Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
noahpinion.blog
noahpinion.blog
"So what should we do instead? Dallas came up with an answer: Teach kids more math instead of teaching them less. In 2019, Dallas Independent School District implemented a new equity policy that encouraged many more people to take honors math classes:
Many capable Hispanic, Black and English learner students did not elect to join these classes on their own or were passed over by their instructors. And their parents were often unaware they could make the request.
Dallas ISD, which serves some 142,000 children, took note of the disparity and in 2017 formed a racial equity advisory council — some of whose members had children in the district — with the goal of improving opportunity for all…It decided to move from an opt-in model to an opt-out policy in the 2019-20 school year. Since then…students cannot opt out [of advances classes] without written parent permission. The move has dramatically increased participation among traditionally marginalized children."
And if I knew whether or not it was nonsense, I wouldn't have prefaced the post with "I don't know." I was just suggesting that proxiful-wash's downvoted post wasn't completely out of the question.
The priors are suspicious enough: might a country that attempted to get the world to believe that the US created the HIV virus [1], successfully influenced a razor's-edge Presidential election [2], and plotted to stir up domestic racial conflict [3] try to handicap the US by originating and propagating counterproductive educational ideologies? It's certainly believable, but there's no smoking gun.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/jun/14/russian...
2: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-panel-finds-rus...
3: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-documents-reveal-...
You seem to take this whole concept very seriously, so maybe you can help me understand why. Out of the idea that Russians are responsible for all of America's worst problems, what endgame do you see that actually improves our situation? What specific and relevant changes in domestic and foreign policy would you prescribe?
Translation: "A good-faith discussion is not going to happen, so let's hit the mud and see how dirty we can get."
I don't think so. Only one of us would enjoy it.
Historically speaking on western social media, making a bold claim on something as generic as American primary education being influenced by foreign powers without any real evidence does tend to go down conspiracy territory. Most conpiracy theories aren't made in good faith, no.
Also isn't particularly good faith to respond with ad-hominem when asked to prove claims, which tends to happen with conspiracy that has little/no firm evidence attached.
"The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
I'll let others debate over which is worse.
One thing's for sure, though - it's pretty unreasonable to automatically discount the possibility of foreign influence, as others in this thread are doing.
I'm chatting with some friends who are parents in the Bay Area. Their admittedly very Californian response is that at least this should reduce competition for college spots. (Their kids are obviously going to get tutoring.)
I can't imagine colleges doing much beyond lots of AI interviews in the near future. That's if there is even a point in getting 95% of degrees anymore anyway.
It has changed education. And people who have kids nearing college age, who have noticed, will be able to help them navigate this world in a much more useful way than people who tell their kids to take on as much debt as they can to go to any university they want.
The pipeline that fuels our decision making of what to focus on in primary/secondary school as it relates only to what will help them stand out in a college application and our decision making of what a university-level education means as it relates to getting a job is fascinating.
First and foremost, these people want to decide what is equitable. Firstly, without taking actual ability (or "conscientiousness", how much effort kids are willing to put in), and secondly, they're human. They're corrupt.
For example, I grew up in Sacramento, and our public schools had a tracked program from 2nd grade. Pretty much all of us took algebra/geometry in middle school, and those who were advanced were taking precalc or calc by 9th grade. It has been a disappointing experience to learn that in the heart of silicon valley, 30+ years later, the public schools have less to offer in terms of differentiated learning and accelerated education.
BTW, I have also been talking with Bay Area parents about this, including some HNers. Would love to chat with you/your friends to know how folks are sorting this out. We've had some success and are always looking to help others do the same. Contact info in profile.
As for bullying, I was a "gifted" kid in school, too. I was treated nicely when people wanted help and bullied ruthlessly when they didn't need me.
> their parents would deny them privileges n beat them sometimes if they weren't excellent students
100% agree that this was one of the biggest factors in my bullying. Shame is powerful, and if a child is being shamed for their academic achievements, they will lash out at someone who has what they desire: good grades in this instance.
In particular the critical trait is amplified creativity to the point i share Erdos view that "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.". Same exact symptoms.
In addition, my being steroidal is justified by the fact that i got brain surgery, like the radio transcranial magnetic crap, against my will n without my knowledge, electroshock too, the works. So perhaps it is understandable in my case.
Poor Californians who can’t afford tutors will lack the skills to compete with other students. (If you’re graduating without calculus, you’ll have a tough time becoming an engineer or performing on a standardised test.) That reduces those with means’ competition, ceteris paribus.
Stop using standardized tests to get in. And then just aim for the perfect "socially desirable" mix. Regardless of ability.
I don’t want to lose my job or be ostracized.
To be clear, my opinions are only that it seems wrong to me to discriminate against someone based on their immutable characteristics (like race).
As an example right in this thread, the grandparent comment talks about the Dallas schools looking at the issue of children unevenly taking advantage of advanced courses and coming up with a solution that helped expand access across the board. This absolutely would qualify as a DEI program (they even used the equity trigger word), but did not do anything I would think many people would find objectionable.
On ramps for everyone are important, but as you say, far far more important and effective in people’s early years.
You do see the glaring failure in your "reasoning", right?
The main way they got screwed was when life taught them whining was better than working hard. We need to stop screwing people that way. We need to hold a hard line on the principle that they can succeed or fail in a free market, and we will not reward whining. This means eliminating all entitlements for adults.
I'll help kids learn to be successful adult. I'm a teacher, that's what I do. Let the kids and their families pick their schools from any school they can get to, including online schools.
I will not help some whiny adult who can not even train themselves when they have Internet access.
If you give money to whiny adults, who do you take it from? Do you take it from long-term investments in education? Do you take it from long term investments in our economy like paying off our national debt? Our (US) national debt eliminates many options we would otherwise have. It is more compassionate to provide the best education we can to the children, and let the adults pay for themselves.
Long-term benefits should outweigh short-term benefits. A society that educates and raises its children to be productive, the provides a free market will outperform a society that rewards whining.
A welfare society trains children to be stupid.
A free market trains children to work.
As a simple example just look at how many people think math is useless. Even having spent 10+ years with people trying to bash it into their heads they still can't figure out any of the infinitely many useful things you can do with math.
Education is the result, intelligence is potential. Stupid people have less potential for results. Doesn't mean some of them can't pull a Forrest Gump, nor that they aren't valuable members of society. Just means they suck at learning (at least some) things so their time is better spent doing other stuff.
Even standardized tests. There is already evidence that standardized tests reduce equality. Which is not surprising at all because standardized tests are the one part of a college application that someone can excel at purely with concentrated hard work over a relatively short period of time.
An underprivileged kid motivated to go to a good college cannot make up for poor grades earned from K-8 when they barely had the ability to plan a day in the future, and so was driven to do whatever their friends were doing. And then that set them up behind the 8 ball in many ways from 9-12 as well.
Finally, real DEI requires listening to actual underprivileged people. The vast majority of underprivileged parents will not respond to data showing that their kids are underperforming by saying “make sure no one can do this”. They will respond by demanding the schools provide more resources so their kids can excel.
The OP wonders how Cambridge, Mass and CA are making such changes. But it’s not surprising at all because these decisions are being driven largely by upper middle class educated people who absolutely cannot relate to the under privileged people they claim they’re helping.
And this is an implementation of the worst of privilege. Making decisions for the underprivileged by the privileged without ever asking the supposed beneficiaries what will actually help them.
Right? Why would any parent want other kids in their class to be dumber so their kid is magically "smarter"? They want their child to grow up to be a competent person who is capable of competing in the world at large, not a wave-through at a "progressive" school.
Parents recognize that their children will be competing with the entire world for jobs, and easily see the folly of such a policy.
Such policy really does seem actively hostile toward the goals of such parents. For a group of educators to suggest that the solution is to do away with "mean grades and homework" is like saying, "We all know that you're kid isn't going succeed in advanced classes so let's not even pretend that they will."
1. It is incredibly hard for rich&connected kid to excel among smart & hard-working individuals
2. If barrier is lowered, and overall pool is "diverse" in terms of IQ and ability, then for a rich kid it gets much easier to outcompete and stand out (due to parent's $$$ and connections)
3. The only reason rich white privileged people want regressive DEI is to make it easier for their kids to stand out from competition
ADDED: I often think I couldn't handle high school today.
I'd quit a job as soon as I could find another, if it demanded of me what high school did. Hell, I'd quit based on the consistent 10+ hour days and constant due-tomorrow deadlines, let alone the rest of it like the before-the-sun's-up start time, having to ask permission to go take a piss, sitting in crappy chairs in bad lighting for back-to-back ~hour blocks all day, and having to keep "working" indefinitely with people who won't stop being shitheads in ways that'd get them fired from most any job inside a week. It's insanely terrible.
Like, there are multiple bad things about it that I've never had to tolerate in such abundance and variety even in low-skilled jobs I've held. WTF.
College and adult life are so much more chill than high school. It was a real shock, leaving there for the wider world. So glad the people who were like "this [shitty thing] is to prepare you for the real world, which is way harder and less forgiving!" or "enjoy it, because this is the best time of your life" were entirely wrong. I'd probably have offed myself by now, if they'd been right. Four years was barely tolerable—a lifetime of that, or worse? No, thanks.
Everything else is much worse for how I think. I don't get to choose how to time my schedule, the curriculum is mostly fixed (you would always have math/english/history, some language for 3/4 years. You only choose an elective and maybe 1 year of science) and homework tended to stack up constantly because every class was 1 hour M-F. And yea, as you mentioned it's absurd having 1 day due homework spring up when you may or may not be preparing for some other project, or test, or even competition.
You also were much more pressured against taking time to yourself. You can skip a class or take a sick day in "the real world" if you need a break or emergencies come up. those "perfect attendence" rewards were the worst grift of the education system.
In the US, it's common for schools to start at 8:00 or even 7:30. Recently there has been a push to start later to give kids more time to sleep. So pushing it back to say 8:30 or 9:00 (but not shortening the day, so basically everything just gets pushed back, and the kids stay up later, and need more time to sleep...).
The reason is purely practical- start times need to be staggered to allow schools to share buses, and having high school students get home first means they can look after their younger siblings until their parents get home from work.
Elementary school, 8am - 2pm
Middle school, 9am - 3 something (3:20pm, I think?)
High school, 7:40am - 2:55pm
It’s completely ridiculous, especially considering how sane many (most?) countries in the rest of the world have it.
Granted, even if they were on 2 income households in the 70's, it was also a time where 10YO's were trusted to get home or even walk home unattended, so it'd only be an issue for the youngest primary students. That may still be the case in some Asian countries today, but certainly not in the US.
For secondary school you can elect to have early and late classes or simply opt out of a period if you have the curriculum met. but I've never heard of a student starting later than 9.
>Who takes care of the kids after parents go to work and before school starts?
that's generally why primary students start earlier than secondary students. By high school it's no big deal if the student is by themselves getting ready to leave at 8:30 if the parents need to take off at 8.
Kids just work at thier own pace and don't graduate until they complete all work successfully.
Anything else is just a diploma mill.
I could have graduated by 12 if they just let me go at the material, instead they had me drop out, in frustration at being forced to work at the pace of the stupidest and laziest, before returning to do exactly what I describe through an alternative education program which cost the system 5x as much per student as main track... and that without addressing that it would likely be cheaper due to fundamentally fewer teachers required per student as the teacher wouldn't be babysitting study hall like they are now but instead focused exclusively on the acts of teaching and grading.
I do agree that we should encourage students to self pace themselves. Another aspect of school I had to de-program myself on: it's OKAY to repeat courses you are struggling on. Expensive, yes, but sometimes coming in a 2nd time gives you the perspective to start focus on the subtleties while you were struggling with the high level details the first time.
In actuality it's more likely that socialization would improve as kids weren't forced through stress periods where they were not permitted to socialize, grouped arbitrarily and explicitly set against each other in various programs (eg - sports, group assignments, etc)....
And that's without yet raising the fact that the kid who does well in language but not math would end up friends with the kid who does well in math but not language, helping each other and challenging each other to succeed in a positive fashion, rather than ending up pitted against each other by the fundamental structure of the class structure.
Nothing tangible. But your peers you do work with very much influences the kinds of peers that become your friends.
But that's tangential to the real point I was making: socializing around a bunch of different peers your age in a specific nigh mandatory environment helps develop a sense of public etiquette. How to socialize, how to figure out who you do/don't want to hang out with, how to manage arguments or de-escalate tension. Potentially delaying or skipping that can be catastrophic, and you can argue that there's so many people today that feel like they never got that.
This can theoretically be replicated outside of school. But given how few venues of loitering there are these days for adults, I don't have much faith that we'll create such places for minors.
>the kid who does well in language but not math would end up friends with the kid who does well in math but not language, helping each other and challenging each other to succeed in a positive fashion, rather than ending up pitted against each other by the fundamental structure of the class structure.
It's all theoretical. But my experience makes me much less optimistic of that outcome than you.
It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have, as the current structure ensures suffering and pain for the majority as a result of the social structure established by the norms and systems.
At least under my suggestion those who would excel Could excel and get the hell out before they were irreparably harmed and held back by the fools and willfully stupid as we have now, let alone the fact that the "less capable" would have a real chance at leaving with a modest education rather than being shoved through and ending up in The real world either zero capacity for real thought, understanding and employability.
It's an inevitable result of reasoning. I can't know what I don't know. Short of the laws of physics, we can never truly predict the behaviors of a new universal model from scratch.
Regardless, I don't think human nature would change that drastically as a result of students being able to pace their learning. Greed, selfishness, and general malice may be lessened but not eradicated. Social castes would probably still exist as a remnant of various luck and circumstance of the elite established centuries ago.
>It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have
I never really disagreed, I just simply want to point out a less talked about point in the current educational system. It's not simply an institution of acedemia, nor a "glorified day care center" as others cynically put it. There's soft skills you don't really get except by engaging with other people, some you don't like. Some you may even outright hate.
I feel any alternative system that doesn't keep those soft skills in mind may face further issues down the road, even if it may or may not end up better than the current timeline.
Kindergarten is about the only part of the current system which could be use as a reference for behavior, as after that all the structural features which _explicitly _ _induce_ the behaviors you reference are Forced on the kids.
So, using K as a reference, what xan we learn about free form education?
STEM minded folks need to eat their own dog food; your sensibilities are not divine mandate.
The other billions don’t owe deference to scientists any more than they do priests.
No scientist is a divine being. Their attitudes can be very human; they think their knowledge and skills is irreplaceable and the social system while trying to pretend that’s objective and could never be leveraged in typically corrupt human ways given their very human being.
In the end you’re one of billions bleating for others to follow the path you lay out. Where is the real or imagine social obligation to specifically serve you or any of the rest of the people here who make up a tiny fraction of the species?
Others think you should learn to grow your own food and kill your steaks rather than exploit the labor of others.
The free market of ideas is not just for selling widgets but tent pole social movements.
The text of the article further suggests that many of the students who scored well on qualifying exams weren't taking the classes because they didn't have the parental involvement or default assumption that they would take it.
(Note that the opt-out group was selected from the general population based on the results of an exam; it wasn't a population-wide opt out. I suspect from your comment you didn't see that?)
That’s all.
Seriously tho I think it will. I’m sure a foundation is important in many fields but one can get pretty far by jumping in. I remember my high school physics teacher take us on a wild ride of quantum mechanics for three weeks. If nothing it opened up a lot of future reading
> Within two years of this policy, 94% of eligible students are taking these classes.
Preselection.
Additionally, about half of the entire student body took the advanced class.
Considering the fact that the advanced class is Algebra I, I’d wager that just being on the right half of the bell curve would be sufficient to pass. Half of the student population = the right half of the bell curve.
Additionally, I didn’t see whether they were doing individual tutoring, which would have an impact on the results.
It's an odd combination of teaching kids too much in elementary school and too little in high. The children are exposed to a far more comprehensive curriculum at the expense of never practicing the skills enough to master them. As soon as summer resets their brains, they suddenly have large gaps in knowledge that slow next year's learning.
One loves to say that summer vacations are long so that pupils have time to fill the gaps for the next school year. If they don't use this time (or their parents don't urge them to), it is their problem.
If you have huge gaps in the subject matter of some subjects, you hardly cannot avoid it (and your parents will likely take care that you cannot avoid it ;-) ).
meanwhile, my parent put me in summer school almost every year in some capacity. At least summer hours and classes are relaxed compared to the gauntlet of 6-7 different subjects 8 hours a day.
This program may or may not be a fantastic idea, but "participation" is about the worst possible metric for measuring the overall impact of a mandatory program.
Are these children having better overall life and educational outcomes from this? Are they taking time and energy away from classes they want to pursue to struggle in math courses they might not be truly passionate about?
And what about its impact on the non-marginalized kids? Because "everybody" is now participating, are honors courses now slowed and dumbed down so actual high-achievers will be less prepared for their future?
> Before the change, three times as many White students as Black students enrolled in honors math; after the change, it was less than twice as many. Not perfect equity, but progress in that direction.
> But did all these new students actually learn the honors math? Yes, indeed they did:
> And the policy has not led to a decrease in student scores as some speculated: Last year’s 8th-grade Algebra I students had similar pass rates as those in years prior, the district said, with 95% of Hispanic students passing the test and 76% meeting grade-level proficiency; 91% of Black students passing and 65% meeting grade level and 95% of English learner students passing the state exam and 74% meeting grade level.
> For instance, they claimed that "Last year’s 8th-grade Algebra I students had similar pass rates as those in years prior" but the word "similar" is subjective. How about showing all of the stratified data in chronological order to make that determination for oneself? Did pass rates for the state test go from say 99% and reduce due to this? They don't mention the White race pass rates before and after this change, for example.
> The racial groups listed are Black, Hispanic, White, and Other. What is other? Are they Asians? That seems like the only place they'd fit, but the participation of "Other" before and after this change seems low for that group.
> This data tells us nothing about how the teachers are approaching teaching their courses in light of this change. Do they stop going over valuable material solely to focus teaching kids how to pass a state test so their metrics look good? (Is that what matters for their funding, by the way?) Are class sizes increasing or decreasing to make this change logistically work?
> Additionally, as I am not an educator from Texas, I don't know for certain, but the test itself seems rather dumbed down if a large portion of kids are passing it, but aren't meeting their grade level. Doesn't it raise an eyebrow that 91% of Black kids are passing the test, but only 65% of them are meeting their grade level?
> The article doesn't clarify if all Texas students take this test or just honors students, but it would be illuminating to see pass rates of this test in that school district from different groups before and after that change. If 95% of Hispanic students in this honors program are passing that test in this district after this change, what was the pass rate of Hispanics before that change?
Again, I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad program. It might be quite a good idea to really raise educational standards and force kids into tougher math programs. But the focus solely on "racial participation" makes this very suspect to me.
https://www.educationnext.org/teachers-should-replace-the-so...
