From my understanding, they revisit this framework every 8 years. California is doing poorly in 8th grade math scores, so I think they want to make changes to improve that.
It seems like such a bonehead solution to the problem. Of course if you’re doing poorly in math scores, you can make math easier in the hope to increase scores.
It’s sad that the state is proposing these changes. I remember in school there were kids who argued “algebra is stupid, who needs it, why waste time” and there were one or two sympathetic teachers who would respond “well, I rarely have to use algebra to balance my checkbook” or something silly. It seems like those kids have grown up, gained power, and are literally pushing the argument that this math isn’t important.
I think the argument (though not necessarily one I agree with) is a spin on what you said:
The current system pushes 50% of the kids into calculus and 50% into 'I hate math.' Of the 50% that go into calculus, 50% go into STEM.
That leads to (hyperbole) 25% A's / 25% B's / 50% F's.
The intent of the new rule is to maybe be more like 25% A's / 10% B's / 50% C's / 15% F's.
The key questions are 1) Is that actually better (I certainly think bringing up the floor is a good idea, but at what cost)? 2) Is this policy even going to get us there?
I like your example breakdown, but my understanding that by removing calculus as an option it’s lowering the ceiling so we’d end up with: 0% A, 25% B, 25% C, 25% D, 25% F.
I guess there is a societal discussion to be had if we should trade off losing As to reduce Fs.
But I think that first there’s not a dichotomy between approaches so the only way to get fewer Fs is to reduce the number of As. I think there are ways to improve education that doesn’t remove the opportunity to excel. And framing it as the California proposal or failing math is unfair.
I think what surprises me so is that they continue to propose these solutions that seem to reduce the overall math capabilities being produced.
I think you should do some primary research. This threads article argues that calculus is impossible, but the actual reality is [0]:
The draft Mathematics Framework includes calculus in the possible high school pathways, and also suggests ways to enable more students to get access to calculus. It notes that many high schools currently organize their coursework in a manner that requires eighth grade acceleration in order to reach calculus or other advanced mathematics courses by senior year. While some students succeed with this approach, acceleration has proved a problematic option for other students who could reach higher level math courses but would benefit from a stronger foundation in middle school mathematics.
There is nothing in this about actually removing calculus for high achievers, and this there’s an argument against it, it’s what I laid out: “is it better to push more kids into calculus at all costs or should we focus on raising the floor?”
It’s honestly a very similar argument to the (popular on HN) argument of “not everyone needs college”
And to be quite frank, this isn’t coming from nowhere, this is modeled on the success of other western countries with higher math scores across the board.
The person quoted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Boaler) is a "Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Mathematics Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education" who "won the award for best PhD in education from the British Educational Research Association"
I'm not saying I agree with the proposed California Framework. As a formerly gifted maths student, I hate it. But let's not dismiss the rigorous work of an academic who is attempting to improve education for a public education body for a state with 40 million people as "bonehead" (or "woke nonsense" as another commenter did).
90% of the reasons why kids say "<subject> is stupid, who needs it" it's because they are not enjoying it or struggling with it and using this as a defense mechanism. Noone who is doing WELL at a school subject dismisses it as useless.
So maybe, just maybe, it's worth evaluating the education process to make it easier to teach kids to give them the foundations that then the more gifted ones can invest and build on top of, and everyone comes out with baseline math competency.
I find this kind of shallow dismissal of a tenured Stanford professor's work based on their thesis unproductive.
Engaging with their current, relevant work would be more appropriate.
This is exactly what the GP is saying - many of us don't like the conclusions, but just blowing off a whole body of work in a sentence is pretty arrogant.
There’s tenured Stanford professors in many subjects, such as theology. I’m sure their work is impressive within the context of the field. But that doesn’t mean it’s rigorous or has real world application. PhD publications are supposed to be a serious contributions to the field. This particular work won a major award.
Stop it with the accusations of “arrogance” and naked credentialism. Any of the millions of people with an undergraduate STEM degree (mine is in aerospace engineering) learns enough about the scientific method to distinguish “rigorous” work from non-rigorous work. It’s actually kind of an important thing they try to teach.
