours read any assigned novels in school in the 4th grade? Ours didn't, they don't do that anymore.

Not much writing either, because so much is online.

My wife is homeschooling next year.

No my oldest’s school didn’t require that. I don’t recall that either, but I was in 4th grade in the mid-80s so my recollection may be off.

They do a fair bit of writing, but not as rigorous as what I had in 5th grade. We had to write legit 5-paragraph essays and reports (I remember this because I struggled with it), and my son’s longest compositions were only required to be 1- or 2-paragraph blurbs in a composition book.

It seems like they took the bottom 40% of learners as the baseline for their implementation of Common Core. If anything they should have at least taken the middle 40%, since that brackets the mean in a normal distribution.

But what do I know. I just have a PhD in physics and have forgotten more math and statistics than they ever learned, and don’t make use of those ridiculous algorithmic tricks they teach and force kids to use, instead of fundamentals.

As a former teacher, there have always been pressure to push “new” approaches towards teachers and students. These approaches usually failed completely as predicted. The cycle repeats every 10-20 years.

You can't get a promotion in the bureaucracy if you just "do things well". You must "innovate" and start an "initiative". Administrators also get a pay bump for completing degrees like a master's and a PhD, right? so you have to do something that pleases the advisory committee to get your pay bump. Individual incentives are really misaligned with helping kids learn math best.

I don't want to be rude about this, but education PhDs are a complete joke, and your argument would be stronger without mentioning as much.

It took me a while to realize that most people with "doctoral degrees in education" have EdDs, not PhDs. The people I know with the latter are quite bright; the people with the former are not necessarily.

One of the reasons for this is that schools typically pay teachers more if they have a masters or doctoral degree in education (but it doesn't matter what type of doctoral degree...so people flock to the less rigorous one).

I haven't seen anything serious in the field of education. Education can and should be a science. There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work. Instead, we have 5 different preschool pedagogies, 5 different elementary pedagogies, and 5 different secondary pedagogies, and nobody bothering to figure out what works at scale.

> There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work.

I think one of the problems is that a proper experiment takes ~ 12 years (or more, if your want, eg, impact in college or on writing life) which leads to many problems:

- how do you get the research funded?

- how do you get people to stick to your approach for that long?

- how do you justify the risk that your idea will not make things worse (for a whole 12 years...)?

You're right-ish, but... the problems of educational sciences are plenty, but most importantly the impossibility to run proper experiments, and the almost complete lack of fundamental, reliable knowledge about human cognition and learning. The bottom line is that they have no idea how learning works, nor how teaching works. Their findings should not be used as evidence. Only the largest effects could be cautiously used as guidelines for gradual and reversible change.

There's 200 countries to examine. Should be plenty of ways to get data to analyse. For some reason it seems to be minimal how much comparison we get. Whether comparisons we do get end up being a kind of contest, like PISA.

So we assign each difference to national differences. Or language. Or some other part of the environment.

If you could get say 50 countries to do a double blind experiment with two different teaching methods, you might make use of the scale. But even then you can only conclude something if all results have (more or less) the same effect size, and what do you win? Little. You can't even generalize over countries, since it wasn't a representative sample. And that's ignoring all the aforementioned factors, and the near certainty of a less than flawless execution that will definitely screw up the results.

So I don't think "200 countries" will work. Such approaches have been tried with other, easier manipulations, like dieting, and it frequently turns out that interpreting the data isn't straight-forward. It isn't physics.

It isn't physics, but the bar is also lower. I agree there are issues with doing the comparison.

I wouldn't say the bar isn't lower. There are so many more variables than in physics, and you have so much less control over them, yet we don't really want less reliable conclusions.

If you want a physics metaphor: it's like dark matter: no idea what it is, where to begin, contradicting theories all around. But this is right under your nose. You've taken part in it, and if you work at uni, you still do.

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