California's new standards were written by folks without a background in math nor neuroscience. They misquote neuroscience papers [2] while making mathematical mistakes in their policy paper.
[1] https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/?ref=st...
[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/17O123ENTxvZOjXTnOMNRDtHQAOj...
I think there's some really necessary attempts to go back to first principles on education. Some steps will be missteps but I'm really happy some people are willing to take some risky efforts. Do kids take math class because they need to learn math? "But teacher, I'll always have a calculator". Damn right. A calculator and Wikipedia and chatgpt. Remembering the quadratic equation is literally useless knowledge to retain. "More math" isn't an end goal to anything aside from the 0.01% who will pursue math as a career and keep the wiki pages up to date for the rest of us.
So what the hell should kids be learning? Good question. I'm not really sure but I'm open minded about the answer.
Remembering the quadratic equation allowed you to make an educated argument against its usefulness, so it isn't "literally" useless (badum bum psh).
While I agree that there is tons of room for improvement on how/what/when we teach students different subjects, I think we should be very cautious about offloading subjects to tools before students have a firm grasp of the material.
In my opinion, one of the greatest benefits of deeply engaging with a variety of subjects is getting into the habit of asking "why". I think this is important because it encourages students to dig deeper. I can only speak for myself, but the times I have learned the most is by far when I took an interest and started asking how and why things work.
Imo, it's okay that students engage with complex subjects that they will never use, if for no other reason than that it will provide ample opportunities for them to ask why. Perhaps somewhere along the way they will discover that they are in fact in the small minority who will pursue math as a career.
Memorizing the exact formula of the Quadratic equation may not be necessary - knowing that the quadratic equation exists and what it is does is the useful part. Even more useful is to recognize a problem and realize the quadratic equation applies to it.
Trigonometry or calculus are better examples of this. Memorizing every formula and then promptly forgetting about them 5 minutes after passing the test is not useful but learning the concepts and the fundamentals and how they apply to solving a whole slew of problems is the useful part. Algebra is extremely abstract (especially if you are a school pupil - "I'll never use this in the real world") but understanding it unlocks a whole lot of higher level conceptual ways of thinking and approaching problem solving.
You'll have far better success using a calculator (or chat GPT or Wikipedia) if you know not just what to punch into it by the why as well.
I feel like that's the point of primary education. It's a sample board of various topics and subjects to help you figure out what you like. I sure as hell wouldn't be in my career if I wasn't forced to struggle on the quadratic formula for years on end. Meanwhile, I'm sure some bio/chem high schoolers could run circles around me for how much of that I retained. It depends on the student.
>So what the hell should kids be learning?
we'll certainly never come to a consensus, but I think the primary 4 subjects taught are a fine enough base. You should understand basic arithmetic and how to speak your country's native language. You should have some underlying basis of science and how to approach experimenting as well as an understanding of the history of your country and a general world history. so general K-8 education feels fine.
it's secondary education that has you really go out in the weeds. If I could choose classes there the way I could choose in college, I'm not sure if I would have given my self 4 years of english and history, nor bothered with further biology and chemistry. Hell, the 1 quarter of english and bio/chem I was forced to take in college felt like too much (I remember literally nothing about those classes). Things by high school become less strictly defined in my eyes.
The Public comment #5 section regarding chapter 12 (which covers homework and assessments) was especially shocking.
Chapter 12 in the 2005 version of the CMF was 5 pages long. The same chapter in the current draft is 70 pages long, almost entirely due to a slew of opinions against homework and other testing practices.
The entire CMF draft was (and still is even after corrections) littered with improper citations that at times entirely contradict the opinion it's meant to support.
I find it the height of irony that a group of educators arguing against homework appear to have... not done their homework.
This brings to the forefront a concern I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread: let's put aside how such a policy might affect any particular student's performance in school... what kind of adults will this policy create?
Imo, policy like this will create adults who put in about as much effort into their work as the 20 people employed to oversee this iteration of the CMF. A single professor did their work for them, and even with his help they still haven't fixed it.
"Oh, you got an F on your assignment? No problem! Just turn it in again next week and I'll give you an A."
To be clear, the specific policy I just mentioned really is part of the document - allowing students to always redo work for a better grade.
That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later". In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".
Homework also normalizes the idea that things will be expected from you in this world if you are to be employed. It's not only about engaging with the material, it's also about practicing being a hard-working and fastidious human. Our grandparents might have said that doing homework "builds character", and I would agree with them.
Finally, the idea presented by the CMF draft that homework just isn't very useful is absolutely wrong. Case in point, piano practice. The only way to get better at playing the piano is to practice. The difference between someone who pokes around on the keyboard every blue moon and someone who practices daily is stark.
Some might argue that becoming proficient at playing a piano is inherently different than becoming proficient at math, to those folks I would ask: How is training muscle memory and engaging with new material so different between the two?
If you've learned the material and fulfill the requirements, and the course is still ongoing, why should it matter you were late? Are you teaching the subject, or is [literally every course all the time] really mostly a study in time management? (hint: it's not for the student's sake, it's about managing teacher time and resources. Which is obviously necessary, but not otherwise positive)
> That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later".
I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.
> In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".
Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.
> Homework also normalizes the idea that things will be expected from you in this world if you are to be employed.
Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work. Nor constant artificial deadlines that never let you truly relax. Constant stress is bad for humans, it's not something that hardens you, and pointlessly subjecting people to it "just because" is not just useless but counter productive, because you get blunted. It's important to have something extra to tap into when shit truly hits the fan and it's time to step up, but the contrast gets lost if it's a neverending blur.
The same reason it matters if you are late meeting deadlines for a customer or your job, because there are consequences. Turning in a paper late to school may not cause you to lose a client or get fired, but the fact remains that something was required of you and it was not delivered. Imo, students should be thankful to learn from their teachers that "yes, there really are consequences when you don't perform in your role as expected", as opposed to learning this from their (probably previous) employer.
> I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.
The fact that some people give up because they weren't able to meet the requirements of a class does not justify lowering the requirements of that class for everyone else. You're attending a class, the class isn't attending to you. If that's unacceptable then it sounds like you're probably in the wrong class.
> Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.
Right. Which is why it is valuable to learn about consequences while you're still "practicing" in school.
> Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work.
You don't have "most jobs", so that statement is not based on evidence. Moreover, I didn't suggest that jobs require taking home work, simply that homework for students reinforces the idea that work will be expected from them. You mention how stress negatively affect people... can you imagine how stressed out a person who has never done homework in their life would be if they were suddenly given a huge workload? Contrast this with someone who is used to spending hours on end studying, for whom the task would likely seem much more surmountable.
> lowering the requirements
They're the same requirements, just with a different, looser, time constraint. You couldn't get a better grade without actually learning the material. Performing tasks on time, managing time, etc is incredibly important, obviously. But in an ideal world with more resources there'd be a time and a place for practicing it, reasoning about it, actually studying it, not this "absorbing it by osmosis from a constant grind" where it's all artificial. Work smart, not hard.
Consequences are still there, you still have to perform, it'd just be less time constrained.
Why would a person who has never done homework in their life be more stressed over a huge workload? They're used to working all day, _in school_. Just like how they'll be working all day, at work. Obviously I'm not talking about not having assignments/papers to write (preferably with at least some time allotted during school hours), but the kind of busywork that is the bulk of homework.
This unfairness exists unless all teachers allow for late submission for all assignments and re-taking of all tests. If this were allowed, then students would all take tests multiple times, so they could cram for the specific questions on the test (not the entirety of the course materials — the rest of the material could be forgotten/never learned).
A weird dance I happened to be good at, but not a skill to cherish or practice _because real work is rarely overloaded enough to make it necessary_
School should be about learning, not whatever meta bullshit the above was, at least for me.
Having more flexibility over pace would go a long way I think.
Hmm... what could a group who enjoy 1/4 of the year off from their primary duties and arguably have never been outside the school system (12 to Post secondary and back to k-12, nothing between but fun) have as an underlying incentive?
It couldn't be that they just don't want to mark the work, could it? It couldn't be that they expect children to do work after an 8 hr work day, where the teachers waste most of the time either engaged pointless self aggrandizing and power games or otherwise self involved, but refuse to hold themselves to the same standards could it?
Nah, that couldn't be it... never... /s
I feel that's a much more philosophical POV than you let on. But let's digress from that argument of redemption and reparations for now.
While there are certainly some careers where you don't get do-overs, I see the other extreme happening more with the current state of mind; they realize that they are out of time, feel like they can't extend deadlines, so they just say "fuck it", throw out some sloppily put together report or attend a meeting without the knowledge necessary, take their D in stride and move on.
You can't always delay in life either, but I think as a society we at least shouldn't shame when certain non-mission critical aspects of work need more time to cook (be it in the project or the people involved).
It's not at all clear to me what you are trying to communicate in the paragraph I quoted above.
> While there are certainly some careers where you don't get do-overs, I see the other extreme happening more with the current state of mind; they realize that they are out of time, feel like they can't extend deadlines, so they just say "fuck it", throw out some sloppily put together report or attend a meeting without the knowledge necessary, take their D in stride and move on.
I'm also confused about what you are communicating here. Is this a simple lamentation, or are you trying to make an argument?
> It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family.
But it does! Very much. I just don't understand why the US tries everything other than fixing the most glaring cause. Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles.
But hey convincing both parents to be gone all day and slave away for the corporate masters was smashing the patriarchy and breaking the glass ceiling or something, and the fact that it doubled the labor pool causing supply to go up is entirely unrelated to the fact that wages started stagnating at the same point.
But really what use is a family anyway, I mean who needs that when you can have a "community" on a platform that is dedicated to "content" for you to "consume".
How does that work for black mother of three kids on social programs, whose biological father is incarcerated/nowhere to be found around?
This is the typical story of low achievement/high crime kids in public school system.
Parental involvement "works" by taking an active interest in your child's activities and development. That's it.
More correct term would be “dysfunctional family”. Family where one parent is incarcerated, another is drug addict etc etc.
This term more correctly describes situation that kid is alone in his education aspirations and needs state assistance
But kids are going to school today and now, they cannot wait for their parents to get out of jail and get sober. These kids need solution asap and waiting for their parents to show up and get involved is a waste of time - and is a primary reason why US is failing kids from low SES and maintaining pipeline of people from hood to jail.
To be fair, the term in question is "parental involvement". It's understandable that some might be confused about why the "parental" part of the phrase is offensive.
It's hard to think of a less charitable interpretation. It makes me wonder, what is your point?
I think being overly sympathetic is infinitely preferable to merciless cynicism. Removing poverty is also much more preferable than, what?, making it harder to divorce? We could probably makes huge strides in education outcomes by adopting universal healthcare and free school lunches so single parents aren't so burdened.
But, the state has created a massive bureaucracy to manage this and gobs of money to get distributed to both public and private managers of these clients. Yeah, it’s about the kids lol.
They're incarcerated [1].
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/record-drop-i...
The fact that being "lifted out of poverty" is somehow seen as a victory when the state has aggressively promoted and incentivized single motherhood for the last 50+ years is astounding. Because that's all a dad was good for. Things.
I'm not sure if it's men that allowed this to happen or if women just fell for it. But it's clearly indicative of the massive decline the West has seen.
Drug use, drug convictions, drug deaths are a big shift from then for sure. Some of that is deliberately abusive policy-making by legislators who had been constitutionally barred from segregating so they pivoted to incarceration. Some of it just that we're way, way better at making narcotics than we used to be. None of that seems to be caused by single parents so I really don't know what point you're making here.
You still haven't come close to explaining who has been promoting single parent households. And now I'm forced to ask what decline has the west seen? Almost everything you're complaining about is specifically about America. And there are few if any practical measures by which are declining. This very much reads like a lament for white privilege.
The welfare state should reward and incentivize marriage. The tax system does for middle and high earners and you see lower rates of single parenthood. The fact you can lose benefits if you’re lower income and married is the worst possible incentive.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230345/#:~:text=This%2....
However, a majority of the newer studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or a positive effect on fertility rather than none at all. Because of this shift in findings, the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes.
Based on this review, it is clear that a simple majority of the studies that have been conducted to date show a significant correlation between welfare benefits and marriage and fertility, suggesting the presence of such behavioral incentive effects.
But it's also just obvious.
And then the effects of kids from single-mother homes:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-children-raised-with-....
This is all widely known and generally agreed on. That the outcomes of kids from single-mother homes are far worse than married coupled homes when you control for income, etc.
A previous poster spelled it out:
> by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles
You seem to be thinking of "pushing back" as some sort of attack upon single parents, when I believe that the original spirit of the comment was more along the lines of:
Let's strive to spread awareness of the myriad of benefits two parents can provide in a child's life.
Let's try to move the conversation an inch or two away from 'my happiness above all else' and slightly more towards 'sometimes being part of a family requires sacrifice.'
Hell, let's create a national holiday dedicated to households with two parents raising children together as a team.
Let's remind people that they aren't freaks for not getting divorced as soon as the initial spark died down. That it's okay to continue trying to make things work for the benefit of their children.
So often today I encounter the sentiment that "there are so many fish in the sea, and it's so easy to find them, why bother putting effort into it if it isn't perfect from the get go?"
In my opinion, the prevalence of this school of thought is harmful to the propagation and stability of two parent families. American society at some point became so obsessed with "self care" that, you guessed it - they forgot about the children.
we do it with every other form of advertisement, why not use it to encourage good lifestyles too?
> You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem
simple:
- they aren't concerned about the problem to begin with. Be it apathy, ignorance, or malice. There are different solutions depending on the cause.
- they are, as mentioned above, more afraid of upsetting single families by imposing what can arguably be a healthier family dynamic
- the school board feels that issues with family are outside their purview so they do not even consider it, despite the fact that parents are the biggest strain on any given school teacher.
Maybe take your own advice? They at least gave propositions, while you are simply engaging in rhetorical attacks without contributing anything worth a conversation. What does "you want something, you pay for it" mean in a conversation about government funded education? We're all already paying for it.
It's hard for me to get behind the logic of someone who opens their response with a direct personal attack. I stopped reading as soon as you started making abusive comments (the very first sentence). I didn't deserve to be told that my thoughts are without merit, and when you resorted to saying so it really did tell more about you than it ever could me.
Currently America incentivizes single mother childhood because all social handouts are increased if 1) mother is poor/low income 2) has dependents 3) more dependents => more handouts
Things like Section 8, Medicaid, SNAP, EBT - were supposed to have social safety net - the lowest standard that any mother can rely on.
It ended up that many mothers cannot rely on anything else.
once you are in the hood and on government's program - there is no incentive to leave them. People can't even get a fulltime job, because that would mean disqualification from Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, EBT, etc
The vicious cycle of black poverty continues... This is what keeps black people locked in the hood:
1. Black women get locked by social welfare and kids out of wedlock
2. Black males get locked by adolescent crime (culture of "background checks" with lifetime record of crime), keep themselves in the jail system forever / outside legal employment system
Welfare Queens don't exist. Absolutely no human being in existence since the New Deal has considered having a baby to be a profit-making venture. I can submit that maybe some, but vanishingly few consider a life on government assistance to be sustainable. The reason something like Medicaid can be a trap is because private healthcare in this country is capitalist hellscape. ACA made the miniscule effort to raise the Medicaid eligibility window and half the country rejected it. Programs like Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP are intended to prevent descent in penury and/or to protect the completely innocent children. Less so the parents.
Your opinion is really just the lowest form of victim blaming. These problems are almost entirely unique to America in the developed world. We have undeniable objective proof that being more generous with benefits improves everyone's lives and does not breed dependence.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487602 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/business/the-myth-of-welf... https://epod.cid.harvard.edu/article/dispelling-myth-welfare...
And for good measure here's someone who thinks dependence is genetic and all the people who think he's a terrible scientist: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/09/adam-perkins...
If welfare queens dont exist - then how do you call beneficiaries of these programs like meeicaid?
Poverty exists in white and asian families, but interesting fact - only in black hoods it leads to high crime, high fatality, high incarceration rates.
How do you explain the fact that poor asian neighborhoods dont have crime and have much better achievements among kids?
And I am not sure that more handouts will help, because these handouts come from taxpayers and US a lot of Us taxpayers will be against it
Uh, "beneficiaries"?
I literally gave you a wall of citations that they do help. A lot of taxpayers being against it is a political argument. Of course they will. They've been fed lies by politicians who have given them fallacious rationalizations for why they don't have have any responsibility to promoting an equitable society. It's called the "I got mine" theory of civics. If you just don't _want_ to do anything, then go ahead and say it. Just stop pretending that greedy self-interest is anything but that.
Its very easy to say "if we could just keep more parents together..." as if the availability of divorce after giving birth was the problem. Solve the major reasons why relationships fail after giving birth, and you'll likely create the situation where kids have more engaged parents too.
There is fundamental conflict:
1. All people (especially young) want hook-ups due to hormones and stuff, as many as possible. These leads to pregnancies and kids.
2. Family requires you to limit your desires only to your partners and create lifelong commitment, which means responsibilities (not only for yourself, but for your partners and kids).
There is mismatch fundamentally. Either hookups culture needs to die, or kids have to be allowed only by stable families
The rest of your argument is incoherent and does not have a point, so I dont event understand what is it about.
Overpolicing is a myth, because cops are policing where crime actually happens. Doesnt make sense for police to patrol law abiding medium/high class neighborhoods if crime doesnt happen there. Police must be present where criminals live, this is actually the only correct approach
Alternatively, crime happens where police are.
Eg. Police might excessively arrest in particular communities as a form of overbearing bullying .. and the arrest and conviction rates in these areas climb.
There is much written about this, your take in your comment above seems naive at best.
The world is rarely as first order simple as you appear to believe it to be.
Of interest (although admittedly not all that compelling as it's a small rich unicorn area)
Crime Rate Goes Down After Half A Cop Shop Quits
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/17/if-the-crime-rate-goes-d...
Look at san frasicko: people wont even bother registering crime if their car window broke or cat stolen.
On paper crime rate is lower, in reality it is different.
Your claim is that "hook up culture" is causing all these kids to grow up single-parent households. This flies in the face of all kinds of studies that show that, starting with millenials, kids are waiting longer to have sex, and are having fewer partners than e.g. baby boomers. At the same time, young adults are waiting longer to get married than baby boomers, are getting married less often, and once married are getting divorced at a lower rate than their parents generation. They're also having fewer children.
And yet, the number of unwed mothers has steadily risen in the past 50 years, only plateauing in the last 10 or 15 (at or about the time "hookup culture" became a thing that people clutched their pearls over). Why is that? I hypothesized, in my post, that there's an "(1) evolution of how people of child-rearing age think about marriage, or that (2) the changing shape of the economy means that marriage-as-a-mainly-financial-arrangement is dying a long-overdue death. (3) It's definitely not that legalizing so-called no-fault divorces allows women (especially mothers) to escape abusive situations that are, for one reason or another, impossible to prosecute as such"
So let's break those down. Point 1 is sort of indisputable. Young people are waiting longer to get married (but also getting divorced less). Clearly, people are being more careful in who they choose to settle down with, including who they have children with.