Scientists and engineers who don’t call out non-rigorous work that claims the mantle of “expertise” are shirking their moral obligations and helping to erode the credibility of science as a larger discipline.
Arrogance is skimming a PhD thesis in a field wildly different from your own and deciding you are more competent in your ability to evaluate its "rigor" than the dozens or people in that field who evaluated it that had a different conclusion.
It's not an original arrogance - it's pretty common amongst the STEM educated to basically consider all humanities, philosophy, social sciences to be not "serious" fields.
Just because it's common, doesn't make it not arrogant.
Individual humans are not free body diagrams. And societies even more so.
The study of people and groups of people and the way to understand them, engage them, and influence them (which is what "education" is) is not going to be familiar to an aerospace engineer. That doesn't mean it isn't built on the work and research of thousands of people over centuries.
> Arrogance is skimming a PhD thesis in a field wildly different from your own and deciding you are more competent in your ability to evaluate its "rigor" than the dozens or people in that field who evaluated it that had a different conclusion.
What a flimsy and transparent effort to insulate non-rigorous fields from criticism.
Ironically, one of the things I do for a living these days, as an attorney, is attack the credibility of credentialed experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard. There is a whole process where attorneys and judges without specific expertise in a field evaluate the reliability of assertions by expert by reference to accepted scientific principles. Because that’s a thing you can do! You don’t need to be an expert in a field to know whether they applied reliable methodologies.
More importantly, people will do it. If you tell them to trust stuff that doesn’t seem trustworthy based on what they learned about the scientific method in high school, then it erodes your credibility and the credibility of all authorities. There’s a lot of work out there that’s not rigorous, and we have a moral obligation to call it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
> It's not an original arrogance - it's pretty common amongst the STEM educated to basically consider all humanities, philosophy, social sciences to be not "serious" fields.
Theology, film, German literature, European history, etc., are all “serious fields.” They’re the product of work by thousands of people over decades or centuries. That doesn’t mean they’re rigorous. Their ability to provide truth value is fundamentally limited by the nature of the discipline.
And yes, maybe engineers have a big head about it. I suspect that’s because they don’t have to brow beat anyone into recognizing the seriousness of their field or the authority of the expertise it generates. You can go up to a random yokel in a Bangladeshi village and he’ll be impressed at your STEM degree. I’ll posit to you that there is a basis for that.
In methodology, the field of education is akin to something like the field of business. It’s based on observation and case studies. It’s not wholly without value, but holding it up as a rigorous discipline that commands deference is disingenuous.
Yes but what is your perspective on the study of individual personal behaviour and societies.
Are you saying that all the "serious but not rigorous" fields that do so are A) all doing it wrong, and that you know a better way, B) That there is a better way and noone has tried, Or C) that it is impossible and we shouldn't bother trying.
Because if it's A or B, you can see why someone would call you arrogant. And if it's C, is that not defeatist? Seems like trying to understand our fellow humans and the societies we create is a task worth pursuing?
(C). Human behavior and societies are generally not amenable to rigorous analysis, and therefore aren't the proper subject of academic fields that purport to generate truth value and produce expertise worthy of deference.
That is not to say we can't seek to understand these things. To the contrary, humans have myriad ways to understand and respond to these things, including religion, tradition, culture, convention, etc. Academic inquiry that has the veneer of rigor--through credentials, peer review, conferences, etc.--but isn't actually rigorous improperly displaces those other ways of knowing, and cedes social power to a narrow class of elites.
The education and socialization of children, for example, is one of the fundamental pillars of society. People around the world have their own ideas of how best to socialize their kids. Unless you can bring real science to the table--unless you can create reproducible results that speak for themselves--you shouldn't be so arrogant as to act like your work can substitute for those other ways of knowing.
Not the OP, but I would weigh in with D) it's worth trying, and we should learn what we can, but the phenomena being studied are too complex and/or subjective to yield the kinds of rigorous results that we expect from the harder sciences, and the opinions of experts are therefore necessarily more infused with personal opinion and bias.
