SF CA resident, parent of two school age children chiming in. The direction with math seems pretty dismal, in that as of right now, everyone is singly tracked together for math through freshman year of high school. This results in children who have higher aptitudes[1] to not be well served by schools. The majority of people I know who have the means opt out of the public school system, which probably makes the problem worse generally but solves a pain point for them.
[1] - I take it as a fact that different people have different talent levels for different things, but not everyone agrees with that, and disagreement on this point is a big driver (but not the only driver) in the "everyone gets exactly the same" approach that is trending now.
I don't know if it's still there in the revision, but in chapter one of the earlier draft of the California framework it said, in a prominent place "we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents"
Edit: in the new version it has been changed to "high-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated"
> "high-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated"
I mean, I would hope this is true.
I'm not "naturally" gifted at mathematics, but like reading, writing, and other things, I can learn them in school and got quite good at them.
Public education is like mass transit. Not everyone gets their own Lamborghini. Most have to take the bus. Its goal should be providing the best general education it can for all people and making as many people as possible productive.
If you looked at society 500 years ago you could assume that only certain people were smart enough to read and write.
It really depends on how you define "high-level". Yeah the attitude that some people "just can't do math" is not good, I don't disagree with you there. But that's not the same as acknowledging that some people may pick up math more quickly.
Holding kids back is really the opposite of cultivating mathematical achievement. To use the reading analogy, do you think a kid that can read at 4th grade level should be forced to only read 1st grade books anyway because that's what their age is? I'm not sure what that accomplishes.
It'd be one thing to make a resource allocation argument but that's not even what this is. This curriculum is clearly a philosophical statement and personally I don't get it.
> But that's not the same as acknowledging that some people may pick up math more quickly.
Certainly some people are better at things than others - but so what? I know plenty of people that excelled in math in grade school and struggled in high school, also many more that excelled in high school and struggled in college. Some, like myself, struggled in grade school and excelled in high school. The difference was motivation.
> Holding kids back is really the opposite of cultivating mathematical achievement. To use the reading analogy, do you think a kid that can read at 4th grade level should be forced to only read 1st grade books anyway because that's what their age is? I'm not sure what that accomplishes.
And how many brilliant kids moved just a bit too fast and lost interest? The thing is you only view things one way. You forget that a fast ramp-up in difficulty can turn away many students who could've turned out to be brilliant scientists and engineers.
> It'd be one thing to make a resource allocation argument but that's not even what this is. This curriculum is clearly a philosophical statement and personally I don't get it.
I don't agree that it is a philosophical statement, having read it, it seems pretty straightforward. The alarmism about the woke mob is overstated.
As mentioned by OP:
> in chapter one of the earlier draft of the California framework it said, in a prominent place "we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents"
The people that wrote said publicly available draft are still involved with this plan, and have not personally nor explicitly backed down from the statement. It's a good sign that some moderation has been introduced to the text, but it seems clear to me there are still some pretty extreme beliefs amongst those leading this thing.
Whether the "woke alarmism" is over the top or not, I don't think it should be controversial to say that a philosophical statement is at the root of this plan. I wouldn't be surprised if the Equitable Math folks would agree with that assessment even.
I also don't think that criticism of a specific model of leveled courses should be used to dismiss all leveled courses. You talk about kids that are rushed ahead or that perform differently at different points in their math "career" - which could certainly be problematic if levels are rigid throughout the educational timeline and leave little choice to students.
Yes sometimes it is implemented that way. But it is not impossible nor even particularly impractical to implement a more flexible levels system that would mitigate those concerns. There are schools that have done this well, California school system was not one of them. This proposal is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I don't see a problem in that statement. The opposite would mean that you are born with ability and can't grow or improve it, which is absolutely false. The idea behind the statement is basically: people do not have to be naturally gifted to be good at math.
> I also don't think that criticism of a specific model of leveled courses should be used to dismiss all leveled courses. You talk about kids that are rushed ahead or that perform differently at different points in their math "career" - which could certainly be problematic if levels are rigid throughout the educational timeline and leave little choice to students.