Point 2 I claim is driven by the fact that single women are no longer obliged to treat their job as a match-making opportunity. Women make enough in the job market, and have enough jobs available to them, to not enter into marriages strictly as financial partnerships, that carry the obligation of sex and child rearing.
Point 3 is subtler, but also the main reason why just discouraging divorce will, I believe, actually lead to worse outcomes for children. Thanks to the various advances in women's rights over the last 100 years, a woman can actually get a divorce from an abusive spouse, without requiring police cooperation. This is huge. We are on a downward trend for domestic abuse, and a lot of that is because an abused partner can actually leave (and why you saw a spike in domestic violence during the COVID lockdowns) without the police getting involved. So the options are "have a single parent", or "grow up in an abusive household". Given how frequently abusers are themselves victims of prior abuse, I'd argue that growing up in a single-parent household is, ultimately, the lesser of two evils.
Speaking of police and their ability to choose not to make an arrest for a given event, there's my point about over-policing low-income communities. A person from a high-income community can get busted over 1.01 ounces of weed, post bail, and be back to work the next morning, then plea it down or have the charges dismissed, provided the police even stop them to begin with or think that an arrest is worthwhile. Meanwhile, a person from a low-income community has no choice but to take the months or years of jail time, for the same charge. And since we say "put police where the crime is", the police are themselves more likely to stop a "suspicious" person, and arrest them, because the police think there's more crime there too, and "going easy on them will just encourage them". All of this adds up to parents ending up in jail when they should be raising their kids, on charges that other people aren't even held for.
You are probably projecting yourself as a well-off individual to the society.
this is not true for low SES stratum: the girls in poor hoods start hookups in middle/high-school. They get pregnant at high school, have unplanned babies without father etc etc.
It is almost as if we are talking about two different Americas: white & black. Medium+ class and Poor class
Teenage pregnancies are dropping, across the board. Children are waiting longer to start having sex, across the board. Young people are having fewer sexual partners ACROSS THE BOARD.
> as a person who was quite poor
You literally proved my point, brother, maybe trend is going down slightly over time but there are still significant number of unplanned pregnancies mainly in hoods, mainly among Medicaid beneficiaries etc etc
https://opa.hhs.gov/adolescent-health/reproductive-health-an...
My point is that things aren't now the way things were when I was experiencing it first hand.
I think increased awareness of Birth control already solved this problem. Almost every first world country's population is starting to fall under the rate needed to increase the population while most third world countries contribute to the overall global population increase.
I'd also say the lack of stigma around abortions, but ofc we know how that's going in the U.S...
I agree 100%. But how would the US government fix this? The only political movement that I'm aware of that focusses on stable two-parent families are the conservative Christians. Or are there any others?
Our 41st president had a Faith-Based Initiative which was successful in many areas. It cost the tax-payer 75% less to have a faith-based organization head up a relief program than it did for a similar governmental program. Why? Because it was a volunteer based organization and they were incentivized to keep costs low.
- Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they get to college (maybe the advanced students can learn single-variable calculus in high school).
- For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions.
- In order to take calculus in high school, you need to at least take algebra I (and hopefully geometry) in middle school. Wealthier parents understand they are playing the college admissions game early on, so they make sure in elementary school that their kids will be able to get on the algebra track in middle school.
- Getting on the algebra track is thus the first really consequential part of the college admissions game, it happens much earlier than the rest, and takes real scheming by parents to make sure their young kids are prepared. [actually true]
- If you could just make this impossible, it will even the playing field in a huge way and knock down one of the biggest hurdles in college admissions for people from lower-SES backgrounds. [also probably true]
- The only downside is that students will no longer have time to cover calculus in high school, which doesn't matter anyway because it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus (very advanced math!), and they can just learn it in college.
This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. It has elements of truth to it which are worth paying attention to. The problem is just that actually, it's really useful and important to learn calculus in high school, and more people need this opportunity.
edit: I thought it was clear that I think a lot more high school students should be learning calculus as early as possible, and that "no advanced math" is a terrible policy, but I guess not...
My high school shifted to it. It's like a college day where you have four longer classes instead of eight shorter ones. Courses are semester-long, not year-long. This means you can take two math classes in one year (algebra in the fall and geometry in the spring).
This also enabled my high school to offer AP Calculus B, which is part-two of AP Calculus.
The other advantage of this type of schedule is that it is also easier to offer other kinds of math that may be more critical to most students, such as a dedicated class on statistics.
I mean a lot of evidence point to people having difficulty focusing on a single thing or learning for more than 20 minutes at a time? 30 minute bite-sized lessons might be perfect.
Poor grades and trouble-making will get you kicked out of the program, so the only kids that are there are the ones who WANT to be there, which is a drastic contrast to actual high school.
Our daughter will be attending this school in the fall, we are all very excited about it.
If I could do it again I probably would have focused on getting the required classes out the way in the fall and focus on the AP in the spring to prepare for the exam in May.
Learning to code would have been much harder if I hadn't grasped algebra.
Calculus is important for understanding science (especially physics) and statistics.
These are not niche subjects for "the few weird students." They are really important to grasp for many roles in the knowledge economy. Your kids will enter a world of robotics and automation. They're going to need to use their brains if they want to succeed.
I'm 100% against a dumbing down of the education system to achieve ideological leftwing aims.
The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring.
The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.
> The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring. >The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.
This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. We did things like clock math, and observed how these other mathematical systems did or did not observe things like the associative property. It was amazing because it made math more than just doing calculations. This class is still one of my fondest educational memories.
What textbook / textbooks did your class use for this?
I'm guessing that a traditionally schooled kid could just do the same. Especially since there's so much that they are probably learning outside of school. It would be a shame to ignore all of those skills and knowledge just because they weren't taught during the hours of 8 and 3, M-F.
Here’s an research paper about Grown Unschoolers experiences with higher education, page 38 discusses admissions: https://www.othereducation.org/index.php/OE/article/view/105...
And here’s a reddit thread about homeschoolers getting into Purdue (which is the school I went to): https://www.reddit.com/r/Purdue/comments/bszc3i/have_any_hom...
I’m assuming that each school is going to have their own criteria.
It’s interesting to see how quickly America is being dumbed down by stupid policies.
College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus.
Students in other countries in the world (for this assumption India, China, Canada, UK, Germany given my experience with the following) are tracked and/or calculus is optional.
We've traditionally had tracking within the US system (hence why AP and Honors classes matter) which helped filter students accordingly.
The issue is our "Hail Mary" pipeline - community colleges - are unnecessarily viewed as negatively, even though they help students remediate any knowledge gaps they might have.
1. College Matriculation rates are low. Only 36% of Germans aged 25-46 have attended Tertiary Education (University as well as Vocational School) [0]. This is a similar story in the UK and Canada as well.
2. In countries like Germany and UK, college track HS admissions are competitive. Attending a Gymnasium or a uni track independent school or public school requires having a mix of high scores in grades 6-8 or competitive exams.
3. Calculus is not in the default curriculum. For example, in Canada Advanced Functions only teaches a bit of Calculus for a semester. The course is optional, only allowed at Grade 12, and sometimes isn't offered in HS. This is a similar case in the UK with "Further Maths" as an optional A-level and Germany with the Maths curriculum in Realschules.
[0] - https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=...
Points 1-3 are the same for India and China as well.
In China, Gaokao (college admissions exam) is only allowed to those who attend College Track high schools (Sr Secondary School).
To enter a Sr Secondary School (10-12) in China, you need to pass the Zhongkao, which is de facto limited to the top 40% scorers of the exam.
Zhongkao is not mandatory btw, and a number of (often rural or migrant) students end up failing to take the exam.
If you don't pass the Zhongkao, your options are either expensive private schools or going to a vocational school which will technically count as a tertiary program by giving a diploma and an extra year, but doesn't include as rigorous STEM classes as the Sr Secondary Schools.
This is similar to India as well, where Calculus isn't introduced in the CBSE or a number of State Board Exams. ICSE introduces Calculus at Grade 12, but ICSE is limited to elite private schools and elite/competitive public schools.
In both India and China, Tertiary education is low (it's difficult to get exact statistics as both countries have now begun obfuscating tertiary level with vocational programs). That said, given the Gaokao filtering, it probably doesn't exceed 30% in China, and India is most likely half of that given the 15-20 year head start China had on India.
Here's the curriculum for CBSE. https://cbseacademic.nic.in/web_material/CurriculumMain24/Sr...
Most state boards are similar to this.
Similarly most Chinese students end up learning calculus in school.
With the Chinese curriculum, same story if not at a Sr Secondary School. Here's the curriculum for the Secondary Vocational Schools (aka the schools most Chinese students end up attending) - http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/s5743/s5744/A07/202001/W02020...
Notice how it caps at permutations.
* Zhongkao Filtering, not Gaokao filtering
Also the Zhongkao IS mandatory, but heavily limits admissions into Sr High School (college track) Programs
Also, since 2022, Senior Vocational School students can now take the Gaokao, but given the curriculum in a Sr Vocational School as shown below, it's highly unlikely they'd meet the scores required to get into a university in China.
That doesn't actually mean that you need to cover calculus in high school. The calculus needed for the first year of college science and engineering can be easily taught early in the first year in the classes that need it.
That's how it worked at Caltech when I was a student (late '70s and early '80s). Around 75% of an incoming class had no calculus. It only took a lecture or two in Phys 1 to cover all the calculus that would be needed for the rest of first year science and engineering.
That calculus taught in Phys 1 wasn't rigorous and proof based, but high school calculus usually isn't either. By second year everyone had a year of Ma 1, which was rigorous and proof based calculus.
For computer science, imagine learning about logic gates and VLSI in the same year.
This question is relevant to me because we are deciding what to teach our kids and I haven’t yet been able to come up with a good argument for why to spend time gaining the skill of pen and paper mechanical calculus algorithms.
Are there professional scientists or engineers out there that do calculus on paper?
Yes.
Any STEM career. Finance and economics. Data science--the component they're replacing middle-school algebra with, the CMF's authors know as much about data science as about math.
Californians whose parents can't afford tutors have been effective gated from these careers.
A lot of this is because the hiring pipeline has dried up. I went to a top hs here in the Bay Area and had teachers who were very knowledgeable and invested in STEM education.
Because of extremely low salaries when factoring in CoL, a replacement pipeline hasn't formed. I had 4-5 of my classmates in HS end up majoring in STEM and minoring in Education at the big 3 UCs, but all of them decided to become Data Analysts or SWEs instead because they would be provided a living wage without having to go get a masters for an additional $30-40k and/or a formal teaching credential for an additonal $12-15k. They were looking at a $150k bill just to earn $70-80k starting AT BEST in Silicon Valley.
I wouldn't do that job if it paid double what I make now.
I've seen antisocial behavior rise in both kids from well off backgrounds as well as from kids from less well off backgrounds. In both cases, the parents aren't an active participant in their kid's lives.
The kids (both rich and poor) with present parents always ended up well established and this was irrespective of race.
The only benefit that money had was it could open some doors if the kid f**ed up.
One of my acquaintance's HS going kid has an active drug problem and has ended up in in the drunk tank a couple times, but because my acquaintance is a white collar professional who can afford to live in a well off neighborhood, they can afford the legal fees. If this was some black kid in West Oakland or a Latino kid in East San Jose or a Vietnamese kid in Newark, they would have ended up in Jail/Juvie, lost critical learning time, and have no real options or safety net to fall on.
- writing prose and composition is unnecessary, as at best one will write on slack and social media;
- doing pushups, calisthenics, or running is unnecessary: few jobs require that;
- learning about how the government works, civics or sociology or psychology should be skipped: all these are taken care by the employer that is not going to let you go vote anyways (still don't understand how/why it is not a mandatory holiday, but what do I know);
- debates should be banned: promotes arguing against cops and employers both having detrimental outcomes;
- art is for the rich and private schools: poor populous should not be dreaming;
I suggest -- my 2 humble cents -- the writers of this abomination take a class in logic. Unfortunately, that is math and requires fundamentals they don't want covered.
P.S. My grad school anecdote: our perception and experiences as "international" grad students of the math understanding of incoming undergrads was abysmal to put it lightly. I don't want to be in any future TA shoes.
Beyond introductory level both probability and statistics have a lot of "counterintuitive" pre-probability and statistics results, that also explain a lot of the misconceptions the public faces in not understanding the notions.
Probability and statistics are topics that our democracies would be better of if people understood them: then they would understand perhaps topics like polling, and we wouldn't perhaps have misuse of the topics in Court like Sally Clark's case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
[But I guess we would have to drop lotteries as a taxation system also. [/s]]
Then the word calculus (and university admission perhaps with other goals in life) can be treated as variable(s). There is no inherent reason the set of deduction rules are dependent on the choice of topic. Let us denote the reasoning for brevity as a proposition p(s, g) with s\in Subjects g \in Goals:
Start substituting other subjects in there. Their reasoning goes that for an s \in Subjects to be in AcceptedSubjects \subset Subjects it must hold that:
p(s,g):=\(For the majority of students), \exists g \in Goals: p'(s,g). Where p(s,g) relaxes also the goal here -- doesn't have to be college admissions. Then start adding art, debates, writing and other topics I mentioned.
so, most of my high school classes? I'm not against a more customizable high school experience, but that seems like a harder sell than trying to convince these boards why this initiative is a horrible idea.
>Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.
Depends, I guess. Physics has the same issue. Where introductory physics can be taught with formulas, AP physics expects you to understand the calculus behind the formulas and not simply spout out random factoids. There's no particularly best approach here.
That said, I think calculus is helpful in the way that learning a niche programming language is helpful: it teaches you about new kinds of abstractions, how to think in a different way, and gives particular language with which to talk about that kind of thing.
You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, or because it's somehow inextricably tied to ways in which equity-seeking populations are oppressed, or used as a tool of oppression.
O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction is so popular in academic circles partly because it plays to this mindset.
This viewpoint dovetails with some of the points you've highlighted, for example many believe that everyone is equally capable, but the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it. So in their view it is rational to get rid of it, replacing it with something (the data science course) that's not advanced math.
For these people, the goal is not to improve equity by getting everyone up to speed in advanced math. It's to bypass it.
That's stupid.
Of course sabotaging kids is also slightly cheaper, and creates the need for more administrators, the ones making these decisions, to decide exactly what is "equitable".
> But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources.
And we're talking about high school educational attainment here, not world-class achievement. To use a fitness analogy, not everyone has the anatomy to be a world-class deadlifter. But pretty much everybody can get to deadlifting 1x/1.5x their (healthy) bodyweight with some training.
There is a broad streak of illiberality running through left-leaning Americans who call themselves liberal. At its core liberalism maintains not that everyone is equal in every way, but that virtually everyone is equally capable of flourishing if given the same opportunities.
Liberalism must believe that since its unit of measure is the individual, not a faction or state.
If someone who calls there’ themselves liberal doesn’t believe that I’d like to know what they think liberalism is.
It's also why liberals have a very strong anti-science approach to fields like behavioral genetics, while falling over themselves to praise the social sciences.
I ... I don't understand. This is literally the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Here's the thing: if a shadow cabal of lizard-people were actually using space lasers to mind control everyone into thinking the Earth is round so we never discover their hidden evil lairs at the edges of the flat Earth, or what have you ... if any those wacko theories were actually true, it would actually represent a terrible evil that humanity should fight to overcome. Such a plot might even make a decent movie. But this? Advanced math? What? Math is conspiring against humanity? I cannot even fathom a B-movie plotline where that holds together at all. No suspension of disbelief makes this make any sense. Math!?
A typical example is something like this, from Louie (J.Res.Math.Ed. 2017):
>Through the lens of the culture of exclusion, students who appear mathematically gifted are viewed as intelligent, whereas others are myopically perceived as “slow,” “remedial,” and “special needs.” These perceived differences are used to justify stratification such that the culture of exclusion in mathematics education shapes access to intellectually stimulating learning opportunities, prestigious educational programs, lucrative careers, and high-status identities. Furthermore, because ability categories are mapped onto other socially constructed categories, the culture of exclusion is both a product of and a tool for the maintenance of racial, gender, linguistic, economic, and other hierarchies.
It is at its core a form of anti-intellectualism, that is true, but often emanating from other intellectual ideas from the academy.
There's no reason to think that mathematics has any more of a "culture of exclusion" than any other field of study, vocation, or sport.
It's a brave new world.
>> Such a plot may even make a decent movie.
A “plausible” one, yes. Incidentally, have you noted how movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership? The same can be said about fiction in general. I bet our culture-makers would vote in-masse to suppress math from whatever curriculum they could.
Um, no, I haven't noticed that. In fact I've seen "this movie is based on hard science!" as being a generally positive selling point for movies, especially sci-fi. I also don't really understand your point: movies and pop novels generally do well when they require very little thinking of any kind. They don't require musical thinking or spatio-temporal thinking or logical thinking or kinesthetic thinking or intrapersonal thinking either. Nor do most of our passtimes. That does not make them anti-intellectual.
> our culture-makers
Who?
> that does not make them anti-intellectual
Math is old, and therefore, a vital aspect of human culture. By purposefully producing something that “does better” by excluding math, we are effectively doing our darn best to push math out of our collective thought. If doesn’t matter if we call that “anti-intellectual” or “junk-food-for-the-mind.”
Strongly disagree, and in fact imo movies that are "junk food for the mind" serve a valuable purpose. The mind requires rest in order to digest new information, and so if we were constantly being reminded to "remember your math!" it would likely become very fatiguing very quickly. Being able to disconnect while still being entertained effectively allows your mind to rest. It's not as good as sleep, but it's better than never stepping away from your math homework to allow it to sink in.
I definitely think we should teach more advanced math (and other) courses, but that particular way of doing it is just not very good - plenty of people who probably could have managed Calc just fine didn't get to take it, due to choices made for them years past probably by parents who didn't understand the significance. The structure and order of classes needs to be redone, which is hard.
I will say though I find it funny how much people are coming to Calc's defense. I'm in software development and it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us. I'm still happy I learned it but for software development it's definitely less useful than the other advanced math you'll learn.
If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples:
- Calculus was the first math class I took that gave a clear definition of what a "function" really is. Do you use functions?
- Analyzing the properties of functions to see what operations made sense to do or not (e.g. continuous vs discontinuous).
- The concept of taking a function at various points and adding a small value to it to see how it changes is extremely important in sensitivity analysis and optimization.
