California Discourages Schools from Offering Advanced Middle School Math (2023) | Hacker News Reader

California Discourages Schools from Offering Advanced Middle School Math (2023)

reason.com

72 pointshui-zheng36 comments

> However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

It's worse than that—if public schools don't offer the kinds of advanced courses that wealthy parents expect their kids to have, the wealthy parents don't just shrug and say oh well. They pull them out of public school and put them into private school or homeschool or get them a tutor. It doesn't matter why a public school is inadequate (whether it's because of policy like this or simple underfunding), inadequate public schools invariably increase achievement gaps between socioeconomic classes. There's no other possible outcome. There's no world where everyone gets held down equally.

That seems to be often the pitfall with socialism-within-capitalism as often done in California imo - many of these socialist-ish policies only work if there's no easy "escape hatch" or it's at least uncommon. But not having access to private alternatives also often goes against free-market ideas.

Afaict, the wealthy and/or well-connected often "drive" the quality of public services - they're not going to insist on improvement if they can easily check out and pay for a private alternative.

I'm not saying to stop private alternatives, just that policies that might work other places probably don't work 1:1 in the US.

Clearly putting harrison bergeron on the required reading list backfired-- apparently some future educational administrators mistook it for an instruction manual. :D

> inadequate public schools invariably increase achievement gaps between socioeconomic classes.

or maybe the people with education and resources decide to volunteer and fix their own community?

if all of the greedy, self-interested, disengaged people decide to leave, how is that not an improvement?

Most people are going to act selfishly wrt their kids, the difference is their means to do so

>or maybe the people with education and resources decide to volunteer and fix their own community?

The prototypical wealthy person is a small business owner or a well paid professional/executive. It's likely that they're very busy, and the prospect of them spending Wednesday afternoons volunteering at their schools is... unlikely.

>if all of the greedy, self-interested, disengaged people decide to leave, how is that not an improvement?

It's a huge problem if they leave and take their tax dollars with them.

In reality, stay at home moms in wealthy communities are literally and figuratively drivers of public (and private) education.

Our PTA raised two orders of magnitude more money than the one four miles away in a poorer area. And the classrooms were filled with parents doing teacher gruntwork - and they also kept an eye on all the kids.

It's hard to overstate how much a good PTA (and good parents) contribute, at least at the elementary school level.

The stay at home moms in those families have lots of free time and are often similarly capable and educated to their no-lifer dads. They just choose the mom job

In this case less wealthy are worth the same in terms of headcount. The only advantage wealthy have from a tax perspective is if they move and pay property tax elsewhere

In much of Latin America that's exactly what happens. The public schools are generally horrible and upper middle class and upper-class families simply put their kids in private schools. Public schools are not an option for these families, so they don't support government policies that aim to invest in the failing schools - a vicious cycle that led to the virtual destruction of the public education system.

"reducing achievement gaps between demographic group" come on now. As long as budgets aren't being cut for normal or extra class for struggling students in order to have advance classes this is bad policy.

The article also sites that those that want to take Calc as seniors would need to double up or take summer classes. This means that if you're gifted you also need to have parents that can support summer school. When in reality kids should have summers to be kids.

I took Calc 2 junior year of High School, the class size was maybe 6 people. Graduating class was 100~.

Gifted kids with parents of means will just hire tutors or elect to do college classes sooner.

Everytime I see the United States crying about marginalized communities and "bridging the gap" between communities I remember how starkly different it is in India, where there's a standardized curriculum(CBSE) that's a hundred times more complicated than anything that the US ever had and it's a constant accross communities that are much poorer and marginalized than the lowest communities in the states.

I still remember first time meeting a kid from the US due to an exchange program and while I could do integrals in my head at 15 they could barely multiply/divide in their head. While doing integrals as mental math may not be very useful in the "real world" as I was told by them back then, it sets a precedent for learning and exercising your brain so you can tackle more complex problems that come later.

I'm not saying that it's perfect here either btw, I'm very aware of the engineering/medicine rat race since I've lived that for 4 years, but I'm amazed how nerfed education in the US is for people who are much more financially in a better position than most Indians.

