Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

The article offers two examples from "Not California" and neither of them are too scary sounding to me.

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.

View on HN

Lengthy discussion from a few months ago: “'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595026

That's also an article about SF, rather than this "going national".

I linked to the discussion, the top comment of which is about Seattle. I can vouch from experience that the top comment is accurate.

The top comment there is somewhat vacuous? Rephrased, "if we want the absolute best education, we will either pay for after school efforts, move to a wealthier place, or send to an expensive private school." That... is the same as it has been for a long long time.

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.

> That... is the same as it has been for a long long time.

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.

This depends heavily on what part of Seattle you mean. I just moved out of Queen Anne, and it is still quite nice school wise compared to where I grew up.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com