- Anything involving non-uniform probability distributions, like sampling a random number from various distributions, requires understanding the relationship of PDFs and CDFs, which is one of derivative/definite integral. This means any form of realistic simulation, any estimations of time to failure, performance of anything, etc.
- Gradient descent and backpropagation in neural networks are completely opaque if you don't understand derivatives.
- Most games or simulations deal with rates of change.
- The concept of infinitesimals applies to finding tangents to curves, showing up in vector graphics all the time.
- Anything involving elevation in GIS, analysis of water flow, even topographic maps
I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments like "I'm in software development and I literally never use calculus / linear algebra / type theory / lambda calculus / algorithms and data structures / boolean logic / binary trees / linked lists / stacks / queues / geometry / algebra / arithmetic" <-- then you're artificially limiting yourself and you're a much worse software developer than the ones who actually do use those things. What do you do all day, copy code from StackOverflow and hope it works? Don't discourage other people from learning just because you were too lazy: in fact that's literally what this entire post is about. You're part of the problem.
I only really started to get math when I learned about linear algebra, combinatorics, proofs, A&D, algebraic structures, mathematical logic etc. And quite frankly those topics helped me much, much more than calculus.
Unless you're using Haskell or something similar, mathematical functions and what most programming languages call "functions" are very different and are better referred to as procedures. Mathematical functions don't have any concept of some basic constructs like variables (state in general), I/O, or even sequential computation. Pure functional languages have to use things like monads to model procedures.
I don't know why you're mad at me, I _literally said_ "I'm still happy I learned it", along with saying we should be teaching more advanced math. I said it was a common _joke_, not that we literally never use it. I went on to say it was "less useful" than other math you'll learn, not "not useful at all". Perhaps you should read the whole comment before getting so angry.
And no, just because I don't use calculus all day doesn't mean I "copy code from StackOverflow", I honestly don't know how you could come to such a silly conclusion (or how you think knowledge of calculus is necessary to understand most data structures). Do you think self-taught developers who never learned calculus are just incapable of learning or using data structures and algorithms, and don't know what functions are? I can tell you quite confidently that they can and do, because I know many of them.
Half of what you listed isn't really Calculus at all: for comparison my highschool taught functions, continuous vs discontinuous, rates of change, and topographic maps in Math classes which happened years before taking Calculus. Then the Calc class was like 70% memorizing "whats the integral of cosecant?", was which I think we should be able to agree is absurdly useless even for people who actively work in a math-heavy field.
I suspect this form of calculus is what people are responding to when they say calc is useless; they should be teaching the things you're saying (including how to think about functions) and e.g. introducing Euler's method getting into what happens when your step size become arbitrarily small are all useful things to a broader set of people, but the actual implementation of Calculus classes in practice is instead entirely useless trivia that provides almost no insights if you wanted to do any of the things in your comment.
When was the last time I did a geometry proof? Used trig? OK, I use some algebra now and then though probably not simultaneous equations. Not calc.
But I'm pretty sure the path is not to make numerical literacy basically optional. Why know how to multiply in a world with calculators? Well... Though I wouldn't argue with more emphasis on things like basic stats and probability early on.
It’s crazy that we spend a decade of a person’s life forcing them to learn a skill that is so completely irrelevant to their lives and yet we ignore skills that could help them from being manipulated or forced into debt slavery.
I need to come up with a better analogy, but it’s like we were still forcing our children to manipulate a cotton gin and know the ins and outs of maintaining and repairing one. I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting and now I want to look up a YouTube video about cotton gins, but do we really need to force this upon everyone? And then we decide that if you didn’t memorize how to change out the plumbus in the cotton gin perfectly then you aren’t allowed to do further study in marine biology.
If I believed in conspiracy theories then I would think that Big Scary Corporations are in cahoots with The Government to keep the public from knowing how not to be manipulated and forcing them to work for low wages for their entire lives. But I don’t believe this because I think the reality is a lot more mundane and stupid. I think it’s just like the story you hear about why your mom learned to cook the ham by cutting off the end and finding out after some investigation that the only reason was because her grandmother had a small pan and we all just tend to continue doing what has sorta kinda worked without thinking about it. But in this case we can’t just make individual decisions to do something different because we’ve decided that the API between secondary school and college is an admissions test that includes certain irrelevant things that we can’t change because of history and the API between college and a job is something completely different.
I do agree probability and statistics would be much better than calculus, trigonometry, and some minutiae of algebra and geometry.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/americas-math-curriculum-do...
I even think Calculus could still be achieved by the end of high school with the right curriculum choices - you can teach a lot of calculus concepts to grace schoolers if you elide the actual mechanics of computation. Anecdotally, students who were pushed through that sort of curriculum earlier in middle school tended to breeze through high school calc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...
I think way of rationalizing it is that there are some parents that feel that orchestra, art exploration, debate, sports or <insert subject/extracurricular of choice> at the collegiate level. After all, many students excel at these and could get into an Ivy league/Big 10 college based on their performance in these subjects. At one point a district may decide to offer collegiate level coursework to students.
Then funding dries up and cuts need to be made. Which courses should be kept and which should be cut and how should resources be allocated is a real question.
Perhaps competitive math courses or multivariate calculus should be considered an "after school extracurricular" similar to the many after school extracurricular sports programs and schools should just focus on providing basic "PE level equivalent" math.
Debate is also the best and most robust pipeline there is to getting into law school, and good law schools at that. Model UN and mock trial don’t even hold a candle to it in rigor.
I mean, it really depends on the school and the major. If you're taking a STEM major in college, having calculus on your resume is the equivalent of having a degree on your resume. You may not need it to succeed (I do not use calculus in my day to day job), but you can see why it makes you stand out.
But sure, if you're more on a medical/law/humanities track, calculus shouldn't really matter for your admissions. It only matters in that calculus makes you understand math better, and math is one of the core subjects used by the SAT/ACT. Naturally, knowing calculus makes those tests much easier to reason about. Maybe we should revisit why Math is weighed so heavily in national tests if we feel this way about math in the curriculum.
I can see the intents, but it feels like it sweeps the core problems under the rug. As usual for education.
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way.
It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-s...
But if you take these rankings at face value [2] it does seem there's more than spending at play here. Though perhaps spending simply has to be normalized against Cost of Living?
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/p...
The California department of education puts[1] per pupil k-12 spending at 23K, almost double that listed in the census.
>The total overall funding (federal, state, and local) for all K–12 education programs is $124.3 billion, with per-pupil spending of $21,596 in 2021–22. For 2020–21, per-pupil funding increased from $16,881 in the 2020–21 Budget Act to $23,089 in the 2021–22 Budget Act.
There is a minimum state funding of $13,976, which is pretty close to the census numbers. There could also be a difference due to comparing the 2023 CA budget to 2019 census data, but a near doubling in 4 years seems pretty extreme.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/yr21ltr0811.asp#:~:text=For%....
I think you're right, the census is out of date. However, given spending likely has a lagging effect, the historically low budget - coupled with harsh covid lockdowns - does begin to explain why CA ranks low among public schools.
Underneath all of this is a budgetary trade-off. Quite often there are funds to pay either for more support for struggling students or advanced opportunities for advanced students, but not both.
That budgetary problem is ultimately fueled by larger socio-economic challenges, including high cost of living that is out of pace with tax revenue for school funding, high public pension costs, and ever-increasing demands on public schools to be social service hubs dealing with fallout from things like drug and violence epidemics. Those are expensive problems to treat.
Furthermore, those problems are not distributed uniformly across society. They are heavily disproportionately present in lower income communities, whether they're urban or rural.
Schools in uniformly well-off communities don't need to worry about treating these problems to anywhere near the same degree, so they need fewer behavioural and educational specialists just to keep the classroom functional, if they can do that at all.
Well-off children from supportive homes and communities are cheaper to educate. They arrive in the classroom with years of preschool and summers of educationally stimulating camps. They don't come to school hungry.
As a society, we could address some of the deeper inequities in opportunity, to relieve low income schools of the additional societal burdens we place on them, but those sorts of measures are even more polarising than school funding.
Therefore, we end up with the default, which is individuals optimizing purely for their own interest (i.e. the push for school vouchers), not what is more sustainable for society.
A lot of people in the equity/equality movement have been following "the means justify the ends" for quite some time now and that approach has been growing in administrators. One of the reasons the supreme court ruled against affirmative action is the implementation of affirmative action in college admissions turned into shameless racism.
Policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization, and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race[1]
[1]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/syste...
So why can't our so-called professionals see this too? Taking away learning opportunities from kids does them no good!
I remember once when I was in 9th grade and my elder brother was a sophomore in college. I found a textbook of his titled "Matrices and Determinants" (or something to that effect), for one of his courses. I picked it up and started reading it. After a few pages I had some questions, asked my dad. He didn't blink and just helped me out. Soon I had finished a couple of chapters and had learned more about matrices, determinants, etc. than I would ever learn in High School. Nobody told me not to read it; they just helped me along whenever I needed the help.
I can't even imagine how toxic this discouragement would be to a curious mind!
I'm curious if/how your teachers reacted?
I wrote a book Freshmen year of high school and started programming on my own. When I presented a physical copy of my self-published book and my computer programs to my teachers they gave me a metaphorical pat on the head, but not one point of extra credit or a special tutor. In computer class I was still expected to learn about Microsoft Excel and in English class I was still required to write two page stories. In my experience, the education system did not empower my curious mind. It felt like I was assigned busy work because the other students lacked motivation otherwise. I can only hope that one day the education system will tailor to the individual.
Is it not strange how in an article arguing from otherwise a very egalitarian, leftist viewpoint, when it discusses how students perform given more or less difficult classes, it somehow thinks the most relevant statistic is the race of the students? (Approximately, even, because American race designation is kinda weird anyway.)
Sure, socio-economic circumstances are correlated with race. (Unfortunately still in this day and age.) Not perfectly, but there is a correlation, so absent other data, it can be used as a proxy for the socio-economic circumstances in which the student grows up. But there are multiple problems with this:
1. If we are to lessen discrimination, the very first thing we should do is stop discriminating. Is this considered normal in the USA? Stop tracking race! And even if you do track it (or an approximation of it) to double-check you're not inadvertently disadvantaging certain minority groups, certainly (1.) there are better measures to designate minority groups, and (2.) one can do this without telling all the world about it and giving society even more fuel for discrimination. If people see other people treat people equally, and see that as normal, they will tend to do the same. We should lead by example, not start a discussion on equality with the worst kind of discrimination.
2. Surely there are better indicators for socio-economic circumstances than race? What about the salary of their parents? This is a typical measure in The Netherlands (where I live). Or even where they live. And if you say that we cannot track those things because that would be an infringement on privacy: how on Earth is tracking parents' salary an infringement on privacy but not tracking race?
Like, I agree that teaching less math is bollocks. But that's not the thing that surprises me most when reading OP.
It's cultural though, we (the people in the US) are obsessed with race. Literally everything you do and talk about is colored by it, and it's pretty much impossible to escape.
The more heterogeneous the society becomes the more obsessed we become with the differences between us.
You're seeing it too in the UK and will be seeing a LOT more of it as your demographics shift to be like ours.
Sorry; it’s not personal. Few Europeans do unless they have lived here for a long time (and even then I see many struggle with the topics).
Do you think that the US has been doing such a good job managing race relations that we can take a superior attitude and reject commentary?
I agree that this topic could be more accurately and inclusively framed as how to improve outcomes for low income students, or children with absentee/incarcerated parents, or children of addicts.
Unfortunately, some people care much more about racial outcomes than they do about any of those I mentioned.
The point of the racial framing IS to polarize, divide, and mobilize a political base, not to solve an underlying problem.
Talking about helping poor children doesn't get people as riled up, and has the risk of actually leading to agreement and a solution.
American politics has no hindsight and is a zero sum game. If you fix a problem in American politics, you don't get credit for it later. You only get credit for promising to fix problems in the future.
If parties agree and implement a solution, neither party comes out ahead, and even worse, you just made the opposition look more reasonable. It is a prisoners dilemma where cooperation is punished
The United States has always been obsessed with race. The south had completely different schools based on a child's skin color. What makes you think this is new?
That said, the relative importance of the issue and satisfaction obviously shifts over time. Gallop polling shows that that by many metrics, perceptions of racial Injustice are at a multi-decade high. It is interesting that far fewer people feel that black people are treated fairly than in the late 90's. It would be interesting to see data going back even further.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/352544/larger-majority-says-rac...
>. It is interesting that far fewer people feel that black people are treated fairly than in the late 90's. It would be interesting to see data going back even further.
It seems intuitive to me. If you have a problem and then activists put in a ton of time to make that problem more visible, its going to change people's perceptions of social issues. For example, if you asked people in 1990 and 2020 if the Catholic church adequately protects children from sexual predators, you're probably gonna get a pretty drastic difference in responses.
I agree that if activist put a lot of emphasis on this and make it more visible that this feeling will be stronger. That doesn't negate the point above, it supports it.
Sure, people can argue over how productive the additional attention is for actually resolving issues, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I merely staying that attention is very high right now
A high point compared to what? The 90s? You have some recency bias in your understanding of this topic.
> agree that if activist put a lot of emphasis on this and make it more visible that this feeling will be stronger. That doesn't negate the point above, it supports it.
You didn't make a point, you said something was 'interesting' which I commented on because its really not, it just makes sense.
>Sure, people can argue over how productive the additional attention is for actually resolving issues, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I merely staying that attention is very high right now
I think you're mostly trying to backtrack a hot take
People are more aware than in the 90's. You don't find that interesting but I do. Cool?
My point was that the US cares about race a lot right now. Generally and relatively. Do you disagree?
If you have a central point you are trying to convey, stop beating around the bush and say it.
Regarding the election of the president, I assume you're talking about the 3/5 compromise. I think this had the opposite impact of what you're claiming.
It gave white male voters in the south less power. Representation based on total human population would have given them more.
If you were voting white male in the North, your representation was based on the total population of your state, including those that cant vote, i.e. women and children.
In the south, your total population for the purposes of proportional representation was reduced lower than the total human population of your state
If the president was elected strictly based on votes cast, the North would have dominated every election.
Not only did the South have completely disenfranchised slaves who nevertheless added to their masters electoral votes, but they also had much more limited franchise even for white males.
The constitution was set up to let the South prevent the vast majority of their people from voting without giving up much political power as a result.
Nobody supported the vast majority of people voting. The Electoral College was never based on voter numbers.
We are talking about a history where: a) A decision to not occupy a defeated country was made because they were impure/non-white (Mexico)... [I don't think I have encountered a similar historical example. I will spend some time looking/reviewing just in case I am forgetting some similar situation.] b) Called Germans and Finnish immigrants "non-white":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th....
Italians and Greeks faced the same treatment. Everything and everyone had to be assigned at some class/color. The wikipedia article goes even more in depth about the issue that also posed for Asians in the U.S. which is a whole lot different rabbit hole, and which I am still confused about.
c) Gun control and argumentation started because of racism. NRA actually did support gun control at one point: when the Black Panthers tried to exercise their right to bear arms. And when Reagan introduced the Mulford Act in response, evidence shows it was enforced based on race.
https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-...
https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-mulford-act-and-americas-r...
And going way back: Black Codes were a big part of Jim Crow measure: everyone could have a gun; unless you were "black." (Or other undesirable.)
And to place the final nail: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers...
There is the claim that the 2nd amendment was enacted to ensure slaves wouldn't revolt. Not sure yet how much weight one should place to that claim; but the world history supports such considerations. [Review cf. Spartans for instance or the Japanese class system.]
As a counterpoint, the last several centuries are full of examples of countries establishing territories or colonies in foreign lands with different ethnicities. In those cases, the local population was generally not given much power for self governance, if at all.
The US has a pretty long history of returning militarily conquered territory back to locals for self governance. These countries usually remain within the US sphere of influence of course, and often retain a US military presence, but we dont call it occupation or the territories colonies. Instead we call them allies (e.g. Germany, Japan, the Philippines, S Korea, ect).
See first paragraph section C, page 11 (293) -- also citation, but didn't have time to link it here.
Funny, but let's not underestimate how much class warfare there is in modern politics. Even if they do a great job using identity politics to lampshade it.
I think Occam's razor suggests the reasons of race are much simpler: race is considered a public statistic, one not trying to be hidden behind welfare, stocks, shell companies, tips, etc. Financial status is much more complex and varies based on COL. Easier statistic, easier to focus on.
anecdotally, I have a friend who, when she was looking for a school for her kid, had to drill down into the data for which schools had significantly worse results for black students, because that spoke to systemic factors in the school environment, and so even if the school looked good in its overall statistics she knew her kid would not likely get a good education there.
I'm sorry for your friend; that situation sounds like a very odd mix of empowering (having the data — albeit after drilling) and deeply discriminatory and marginalising.
Over here we do actually have at least some of the race inequality problems, but we're putting much less emphasis on them. The approach has advantages but clearly also disadvantages. Thanks for the thought-food.
Usually in data science, you "mine" for features or combination of features. That is you collect as much as possible, then actual find the critical features e.g. to construct a random forest/decision tree/ ...
Here they are going as you point out the other way. And the more I study U.S. history (and politics) the more racist I find it.
The first six months was very rough as they caught up from being so far behind, but they are being well positioned to the rest of their school careers compared to where they would have ended up academically in the public schools.
1) The kids State Standardized test scores were abysmal, but they were given great scores by the school. If they failed tests they were given unrelated “makeup work” to being their grade back.
2) during Covid, everything went online and we could see all the work being given. Our daughter was specifically given topics 2 grades below her actual grade to keep her grade up. Her teachers told her this, and they didn’t assign homework “because of need for school / life balance”. My son’s work was dumbed down as well.
For private school, we see it because we had to help get them back up to par. I have helped my son understand algebra and read Shakespeare, and my younger daughter age appropriate math and English.
Both are now able to take over their own studies, which are far in advance of where the grade equivalent public school is.
Our public schools also have almost no AP courses at all. The private school has only college-prep courses, and the question is only what level - basic to advanced to honors AP.
Wallethub.com said it's #3 overall [2]
US New and World Reports said it's #2 overall for education[3]
In 2019 EducationWeek ranked it #1 [4]
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"they didn’t assign homework “because of need for school / life balance”.
Covid was a stressful time for kids and parents alike. Is school/life balance not a valid concern for teachers especially under unique circumstances? You also mentioned everything was online, not sure if that was part of your criticism but weren't private also doing that?
"For private school, we see it because we had to help get them back up to par. I have helped my son understand algebra and read Shakespeare, and my younger daughter age appropriate math and English."
You could have helped your children in Public school as well right? Isn't it possible that you changing schools also caused you to involve yourself more. That the end result is not so much the private school but an attitude change due to the new school. Similar to how someone moves and it gives them motivation to find a job or get their life together.