But arguing for a gifted track IS rigid - it basically says "you must decide now if you're good at math, or not." That is deeply flawed. You can't add flexibility - you need algebra and geometry to do calculus. If you decide or become motivated too late (even if naturally gifted!), you have no recourse, as the "gifted track" starts before you can even know. The current system and system you advocate for could be removing huge numbers of potential STEM graduates from the mix.
> Yes sometimes it is implemented that way. But it is not impossible nor even particularly impractical to implement a more flexible levels system that would mitigate those concerns. There are schools that have done this well, California school system was not one of them. This proposal is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Not really - as is said in the framework, most foreign nations that outperform the US have a standard curriculum. So the problem isn't flexibility.
"The framework builds on the strategies used in a number of high-achieving jurisdictions (e.g., Estonia, Finland, Japan, and Korea) that pursue an integrated curriculum—connecting the domains of mathematics with one another as students collaborate in using data to solve real-world problems. These countries pursue a common curriculum in elementary and middle school, supporting more students in reaching higher level mathematics. The framework illustrates how this integrated approach with many different kinds of supports can be used to expand the number of students excelling in mathematics and heading for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers."
If you define "natural talent" in such an unconventional way sure I guess. But the existence of innate potential does not imply that abilities cannot be improved. Derek Jeter has natural talent. Derek Jeter worked his ass off to cultivate those skills. There is nothing at all mutually exclusive about these things.
Schools spend a lot of time reviewing things over the course of the academic year, including things from prior years - I disagree that it is not possible for students to move tracks with a well thought out curriculum plan. But regardless the proposed curriculum eliminates material that would be covered in upper track courses, and explicitly states it does not aim to have students prepared to take calculus during high school. This is like putting all students on the lower track, which is a hell of a solution to the problem of students getting stuck on the lower track.
Japan's model is much more like putting every student in the high track, it is not comparable to what is being proposed here. Japanese high schoolers are able to take intro analysis in 11th grade, here is a translated textbook that would be extremely rare to see a US 11th grader cover the same material (even with standard tracks you'd be lucky to cover it all in 12th):
https://bookstore.ams.org/mawrld-11
I'm not familiar with math education in those other countries mentioned, but I imagine it is more similar to Japan than the US. Hilariously there have been some recent pushes in Japan to be more like the US education system as far as flexibility is concerned, in order to take some of the pressure off of students.
Actual math is irrelevant to this whole argument, just as actual literacy was irrelevant ~500 years ago. This isn't about math ability, it's about the fact that STEM is an obstacle to woke bureaucrats' projection of power.
I'm not sure if I buy the woke-alarmism that is rife on HN. Reading the framework, I don't see any of this "wokism."
It seems like any other guided/misguided attempt to improve the school system that has already taken feedback into account.
This entire HN thread is filled with "back in my days" and "wokism" but no one actually is disputing the content of the framework itself with actual evidence.
As a student who participated in Math Olympiads throughout middle and high school, having to be on the same track as everyone was downright painful. This type of thing really shouldn't exist.
That would drive my wife up the wall. Our school district in the Pittsburgh suburbs has 5 math tracks from grades 4-12. They just added linear algebra because so many kids were maxing out the available math curriculum.
My understanding is that in the US ‘linear algebra’ is used for both the thing that involves manipulating grids of numbers in various ways (so the basis is implicit), the thing that is a bi like algebra but for matrices and vectors, the thing you have in physics where linear maps have specific geometric meanings (so you care about being mostly basis-agnostic, and you care about how the objects change when you change basis), and the thing which is abstract algebra for vector spaces and so on.
When I was in school in the U.K. we did the first and second things, including eg multiplying matrices, eigenstuff, diagonalising them, inverting small matrices, some determinant/cross product stuff, and we maybe did the thing where you solve a first order linear ODE system by converting to matrix exponentiation, though I don’t quite remember. I think we just called it vectors and matrices.
