California’s math misadventure is about to go national
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
> Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school...
[0] http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf
Instead, we want them to invent how to write music "using the innate and self-discovered techniques for music notation that make sense to them as whole individuals".
I've known a family of three siblings who all played in the state orchestra in their teens and only one was a fluent reader, the other two were extremely good musicians that practised hard and either very slow worked through written music note by note, or, once familiar with a piece looked at a page of music with a helicopter view, not reading" individual notes, but tracking off entire blocks .. like seeing a page of text w/out wearing glasses.
From the same music roots, some years later, Tim Minchin- admittedly more an Entertainer than a pure Musician - but none the less someone that made their name and living from performing original and relatively complex music on stage playing piano and singing - also doesn't read music:
https://www.straightdope.com/21343780/if-irving-berlin-could...
Doesn't read | write sheet music (see youtube interview linked in GP comment)
Oxford English Dictionary:
musician - A professional performer of music, esp. of instrumental music.
Wikipedia:
Timothy David Minchin is a British-born Australian comedian, actor, writer, musician, poet, composer, and songwriter.
Also - pretty much the entirety of Indonesian traditional ensemble musicians (Gamelan and other) going back to the bronze age - no sheet music so no reading writing music - they train like Homer delivered poetry and use non Western scales - their music is available in notation, but notation created by westerners.
Here's a bit about Western students learning to learn music w/out using sheet music ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHgdrzgtBik
They're not some minor outlier either, btw - "With over 278 million people, Indonesia is the world's fourth-most populous country".
Once we were in the room and playing, and I got to hear the music, I was good and the notes on paper made sense- but out of context the notes didn’t do it for me.
That said, dropping math standards is a bad idea.
Then there are all the non-western scale musicians who learn other systems, or use some variation of solfège to explain musical ideas.
The same absolutely cannot be said of mathematicians, physicists, and those in other fields that rely highly on mathematics.
Even if the suits don't go unfavorably, simply publishing an original song opens one up to a major risk.
It's been interesting to watch Adam Neely, a music theory YouTuber and practicing musician, become increasingly disillusioned with copyright after analyzing a handful of high profile music lawsuits...all of which were as ridiculous as Oracle v Google.
Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement | Damien Riehl | TEDxMinneapolis
That whole skillset is all but lost now, long supplanted by a hyper-competitive culture of supposedly 'virtuoso' performance. It survives to some extent in organ playing, and the jazz tradition as a whole may or may not be an offshoot of some popularized ("folk") variety of it.
[0] See Robert O. Gjerdingen Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians. (2020) Oxford University Press.
I've no idea why your comment was flagged and moved to [dead] - it seems fine as a comment to me.
That said:
> you're still talking about performing existing pieces from a very well-defined canon
My first comment in this thread could not have been "still talking" - and I contrasted two things, - reproductive orchestra performances by people trained in composition and improvisation two of whom considered themselves unable to read music (responding to the person above me) and
an "entertainer" considered by many to be a real musician (that's a whole thing in itself, isn't it) who also can't read, composes his own music, and improvises around his own work during nearly every performance.
I'm actually siding with yourself, the formalities in both mathematics and music are important and useful but they aren't fundemental for a great many with talent in those fields - they can intuit they way through to a large degree and teaching based on intuitve methods can make great inroads when introducing new students to these subjects.
Formalities can come later (or drilled in parallel), they have their place - but having a 'feel' for these subjects carries a great deal of weight, if not more.
Maths proceeds faster with those who have been passed good intuitions about lengths, symmetries, and other concepts - these are the fundemental groundings. The formal notations follow to add rigor and to assist in the reasoning and formal proof.
With no intuition and only formal methods all you have is Coq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq
> Even in music, a successful composer or improviser needs to know a lot about viable patterns and rules of thumb, and this knowledge would've been conveyed explicitly as well as by example.
There are entire schools of music that are conveyed entirely by example with no formal music theory whatsoever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgBgQQXoUw8
Even individuals on remote islands born blind and left handed can make music with no training, no music theory, and only a right handed guitar.
FWIW my 14 year old is doing pre-algebra now, she struggles with math and the way they are teaching it seems insane. Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing. That probably results in relatively equal outcomes but she has no clue how to do things that fall outside of the frameworks they established.
It doesn’t matter if a high school gave someone all As and a college gave out a degree in Community Building. The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people.