You also talk about how your kids are learning the way they did years ago and that your 5th grader (at the comment's time) is learning Latin. However you mentioned that the first year of the private schooling was difficult because of the transition and the amount to overcome (related to your children being behind?)
Isn't it possible that Covid caused a distinct change in your mental state. Think about it, you have your two children home all the time unexpectedly , both with learning disabilities, and you had schools that had to adapt to remote learning quickly. There's stress everywhere. So your children don't score well on standardized tests, it's understandable to be concerned. The school, having trouble implementing a completely new way of learning drops homework and is generous with the grades. Maybe that's not unreasonable considering the situation for schools at the time.
"The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of children and adolescents is multifaceted and substantial. Survey studies regarding child and adolescent mental health amid COVID-19 indicated that anxiety, depression, loneliness, stress, and tension are the most observed symptoms." [5]
[1]https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?chor... [2] https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/533... [3] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education [4]https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/in-national-ranking-o...
[5]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8972920/#:~:tex....
We happen to be in a lousy district. Yes, Covid uniformly hurt all schools. But don’t presume to know our kids, our schools, or our context. Our public schools have always had lousy standardized test results, even pre-Covid. Post Covid it is getting worse and worse - a few weeks ago our Superintendent rejoiced that we should all just ignore those scores, because more and more colleges are not requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission. He said this and wrote it in a presentation. A celebration of ignorance. Paid for by my tax dollars.
Ugh.
---- edit end
Your fixation with standardized tests is unusual for this site. It's a complicated debate but you seem to have a strong opinion about the value of standardized tests
Some colleges don't even require them anymore [1] as you mentioned. The NEA claims they don't properly measure student value [2].
Finally, I know many children of immigrants who literally have burned out because of a singular focus on education by their parents. That's anecdotal of course and I almost stupid mentioning the steretype. However, this may be a real issue even if it's not all[3].
You have focused on these tests often in your comments. Do you have evidence these are a good measure of intelligence or ability related to either to college or the workplace?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/us/SAT-ACT-abolish-debate...
[2]https://theeyeopener.com/2019/01/added-pressure-students-of-...
You want KPIs that you can measure that are based somehow on reality.
The problem with public education in the US is teacher’s unions fiercely fight against any sort of KPI, because they would then be evaluated on actual results. They much prefer to have bullet proof tenured jobs for life with no accountability.
One way to fix the statistical aspect of that problem is to reduce the possibility for such disparities to exist, which could be accomplished by removing "higher level" classes, such as algebra in middle school. If the upper limit of what a student can learn is lowered, then the students below that limit are "closer" to the students who are are at or above it.
Can anyone convince me this isn't what's happening? It just seems like a entirely ineffectual political move with the singular goal of making the people behind it look good, so that they can retain power. I cannot provide evidence, because part of my theory is that everyone involved in enacting these policies is either lying, or they incorrectly think that these policies help. I just can't see how anyone can think this is a good idea, or that it will help anything other than the stats. But why shouldn't I think this?
But this is far cheaper than actually fixing our entrenched poverty problems, screwed-up justice system, and terrible social safety net, and school reform programs are easy and often fairly popular (as opposed to what we actually need to do, which is guaranteed to be controversial and probably end up sabotaged no matter which plausible set of solutions one proposes) plus the real solutions would take many years to yield results, which is far too long for our political cycle—so we keep trying, then act surprised and/or outraged when the results are very stupid, when we've set things up such that we're basically asking for stupid results.
They're trying to make the schools fix poverty (whether caused by racism or anything else), in order to avoid directly fixing poverty. It's an endeavor doomed from the start because it rests on the religious belief that success is directly proportional to merit, and merit is best shown by achievement in school.
But we can't have a society of middle-class strivers, because no ditches will be dug, so all you end up with in the fantasy case is a bunch of well-educated ditch diggers who now have massive student loan debts. What you get in the real case is a bunch of people who realize that they can either A) be depressed baristas lamenting their failure to do better with the expensive degree that has given them a lifetime of debt, B) be depressed baristas who don't owe $100K for a useless degree.
It's not compulsory and free primary education that will fix poverty, and it's not the job of teachers to repair all inequity in society (although to the most egomaniacal, it's all they think their duty is.) Just like it isn't college's duty to fix racism. The way you fix these things is by directly addressing them, not explaining to children how to use a bootstrap.
> The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware.
I was wondering if some people are aware of studies supporting this strategy.
I could try to dig them up, but I remember few studies demonstrating that school success is more correlated to the socio-economical situation of the parent than to the child intrinsic capacities (I think one usual method is to compare success of twins adopted in different families to remove the naive argument "higher socio-economical situation means that these people are intrinsically smarter").
If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).
I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some. A bit like if your professor was saying "we have an exam on chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, I will tell you the chapters 1 and 3, the chapters 2 and 4 are in the books but I'm going to give this book only to some students and not other". If a professor does that, people will obviously say that it is stupid, that the professor should teach chapters 1 and 2 to everyone and then do a test on chapters 1 and 2, and nobody will pretend that this is "dumbying down" the students.
They do leave out some things: food + shelter. Many poor students have problems with nutrition and safe shelter, both of which make learning near impossible.
The metro area I'm in is a perfect example of this. We have two small cities side by side. Pretty much the same socioeconomic makeup in both. One invests massively into education, tutoring, summer programs, etc. In the other the schools are literally crumbling, but hey, the police budget is at an all time high! The city investing into education ranks 9/10-10/10 on state tests, the city that allows its buildings to literally crumble (the library was off limits for a while because the ceiling tiles were falling so often they were injuring the children), ranks 2/10.
We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.
> We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.
And we can also give poney to every kids.That's a nice thought but that is so deconnected from reality, which means that you are pushing for something that will never happen and at the same time the unfair situation will stay the same.
(Also, only about a third of the incidence of corporate taxes falls on shareholders, with the rest being split about equally between lower wages for workers and higher prices for customers. It can be surprisingly regressive!)
- There are many taxes, not a single tax rate
- It completely ignores the idea of progressive taxation: rich individuals and giant megacorps can afford to pay higher tax rates without the same issues that would occur by applying those tax rates on lower and middle classes and small business.
- It cannot be empirically validated without cherry picking data because it ignores many crucial factors.
It's basically just propaganda paid for and promoted by the rich to convince the proles to let them keep more money.
But you are obviously not the first one coming up with this idea. Plenty of people have tried and are still trying, and it still does not work (it does not mean we should not try). In the meanwhile, we still need to improve the situation for people who are being the victim of it.
This is why this measure has been created while your measure is still far from being reality.
Why? It's always appeared available on an opt-in basis as far as I can remember. It should be possible to drastically expand this through various means, outside of standard classroom hours.
Their kids will then mop the floor against all other kids, including engaged kids without engaged parents, that would have benefited from more advanced classes. Is that equality?
Without this measure, the kids that are not able to follow classes that needs things they cannot afford will just fail the lecture and drop from school, from THE WHOLE SCHOOL.
Without the measure, you have people who drop out of school and get a mathematical education close to 0 and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10. With this measure, the same people will get a mathematical education closer to 5, and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10.
But as the parent post points out, 10s either dominate the class, leave the class, or ignore the class and take math outside school. None of that help's the 5s, and all of it hurts, or is wasteful for the 10s.
So, I'm now not even sure where this "dumbing down" the students comes from. Maybe it's yet another moral panic.
You have to look further back. They are blocking middle schoolers from taking Algebra. That means they won't haven't progressed enough to get to Calculus unless they skip ahead a grade level of math, either via summer school, or other outside study.
By replacing it by another challenging mathematical content. How is that "dumbing down".
It's like saying "they are making students less musical because they are replacing piano lectures with guitar lectures".
And, yes, I get that Algebra is not the same as Data Science, and that Algebra may cover some foundation needed for a math specialization. But a lot of students don't end up doing a specialization in math: for them, Data Science may make them SMARTER than Algebra which give tools rather than train the brain to think differently.
I had a strong math cursus at uni, and I've observed that it takes a while for the "math point of view" to "click" and suddenly make sense. It is also the case in some comments here. I have never seen someone saying they have "clicked" before uni (I'm sure there is some, the point is that they are too rare to be the reason we waste all the other students' time). The reality is that teaching 1 year of something that you need 2-3 years before "clicking" means that it is just wasted on people who just do one year.
And, of course, Algebra is not limited to that. But it is also just true that a lot of it is learning formula by heart, which makes it difficult to pretend teaching a more challenging, engaging and practical math domain will make people somehow less smart.
Nobody has a problem with there being options for students to learn at their own pace.
The problem is not allowing people to take more advanced classes, if they so choose.
> nobody will pretend that this is "dumbying down" the students.
If you prevent students from taking more advanced classes, if those students choose it, then yes it would be dumbing down their education.
Just let them take the more advanced classes. Stop removing their options.
The article itself says that students who want to go ahead will get private lessons.
The idea is not stopping people to get more advanced classes, the idea is to cancel more advanced classes as long as "normal pace" classes are not present.
The way it works is that if you put an advanced class and no normal pace class, people who need the normal pace class will fail school over and over again and finally drop out of it, and people will just say "the advanced class is just a normal pace class" without realising it's not the case.
1. Why this initiative is a problem
2. That simply rewording "slow" to "normal" and "normal" to "advanced" seems to constitute the majority of your argument, without which there isn't a good one
Estimating if the pace is "fast" or "normal" is very very complicated. Only an idiot will pretend they know for sure that "this is too slow" (unless obvious extreme cases which don't correspond to what we have here)
Also, apparently, the measure was to replace advanced algebra by advanced data science which was in fact more challenging than the initial recite-by-heart-the-formula algebra lessons.
then, with that data, you will know to replace "terribly fast" with the original "slow", and can try to make your proposal not depend purely on the semantics of inaccurately renaming "slow" to "terribly fast"
remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum the normal one, when the normal one is the one they had before these changes, the one which reflected the norm (hence the name) in the US
if you think that one is actually "advanced", that's upon you to convincingly make the case for, otherwise we default back to the above, but a purely semantic argument is pretty weak on its own anyways
also, the last paragraph of your post presents a false dichotomy: creating a new class doesn't require cancelling advanced algebra (advanced advanced algebra?)
Except that you have not done that. Where are your data? Did you make sure that the group you compared are representative to each other? How do you correct for all the differences in state (unemployment level, diversity in education, political orientation, level of rurality, ...) that all have an effect? ...
So, no, it is objectively pretty complicated. You should have taken advanced data science, you would understand better that just comparing 2 states is very very naive to draw conclusions.
> remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum the normal one, when the normal one is the one they had before these changes, the one which reflected the norm (hence the name) in the US
In fact, I was not the one who started: the measure that is in question in the article has been proposed because people have done a study (a real one, comparing the numbers, you know, the thing that you say one should do before saying if it is slow or not but that you did not do) and concluded that there was a problem.
The document is 1000 pages long, of course it covers the elements that support their proposal (and you should agree with that as you say it's not complicated). These elements were themselves critized (maybe correctly), so it is funny to see that sometimes the argument is "their base study is badly done" and sometimes it is "I claim that I know what is 'slow' or not, without study, which is fine because if someone says it's not, they have just renamed without study"
If a team came up and say "we had a look and concluded that we should replace algebra by data science" and you just say "naaah, I have ZERO study on the subject, but I want to believe that algebra is fine", when someone says "but the point is that algebra is not fine", you cannot say "you haven't done a study": YOU are the one who pretend that the measure is not supported by the data, while you are the one having not looked at the data.
(and don't get me wrong, it does not mean that the study done by the people who proposed these measures is perfect or even correct. On the opposite: such study is difficult. If you now claim their study is invalid, it just show that 1) it is true it's complicated, 2) you don't care about the reality as you didn't even consider that they may have been backed by a study, you just assumed there was none because it was more convenient for you)
> also, the last paragraph of your post presents a false dichotomy: creating a new class doesn't require cancelling advanced algebra (advanced advanced algebra?)
What are you talking about: I'm not saying they had to remove advanced algebra in order to introduce advance data science, I'm saying they decided to replace something that they think is not challenging, engaging and useful enough by something more challenging, more engaging and more useful.
And if you think "aaaah, it's awful because before there was algebra and now there is no algebra, so it tortures the poor students who like algebra", why were you not crying about the poor students who like data science that was "canceled" before this proposal.
It's your responsibility, not mine, to prove that what was normal before is now "advanced" by the standards of the country, and that slow is now "normal"
> I'm not saying they had to remove advanced algebra in order to introduce advance data science, I'm saying they decided to replace something that they think is not challenging...
this contradicts the assertion that the class was too advanced, now it's not advanced enough? Doubt. Plus, you yourself are using the word "replace", here meaning removing 1 class and adding another: two acts. There's nothing requiring them to remove the first class, and there doesn't seem to be a convincing case for doing so. If you want to have a new class, go ahead, but don't nuke good, unrelated classes in the process.
>...by something more challenging, more engaging and more useful
is it, though? That's what they say, on 1 side of the issue, but it doesn't seem like that's the case, and again, both are useful, so that's not a valid excuse for nuking 1
I've answered that already: the demonstration is in the 1000 pages of the report supporting the measure debated here.
> this contradicts the assertion that the class was too advanced, now it's not advanced enough?
This is not complicated. I'm saying we need a correct entry-level, followed by a correct advanced level. I was just saying: "This measure does not dumb down people if they allow them to enter something they were not able to enter before. Moreover, I've also noticed that some people here seems to think that this measure implies that everything will ever be entry-level, which is not true, they are also doing advanced-level for students who have a faster pace"
> Plus, you yourself are using the word "replace", here meaning removing 1 class and adding another: two acts.
That's correct, well done. Let's see another example: yesterday, I've downloaded a movie, this morning, I've replaced this activity by listening to music. 2 acts. Yet, no false dichotomy.
> There's nothing requiring them to remove the first class, and there doesn't seem to be a convincing case for doing so. If you want to have a new class, go ahead, but don't nuke good, unrelated classes in the process.
Say the person who has absolutely no idea of the intricacy of designing an education program. They have to compose the program. Having parallel subjects means multiplying the work for the design, for the teacher, for the controlling bodies, ... Not something impossible, but certainly not something you want to do unless you really have to.
But then, you say "good class", and this is the problem: the reason this initiative exists is because IT IS, according to them, NOT A GOOD CLASS. It creates problem: inadapted learning curve, inequalities, early tracking of students, ... while not being intellectually very interesting.
Again: ACCORDING TO THEM. It does not matter if you don't agree with them: it is impossible for them to do a proposal where every one agrees. You are not special, and you can repeat "it's a good class", THEY HAVE A 1000 PAGES REPORT, they did not just wake up a morning and decided "it's not a good class", it's a result of a reflection that may be wrong but is certainly way more solid than yours. (just in case: it is not an "argument from authority", I'm not saying they are right, simply, painting them as if they are equivalent to a random HN commenter is just either intellectually dishonest or the proof that the person who does that is themselves really stupid)
> is it, though? That's what they say, on 1 side of the issue, but it doesn't seem like that's the case, and again, both are useful, so that's not a valid excuse for nuking 1
You realise too that if you propose to keep the 2, you will have people complaining about that, right? Some people like the color orange, some people like the color green. You may like green. Sometimes, people choose green, and you are happy. And sometimes they choose orange, but don't pretend that "green" is somehow "the good one", especially if you have nothing else than feeling and vague idea of how it works. But also, importantly, when we have the green-vs-orange, there is always an idiot who say "it's easy, let's just mix green and orange together" thinking that magically, both green and orange will be happy.
No, having both Algebra and Data Science is not "the best of two worlds". There are plenty of reason why it is very very stupid: more work, more confusion, we dont fix the early tracking of student (we increase it in fact because the uni will even less adapt to people who haven't done Algebra if they can just say "you had to choose Algebra"), we don't help diversity (Algebra will be even more non-diverse now that the "bad ones" who loves math will be pushed to do Data Science), ...
Canceling advanced classes quite literally prevents people from taking those classes.
If someone doesn't want to do the advanced classes, they don't have to. But don't prevent others from taking those classes if they want to take them.
> people who need the normal pace class
This is about allowing people to take the advanced classes if they choose, and allowing others to take normal classes.
And other people, who want to cancel the advanced classes, are definitely the ones who want to dumb things down.
Just allow people to take those advanced classes if they choose, and allow others to take take the normal classes. Problem solved.
1) You've cut my sentence, which says "cancel more advanced classes IF ...", which means that not all advanced classes are cancelled.
2) You are therefore asking to cancel "beginner's classes". I'm saying "cancel advanced classes as long as there are not enough beginner classes", so you are in practice canceling beginner classes. As any "advanced class" student was first a "beginner class" student, you are canceling the path towards advanced class.
> This is about allowing people to take the advanced classes if they choose, and allowing others to take normal classes.
Quickly looking closer to this, it was NEVER QUESTION TO CANCEL ADVANCED CLASSES. Simply, instead of algebra, do advanced data science (basically statistics), which is probably 1) more challenging, 2) more engaging, 3) more practical.
> Just allow people to take those advanced classes if they choose, and allow others to take take the normal classes. Problem solved.
Which problem exactly? It looks like the "no advanced classes" is just people on the internet getting all exited for something that was never considered.
No, people are not asking to do this, lol. The complaint is about the education report that opposed students being allowed to study algebra in advanced classes.
Thats what this is about.
> Simply, instead of algebra, do advanced data science
Ok, so algebra classes are being cancelled. Yeah, thats the problem!
> Which problem exactly?
The problem of not being able to take algebra classes.
Obviously, nobody is just coming and saying "lol, I hate children, I want people to be dumb, I will stop them being educated".
The reason this report proposes to replace algebra by data science is because this report argues that data science is making people as smart as algebra, but also, unlike algebra, it does not stop some people to get smart.
(in more details: algebra is a lot of "learn by heart" and is mainly a preparation for higher studies with a learning curve that blocks more people, which means people who have not the luxury to take it will not take it)
> Ok, so algebra classes are being cancelled. Yeah, thats the problem!
They are replaced by something better, and removing them stop some students to end up less smart. Is that really a problem?
I'm sure algebra have some good sides (it's good to get good foundations when someone wants to study math, for example, without being indispensable), but is it worth the cost on other students?
> The problem of not being able to take algebra classes.
And yet before this proposal, no one was able to take data science classes, and no one (and not you) were complaining. Isn't that a bit unfair: you don't mind a world without data science classes (despite the fact that they are better than algebra), but a world without algebra is suddenly a problem (well, not "without algebra", you can still do algebra, just not in the same order)
Ok, so it is replacing stuff! Not sure why you had to go through so many posts to just admit that.
And people have a problem with what is being replaced.
If you wanted to say that support the replacement of algebra, you should have just said that from the beginning instead of doing this whole rigmarole.
But other people very much do not want this option taken away from them and step one to talking about this is at least admitting that, yes, algebra is being replaced.