I think it is incumbent on all fields to be exceptionally clear about which of their results are rigorous, and which are outside the realm of rigorous knowledge. For example, as someone with expertise in CS, I can give you very reliable information about computability theory, and pretty reliable information about what is technically feasible to implement using current technology, but my opinion on fair moderation policies for social media are not really buttressed by my CS expertise. I wish public health officials (as just one example) were similarly clear about what they have expertise about (how disease spreads and what interventions will have what outcomes) and what is their personal opinion (cost/benefit analysis of different options, who should get vaccines first, etc).
I love that response because I think it gets to the point and the problem.
Q1: "What is the worst-case runtime complexity of quick sort" is a question that has a rigorous answer that can be proven with fundamental scientific concepts.
Q2: "What is the programming language/framework we should use for this next project" is one that absolutely cannot.
Any answer to Q2 will invariably involve some personal opinion and bias, AND YET serious professionals with decades of experience - ones perfectly capable of answering Q1 would also be expected to weigh in on Q2, incorporating their knowledge, context, the skills of the rest of the team, the existing architecture, the requirements, etc, etc.
It would be absolutely arrogant to push back against the qualitative analysis of a senior software developer making a recommendation to Q2 with "That's just your own opinion and bias" - ESPECIALLY by someone outside the field who doesn't understand all the considerations being weighed.
I sympathize with your desire for health officials, but my theory is that everything about epidemiology, public health, disease spread, etc are all mostly Q2-category questions. You still need a PhD and rigorous understanding of all the Q1 questions but shaping public policy in a pandemic is all Q2.
Education is much the same way. Education of mathematics at scale is less about mathematics and more about people.
I think your Q1 vs Q2 is a good start, but I would add:
Q3: "Should the US regulate Bitcoin?"
CS expertise will give a person much greater understanding about the details of how Bitcoin works. But any layperson can learn enough about how Bitcoin works to form an opinion on the question of whether the US should regulate it. I would never tell a non-CS person that they don't get to weigh in on this issue because they are not in the field. Would you?
Ultimately what we are talking about here is policy, which affects everybody, and value judgments, which everyone is entitled to make.
OK, let's bring it back full circle: The context was maths education - not "Should the US teach math?" (to which every layperson can have an opinion), but "How should the US (California) teach math to high schoolers?"
That's as complex of a question as "How should the US regulate Bitcoin (if it were to)". And while it's true that laypeople do have lots and lots of opinions on financial regulations, if there's one thing that HackerNews can agree on is that most lay opinions on financial regulations are not rigorous or serious, and come with unexpected side effects and consequences. (Whether it's taxing billionaires on stock grants or restricting crypto).
So in that sense I do still this requires people with expertise. And gifted math nerds (which I were) that benefited from a dramatically accellerated program have as much knowledge about the subject as a stereotypical redneck saying "We don't need math out on the tobacco farm".
Yes, many policies have unexpected consequences. The question is whether the experts are doing better at predicting them. The most sweeping educational policy in my lifetime, No Child Left Behind, passed with large bipartisan support, only to be abandoned 15 years later for failing to achieve its goals. I cannot find any expert opinion from the time that accurately anticipated these unintended consequences. If experts are much better than the general public at predicting the effects of policy, I would expect to see education experts on the record predicting the ultimate effects of the policy.
> And gifted math nerds (which I were) that benefited from a dramatically accellerated program have as much knowledge about the subject as a stereotypical redneck saying "We don't need math out on the tobacco farm".
I think the "nerds" would know enough to understand that they benefitted from the accelerated program and would have not achieved as much if it were taken away.
A Professor of Mathematics Education is a role that fits into a woke section of academia and generally publishes woke forms of advocate research. Many people can study mathematics education without studying much mathematics at all.
When the Mathematicians and Scientists are screaming that the policy is nonsense, I'm not convinced by an advocacy researcher saying it's rigorous work.
Can you make specific arguments instead of devolving to shorthand dogwhistles that are completely up to the interpretation of the reader.
The term 'woke' has no meaning, depending on the context it's anything between "We should shame all white people for the crimes of their ancestors" to "We should make a movie with a female lead".
By using it, you leave it ambiguous as to where on the spectrum you fall.
The specific argument is that the Mathematicians and Scientists are screaming that the policy is nonsense. The other specific argument is that a researcher in mathematics education doesn't need to take a lot of mathematics. The inference is that we should trust the former set of people more even on matters of mathematics education.