After all, if you had to hire someone, are you going to offer a job to someone who writes in broken emoji-gibberish and can’t multiply?
One time I got a resume from someone at a fairly well-regarded college for an internship, and the cover letter was a single run-on sentence without any capitalization. How could this person possibly succeed? How much money did they spend getting to this point of obvious failure? Very sad
this is a pretty big issue, though. even here on hn, many folks claim the best or only way to get a good job is by networking
I was lazy one month and he wrote me up, gave me a PIP. I worked harder after that. :-)
The best part of it was that I got to take walks with my dad during the lunch hour every day.
That's when the the miseducated majority will find that the market is unjust. All goes according to plan.
And that's where Woke comes in.
Sure, you're utterly incompetent but you have the Approved Believes, support the Approved Causes in the Approved Way, and you ticked the right superficial Identity+ checkboxes we needed.
You're hired.
In any case, what check boxes are you specifically referencing? Appearance?
false in the general case, you're basically invoking a just world hypothesis without actual proof for it.
For a counter example, please see slavery - slaves were not paid anything, despite obviously producing something of worth. Furthermore, there was no difference in the salaries between slaves, despite there presumably being differences in output.
For another counter example, you can look into the variation in programmer salaries based on country, or more generally location. The same job will pay anywhere from $180k in SF to $8k in India, due to differences in cost of living, which have a priori zero effect on programmer 'worth', which I presume would be how good the programmer is at writing code and delivering business value.
It is true that at a certain point, 'real skills' matter - eventually, if you're working as a software engineer, you need to write code. However, it is false to assume there is anything besides a maybe a very mild correlation, if any, in the salaries of software engineers and their ability. You can have a Polish dev with 15 years of experience making less than a new grad in California, and that has nothing to do with skill, but everything to do with regional differences in salary.
this is true.
The market isn't fair however, nor does it pay everyone what they are worth, and I would rather correct that common falsehood when I see it.
You seem to equate "worth" with "market price"/"business value".
I equate "worth" with "how much money they make the business".
So in my defintion/worldview, an programmer in India that increases the click through rate on $AD_TECH_GIANT's ads by 1%, raising the ARR from $1 billion to $1 billion, $10 million dollars is worth $10 million, and a programmer in San Fransisco who accomplishes the same is worth the same.
In your worldview, how much value they bring to the organisation is irrelevant, and they are worth what the market pays them... which honestly doesn't strike me as a particularly useful mental model if you're trying to get rich, but if it works for you, keep using it.
To quote Warren Buffet: "price is what you pay, value is what you get."
I try to find things with a good value/price ratio. Using your model, the value of a thing is it's price, so... not really sure how you can make purchase decisions thinking like that, honestly.
For more thoughts on the matter: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/
If I'm paid what I'm "worth" why would a business spend any time/effort interviewing and hiring me -- the best that can happen is they will break even through the deal.
It would be like buying a stock you know will flatline at the purchase price for the next 20 years. No monetary loss, but no gain either -- that's almost the definition of opportunity cost.
1) slavery was enforced by the government who had use of force to compel. There was no voluntary two party agreements.
2) countries are governmental constructs with barriers enforced by use of force. A polish programmer cant work in the US due to governmental interference.
Now that the borders are wide open expect to see programmers exploiting the work loopholes to get work visas that allow them to work at market wages.
there is no perfect information and there will always be mismatches. But in a free market those mismatches are temporary. Also the market may be valuing things other than technical prowess (e.g. english proficiency, understanding of cultural norms etc)
Markets only exist in the presence of government. Read David Graeber's Debt if you want a history of how markets and money work - generally speaking, they are things created by governments, to ease the work of figuring out taxation. Those quarters and nickels and dimes only have value because you know that come tax season, Uncle Sam will knock on your door and ask you for some, and if you don't give them to him, he'll toss you in jail. This creates a demand for those coins, and therefore a market for them, so now Uncle Sam can pay his soldiers in coin, the soldiers trade it with civilians for food and lodging and boom, it's a market!
You seem to be doing that thing where you want to believe the world is fair, so you invent this magical free market to be able to pretend that life is fair.
To paraphrase Dan Luu: markets are people, all the way down.
you can read https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ and https://danluu.com/talent/
for more info.