Of course algebra is being replaced, where do I say anything different.
I guess my mistake is assuming my interlocutors are not idiots and want to debate the reason of the replacement rather than just staying on "I like Algebra so I'm crying like a baby".
> And people have a problem with what is being replaced.
This is what I don't understand. They don't have any arguments to support the fact that the replacement is not bringing more supported "pro" than "con".
All they say is "I can see one good thing to Algebra, so it implies that this measure can only be a bad one", which is obviously incorrect. In real life, measures usually replace things that are not all bad by things that are better. The point is that you need to weight the pros and the cons. Here, it feels like people are just saying "I don't want to hear the pros, I know one con, and it means it's a bad idea".
I personally like Algebra, and I would have loved it to stay. The same way I like the convenience of some fastfood. But when a study shows that for the same price, they can replace a fastfood menu to a better menu in a school, the normal thing to do is to weight the pros and cons, not just cry because I prefer fastfood.
It is interesting to see that some people who present themselves as on the side of reason will act so irrationally to oppose some proposal without caring of the pros and cons, just because it feels negative in their feelings.
This is a ridiculously privileged view that hurts the people it claims to help.
As a child, I was heavily invested in math, but I was raised by a mother who had no resources or inclination to pay for private lessons. Luckily my public school district had a few advanced classes available for all, and along with my own initiative, I was able to scrounge up a passable math education.
> The way it works is that if you put an advanced class and no normal pace class,
Caveat: I didn't grow up in California. I don't know how public schools are run there. That being said, this sounds like nonsense to me. There were always normal pace classes for students who excelled less. These were, in my experience, the most populated classes.
I'm not saying it is what it will happen, I'm saying that some says "this measure is stupid, smart students will get private lessons anyway" and other are saying "this measure is stupid, smart students are forced to not learn".
All I was saying was: if you think that the "private lessons" argument is elitist or unrealistic, then you should disagree with the author of the article.
See Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hppbxV9C63g
It just doesn't look good. Pretty much every study done has shown such a strong lean towards genetics everyone avoids it.
> I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some.
The NORMAL pace is too slow for some kids who aren't even doing any math at home. The solution to kids learn at different paces and some kids can learn at a faster pace if they have resources at home, but not all kids have resources at home isn't force everyone onto the normal pace. It's to make sure all kids have access to resources.
If it's hard to get resources, then maybe you can free up some by adjusting class sizes. Instead of 60 kids, and 20 kids / class room all at the same pace; you can take the 30 kids capable of doing a faster pace and put them in the fast paced room, then have two classes of 15 kids at a slower pace and now they've got more time for individual instruction, and you didn't have to hire anyone.
People who fall behind don't need a slower pace. They need to move faster. That means not just more attention but longer hours. But there is only so much time. A school wanting to maximize its graduation rate needs to spend less energy on teaching people who are good at a subject in order to divert resources to those who need more. That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.
It looks like a lot of people who are screaming at the end of science haven't even realized the problem may just be in their head.
In fact, math curriculum has never been made “more complex”, quite the opposite is true. Especially with recent trend of “math is racist”
Maybe it's the right thing to do, but you're not going to get a lot of support for letting the kids who are good at school go home after an hour. All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class. Might as well try to have something for them to do other than throw paper airplanes after ten minutes and distract the kids who need the whole hour.
Anyway, I suggested 2x the pupils for the fast math class, so that the normal math class got more resources. If you've got smaller schools, it's harder to allocate resources, and that's understandable, but a lot of schools have enough kids to push the ratios around to get more attention to the kids that need it.
It's unnecessary for all high school graduates to have taken AP Calc; but it's a waste of students' time for those who could have made it through that not to have had the opportunity. Just like it's a waste of students' time for them to be in classes that are beyond their current level so much that they can't catch up and then just passing them because there's no alternative, so they just zone out. Admittedly, the daycare function of school doesn't really care about wasting students' time, but that's only part of the function of school.
But why? This is a very dysfunctional way of allocating teaching time, especially if the classes are not split along learning ability. What ages are we talking about here?
At my school, we didn't even get subject-specific time slots until 13/14 years: before that, we all spent the same time in class but everyone worked on their own subject. The teacher's job was to make sure that every child spent time on each subject according to their needs, not according to alotted time.
And after that, when we did get separate classes and separate teachers for the different subjects, only 70% of our school time was scheduled for the whole class; the other 30% was for teacher "open hours": the students were expected to fill that time according to their own needs.
I think you are correct, but you are pushing against the headwinds of academia.
Good students will learn complex Math, while struggling students will learn Math-I kr something simple.
That way everyone feels challenged
About two years ago I chatted with a professor at ASU who was developing AI tutors and other sorts of systems and was able to show in research papers that they enhanced the learning of the class overall. However, he claimed that adoption among teachers and schools was largely rejected because teachers hated having imbalanced knowledge among the students.
China is apparently pursuing this education strategy, though: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/02/131198/china-squ...
Speaking as a parent with a child in private school, even there they have a strong resistance to teaching kids who already knows materials from the current year, where I was explicitly told those topics wouldn't be covered for two more years rather than embracing my child's curiosity and interests. K-12 education seems extremely non-optimal except for enabling parents to work, but my complaints about education aren't new [2] and our K-12 education certainly doesn't cultivate geniuses [3].
[1] https://slejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40561-...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201107...
[3] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-mak...
The US generally takes the approach that changing the curriculum or changing standards will change outcomes, but rarely invests in teacher quality, which would have very high impact (compare to Korea, Finland, etc.).
More recently, my kids had the option to take algebra in the 8th grade. I don't see any good reason to not keep it available. Sometimes kids need a challenge (or at least need to see a point to it) to engage in a subject.
My guess is that the districts that want to eliminate it are looking at poor math achievement and thinking that applying more resources to getting all the kids up to some minimal level of math literacy is better than diverting some of those resources to a smaller number of kids who are ready for more advanced topics. And yeah, sad to say but there are some teachers who are not themselves capable of teaching algebra or anything more advanced. So teaching it in junior high leaves a smaller pool of qualified teachers for high school math.
So the problems they are trying to solve are really a scarce resource problem. They need more resources to try get the low performers up to some satisfactory level. The real answer of course is always the same whenever you have a supply problem: you need to pay more. Wealthy families will do this. They will hire tutors, either personal or virtual. For the rest of the kids who only have public education available, we've shown a consistent unwillingness to properly fund it. And I don't necessarily mean in terms of total dollars. We spend a lot of money on public education, but we spend it poorly.
You don't need to have a unified "goal". Just let the faster students learn more. Note California public schools started *removing* optional classes for faster students.
The question I have is what the grades look like for the kids who were somewhat involuntarily included in the class. In junior high, grades don’t matter all that much, but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depending on how hard the GPA hit is.
It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything.
The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-administrator conferences (and sometimes parent-lawyer-administrator conferences) and you end up with school-wide policies like failure quotas where you are not allowed to have more than 5% of your students fail your class (ie the responsibility of the students grade falls on the teacher, not the student). And that is how grades stop being a measure of a student's understanding of the material.
Meanwhile, universities don't take the time to seriously consider what courses a student took, save for a few APs. That leads to a situation where it may well be in the student's best interest to coast through an easy A rather than get a B or C in a more challenging course. An example I can think of immediately was a friend who got an offer rescinded from a UC because they failed Discrete Mathematics as a senior, despite the fact that taking the class at all was completely optional for him.
Most people aren’t at school for learning.
I would expect that it wouldn't be that difficult to select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class. This would be more fine-grained than simply shunting all kids into an advanced class.
That's how it works now, pretty much everywhere. Your 7th grade teacher recommends you to take the 8th grade algebra class based on your performance (or, at least, their interpretation of your performance)
The question is, where do you draw the line that qualifies someone to take 8th grade algebra? Who do you let in when there is 1 seat left and 3 eligible students to fill that seat? How do you make sure that the grades you are using to determine who makes the cut are accurately measuring mathematical ability of the students and not biased in some other way?
I'm not advocating for either the California or the Dallas solution to this problem, but both those school districts have identified that letting the 7th grade teachers make this placement decisions is a problem.
For college admissions, the admissions offices aren't stupid. They generally don't look at "GPA", but compute it themselves. A small private school might need to worry about how colleges interpret their transcripts. But a system as large as California? Colleges will learn very quickly how to weight grades from different levels of classes. They already need to deal with grades being wildly inconsistent between schools. They also get other signals such as the SAT, which provides a consistent measure independent of class level.
At least when I was in high school, the regular, pre-AP and the AP classes each had a different grade scale. Core classes were a 1.0(70%)-4.0(100%), pre-AP were +1 (1-5) and AP were +2 (2-6). So in theory they were taking into account how difficult the classes were. Since this was in the DFW area, I'd expect something similar in Dallas.
1: https://thecampanile.org/27999/news/the-verdict-is-in-pausds...
The crux is that many students would take the 9th grade math course via private courses to then jump ahead a year or two when they get to the high school. The school tried to prevent people from doing this and the parents sued.
I went to this high school ~10 years ago and at the time a handful of kids every year would do this. I'd imagine it's much higher now though.
The district lost on (1) but not on (2) because it is illegal in CA to refuse placement for a student who has completed a course that would qualify for UC/CSU credit — which is what PAUSD was doing.
In 9th grade, to accelerate from Geometry to Algebra 1 (10th grade) you needed a 95% on the exam, which was 1 hour long and around 90 questions. And this was despite taking Algebra 1 and 2 at a certified private school with UC/CSU credit that the C-suites of Tech companies send their kids to.
My understanding is that at PAUSD they had two tests, one part that measured if you understood the core curriculum, and another that was more along the lines of brain teasers/math competition problems. You had to pass both (many passed the first but not the second). One issue was that the district seemed to cherry pick students to let them through; students would get access to accelerated classes even if they scored worse than other students who were blocked.
> another that was more along the lines of brain teasers/math competition problems. You had to pass both (many passed the first but not the second)
Same with my district. I attended a HS that is a peer to Gunn here in the Bay Area.
I had a somewhat similar issue in high school and 1 summer class got me more advanced than anyone else, I was able to duel enroll after that.
It’s almost like whenever the government tries to “fix” as issue and put its thumb on the scale it backfires. The results end up being the exact opposite of the government’s stated goal, unless that was the plan all along.
It is shocking to me that this has to be said. What in the world...
In Baltimore, and everywhere else, raising the minimum wage, offering free daycare & preschool, and improving the social services that prevent many low income kids from learning outside of the school (and parents from supporting them) is what will make the real difference. But, at least half of this country is opposed to spending money on those sorts of things because the "I got mine" attitude is more pervasive than "What's good for my neighbor is what's good for me".
For example in a poor area with more crime a child may need after school programs, which cost more money, to keep kids out of trouble.
Urban school districts in the US are disproportionately in old buildings that have high maintenance costs, low efficiency for utilities, and have all sorts of problems that need remediation, like lead or asbestos. There is generally no capex money to replace these buildings, and even if there was, finding a suitable property in an urban area is pretty difficult, since schools are big.
Some kids are educatable. Some are not. (and this also depends on subject and other factors)
That's true across all races, classes etc.
I say this because I actually think the biggest issue in education is that we waste resources on kids who are not educable and hold back whole classes for the one kid who refuses. This, and 101 other issues stem from that policy. A big part of what parents get at private schools or schools in nicer neighbourhoods is fewer kids holding the class up.
We should be assessing schools on how many kids get As and go to college. Instead we assess schools on how many kids pass or attend. So schools spend their time and energy dragging truants into classes and turning Ds into Cs. Anyone trying hard is just ignored, there is no news story, reward etc for getting a B kid to get an A etc...
Citation needed. Why wouldn't they be, unless there's a disability?
I have seen good teachers do wonders for 'problem' kids.
They come from a sub-culture (mostly based on social-economic status) that is aggressively anti-intellectualism.
Being bullied, shunned, etc. for being able to do things like read, do “basic” math, and/or speak anything outside of the local vernacular (e.g., something like a more neutral sounding “TV English”) is a thing.
This type of research is abundant in the education literature. That said, it is not always presented as straightforwardly as one might expect since it doesn’t match up with certain agendas in the education research and policy worlds.
And by the way, the statement "Some kids are educatable. Some are not." also comes from a sub-culture that is aggressively anti-intellectual.
Definitely not. Quite the contrary, actually.
My point is that folks shouldn’t be surprised that some kids in these types of environments have low or negative motivation to learn.
> And by the way, the statement "Some kids are educatable. Some are not." also comes from a sub-culture that is aggressively anti-intellectual.
All kids are able to learn — in fact, they are sponges.
The issue at hand is what do they learn and in what contexts.
Formal school-based learning is a tough sell in some contexts.
People continue to be shocked that throwing money at low SES students doesn’t meaningfully improve education outcomes, despite decades of data showing that it doesn’t.
The interventions that have been shown to work over and over again are:
1. Early interventions like the (old?) Head Start.
2. Increasing engagement at the community level, specifically with parental buy in. This is very hard to do, but can be done.
Once a community has embraced anti-intellectualism, all the school can really do is create a safe space in at least part of the school for those who want to learn.
You seem to be offended by my ideas. The ideas I present here are based on actual research. I encourage you to look into the literature and (if possible) talk to researchers and practitioners in environments that you are not native to (low SES rural, urban, and non-native speaker communities are good places to start).
Exactly.
If you have a 1h lesson and 30kids you have 2minutes per kid. Assuming there are no "fixed costs" like registering them etc.
So EITHER that teacher somehow changed a kids whole mindset in 2minutes per lesson (and that's what, 10min a week if you're lucky?).
OR they neglected a big chunk of the kids that turned up already wanting to learn etc and gave those kids time to that 1 kid.
This is the fundamental problem I am talking about: "good" teachers neglect 80% of the class to go after 1 kid who does not want to be there. Turning that one F grade into a C grade is given more attention than turning 20 other Cs into Bs and As.
It makes a great Hallmark Moment, but it's terrible actual educational policy.
Then people wonder why education has so little affect on outcomes.
Let me be really clear here: I am not making a moral argument about leaving that one kid behind. Just purely a practical one: when you neglect the majority and focus most resources on the least productive cases you get very poor outcomes for the average person. And the outcome for the group is highly dependent on how many and how bad those worst cases are.
From everything I've read, it's nearly entirely the case that low income and ESL students do the worst (and there's a large overlap between those groups) and it has almost nothing to do with the kids' educability or intelligence. They are in a difficult spot due to no fault of their own and require more support than what a typical teacher in a typical school in a typical city can provide without meaningful investments in broad social services Americans don't seem to have much appetite to invest in.
Then based on your logic schools would just pad grades.
Also the rest of your comment is a pile of right wing garbage
Wow, I thought we left this nonsense back in the 1960s. Study after study shows that every additional confounding factor you account for lessens this supposed difference. Nutrition, health, environment, socioeconomic status, cultural attitudes toward learning, implicit bias in the IQ tests themselves, blood lead levels, iodine levels; race is confounded with hundreds of variables. The more of those you hold constant, the less you see any difference in racial averages. I suspect people who still spout this nonsense know this, and/or don't care.
I remember the controversy over Common Core Math and I realized a lot of people complaining about it weren't very good at math and their criticism was more a reflection of that than valid criticism.
Now it's hard to believe when people complain about something when education is involved.
Proponents argue that it advances equity and removes stigma. Opponents argue that equity is a bad goal and even if you thought it was a good goal, this perversely accomplishes the opposite.
You're starting to see articles like this one or this one https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/metro/cambridge-schoo... because well, the worm turns.
*While standardized testing is not truly objective it is dramatically more so than grades.
Finally the demented Paulo Freire idolaters are coming for stem fields. Let's see if the push back is too little, too late, or if there's hope. Otherwise, do tutoring or homeschool your children.
Edit: and of course, the result of those last 2 proposed actions will be that the gap between social economically well off kids with good structured families and those in difficulty will soar sky high. And progressives will use that increased gap to double down on asinine policies.
Teachers' unions are increasingly compromised. Electeds use kids as pawns to appeal to radicals to promote random social causes. And parents seem to focus on grades going up at the expense of an actual education.
Maybe they'll just vote themselves candy. But in my experience, kids understand--at least as well as the median adult voter--what they need to succeed. Enfranchising them in their own educations seems worth exploring.
California, in particular, has high-school only school districts. We don't have to start with whether the kindergarten block is aligned with less nap time.
If you want to see how well it works, look at the Sudbury Valley School model. (It works extremely well.)
The schools are under government order to equalize educational outcomes, but because Asians dominate in educational performance the only feasible way to get outcomes is to crush the top, i.e. it's easier to make everyone dumber than make everyone smarter.
It's not OK to harm Asians to elevate other groups when Asians have been victims of racism in America for hundreds of years.
It's like a super power to be able to tailor education for your own children. You know their strengths and weaknesses better than anybody.
In the end though, while many homeschooled kids do well on tests, they all show the narrow mindedness that comes from never meeting someone who is different (religion, and political background are big ones here)
The late-game strategy that I see is enrolling in community college for advanced classes in math, physics, science, etc. In Washington state you can start this your junior year in a program called "Running Start" and it's free. At this point your homeschooling with that child is essentially over and they're taking college classes for college credit.
This solves both how to teach and the bigger problem, what to teach so your kid passes the SATs.
We have a generation if activists and policy makers that have grown up seeing measurements as the ground truth, that they have list sight of what they were trying to accomplish.
Also, in high school & college I tutored people in mathematics (algebra and pre-calc usually). What I found is that everybody can learn anything (I truly believe this), they just need help and for people to be patient with them. What saddens me about this policy is that:
1. It feels like its giving up on students. Instead of trying to help them they're just throwing their hands up.
2. It also feels like a very lazy and uncreative solution. let's assume there are people who just can't do math. Why not create tracks for them to succeed in topics they are good at and create separate tracks for people good at math? It feels like the school districts are trying to fit everybody into the same bucket when maybe people should be put into different buckets. This is how it was in my public school system (gifted vs. honors vs. regular track) and nobody complained. Regardless of the political association (progressive or not) it feels very very lazy.
That, though.
In general what you'll find is that most of these advanced classes are dominated by certain economic groups. Public funds are advancing people with more resources when all they actually need is to pass state college entrance exams. It's not that children from low income families can't do the math, it's that they're at a huge disadvantage when their parents are often working, can't hover over them to make sure they figure it out, and can't afford Kumon. If you agree with a progressive tax rate (which not everyone does), surely you understand that this is a bad thing.
I personally think all middle and high school should be bare minimum. Kids should be able to test out of classes when appropriate. The extra funds can go toward paying competent teachers for the less advanced subjects. If some parent wants their child to be advanced, they can use their own resources to help them test out of classes and take whatever APs they need.