There was some useful stuff there. The problem is that it was at a course so close to the leaves of the ‘x allowed to depend on material from y’ tree that we didn’t get to apply that much (related example: we had to waste a bunch of time on silly equations in physics because they couldn’t depend on us knowing about the y’ = kx ODE)
At university we did some courses in vectors and matrices / vector calculus that went down the practical route towards physics things and useful tools, and we had a course called ‘linear algebra’ that covered the abstract algebra side of things, where everything was lemmas/theorems/proofs beginning with e.g. suppose e1, e2, …, en is a basis for a vector space V over F, …. However it is certainly possible that the US terminology (linear algebra for everything) was more common outside of the courses I took.
I think I can respond to your footnote. I went to a Catholic school that split us up into separate tracks for maths specifically in grades 4-8. I was in the upper level math class for a year before they moved me. I had a teacher who celebrated and encouraged bullies, slapped children with a ruler, and threw a chalkboard eraser at me from the front of the classroom because I appeared to be falling asleep. When my grades fell the knee jerk reaction was that I was wrongly assigned to this class and it was expected to have below some magical threshold of attrition. The ramifications for me were that my old friend group would no longer interact with me the way they used to, I was immediately bored in our lower maths class, and I was now a "dumb" kid.
It wasn't until I'd dropped out of college and taught myself math, because of the interviews in this industry, that I learned to enjoy math again. My point is that you're really fucking with the social firmware of kids when you do that. Also, reading between the lines of my life, not being in that upper level math class clearly had no impact on the latter parts of my life.
First, I'm sorry you had a bad experience with that teacher and that it caused you problems for many years down the line.
I'm trying to figure out how this relates. It sounds like you had a bad experience with tracking, and there is a fundamental issue with tracking where some amount of people will have bad experiences, but ultimately you were able to achieve your potential anyway, so why make the experience bad with tracking if people will eventually get to the right level over time - is that a fair interpretation of your comment?
My lack of success in that math program was due to a "bad experience" (I chuckled a little at that phrasing). The fallout of which had social implications, made me entirely disinterested (if not hostile?) to maths, and followed me for years. Point being, separating our classes had little to nil positive impact (for me) in the long run, and the decision of which class I was in failed to address the foundational problems with the class. The latter bit being the most important; in my case it was an abusive teacher with an anger problem, but there's also a good chance that nobody actually sucks at math but that we teach it from a perspective that only a subset of the population will ever relate to or meaningfully learn from. I guess what I'd like to see is some reproducible results showing that giving gifted kids their own course program and separating them from their cohorts actually has a long term benefit when compared to keeping them all together.
Edit:
To make what I'm saying a bit more clear: There's a ton of people in these threads assuming that not everybody is born with math skills (or variants of that attitude). That is exactly what these teachers thought and how different my life would've been had I agreed.
"not everybody is born with math skills" isn't the argument though. The argument is "not everybody has the same math skills". It's a multidimensional and continuous thing, but it's not exactly feasible to teach that way, so some approximation is involved.
It sounds like that was implemented very poorly in your case. You yourself said "I was immediately bored in our lower maths class". I don't see how the solution to this is to make everyone take the lower math class. Certainly there is some middle ground between the California plan and what you experienced.
Same, I had a really hard time parsing that comment. My read is that they had a terrible teacher who had the power to label them as “average” instead of “above average”.
It’s hard to see that as undermining tracking as a concept, since the problem is actually the absence of oversight and termination of bad teachers. No one teacher should have the power to doom a student, but a school needs to be able to recognize and cultivate talent.
Eh I don't think things working out in the long term necessarily invalidates the criticism, we have no idea how OP would have turned out if in a different situation. I'm sure most people that should have been in fast track math but didn't have an option for it still figured shit out long term, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have benefited from better math education.
It sounds like the implementation of levels was especially bad in the OP's case though, so I agree it isn't really a good anecdote to argue against leveling entirely like California is doing. It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else
It doesn’t bother you sometimes that some people starve while others hoard wealth that rivals the gdp of entire countries?
People going hungry, especially children, is a travesty.
What is your solution to it? We already have food stamps, welfare, fully subsidized healthcare, child tax credits, social security disability, free school breakfasts and lunches, Section 8 Housing, SNAP, WIC, CHIP, Medicaid, churches, charities, social security death benefit and so much more. People are still hungry.
Should we do more? The lesson of Africa says we shouldn’t. Decades of food aid to Africa did little more than make the continent dependent on food aid and drive all the farmers out of business because they couldn’t compete against free.