If entrepreneurship doesn’t work out worst case I’ll be making 250k plus somewhere, or 400k plus at big tech.
And if I don’t want to do that I could just learn something new since I learned how to learn. Yo dawg.. jk but seriously I can’t complain. Given our socioeconomic circumstances (dad was making like 30-40k and once my mom was able to get work authorization she could only find temp or part time jobs) I couldn’t have asked for a better set of parenting and parents.
But it seems to me that if one (subconsciously, maybe) worries about money, one will be better off psychologically, compared to someone who has so little to worry about that they start to worry about things that they can't control.
Money means you can eat and have a roof over your head. More money means you can do more after those needs are met.
Like you point out, common core was focused more on understanding concepts as opposed to reaching answers.
What the California standard appears to be doing (full disclosure, I’m basing this on second hand accounts all of which have been negative) is simply eliminating certain fundamental math altogether.
The methods themselves can be any methods. I agree that the methods Ive seen associated with common core are designed to help people understand how the math works. Like why when you add fractions do you not just also add the denominator. However it is a tough balance between just memorizing how to do the problem and understanding why you do it a certain way.
The big push I see is word problems in lieu of worksheets. The huge issue is word problems take a long time and kids havent done enough worksheets to become fluent in the techniques. Teachers call worksheets drill and kill and want to "teach to the whole child".
The big problem is that people in education are simply not very smart. The education researchers are also not very smart. Ive seen data that shows that stem teachers are ok, but I dont think those are the majority of education academics.
Maybe this raises the floor of math education? The majority of US high school graduates are not rated as proficient in math and a small minority are actually ready for college level math. That's been true for a very long time now.
It appears that there's a belief among educators (or whoever comes up with the curriculum decisions), that it's better for society to raise the floor than the ceiling on math. Given how poorly math education outcomes have been for a long time now, I'm all for them trying something new (it would be insane to continue to do what clearly hasn't been working for a long time now). That said, I'm pretty conflicted on it meaning that more gifted students lose out on access to learning anything more than the floor level. I don't understand why they need to make that tradeoff at the expense of those who have above average mathematical aptitudes during their school years.
Getting to the root causes of variance and fixing them is hard.
Injecting extra latency on the fast queries is easy. Even if the query returns in 80ms, we just wait until 800ms have passed before returning the result.
These are the same incentives given to administrators tasked with improving equity.
What is happening is that everyone in the middle is being dragged down.
Isn’t this how pre-undergraduate math education has been for the entire history of mass education?
How else would you describe everything from how to multiply two numbers to simplifying fractions to the chain rule?
How is that anything other than a “step by step methods that allow[s] you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing?”
Come on, this argument is ridiculous. There was no golden age of mass mathematics education.
This is exactly what happens with multiplication (and simplify fractions and taking derivatives). That’s been exactly my claim all along.
Virtually no 16 year olds know why the procedure they were taught to multiply 123 x 456 produces the correct answer. Not today, not 20 years ago, not 50 years ago. They know how to execute the algorithm. That’s it.
If it was that way, there would not be so much variation between performance in math around the world, as they'd all just be having kids memorize the same stuff.
No you don't, addition is taught by making kids count up sums, not by giving them magic rules to follow. Addition has by far the strongest connection to reality and that connection gets hammered into every child. Basically everyone knows how to add by counting on fingers.
I can think of a couple. limits at infinity are thoroughly hand wavy, at least at the level they're introduced in high school or lower division college calculus. And I would say this even projects backwards into geometry, and even the Blurred overloaded operations of rational numbers and simple fractions. the notion of being able to add up an infinity of nothing and get a quantifiable something is just sort of taken for granted without elaboration.
The equality operator ( = ) is also presented as an implicit expression of truth when introduced, when it clearly admits to shades of true at best. 1*1 = 1 = 1^1 = 1^2 is one kind of true and a bunch of kinds of false. and although at a young age kids may not be sensitive to this, letting it go without explanation or curious challenge can be the source of inarticulate senses of doubt about what's really going on when they get introduced to higher levels of math.
Yes. Not sure why you're in the negative ATM.
Do you have some examples of these frameworks that eschew understanding?
However, parents didn't learn this way, so it's bad.