Also many of the comments on this topic here and on Twitter to me reek of solipsism. Every upper-class parent wants the best for their child, and every hacker thinks the story of their journey into math and CS is the most important one.
I sometimes wonder if this is how the German system came about, where there's a hard split in high school / gymnasium between the academic track kids and the vocational track kids (and there absolutely is not any shame in taking the vocational route).
The solution you're proposing takes away any chance of accessing these advanced classes for lower economic groups, and keeps the economic inequality moving.
What happens when the low income kids test out of the remedial class? Oh well, they're just done with school then?
> Every upper-class parent wants the best for their child
I'm not sure how to read into this. Why did you purposefully qualify this to only upper-class parents?
I'm OK with that and no it doesn't keep inequality moving.
Yes, done with school. Read a book, or go to work, or just hang out.
Read whatever you want, you're just concern trolling.
Unsurprisingly, it was a bit of a disaster.
What we should probably strive for is an environment where you can catch back up if you fall behind as long as you're willing to put in effort. This can be accomplished by helping everyone who is disadvantaged (e.g. poor) equally. This will disproportionately help any group that has been disproportionately harmed for whatever reason, so it's self-correcting over time and only gaps in effort will remain.
It will take an economy the size of CA to upend things, and they need to be upended. If it's progressive to have a larger base of the mathematically literate, then so be it.
The current system just hires who resembles the incumbents the most. I think that can be broken if enough students and resources go another direction.
Math is no different than any other subject at its core. So it needs to go back to being a regular subject, not among the few in the pipeline, which should never have existed. (Why do I need 3 sophomore level prerequisites, Applied Linear Algebra, Calc 3, Diff Eq's, for a junior level class, mathematical modeling? And there's worse examples at my university too, I followed the least pipelined path. That structure doesn't exist as directed for most subjects. The pipeline needs to go. Math doesn't have to be this way).
We are not, should not, and cannot all be the same.
I am bad at languages. Should I now demand that everybody please slow down so that I do not have to feel bad about myself? ... Nope.
And come on please, not slowing everybody does not mean that the teacher moves "as fast as the best student".
What you call morally reprehensible is rooted in your own black and white thinking in this matter.
You're right about my interpretation as black and white. I still think it's an issue if some or even one child (assuming they don't have some mental issue) is left behind in a class. Meaning that the teacher won't slow down for one child but the pace is acceptable for everyone.
Yes, they are. But they won't be equally educable, and that's what matters to critics.
Is that the goal? I don't think it is. I think that schools serve a host of purposes, some of which we don't like to talk about. They are a place where the government can literally inspect children. They are where the malnourish, sick or otherwise distressed children can get noticed by people in a place to help. They are daycares that free up parents to work more and be more productive. They are centers of indoctrination where kids are taught societal norms. They are cultural melting pots where kids learn to navigate self-defining social structures. They are also proving grounds, places where children are judged and assigned numbers (grades) that will either grant or deny them access to higher levels of education or other opportunity. The three Rs have never been the entire mission. Looking at what kids do at schools these days, education seems very much secondary to everything else that schools do.
The article is based on an assumption of why something was done. It is positioned in a way that it immediately invokes a reaction "how can they be this stupid". But... What if that is not what those who made these decisions actually think? If he just assumes that is the case?
I'm no expert, but maybe it would help here to do a thought experiment of "what I might be missing from the puzzle?".
Lack of resources is one thing that was mentioned here. It is not that they drop the class and do nothing else. So what was the alternative? Where are the resources put now?
I'm quite sure there are other things we are missing too. I'd like to step into those people's shoes who are making the decisions to understand better why they chose what they chose, instead of assuming what they think.
Of course, if the goal is to actually improve equality, it is really stupid. Somehow I just doubt people are that dumb. There must be something more to it that I'm missing.
But what makes it worthwhile is Noah's coverage of the Dallas experiment. That is a much less-told story. If you came directly to the comments, it's very much worth clicking on the link and scrolling down to the second half to see the data from Texas.
25 years ago I was part of my National Honor Society outreach committee. One of the things I and my committee co-chair did was go to all the "normal" (rather than IB) classes and tell students that with a good GPA they could join NHS (as NHS did have a demographic makeup that wasn't reflective of the school). Students had no idea. The outreach did make a difference. The Dallas experiment, and the tutoring discussion in the article, resonate deeply with my later experiences as a math prof as well. Pushing kids results in higher achievement.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup, " said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts .
It reminds me of one practice in communist China under Mao; university students were forced to spend some time now and then working on the land, to let them feel that they were not any better than the farmers who lived there. But actually this is even worse.
It’s finally explained something I never really understood. How do so many people fall for pyramid schemes. How are there so many Americans that don’t understand the difference between their net worth and their credit limit.
If you haven’t built a basic intuition for abstraction, which one pretty much learns only through algebra in K-12, all these things will be extremely difficult for you.
and yes, for children, because computers.
So the big question is, why make everybody take the slow track? Why not offer the option of 8th grade algebra to students who are ready for it? As far as I can tell from listening to advocates, it actually is the Harrison Bergeron thing, but with a twist: the achievement gaps that they're trying to narrow have strong correlations with race and class, which makes closing those gaps almost a sacred cause. And that typically is where the arguments stop, in much the way that a mathematical proof stops when you say "QED".
There are people, many people, who disagree with you. In good faith. They want the best for everyone, and they see inequality as the source of much suffering, and does it not make sense to address the core of the problem?
The problem with such people is that they lack the imagination and humility to understand the downsides to their proposed "solution". They choose to ignore the old addage about "the cure is worse than the disease". Ultimately the sin is hubris. They will read Harrison Bergeron and call it propaganda, hyperbole, designed to derail right-thinking, good people from pursuing utopia.
What then?
It may also be that we discover how many truly BS jobs there are such that it was all a house of cards to begin with. Not sure what we do then.
I think once tens of millions of jobs are going away and everyone needs to retrain into the types of work that are still available, we'll pretty seamlessly be able to transition into a UBI model where everyone affected becomes a college student or learns a trade or craft again, with UBI making it a graceful and exciting Great Reset without anyone falling by the wayside. Because at that point, the real economic efficiency gains still exist except at a marginal cost of effectively 0. This means that with automation you can just print what you need and everyone's standard of living skyrockets.
This is because commodities are plentiful on a big planet like this one and others.
I think the "BS jobs" concept is missing the mark a little. Those aren't BS jobs. They're just the jobs that have been most visibly automated the fastest. They may still retain, say, 25% of the useful and necessary functions that those roles require. But because of how culture and legislation lag behind technology in rate of adoption, people still feel the need to put up with appearances of working a specific amount of time or quota in order to placate someone who only counts the beans so to speak.
Tens of millions of people enjoying a Great Reset is a beautiful and achievable outcome if we do it properly.
When everyone is affected, we will just work on art, music, self-improvement, learning for joy, and spending time with loved ones. And making more loved ones. This will happen.
And you've traded the current mostly working solution for the political difficulty of getting UBI done. People aren't rational, especially in today's radicalized political zeitgeist. I wish it weren't so. Heck, only 1 in 5 GOPers think climate change is real. UBI will be fought, perhaps with violence, as a form of socialism.
What?! Who would seriously propose this?
> California
Oh.
The headline and the rhetoric used in the article are misinformation at best if I assume the author is simply ignorant.
I think it's worth it in this case. You have to be an absolute moron or someone with a sinister agenda to think that decreasing the standard helps the community in any way. Especially idiotic to call this "progressive".
Something that's just there in larger or smaller amounts, like the weather.
To these people, standards is just another word for gatekeeping. In this frame of mind, something like communism actually makes sense - the prosperity is there by default, and those at the top get most of it, so why not put everyone on the same rung of society.
There's another school of thought a step closer to the centre which holds that competence exists, but has no innate component and is purely environmental. This leads to the conclusion that if you put everyone in the same environment, you'll get the same outcomes.
If I were a country trying to subtly sabotage the future growth of another country, I would target the educational systems. Not to say that is that case with what is going on here, Hanlon's razor and all that. But it does make you think.
Either way, I worry for what the future will be like with current educational policies.
Pull your kid. Find them a school that gives them the greatest opportunity to succeed and use the funds earmarked for their education to ensure they receive it.
Currently, options are restricted to parents who can afford to move to a different school zone, afford private school or have a parent available who can facilitate a home school environment.
Letting parents vote with their kids placement will force schools to truly advance.
In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged."
> There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents
is really rough on the kids of engaged parents, forcing them to be responsible for "fixing" systems that they didn't create.
In the UK, we used to have "grammar schools" that selected on ability based on a standardised test. They were responsible for many working- and middle class children being propelled into high positions in industry and politics, including Prime Minister.
However the whole idea was deemed inequitable, so they were dismantled. Now privately school educated children have less competition.
If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people.
Public education doesn't have to mean public schools.
We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.
Parents complain about this and fight against it but are ignored. So what are we supposed to do? There are only so many school board meetings you can attend only to get eye rolls from officials.
Who defines what fixed is? How do you call success on those fixes? The process is a problem today and it's similar to politics.
I'll give two issues of issues in fixing things...
First example, if there is a problem leaders can come up with a policy/process/thing to deal with it. And call success at having that in place rather than seeing results. If the policy/process/thing doesn't work success has already been called. They aren't going to walk that back. There is a lot of this.
Second example, schools are being used for social change. And the topics of some of the social change are not agreed to in society. Who gets to decide what's right? Should schools be agents for this change? This is being fought in society right now. It's not really discussed or debated but more fought if you look at the tactics and behaviors.
How do you fix things in this form of environment?
There is a first amendment case to be made about withholding education funds from religious schools. By withholding funds from schools that are deemed to be "religious" the government is creating a preference for schools that are not on the list of religions but may be every bit as ideological. The government cannot prefer one ideology or religion over another. It is required to be agnostic.
The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.
This is eloquently put. I’ve never heard it said that way. There is no reason to believe that an entity like the government, great for accumulating and distributing the money required for public education, is a good or efficient agent for administering said education.
We see this in many other fields. For instance, non-government researchers receive government grants for research. Similarly (for better or worse), the government gives money for agricultural subsidies; nobody proposes that the government ought to run the farm. It is intuitive to us that specialists in a given field may not work for the government; it is high time we applied the same logic to education.
Consider this
If you look at the system without vouchers, there is no market mechanism to correct the situation everyone is complaining about.
There are no incentives. Each year, more and more money is dumped into the system.
If you introduce competition, then schools have to start fixing problems if they want to get the funding.
One thing that was repealed by the last Labour government was the Assisted Places Scheme [1]. If you scored highly enough the government would pay for a child to go to private school.
Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students.
Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.
You could literally rewrite history and language and program an entire generation of future voters. Imagine the possibilities
The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcomes should be required.
Furthermore, making schooling a purely financial transaction? Where do you think that leads?
I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.
I spent years in both public and private schools. The worst part of public schooling was that everything was scaled down to the poorest-performing child's level. The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.
The latter outcome is _significantly_ better for society than the former.
No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large.
(If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied religions.)
Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it.
Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Religious freedom is an enshrined right in this country.
It is very actively 'trying to fuck us over'. And it's winning, hard, in both the 6-3 sphere, on the legislative bench, and in many others.
Keeping religion out of publicly funded institutions, including schools, is done as much to safeguard free religious practice in this country as anything. The point is that the public institutions should be entirely civil and not under the sway of any one religion, because each religion once in control of society ends up discriminating against the others. That's why you don't allow them power in the civil sphere.
I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity.
I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.
The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.
Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]:
The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide
an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools —
and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas
the city says are ultimately under state authority.
The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny
investigation that has stretched on since 2015.
The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards.
That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019.
[...]
The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young
Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva
graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside
of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra-
Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for
boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools
have pushed back strenuously on those claims.
The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all
private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an
education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools.
The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially
equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it.
Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society.
[0] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-yor...
The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.
Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor.
Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.
In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats).
As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them.
I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.
The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.
We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.
Much like the original architecture and UX of welfare in the US had assumptions like a family with a cook at home I don’t think education as an institution is really meeting the needs of the public to be better informed and critical thinking citizens invested in communities and society as a whole.
There’s a big cultural issue currently where people are resistant to move for better opportunities when much of the US immigrant population has thrived over generations specifically by migrating to opportunity areas. Now, many that try to leave impoverished areas are shamed and become pariahs for leaving basically job deserts and the social costs are horrific as people find less and less connection to others.
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.
My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket.
I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education
As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating.
By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family.
This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
Most importantly, original articles here provide data that show that teaching math the way CA is trying to do has led to worse outcomes across the ethnic spectrum(unless of course parents had a financial ability to complement with private school/lessons).
So, we have the right to indoctrinate bullshit to children?
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
We work by improving public schools. That's going to be easier said than done, but it's the right solution.
[EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.
Would you be okay with the exact same amount of your tax dollars being used to send his kids to public school? If so, then why the difference?
I'm also OK with taxes for public libraries, but wouldn't like my taxes going toward vouchers to help people pay for access to private libraries.
From what I have observed of the US's education system, the problem is that the public education system is assimilating children into values that are _not_ shared by society nor their parents.
That is to say: I'm a leftist and I'm worried about schools indoctrinating kids into a whitewashed, anti-LGBTQ+, jingoistic understanding of the world. However, I'm sure there are Republican parents that are concerned about kids being indoctrinated into a "woke" understanding of the world.
I don't know how you manage things when you have the country split down the middle with two completely separate worldviews.
The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.
I can also see it is causing a mental health crisis in students, who increasingly are under pressure to identify as an oppressed minority, in order to be marked out as an oppressor; victimhood conferring social status.
Where is this being done? What school districts specifically? What are the specific topics that "introduce victim/oppressor politics into schools?"
I'd really like to know, as I'm not aware of any of that stuff. Since you're obviously a "disinterested observer," without an agenda, I assume you've gathered actual evidence for your assertions.
My view (as an American "with an agenda") is very different from yours. If I'm wrong, I'd like to adjust my view. As such, please provide me with specific examples of what you're asserting.
Thanks!
An excerpt from the section "Trans as an intersectional shield":
> "“Of all of these badges of victim status, the only one that you can actually choose is ‘trans,’” Heather Heying, visiting fellow at Princeton University, pointed out to me. “All you have to do is declare ‘I’m trans’ and boom, you’re trans. And there you get to rise in the progressive stack and you have more credibility in this intersectional worldview.”
And earlier context:
> Kindergarteners are introduced to the “Genderbread Person”15 and “Gender Unicorn.”16 Kindergarten teachers read from I Am Jazz, and the little ones are taught that they might have a “girl brain in a boy body” or vice versa.17
> Teachers present an array of gender and sexual identity options and appear pleasantly surprised when a child chooses wisely (that is, anything but cisgender).
> The schools are not forcing adolescents to identify as transgender, but they are greasing the skids. The LGBTQ safe house they’ve fashioned is avant-garde and enticing, framed with moral superiority, insulated with civil rights...
That doesn't answer the question I asked, nor does it show anything even close to encouraging a "victim/oppressor" environment.
No one is trans because its' "cool" or because someone mentioned that trans people (less than 1% of the population) exist. Do you know anyone who is trans? It's certainly not some golden road to peer/social acceptance and popularity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In fact, trans folks are routinely subject to harassment, ridicule, threats and physical violence. Stopping such abuse is the goal, not creating more trans folks -- which is ridiculous on its face.
That you take your own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature don't make them so.
None of what you posted makes your point, rather it just points up that you don't like what certain people have to say and you want such ideas and people suppressed. What are you afraid of?
I'm not claiming that "I just want to have a debate," nor did I "pursue" you (I made exactly one request to detail evidence of your assertions) and none of what I asked about was "tangential" or "previously addressed." And I'm not "feigning" ignorance. I know quite a bit about trans folks and the issues and discrimination they face.
What's more, the tired tropes (which you trotted out rather than have a substantive discussion) are more akin to the "Gish Gallop"[0] than anything I might have written being "sea lioning."
I have no interest in debating anything with you. You're just flat wrong.
Regardless, you have your ideas/beliefs and as a decent human being, I don't despise you for those beliefs, nor do I advocate for you to be silenced (as you do about others).
Please do speak your mind. It's an important part of having a free and open society. And I will do the same.
Have a good day!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Edit: Fixed typo.
Regulate voucher schools. Content requirements. Restrictions on religion. Maybe even standardized testing, or requirements that voucher students not be subject to extra fees.
The public is paying, after all. It can attach strings to its money.
The US no longer has universal shared values, it has many different sets of values that are all competing for survival. Schools have become the front line in this battlefield.
I disagree completely. Our shared values include belief in the rule of law, equality under that law, equality of opportunity and a whole bunch of other stuff that has always been the rhetoric, but much of which has only grudgingly been implemented for wider and wider swathes of Americans over the past 230+ years.
That some folks are at odds some issues most certainly does not mean we don't have shared values. It means that we don't share all the same values/ideas. Which is exactly how it's been here since well before the founding of the US.
Edit: Fixed prose.
An interesting and important anecdote. But rather than focusing on your mom's inability to take shop class, perhaps you might reflect on the fact that your mom (and many other women/girls) fought for such changes and, eventually (albeit too late for your mom), won.
That's how change happens. If you just throw up your hands and say "well, I/my mom/whoever couldn't have something that was good and important. So there's no reason to ever fight for change," seems incredibly reductive and doesn't reflect how change has been wrought throughout history.
Please understand, I'm not poking at you or your mom (in fact, I don't know her, but I think she's fabulous!). Rather, I'm taking issue with the idea that we "can't win, so don't try." That's a recipe for those who understand how change is made to create the world in their image, whether you like it or not.
I get that it's hard to ask people to think of the wider implications when they've got their own life to consider though.
Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children.
Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parents the enemy of the state.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jo...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/29/garl...
https://apnews.com/article/merrick-garland-school-boards-vio...
As for ideology, I doubt it's possible to be non-ideological. I have children not because they are accidents or the abortions my wife didn't bother to have. Not even because we just didn't know any other way to go through life. We had children because children are a good thing unto themselves. So good that I hope they grow up to have their own and enjoy that experience. Schools are hostile to that and seem to be doing what they can to encourage sterility.
Ah yes, this is clearly a 'both sides' issue where parents are the victims.
This assumes that it's actually possible for parents to override insulated bureaucrats whose heads are stuffed completely up their own derrieres.
Political hyper-polarization doesn't help either. If your local crazy-left school board abolishes merit in the name of equity, you could always replace them with crazy-right Republicans who believe the Earth is 6000 years old and Qanon is real.
There are grim economic shifts behind this. The majority of people are now priced out of raising their own kids to a good standard (i.e. stay-at-home mum). So, more and more people feel envy towards those who can, and various "equity" movements pop out (that all focus on bringing top performers down, rather than bottom performers up).
The only way to fight it is move to an area where most people can still afford kids, and in our generation it may mean moving out of U.S. entirely.