There is a huge difference between middle class and marginalized communities..in the USA and India. You don’t compare the low end of the USA to the high end of India, of course. We could also compare to China, where education isn’t even compulsory after the 9th grade (not sure about India), so you have very different populations of high schoolers. And then there is the over emphasis of Euclidean geometry because of the gaokao.

Still, I’m disappointed I didn’t learn integrals until the 11th grade (and there were only a few seniors and juniors in that class which was well rated for the Seattle area), I could have learned them in middle school and maybe I’d get more out of my secondary education. I didn’t even get to linear algebra until my second year of college.

> Under the CMF, Conrad wrote, California schools are encouraged, but not required, to delay Algebra I until ninth grade—

Where in the framework is this? The closest I can find to this is a reference in the high school section of the framework referencing a time in the last when California schools did more to push students to accelerate courses in middle school than they do currently, and negative research about about the impact of that effort on what students ended up completing.

But nowhere in either the Middle School or High School sections which discuss the issue of acceleration is there any language encouraging delaying Algebra I/Math I to ninth grade.

This particular complaint seems to be literally people inventing something that is not in the document to be mad about.

> meaning that students would be unable to take Calculus as seniors without doubling up on math classes or taking extra classes during the summer.

That's not true; the CMF includes an trig-inclusive Algebra II which can directly be followed by Calculus; taking a Precalculus course in between would be a slow path. Algebra I-Geometry-Algebra II-Calculus or Math I-Math II-Math III-Calculus is fairly explicitly envisioned as a normal and encouraged four year sequence for students planning STEM majors in the Framework, though taking a Precalculus course after it is also envisioned as a possible sequence.

> Where in the framework is this?

Appendix D: Course Placement and Sequences (https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfw-appendixd.p...):

> The California Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CA CCSSM) represent a tight progression of skills and knowledge that is inherently rigorous and designed to provide a strong foundation for success in the new, more advanced Algebra I and Mathematics I courses that are typically taken by most students in grade nine.

And:

> Prior to the development of the CA CCSSM, “Algebra I” was taught in grade eight to an increasing number of students. That same course name will be the default for grade nine, as most students who move forward will complete the CA CCSSM for grade eight—and the new version of Algebra I is more rigorous and more demanding than previous versions of Algebra I.

Page 833 shows a diagram that by default gets students only to Precalculus in 12th grade, passing through Algebra I or Math I in 9th.

If CA is right that the new Algebra I is more demanding than the old then this could just be a question of semantics and definitions (though with calculus not an option by default it's still pretty clear that they're not covering as much material by default), but Conrad definitely didn't invent the idea of Algebra I being moved to ninth grade.

Remember the approved version of the framework was changed significantly to fix many of the shortcomings Brian raised after reading earlier drafts. And he authored a chapter that was incorporated before approval.

So some of his prior criticisms no longer apply.

One problem with the Left in general is they tend to try and equalize humanity by dragging people down instead of raising people up.

California could just as easily say "how do we get more underprivileged kids into advanced math?" and implement a multi-year effort across grades and schools. But that would be work...and against union contracts. Instead, just drop the subjects.

Dragging down is human nature. When optimizing metrics is always easier to push down than up

So that's why we need to describe the problem as dealing with poverty instead of income inequality. You solve income inequality by dragging the top down. You fix poverty by bringing the bottom up

The CMF is big, but maybe this is part of what TFA is talking about. From Chapter 8 pp. 28-30, https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

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Some students will be ready to accelerate into Algebra I or Mathematics I in eighth grade, and, where they are ready to do so successfully, this can support greater access to a broader range of advanced courses for them. At the same time, successful acceleration requires a strong mathematical foundation. Research indicates that in the era in which California policy encouraged all students to take Algebra in eighth grade, success for many students was undermined; widespread acceleration did not enable students to progress as expected to subsequent courses. The authors of one study found that many students had to repeat Algebra I in ninth grade and did not extend their course taking to advanced courses. The authors concluded that: “encouraging more students to take eighth-grade algebra does not by itself lead to significantly more students taking advanced mathematics in high school, nor does it lead to substantial increases in performances in higher mathematics CST.” (Liang, Heckman, and Abedi, 2012, 338). Other studies found mixed effects of this policy across districts of different kinds and for different types of students (Domina et al. 2014; Domina et al. 2015).

