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Comment by crop_rotation | Hacker News Reader

In the age of Zoom, won't even slightly well to do parents get tutors from a remote country for a reasonable price for their kids if the school stops teaching math. The only kids who will suffer are the kids where parents are not so much focused on education, thus increasing the disparity.

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You can get remote tutors to teach your kid skills, yes. However, if your goal is to have your kid advance to higher math classes, it isn't enough to just know the skills. Schools erect extreme barriers to advancement (Palo Alto USD has been successfully sued on this point [1]), so what students really need is to enroll in outside courses that are certified replacements in order to get credit. Finding out about which courses these are, getting your kid physically to the courses, etc., will always be easier for parents with more means.

1: https://thecampanile.org/27999/news/the-verdict-is-in-pausds...

The article you linked is incredibly confusing. I assume the issue is, which is typical of any advanced courses in school districts where helicopter tiger moms live, that little billy didn't qualify for the advanced math course because he's not smart enough but mom knows he's actually a genius. The pressure to let in little billy builds and builds until the districts relent and fill the classes with buffoons and the educational quality is lowered for everyone.

This article is better https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/03/judge-rules-h...

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 lawsuit was filed because (1) the district refused to allow students accelerated placement based on their prior outside coursework, and (2) used acceleration exams with a pass threshold that was comically too high (requiring students to know much more than was actually taught in the classes they sought to pass out of). These tests ended up having a wildly disparate impact on girls, who passed at a much lower rate than boys.

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.

I experienced this first hand.

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.

Why would you accelerate from geometry to algebra 1? Do you mean algebra 2?

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.

Haha yep, I meant to accelerate to Algebra 2 in 9th grade.

> 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.

It sounds to me like there may have been an intermediate step, which was for little billy to be enrolled in some sort of third party course as a catch-up / qualifier for enrollment in the advanced class, and the district not accepting that.

Go straight to college.

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.

Dual enroll meaning take classes at a nearby college while going to high school? Do HSs let you take just part of their curriculum? Did you go to that college full time later on, or just for a couple years and then apply to regular 4-year colleges?

Yes went during high school hours, they let me out 2 hours early. I didn't get high school credit, but you could fail/skip 2 classes and still graduate. I went to college after this, graduated about 1 year early.

Learning remotely is hard, especially for kids. People will just get normal tutors.

Not a kid, but I got a math tutor remotely. 1:1 a lot of the group remote problems go away. And market differences make a huge difference in affordability.

People will get/prefer normal tutors when they can afford, yes. But good high school kids would be able to learn from remote tutors too, and those would be affordable for most families.

This is what I'm most excited for in LLMs. GPT4 Code Interpreter was created by taking the Base Model GPT4 + Layer of programming questions. I hope they do the same for a math tutor model or open up the base model for others to do so.

How does that follow from GP’s point? If remote interaction with a human doesn’t quite measure up to face-to-face interaction, how does an LLM improve upon that?

Major difference between a personalized tutor LLM and remote teaching an entire classroom.

I don't think you need to get a tutor from a remote country. I would just enroll them in an after-school math program like Kumon. But yes, enhancing the education after school in general is likely what motivated parents with means would do.

Isn't Kumon just drilling basic stuff?

yeah its a lot of drills, I hated it as a kid but it worked. I didn't use it for algebra or beyond but I'm pretty sure they have it.

> The only kids who will suffer are the kids where parents are not so much focused on education, thus increasing the disparity.

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.

No, it is just people who are trying to do something would achieve more in that area than people who are not trying, regardless of conditions. You could change things so that trying is not really required, and it might work wonderfully if the barrier was made up to begin with, but that fails hard when that clashes with reality.

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