Too many years ago, I was pleasantly shocked at looking at what was being covered in elementary education by tutoring a friend. They were teaching discrete mathematics, different numbering systems ... forcing the teachers to learn how think in a different system. It was inspired (and harder then I would have expected). However, the book author's did not seem to realize what they were doing or why. They were meeting the requirements without understanding why they were requirements. It unfortunately seemed far too appropriate for what would be happening in many grade schools.
There are dozens of Common Core compliant math curriculums that teach in all sorts of ways, some are more "how" some are more "drill". The more trendy curriculums make a false promise of a painless "How" that ends up with kids neither learning How it Works, or How to get the right answer.
Understanding came rapidly for me as I grew up - arising primarily from seeing repeated patterns. Isomorphisms are natural to pick up once sufficient data is shoved into the mind.
I will try the same with my children. The real lack in the US is that most children here consume small quantities of information. The few who are pushed or permitted to push themselves succeed greatly.
For example in trig they define quadrant I, II, III, IV and whether sin, cos, tan, sec, csc, cot are positive or negative. Im sure they briefly taught why, but for the problems it is just memorization. Most in the class dont understand the relationship between sin/cos and X and Y coords in the unit circle.
I told her it can be faster to memorize, but understand it so you can double check to make sure things are right.
There is no way a poor student can get through precalc unless they are way above the average because their parents likely cant help them at all.
Day One of her cool new job in the UK NHS she was handed a stack of paperwork that she had to fill in. Needless to say she did badly; it took her forever and everything was misspelled. She lasted a month before they let her go, and she was glad to go. Her degree was very vocational - there aren't many opportunities for qualified OTs outside the health industry - and every single OT needs to deal with stacks of paperwork every day. [0]
There's no point getting people qualified in an area they can't actually deal with. Making people who don't get on with maths work in an area that requires a decent understanding of maths is just going to make everyone unhappy.
I understand the need to even out results and provide opportunity for people who are less STEM-oriented. But (as with the ex-gf) it doesn't work like this. If she had had less help in her degree, she would have wasted less time trying to get into an industry she was fundamentally unsuited for and everyone would have been better off, including her. Providing her with all the help was well-intentioned but ultimately hurt everyone.
Except the university, of course. By providing assistance to an extremely dyslexic student they got another win on the board. Another "disadvantaged" student passed. Social goals met, etc. Everyone else suffered, but the uni got a win. Which was the point of the policy.
I suspect the same is true here - the change in maths teaching is about making it easier for the schools to claim their wins, not about making it easier for students, or providing a better education. It's all about education metrics, not actual education.
[0] Just to close out the story: she ended up getting another degree in Fashion and Textiles which was her real passion and what she was really good at. The OT thing was about making her mum happy; she came from a long line of nurses.
I'm sorry to hear your ex-girlfriend's employer failed in their legal duty to provide reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act.
If it was a trust in England I'd be happy to push through complaints for her.
What are the options, and what are the legal responsibilities for the employer here?
Is there any real danger that this "is about to go national"?
I'm out here in middle America with an 8th grader taking geometry and a 6th grader taking pre-algebra. And I certainly haven't heard anything about reducing math opportunities. Quite the opposite, really - they're talking about expanding a program where the school system will pay half the tuition for advanced math classes at the local community college if you end up beyond what they teach at the high school.
Would we like better? I mean... yeah. Hard to say no to that one. What is "better," though? So much of education discussion is dominated by talk of things that "used to work," only, they probably didn't actually work that well.
It really was not, at least in Seattle. Seattle had a pretty good gifted program for a very long time. If you got into that - you can get a very good education in a public school. They gutted it in last few years under the banner of equity.
It still exists in the suburbs like e.g. Bellevue or Redmond, but even there it is being watered down. I have 2 kids in various stages of gifted education and follow various covnersations about it and it definitely goes downhill.
That said, main city of Seattle used to be basically the industrial zone. Bellevue and Redmond had the better schools even a decade ago. Such that I have a hard time following that. Happy to see hard data showing a decline.
Even still, I meant my point to be what it has been like for most of the nation for a long time.
Again, happy to see hard data showing Seattle proper has had a decline in school quality. Most anecdotes I've heard don't really support that.
Yikes. The great state of CA spreading hope.
>The document tried hard to convince readers that it was based on a serious reading of neuroscience research. The first chapter, for example, cited two articles to claim that “the highest achieving people have more interconnected brains,” implying that this has something to do with learning math. But neither paper says anything about math education.