And I haven’t even brought up lthat there simply aren’t enough billionaires to tax to make even a tiny difference in any of this. Even if you took literally their entire net worth, converted it to cash (which is literally impossible) and spent it on the poor it wouldn’t make any difference.
THe child tax credit cut child hunger by 26%. We let it end. Giving people food isn't an especially hard problem in the US, yet we're not able to do it.
Increasing the eligibility and amount of the credit is helpful, but doling it out in repeated checks that you then have to go back and report on your 1040 is annoying. How many news stories are run about people who depend on their annual tax refund for living expenses? Reducing that refund by paying the money out earlier and celebrating it as a free handout is awfully manipulative.
Not really negatively manipulative IMO, I've worked with many people who don't really understand taxes and they think that a refund is some kind of free money "bonus" and often use it to make frivolous purchases and blow the whole refund at once. Most of these people don't really plan or budget on how to use their refund because they have no idea how much it's going to be, it's just treated as kind of a random winfall.
Doling that out in smaller increments and making the purpose specific (child credit, instead of tax refund) seems like a good nudge into better spending habits... especially when the amount is known ahead of time.
they think that a refund is some kind of free money "bonus"
For many people that get the child tax credit, a bonus is exactly what it is.
The word you should have put in quotes is “refund”. My sister, for example, used to pay about $1,500 in tax throughout the year yet get a $7,500 “refund”.
Isn’t that something? Pay x and get 5x as a “refund”.
in my opinion, as long as people are starving we aren’t doing enough… if billionaires aren’t enough tax the millionaires, if the millionaires aren't enough then tax me too… I can’t look at our existing failures and say “good enough, it’s just too hard”
Nobody should care about disparity, people should care about maximizing benefit for every American. I'm not saying it is easy to evaluate this, but it is obviously all we should care about. The existence of gazillionares is fine so long as individual wellbeing in this system is higher relative to other potential systems.
Firstly, evidentially, people do care about disparity: increasing disparity seems to adversely affect people physiologically, independently from wealth. That is, having someone else be significantly richer than you, independently of your own health, seems to create stress effects in a population. By the metrics of national health and well-being, it seems like wealth disparity is a bad thing in its own right.
Secondly, the problem with billionaires is not that they simply have so much money, it's that one's ability to influence society, including making and breaking the rules of society, is intrinsically tied to money. For example, consider the recent news about Bezos buying a new boat, and having to take down and rebuild a bridge to get it to sea. On the one hand, it doesn't really matter to me how much he spends on that boat - it's his money, and he can use it as he likes. However, the people of Rotterdam were promised that the bridge would remain put, yet Bezos' money (presumably via the shipyard that organised this) was enough to override the democratic process, presumably alongside adding a significant inconvenience to the people living there.
Or consider the recent trend of billionaires buying media companies. On the one hand, it's kind of irrelevant how they want to invest their money, but on the other hand, these media companies afford significant impact on the views and perspectives seen by society. If we really want to claim that we live in a democracy, it seems dangerous to also accept that one person can, essentially on a whim, buy one of the largest social media platforms with only vague hints as to what he plans to do with it. That sort of power is absolutely not something that you (I assume) or I personally can wield, yet it could well have a significant impact in shaping public opinion.
As long as money can be roughly equated to power, then wealth disparity will remain a very important thing to be concerned about.
It’s honestly a fucking nightmare to live here, especially with kids. I’m a crazy “leftist” where I grew up but SF/CA is bonkers (e.g. re: [1] — are you fucking kidding me? Have you not met a single real fucking living human being? My family has a “curse” we ascribe to all the clumsy folks of our blood and I assure you there are more than can be reasonably blamed on chance).
(personally I don't understand what your saying / what the point is, but I'm also tired. I'm not GP btw. -- in what ways is it a nightmare for example? What's a real human and a not real human? "the clumsy folks of our blood" -- I don't understand, how are they clumsy for example)
[1] - I take it as a fact that different people have different talent levels for different things, but not everyone agrees with that, and disagreement on this point is a big driver (but not the only driver) in the "everyone gets exactly the same" approach that is trending now.