The only option is do not help and do not engage. There is no point in expending effort trying to fix a system led by people that hate you.
That's exactly what's happened at our board level. The PTA of the school itself is the involved parents, and the schoolboard has the utmost contempt for them!
None of the involved parents are willing to put in the effort or have the desire to be elected to the schoolboard though.
With respect to the GP comment, I don't think things are quite as pre-planned as a deliberate effort to have engaged parents sort of subsidize the lack of effort by less engaged parents. That might be the net result, but attributing that to a deliberate and coordinated plan on the part of school boards or the broader public education system is, to my thinking, giving them too much credit in their ability to so coordinate and engage in such complex efforts. They bicker far too much among themselves pursuing their own agendas to agree long enough for that level of strategy.
And there are on occasion parents truly willing to put in the effort and get elected, but end up quickly disillusioned on their hopes for affecting any change and leave to spend their time more productively. Often enough those who seek & stay in these board position aren't even parents of children who currently or even attended the schools in the district.
Again though, I'd temper my statements with the caveat that they're based on my own singular experience, and I'd readily believe that elsewhere there are boards who arrive at the same state of affairs with a bit more deliberate actions. It's all a mess.
Assume for a moment that my vote matters... in the sense that who I choose is elected. Further, assume that I get to craft and design these magical candidates like it the sandbox mode of some video game.
So, after all this, these candidates of mine are in charge of the school board, and no one can cockblock them. At this point, does it change the quality of the school's education? Not necessarily for my kids... that's a more difficult thing. Maybe it's a great school, but my kid's just one of those left behind by random individual circumstances. Just on average, does this school improve?
Turns out, not really. That school system is still limited in many ways beyond the school board's ability to affect on any reasonable timescale. There is not just a finite talent pool to hire from, but quite limited. And the resources to somehow expand that talent pool are limited too (and it seems likely that even if you could offer $500k salaries, you're attracting money-grubbers more than great teachers). Your capacity for the HR system to even pick the best of that talent pool is sketchy.
Textbooks? Limited by what textbooks are offered on the open market. Limited by whether parents will accept that Timmy really is a D+ student, and doesn't deserve automatic Bs for showing up and not acting the maniac. Limited by the "culture of public education"... if the best field trip ever could only happen at the end of July, that doesn't happen because we have ideas about how public schools are supposed to work and they're just not "on" during that part of the calendar.
If I was some angsty nihilist, I'd be ranting about how school boards cockblock everything public schools should be doing. But it's so much worse than that. If they did cockblock those things, it'd mean they had some idea what they should do, and were for some reason opposed to it. They don't know. And if they did, it wouldn't matter.
The system is designed in such a way as to be completely orthogonal its imagined purpose.
And you don't have to be especially intelligent or attentive to recognize any of this enough that you just don't bother with the school board elections. Why would anyone bother to vote? The truth of the matter is it's mostly between worse-and-worst candidates who have no true desire to see any sort of real improvement, and your one vote's not enough to sway it to one or the other.
If everyone is committed, everything must improve for you to see changes. If everyone is not committed they'll just send their kids to the best schools and ignore the problematic ones.
The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed free money for universities without any underwriting process and an albatross on the neck of the middle class.
Tuitions will remain high for as long as they have students desperate or ignorant enough to make poor financial choices.
The sad part is that this continues despite universities largely not meeting society's needs nor the needs of the students.
I would reference the confirming NAIS studies as well but they've got some self-interest in those results.
the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...
Private schools outperform in nearly all subjects.
Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.
Is this a result of the private schooling or does the socioeconomic status of their parents play a significant role?
I attended both and the people that were rich enough to attend private school but were sent to public school anyway still did very well for themselves, not obviously different from those that attended private school.
This assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. In general schools that accept vouchers generally operate on much smaller per-student budgets (especially if you include the capital budget -- buildings and facilities) than public schools do. In many voucher states, the public school gets some level of funding for a student even a parent gets a voucher and sends their child somewhere else.
They can and do raise my property taxes, but it's much harder than colleges simply demanding higher and higher tuitions.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-roots-of-black-politic...
EDIT: There are lots of papers regarding school vouchers and private schools and why it’s a bad idea. Simplistic solutions to complex problems tend not to work and have bad unintended consequences.
This hasn't been true for decades:
>on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively.[0]
Almost all federal funds go to poor areas, so much so that they have more funding on average.
[0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...
While total per pupil expenditures may be greater for the typical Black or Latinx students’ districts, there is variation in how these dollars are spent. On average, both Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures exceed White per pupil expenditures for administration, instruction, and social services. On the other hand, Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures are less than White per pupil expenditures on infrastructure. Black per pupil expenditures on all other items are slightly less than in the typical White student’s district, while Latinx spending is comparable.
Table 1 also illustrates some familiar facts. Black and Latinx students’ typical districts tend to have higher levels of child poverty, on average, than the typical White student’s district (5.4 and 4.0 percentage points higher in Black and Latinx districts, respectively).
Poor students who come from food insecure homes or live in high crime areas need more help in school in terms of school lunch programs, after school care, mental health intervention, etc. As such they need a lot more funding per student.
Complex problems require more than a simplistic solution. There are cultural, sociological, and economic forces at play. Vouchers are not a panacea. For one thing, private schools don’t have to accept students they consider a problem. Wealthy schools don’t want too many undesirables so won’t accept vouchers. Public schools will end up having mostly all the problem students without the resources to deal with them.
The answer is (and always will be) human capital. You could airdrop TJHSST kids into a literal warzone and they would do well. Smart kids are smart because they are smart. There is no magic dirt, and "muh multicausal forces" is pure cope.
People like you got ahold of SF's school system and made Lowell lottery entrance. They swore that it wouldn't have a big impact on test results and that the new class would benefit from being on the magic dirt of Lowell High School. Of course that's what their theories would support. Lo and behold it was an abject failure as anyone who wasn't a psychotic leftist could predict.
Smart kids dropped into a war zone may or may not do well. They might die for one thing. They might get so traumatized by the event that they are unable to cope in life. Change someone’s circumstances drastically enough then it won’t be possible to know what the outcome is.
Which you keep repeating without providing any supporting argument or citations, hence the downvotes.
It’s worth pointing out that people who support vouchers haven’t posted links to papers showing that vouchers are good. At least not in the thread started by rayiner. There have been papers posted on ancillary topics but not on the efficacy of vouchers. This isn’t a complaint on my part. I’m showing an asymmetry in the view that you posted above.
As for downvotes. I don’t care about internet points and never complain about downvotes or are otherwise affected by them. If you think what I’ve written is poorly stated or otherwise bad then downvote.
The person who said that smart kids dropped into a war zone would do just fine said something moronic and without attribution to its veracity. Why don’t you downvote them and ask for citations? Are you consistent in your view on this? I doubt it because if you were you’d be downvoting the overwhelming majority of comments on every thread on HN.
Being a progressive and seeing real-world data crush your entire world view time after time must be a strange feeling.
It’s not a strange feeling seeing data contradict my beliefs. I welcome such occurrences as they provide an opportunity to get rid of false beliefs. In the present circumstance I’ve not argued that more money needs to spent. I have suggested a better method of allocation of expenditures and that school vouchers are not the answer. Do you have evidence that I’m wrong on this? If so please show the evidence.
If it was a different pool of money, I get it, but -- speaking specifically about the Bay Area -- one of the reasons public schools have suffered is because of attrition toward parochial & private options. When school attendance shrinks, so does funding, which creates a downward spiral of performance in many cases. And it isn't even that all the private options are superior, but because public school funding is dependent on attendance, they detract from the capability & capacity many of these schools have to deliver high quality education. I'm sure it isn't unique, but I've never lived in a place that had such a high proportion of kids in parochial & private schools, and it absolutely does harm the public schools. Compare this to somewhere like Massachusetts, which is equally progressive, treats teachers equally well (better), and has much higher performing public schools -- largely because fewer families with means to pay for private actually do, and those kids & households further support the teachers and administration of their neighborhood schools.
By what metric are the private options not superior to the Bay Area Public Schools?
The schools are there for the kids. They aren't cattle to be used as a commodity input to a jobs and spending program.
The incentive is because it saves the government money, and educated the student better.
If costs the government 20k per year to educate 1 child, and a private school can do a better job of it, for 15k, then the government saves money by having the private school do it instead.
I would argue that until the Bay Area housing crisis is resolved (probably in part by repealing prop 13), the private-school exodus will continue.
And even then you still have the problem of transportation. Only the more well off families have the time and means to get their kids to somewhere that isn't their closest home school.
Unless you require the school to accept vouchers from anyone who wants to go and provide them transportation, you're still going to get inequalities of outcomes.
As for not giving schools significantly more money for special ed, what is significant in your eyes?
I'd suggest that additional funding for special education, on a per student basis could be based on some sort of disability index, whereas the more services they require gets the district more money. Ideally some formula that is a mix of numbers based on local assessments, and weighted to similar districts in size and socioeconomic backgrounds of their residents. Like if a district games the system, the weighting should result in them being brought back into some mean.
No. Why should I accept less from a private school when the public school already guarantees it? This is incredibly important for special needs students and families.
> I'd suggest that additional funding for special education...
This already happens. In part, it depends on the state and county. Schools get more money for special needs students. I'm fine with them getting more money, but let's not pretend that the school receives the same funding for special-needs and non-special needs students.
There is inequality in aptitude with respect to education. Forcing equality of outcomes is a design for crushing cruelty. Some people having good schooling is better than nobody in the name of equity. Pursuit of this policy is undermining public support for state-run schools.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Rich people buy homes near good schools. Poor people live in homes they can afford next to bad schools. Removing the option for poor parents to drive their kids is not equity. Its damnation.
I live in a state where you can _pay_ (yes not a voucher - you PAY) to attend a school outside your district. I knew several poor families which took advantage. I don't know of a single middle-class family which did the same.
Not a scientific study. But it seems to me totally excluding the possibility of going to a better school is not kindness or progress or equity. Infantilizing poor people who "don't have time to drive" is silly. Some don't but there's always car pooling. When you're desperate you make it work.
> Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life.
The only thing that does is line the pockets of fundamentalist christian schools with money and increase the inequality. schools should not be tied to local taxes by and large... there should be a equality of funding.
That's naive. How much effort will be required to get your kid to a better school? Daily effort? Schools get selected because of convenience (distance, cost), and because the neighborhood friends go there as well. Homo economicus does not exist.
Furthermore, it presupposes an open competition between schools without restrictions on placement, and all information available and understandable to everyone. It's not going to work.
There's also the effect of mixing children with different backgrounds. A good school with can absorb a small amount of deficient students and stimulate them. Having everyone fight for the same school will cancel that, certainly if there also are programs that advance one group over another.
The only result of a free market for schooling will be that well-informed parents with some means will be able to select better schools for their kids. This being a (near) zero-sum game (you can't find a million good teachers), it'll mean the rest will be off worse.
You say this, but what you actually mean is no wealthy parent should be stuck without options.
The hoi polloi that can't afford the voucher plus mountain of money private school tuition will still be quite stuck without options, except that you've also created an explicit two-class system.
I hear those do wonders for social cohesion. As will opening a firehose of money into the insane fundamentalist indoctrination that so many parents wish to inflict on their children, but can't in public school.
What are you talking about? The voucher is supplied by the state, and charter schools are definitionally tuition-free to students and their families.
No, it's not. Society only works when people believe in a shared fiction, and when they stop believing it, things go completely to shit.
I would absolutely oppose indoctrination into a bad shared fiction, just like a religious person would oppose indoctrination into a 'religion is the opiate of the masses and must be purged from society' shared fiction, or like a pro-democracy person would oppose indoctrination into 'the way forward is installing an autocracy that will seize power through force of arms' shared fiction, or like how most of us would probably have issues with pro-ISIS indoctrination.
You claim that you shouldn't be "stuck" with a bad school program but you aren't. You can run for school board along with other like minded student-focused parents and get the thing corrected.
What will really happen is what happens today. Kids whose parents have options just get put in private schools and the problem gets ignored. The kids whose parents have no options get left behind.
Are there circumstances where the availability of vouchers results in a parent making a worse educational selection for their student? Would this leave educational marketing to lean towards populist institutions (like Kanye West's "schools" or Megachurch-derived schools)?
1) A good public education should be available to all students, with reasonable transportation provided. This is an axiom for me.
2) Private schools do not seem consistently provide a better education, but they do enable siphoning and segregation of students. Students with disabilities of various types can be excluded; the education can be explicitly religious; private education can really enable exclusivity of many kinds. On one level all that is fine -- but I don't want taxpayer dollars to support it. Raise money thru your church to send kids to that stuff.
In addition, I think your premise is false. In the school district I live in, children can apply to attend any school in the district. Charter schools are available as well as public schools. Choice is available with a publicly funded model, and as a parent I am partaking in that and switching a kid from a high-scoring school that I'm nevertheless not fully satisfied with to another high-performing school that rivals the privates for about $30k less a year.
But in the end, I actually don't think competition forces improvement. The misalignment of incentives is too great. Individual teachers want to do their best for their kids, in general, and they also want to improve their income. To do their best, they try to help the visible high achievers if they can but they absolutely must take time on the kids acting out. Administrators have to deal with district edicts and teacher demands, but they don't have the money to support teacher development (which would be the #1 thing to help both teachers and kids). School districts/boards need to show they're "using technology" and "being equitable" and "being innovative" and all sorts of stuff that is not the same as improving outcomes. Everyone is supposed to do well on the tests, even when the tests are stupid (and whoo-hoo are some of them terrible). Schools have to deal with homelessness and hunger, because no other regional agency deals with all the kids in the area. Nothing lines up and so we end up with free lunch that's not so nutritious but does hit a calorie bar, attempts at equity without supports (putting kids with behavioral problems into crowded and understaffed classrooms), a bunch of teachers who are scared of math yet have to teach it, who would benefit most from upgrading their skills....
The best argument I have heard for not getting into algebra too quickly is that kids are often not getting enough time spent on foundational math skills, and then that leads them not to have those foundations as math ramps up in difficulty.
I don't think eliminating advanced math for equity's sake makes any sense, but we should also be careful not to rush through lower-level math and leave even strong students without foundational skills.
Math education in the U.S. is not working for the vast majority of students. We need to find a way to make it more engaging and applied. We may also need to just spend more time each day on math.
Elon Musk already complained about the basic difference between the CCP politicians n the American senators n congressmen is the former have a distantly n vertically superior knowledge of math n science than their American counterparts, being engineers w a v rigorous sink-or-swim training, than the American politicians who are generally lawyers n only one of which has a PhD. There's as many PhDs as comedians in Congress for fuck's sake, like not hating the comedian i appreciate there being one, that's cool, but for there only to be one PhD, what the fuck?! Some people need to have a PhD, it matters sometimes it is generally a good way to get technical expertise spesh w subjects w high stakes that require planning for executing correctly, which is why i went into algorithms instead, my laptop had no choice but to obey n compile what i wrote, n run it, automaton after all, that computer was my only audience but an audience nonetheless. There it's fine, n that's why coders don't need degrees for the most part, low cost of failure, not like a civil engineer which i would not allow building a bridge j like that.
Here is what Jo Boaler has to say on the issue: https://patch.com/california/across-ca/lets-move-past-acrimo...
she claims that having different math tracks creates a “mathematical nowhere” for some students that stop at algebra 2, but absolutely nothing in her system really alleviates this non-issue or makes it better. It’s honestly such a nonsensical policy to me that has nothing to do with politics whatsoever, in my mind, but people will inject what they believe into what they see.
Education policy is difficult, and every political movement that has worked on it has had at least 1 stupid and counterproductive idea. The particular stupid idea under discussion here happens to be one done by the movement that identifies itself as progressive, and in a state where progressives hold a lot of political power.
If any young people out there are reading this and scratching their heads, let me offer a small piece of advice: if someone's argument hinges on generalizations against a group of people, it should give one pause.
Edit: I just made a generalization about the uber rich. Please, think of the uber rich. They suffer so.
IME, tracking is only a portion of the issue, anyway. A confluence of factors stymied my growth; having to take Algebra 2 and Trig separately and Precalc as a standalone course didn't help, but poor instruction from "sink or swim" advocates was probably more consequential, and having parents distracted by a messy divorce and economic stresses from the 07/08 crash even more so. Between those, I went from starting middle school on track to take college-level Differential Equations or Calc 2, and ended up almost flunking AP Calc. Never really recovered.
If a kid wants to learn algebra, support them. Why does everything have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator?
Not that I'm salty, but I always had poor grades because I rarely if ever did homework. But I aced the tests, so why bother?
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/i-wanted-to-be-a-teac...
This paragraph shows the difference between college and other education. This applies to college because everyone there paid to learn. This does not apply to public schools, ESPECIALLY if it's in an area where the culture is bad for education. There are a ton of kids who absolutely do not care at all about anything you have to say if there are no consequences for being apathetic.
Maybe kids that are ready can just start going to college earlier or even skip high school altogether. Yes, they'll have to pay but a community college will suffice. They could probably just take the GED test and pass at 14 years old. I can only imagine how dumbed down that test is.
They try to teach how to think about a topic without hard tests.
Simply does not work.
In general we need deeper foundational knowledge beyond memorization of notation. True math understanding enables students to independently discover common formulas rather than deploy them from rote.
Noahpinion doesn't begin to speak to this, and is in fact a moron.
Every mathematician disagrees. The Stanford professor pushing this policy has no math education. (She does have consulting gigs with school districts where they trade a teacher's annual salary for a few hours of Zoom calls [1].)
I grew up in Cupertino and am flying back to the Bay Area. Every friend who is a parent is planning on circumventing this policy by enrolling their kids in more tutoring.
California is dumbing down its poor to sate a private education and education-consulting industry.
[1] https://google.com/search?hl=en&q=jo%20boaler%20consulting
You guys are talking past each other, and the guidelines in question are aimed at the kids in primary math education, not academic and applied math, where your statement applies better.
They teach undergrads. They are saying a student graduating from this framework, without outside tutoring, would not have the skills necessary to learn entry-level undergraduate math.
The data-science component, additionally, seems entirely designed to support a private consulting complex. That time would be better returned to students, given the content's outright inaccuracies.
This sounds like you're advocating for more memorization of notation, earlier, so children will have the time to be taught the deeper "foundational" knowledge that requires that notation. Otherwise, I don't know what you're talking about.
> Algebra has historically been a kind of gatekeeping in middle school between kids who plug in the formulas vs the kids who "arent good at math."
Any child can be good at math. A lot of children are traumatized by the unforgiving nature of quantitative reasoning, get discouraged, and are told by innumerate or condescending adults that it's alright to quit because they don't have a math brain, or that the equationa are just military-corporate imperialism used to distract people from their deeper, innate, math-senses.