Yikes.
My dad didn't graduate high school and even he knew enough algebra to work out how much money he needed a month for cigarettes (until he eventually quit once he really thought about the numbers).
Using a credit card isn't very abstract.
You only have to use the concrete specific values in your situation, and not solve some generality.
Moreover, I don't think I had to ever square anything, let alone, cube, when reckoning over credit card transactions. Or find the roots of a polynomial, or do anything with polynomials.
I'm not saying that the intuitions gained from algebra are not relevant, mind you.
To use a credit card responsibly you need to understand the concept of exponential growth, or you might accidentally turn a manageable $500 debt into a burdensome $5000 debt. Same goes for understanding good debt (mortgages) vs bad debt.
It might not be solving a polynomial per se, but I don't see how you get to understanding exponential equations without at least understanding algebra.
There are many examples of lottery winners, athletes, and celebrities who came across considerable resources yet still went broke because they didn't understand how to manage it or the concept of exponential growth.
A fool and his money are easily parted, as the saying goes. People who don't have financial literacy will lose their money over and over again regardless of how much you give them.
You are also picking a category of people that come across enough resources that make them a target to plenty of others. Such that it is almost an adversarial game, at that point.
Evidence shows that having an excess of resources actually leads to more financial irresponsibly, not less. Or as the Illustrious Notorious B.I.G. eloquently put it: "mo money, mo problems":
"The CFP Board of Standards says nearly one-third of lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy, and lottery winners are more likely to declare bankruptcy within three to five years than the average American."
https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th....
That is to say, yes, you have to rack up some bad debts in order to declare bankruptcy. The kind of debts that just aren't possible for most people.
And this is ignoring the selection bias that almost certainly exists here. Buying a lottery ticket is, basically by definition, not a savvy financial move. That it basically works out for 2/3rds of the people that do it speaks to the power of additional resources. :D
I don't spend money I don't have.
It's really simple math this way.
Exponential growth is a fundamental concept of financial literacy. If you want to invest in the stock market or plan your 401k it helps to understand exponential growth. The reason why it's impossible to get rich off a wage is because of the difference between exponential vs linear growth.
>I don't spend money I don't have.
You've never taken out a mortgage or opened a margin account? Plenty of responsible people make money by spending money they don't have every day.
People without that intuition are surprised at how fast the little charges added up to an unexpectedly large sum.
But I only spent a hundred here or there; how did it blow past $4700?
This is basic human frailty and completely orthogonal to mathematical ability.
Mathematics is not some magical piece of knowledge that needs all sorts machinations to teach. Like any subject, it should be moved away from rote teaching and into projects and applications rather than mindnumbing exercises.
There is probably no need to delay studying some combinatorics before algebra, but at some point, you need the algebraic background.
[1] https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/#h.ns5n...
I don’t imagine calculating Shannon entropy is part of the curriculum.
I bring this up because that's what I want for every student. Why shouldn't each student receive a kind of individual plan where they can have lessons and classes tailored to their needs? That's the outcome our kids deserve, rather than some reduction to the mean where no one's needs are met.
Isn't the California cost per student per year is like 20k or something ridiculous where each kid can get a private tutor?
Especially given competing education standards, especially given the insanity of trying to find childcare at all.
And advocating online-only education is a great way to ensure another generation grows up incapable of interacting with anyone.
But this kind of thinking is what happens when we let people who know literally nothing whatsoever about education feel like their opinion matters as much as an expert’s.
Even if there's only a tiny minority of parents who are able to research and move their kids to a better school, their experience will motivate others, word will spread and the public schools will feel the pressure to improve their environment and outcomes. Even the threat of competition can be motivating.
I dare to believe that the majority of parents across the US do care about their kids and are willing to drive their kids to a different school if doing so means they'll achieve significantly better success in life.
You’re giving poor families appalling choices for no net benefit.
And again, you’re assuming all parents can drive their child across town to that one school that took them with no additional fees and had space leftover. That’s just not reality for a lot of people in this country who depend on the country at least trying to provide equitable education instead of finding new ways to lower the income burden on rich people.
When you can guarantee perfect access and perfect information, then sure, let’s talk about vouchers. Until then the only reason to advocate for them is to facilitate and speed up the creation of a permanent societal underclass.