These challenges are no doubt a function of students’ curricular readiness—whether they have mastered the right foundations—and the quality of teaching both before and during the course itself. One racially and economically diverse New York middle school that successfully accelerated all of its students offers an example of the conditions that enabled stronger outcomes. The school ended tracking in mathematics and gave all students access to the more advanced three-year curriculum sequence that had previously been reserved to a smaller number. This sequence included in eighth grade the Mathematics I integrated course normally offered in ninth grade. Researchers followed three cohorts in the earlier tracked sequence and three cohorts in the more rigorous untracked sequence. They found that both the initially lower and higher achieving students who learned in the later heterogeneous courses took more advanced math, enjoyed math more and passed the state Regents test in New York sooner than previously. This success was supported by a carefully revised curriculum in grades six through eight, creation of alternate-day support classes, known as mathematics workshops, to assist any students needing extra help, and establishment of common planning periods for mathematics teachers so they could develop stronger pedagogies together (Burris, Heubert, and Levin, 2006).

For schools that offer an eighth grade Algebra course or a Mathematics I course as an option in lieu of Common Core Math 8, both careful plans for instruction that links to students’ prior course taking and an assessment of readiness should be considered. Such an assessment might be coupled with supplementary or summer courses that provide the kind of support for readiness that Bob Moses’ Algebra Project has provided for many years for underrepresented students tackling Algebra (Moses and Cobb, 2002).

One consideration in sequencing mathematics courses is the desire to enable students who would like to reach Calculus by the end of high school to do so. Currently, most high schools require courses in Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II, and Pre-calculus before taking a course in Calculus, or a pathway of Mathematics I, II, III, then Precalculus. This sequence means that students cannot easily reach Calculus in high school unless they have taken a high school algebra course or Mathematics I in middle school.

An alternative to eighth grade acceleration would be to adjust the high school curriculum instead, eliminating redundancies in the content of current courses, so that students do not need four courses before Calculus. As enacted, Algebra II tends to repeat a significant amount of the content of Algebra I, and Precalculus repeats content from Algebra II. While recognizing that some repetition of content has value, further analysis should be conducted to evaluate how high school course pathways may be redesigned to create more streamlined pathways that allow students to take three years of middle school foundations and still reach advanced mathematics courses such as calculus. Schools may also organize supplemental course taking in summer programs, to allow students who start Algebra or Mathematics I in ninth grade to be able to take Calculus in high school if they choose. (See chapter 9 for other possible strategies high schools can adopt.)

Race gaps are a societal atrocity and a national embarrassment. It is the enduring humiliation of a society that yearns to displace itself from its history.

Mandating equality by removing opportunity only obscures the metrics. This is a hack to avoid accountability--if there's no data showing inequality then surely there is no inequality.

>Mandating equality by removing opportunity only obscures the metrics. This is a hack to avoid accountability--if there's no data showing inequality then surely there is no inequality.

In this case it's actually worse than that. They're not just covering up metrics, they're actively making smarter people worse off. It's like Kurt Vonnegut's fictional dystopia where the government makes equal by handicapping the people who are better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

What would you suggest?

My guess is this comes down to funding, and having to choose if the money will go to spend more time with students that struggle, to help them out, or with students that excel, to boost them further. And we really shouldn't be having to choose between the two, but if you had too, I don't think there's any right choice, they both have losers and winners.

I wanted to do further maths in my own time but my school wouldn’t let me. But then all the top universities entrance exams required further maths to even understand the questions.

How did they prevent you from studying in your own time?

They could prevent you from taking further maths exams at school. But not taking those exams wouldn't prevent you from using the knowledge and skills for other things, like university entrance exams.

Well if an administrator needs to improve the relative outcome for low-performing students, and can't come up with a better way than to lower the upside for everyone as a whole, I wouldn't really call them any kind of an educator.

No but I world call then a successful administrator

I went to a high school that hard very hard time offering advanced level courses. But they argued, successfully, that gifted students were just the other side of the 'special needs' spectrum and had the same right to resources as students who needed extra help. They got the funding and the advanced courses were a success and continue to this day. They also managed to keep the bar high - i.e. they kept it hard and many students who initially signed up would drop down to regular levels after a few weeks.

Posts #9, #10 and #11 here are about the final (adopted) version of the framework:

https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/

(2023)

junior-high math

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