That was a thing when I went to public school in the late 80s-90s. Easier for schools to manage assembly line thinkers. This is 100% intentional government policy. The kids who don’t fit in the system are “troublemakers”.
My family is full of PhDs and tutored me. Teachers tried telling my parents otherwise but the fam laughed in their face and pulled the “free speech” card.
Look at the ages of politicians, the material comfort they have, then question with a straight face why our society is ossified and half asleep.
https://www.boston.com/news/the-boston-globe/2023/07/18/camb...
This trend is really upsetting. My daughter is a baby but i am already looking into math circles and alternative mathematics curriculums since us math education was bad before this trend of gutting mathematics education.
Are their kids in public school? In some areas, the rich and educated have completed separated from public education, which leaves poor, overworked parents prey to well-meaning but clueless activists.
What other options are there?
It has all sorts of other negatives associated with it but lack of choice in curriculum and staffing isn’t one of them.
EDIT - to add, what does this solve in the Cambridge, MA situation where the entire district has removed advanced Algebra?
Lets call a spade a shovel here - there is nothing well meaning about not teaching maths to children.
It's stupid. And there is definitely corruption [1]. (Surprise, surprise, it's another Stanford researcher.) But I don't think most activists are going in to hurt children. They mean well, but wind up causing more harm than good.
[1] https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...
However, if when peer reviewed and faced with the obviousness of said stupidity one choses to double down that this is the one true way, and proclaim Many of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make then the intention becomes all to clear.
If everyone had good intentions, we would cherry pick the good things from all the rival plans and might just find a magical middle ground that balanced many of the issues and resulted in a better outcome for all.
Its almost as if the rich want to keep those people uncompetitive so their own kids face less competition.
What is the thinking behind this? Is this similar to what was happening in the Bay Area where people took issue with some racial group not being perfectly represented in advanced classes so they scrapped them altogether?
There's resistance towards "creaming" elite students out of classrooms, as it can increase a teacher's workload: all the students who require zero assistance and could possibly assist their peers are now removed from class, and replaced with different students who will require more of the teacher's attention, reducing individual attention on students who need help.
There's also some equity concerns, where there's reluctance to invest additional personnel and administrative overhead on students who are "going to be fine no matter what" and would rather see those additional resources towards students who are struggling - lots of this is based on the belief that low-SES students are less likely to be part of any gifted/honors program compared to high-SES students.
Edit: And finally, there's the cynical data-driven reason that underscores this, where if you need to maximize the number of students who demonstrate reading/math proficiency, you need to pull as many students as possible over the line - once they're over the line you can "ignore" them and focus on getting others over the line. Schools unfortunately aren't measured by how they serve their most dedicated students.
I probably would have failed out of high school instead of almost failing if I didn’t have access to AP classes. And I’m fortunate AP classes were based on test scores and not grades for that school. Those classes were the only interesting classes for me. So I hate the idea of them not being an option. But I also would have benefitted a lot from being put into a position to mentor another student on a topic they didn’t understand. Hard to say which would have benefited me more.