You're asserting vouchers would bankrupt public schools. How do you figure that? Maybe you're assuming that parents will move their kids to a better school, resulting in dwindling enrollment? If so, good! A public school that's not doing a great job should lose students. Let them feel the pain until they work to do better.
> When you can guarantee perfect access and perfect information, let’s talk about vouchers.
Your goalposts are unreasonable. Of course access and information will never be perfect. But they don't need to be.
When I started school, my parents were very poor. When they went on a date, they split a Taco Bell bean burrito (seriously). They had to sell a lot of stuff on the front lawn one month to make ends meet. My dad had to ride the bus to work for a while, and had to borrow money from his brother. But they still somehow managed to send me to private school (probably with tuition assistance), because they believed doing so was the right thing.
I understand a lot has changed since then; minimum wage is not a living wage anymore; many parents depend on free meals from public schools to make ends meet. But that doesn't mean the availability of other options is a bad thing or would be harmful.
That a public good, meant to ensure an equitable start for all children, regardless of their or their parents’ circumstance, is being treated like a free market asset is a bizarre failure to understand the fundamental difference between, say, Apple and your local elementary that must be prepared to educate kids ranging from G&T to barely able to read, and must often take the place of parents who are either incapable or unable to be present and continue the kids’ education outside school.
Your comments are case in point why people who don’t know anything about education shouldn’t have any input into how it’s delivered. I can’t tell if it’s Dunning-Kruger, or just an assumption that educators are idiots, but I can assure you the latter isn’t true.
Public school administration, public policy, and the content of education degrees is where I'd place the blame (and some curriculum publishers) -- the sort of people who write and listen to the kind of drivel TA is talking about.
This drive towards "equity" is creating even more disparate outcomes; and the notion being taught in some education degrees that a teacher's primary job is to make activists out of kids is hurtful to the kids, and to society.
Do you actually think that any teachers are being taught that their primary job is to create activists (and do you have a source), or are you just repeating X memes because being angry feels good? What, specifically, do you think an education degree consists of, and what is your personal experience with that curriculum?
I can’t imagine you’re continuing to make sweeping pronouncements about something I’ve already asked you if you have any experience with.
Expertise in a subject is not required to think rationally about it. Do you require those who agree with you to have expertise in order to form a rational opinion?
> Why do you think “equity” is driving disparate outcomes, let alone more disparate outcomes?
Because according to hard data, it is. For example, delaying Algebra 1 and the other "equity" programs in the San Francisco school system did not improve outcomes or even manage to bring down top performers. Everyone did worse except those with means to be tutored outside of the classroom -- that's a more disparate outcome.
> Do you actually think that any teachers are being taught that their primary job is to create activists?
Yes, I do.
> (and do you have a source?)
Many. Here are a few I just cribbed from Google. These demonstrate the ideas that are going around in modern liberal education:
- https://www.graduateprogram.org/2020/02/how-teachers-can-fos...
- https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED600797.pdf
- https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-educators-must-be-on-the...
> What, specifically, do you think an education degree consists of, and what is your personal experience with that curriculum?
Again, why is this relevant to the discussion? I have heard multiple sources I trust from multiple angles emphasize that today's educators must make activists out of the next generation.
I've also read that today's graduating seniors feel a massive emotional burden because of the beliefs that their education has (probably unwittingly) instilled in them -- namely, that it's up to them to fix society's problems through activism.
Internet comments and most public discussion doesn't have to be held to the same standards that academic papers do... I hope you don't require people you talk with in person to have expertise in order to have a rational opinion on a subject.
I just used Esri geoenrichment tools to create maps of private schools (based on SIC code lookup) in the LA area, central Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Your assertion doesn't hold. There are multiple private schools in every local suburban area I've looked into. Or did you have a particular area in mind? (or maybe you meant to say "rural"?)
Southern California alone (south of San Luis Obispo) has 962 religious private elementary schools, and that's not counting the nonreligious, Montessori, preparatory schools, etc. Even charter schools in California (not counted either) often present excellent competition to traditional public schools, primarily because through them parents have greater choice (and no tuition!).
This is such a lazy, uninformed take. Someone's sad? Keep physically abusing them until they're less sad. Public schools do a bad job because they are under-funded, and have to use the limited funding they do have just trying to get their standardized test scores up so they don't lose even more funding. Punishing under-funded schools by giving them less funding is exactly the bad-faith strategy of people who are trying to destroy public schools so they can rake in money with their private schools. Private prisons going well? Private healthcare? Private unregulated utilities? Why would private schools be any better? The obvious answer is to actually invest in under-funded public schools, not punish them for being bad by making them even worse.
The US spends more per student than essentially every other country in the world (besides the few statistical anomalies like Luxembourg), and most of the areas with poor-performing schools are funded at an equivalent level to nearby schools that are high-performing, thanks to large state and Federal subsidies to make up for lower local taxes.
In neither case are we adequately paying teachers, which is generally the “funding” issue - if you want the best people to teach, you need to pay them like they have value. Currently, we pay them like 7-11 employees, make them buy their own supplies, and arm them with books chosen by lunatics in TX (if we’re not still recycling 30-year old books), and then wonder why they aren’t constantly turning children whose parents work three jobs into Rhodes Scholars.
Oh, and all of this while we yell back and forth about CRT and whether it’s ok for gay people to exist in schools and do nothing to address school violence.
No wonder people think our schools are failing - they’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At least in my state and area, I've read through the budgets, and the typical canard of 'administration' making up the bulk of the spending also doesn't hold water. Around 70-75% of the spending was directly on teachers salary/benefits, and only 10-15% for administration, and 10-15% on facilities. That certainly seems like a reasonable allocation to me, and I'm not sure how one could adjust it further without creating a new obstacle.
What does your district pay teachers? What benefits are included?
Is part of what you’re counting as teacher pay something that’s taken care of via other taxes elsewhere (pension, healthcare)? I feel like this isn’t at all apples to apples.
In general, when a teacher can make $50k/year, and someone with a 6 month boot camp can double that, you’re going to lose a lot of potential teachers to other jobs, regardless of what other countries pay their teachers and their software engineers. The US, frankly, isn’t Sweden (or wherever). Pretending that what works in one should work in the other is confounding a lot of things - do other countries force disruptive students to stay in the classroom? What measures are being used to indicate quality? Do other countries have similar numbers of parents unable to work with their children at home? Do other countries base funding on neighborhood taxes, and if not, how are you normalizing costs between them?
I tend to think any comparative analysis is going to be extremely lacking, if it’s not done hand-in-hand with people who actually understand educational challenges in each environment. Certainly, reading a budget is insufficient.
I wish that were the case in the US -- but we'd be talking about overhauling an entire profession, not merely increasing wages. I do think increased wages would be a great idea, but I think it would take more than that to achieve what Finland has achieved.
This too is a lazy, uninformed take.
A 8-10% swing in topline revenue for the supermarket is a lot. Supermarkets can't afford to scare away those shoppers. We all benefit from that positive externality
This is a bad comparison and another example of why “free market education” is nonsense.
Sure some parents care about sports too. Maybe because their kid is athletically gifted. Not every kid needs to go into STEM. Why shouldn't they be able to enroll in a school that focuses on sports?
To sum up the whole CMF in my words, it's Critical Theory applied without critical thinking used. Proponents saw that minorities were struggling in math class, so they proposed a solution to handicap math classes. That's literally what CMF is. Proponents would rather see everyone fail than some people succeed. Especially if those some successful people are not minorities.
Why we should learn math from people who clearly have no respect for facts and reality in the first place is beyond me. Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of set theory, would have outright rejected most of the philosophy that inspired the CMF.
Edited to add where I got the chapters from: I gather the chapters from another posters link https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
As a reference, since the late 70's, California has a history of adopting unproven and untried pedagogical fads for the entire state. California's abandonment of phonics (reading) was the impetus for the creation of the private schools by the name of Challenger. A commercial productization of this superior method had an annoying TV ad that morphed into a meme.
Not a bad thing if that means teaching peers math; you learn a whole lot by teaching material that you otherwise believe you have mastered.
How it worked in history: if we take away the wealth from rich people and spread it within the ruling classes, then every peasants are equally rich, or poor.
If we take the opportunity of education away from every students, then they are equally dumb, which means they are equally smart now!
> For those interested, a link to the CA proposal:
If on balance the only stuff to read on the internet is “the official proposal on ca.gov” and “a library of folks describing The Grapes of Wrath But It’s Math In California” that would be fascinating.