This is the way. Teach kids more, not less. Ask more of them, not less. If you need to lengthen the school day and school year to do so, do it. Do it now.
"So what should we do instead? Dallas came up with an answer: Teach kids more math instead of teaching them less. In 2019, Dallas Independent School District implemented a new equity policy that encouraged many more people to take honors math classes:
Many capable Hispanic, Black and English learner students did not elect to join these classes on their own or were passed over by their instructors. And their parents were often unaware they could make the request.
Dallas ISD, which serves some 142,000 children, took note of the disparity and in 2017 formed a racial equity advisory council — some of whose members had children in the district — with the goal of improving opportunity for all…It decided to move from an opt-in model to an opt-out policy in the 2019-20 school year. Since then…students cannot opt out [of advances classes] without written parent permission. The move has dramatically increased participation among traditionally marginalized children."
I'm chatting with some friends who are parents in the Bay Area. Their admittedly very Californian response is that at least this should reduce competition for college spots. (Their kids are obviously going to get tutoring.)
I'm not sure it will — there are still plenty of schools elsewhere that offer advanced coursework, and their graduates can more than fill the freshman class of elite colleges.
For example, I grew up in Sacramento, and our public schools had a tracked program from 2nd grade. Pretty much all of us took algebra/geometry in middle school, and those who were advanced were taking precalc or calc by 9th grade. It has been a disappointing experience to learn that in the heart of silicon valley, 30+ years later, the public schools have less to offer in terms of differentiated learning and accelerated education.
BTW, I have also been talking with Bay Area parents about this, including some HNers. Would love to chat with you/your friends to know how folks are sorting this out. We've had some success and are always looking to help others do the same. Contact info in profile.
I think getting rid of this will cause more disparity in the outcomes. Rich parents can afford tutors and poor parents can't, so poor kids come out even worse off.
Tracking helped me in particular by making my homeroom (the British school equivalent, j called a class) more civilized, n fair to students w less academic talent than me. Given the tracking in English n at one point, briefly, Mathematics, it meant the other boys had a shot at getn the best score in the class or at all enjoying leniency in grading, which my presence as a future Erdosian mathematician made impossible, n their parents would deny them privileges n beat them sometimes if they weren't excellent students, so they'd bully me for monopolizing the academics completely. The girls did not, because i believe there was not an expectation they be the best student n plus i was very good-looking to them, though not to myself. Future model too. But the bullying was the main challenge, no matter what they threw at me the academics were nothing in difficulty compared to the bullying. So for that reason alone tracking helped me out, n the homeroom out too.
As for bullying, I was a "gifted" kid in school, too. I was treated nicely when people wanted help and bullied ruthlessly when they didn't need me.
> their parents would deny them privileges n beat them sometimes if they weren't excellent students
100% agree that this was one of the biggest factors in my bullying. Shame is powerful, and if a child is being shamed for their academic achievements, they will lash out at someone who has what they desire: good grades in this instance.
Erdosian means having the genetic trait Paul Erdós had, which was the uncommonly good reaction to similar stimulants to those he took, without which he could not do any math research at all. He was steroidal, i'm steroidal too in my research, it's like bodybuilding in that steroids are part of the game. As long as they do not damage your health, it's fine. I literally get time dilation from the stimulants i take, which i do under prescription of course, but at the same time i know it's not fair to play sports for instance, because they're performance enhancing drugs (n generally outright forbidden). But sports are zero-sum, research is positive-sum, so that's what i do instead.
In particular the critical trait is amplified creativity to the point i share Erdos view that "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.". Same exact symptoms.
In addition, my being steroidal is justified by the fact that i got brain surgery, like the radio transcranial magnetic crap, against my will n without my knowledge, electroshock too, the works. So perhaps it is understandable in my case.
Ha that’s not actually happening though because college admissions aren’t going to be based in knowledge but on ability to jump through hoops perfectly
And what, exactly, do you expect administrators to do? They don't have any actual knowledge and if they do, they absolutely do NOT want to use it, so tests are out. There are now more administrators than teaching staff. We're not far off from having more "social" workers in schools than teachers.
First and foremost, these people want to decide what is equitable. Firstly, without taking actual ability (or "conscientiousness", how much effort kids are willing to put in), and secondly, they're human. They're corrupt.
That’s exactly what I expect. With no ability to differentiate candidates by ability all you can do is chase diversity metrics or look for people that haven’t made any mistakes yet (4.0 vs 3.9 etc)
I can't imagine colleges doing much beyond lots of AI interviews in the near future. That's if there is even a point in getting 95% of degrees anymore anyway.
The internet should have transformed education. For curious self-learners it has, there’s incredible resources online for those who seek them out. But it hasn’t made much of a dent in ‘the education system’
Something I say to anyone who will listen is that we have lived through the moment in history when the cost to receive a world-class elite education has collapsed to near zero and hardly anybody has noticed. We still talk as if an official four year university education is the goal and bemoan the cost of it rising faster than general inflation and worry about taking on debt that will burden them for the rest of their lives and worry about our kids “getting in” to the university of their choice.
It has changed education. And people who have kids nearing college age, who have noticed, will be able to help them navigate this world in a much more useful way than people who tell their kids to take on as much debt as they can to go to any university they want.
The pipeline that fuels our decision making of what to focus on in primary/secondary school as it relates only to what will help them stand out in a college application and our decision making of what a university-level education means as it relates to getting a job is fascinating.
The sort of personal mentoring, practical supervision, and social skills development that is required for intellectual maturity cannot be acquired from YouTube videos.
I learned these skills more thoroughly in a week of fast food training than in sixteen years of public and private schooling. If these are important context for education, you'd think we would still teach decorum.
Because ability to asses knowledge is poor everywhere. programming might be a bit better at it but everyone else relies on signaling. Also many industries are essentially government adjacent so they continuation of college entrenchment continues
The main purpose of college besides education and networking is the development of social stratification. Many employers will toss your CV without a degree even if it is not required in any capacity for the job in question.
I personally am afraid to speak out against such things. I did in college and was viciously flamed by people who thought it was a good idea. You can shut down the entire conversation by just calling someone “racist” or “bigot”.
I don’t want to lose my job or be ostracized.
To be clear, my opinions are only that it seems wrong to me to discriminate against someone based on their immutable characteristics (like race).
It only seems inexplicable if you accept as reality the most extreme characterization of DEI programs, which personally I believe should be a tip-off that such a characterization might not be entirely accurate. The more ridiculous programs naturally get the most attention, regardless of how representative they are, and DEI programs as a whole are further strawmanned by politicians and pundits looking to trigger your outrage. The discourse thoroughly ignores all the programs working on DEI as a topic in ways most reasonable people would probably be OK with.
As an example right in this thread, the grandparent comment talks about the Dallas schools looking at the issue of children unevenly taking advantage of advanced courses and coming up with a solution that helped expand access across the board. This absolutely would qualify as a DEI program (they even used the equity trigger word), but did not do anything I would think many people would find objectionable.
On the contrary, I think most DEI programs suck and people know it. There's a few like the Dallas program that actually try to solve the problem in a reasonable way, and you won't find nearly as much pushback from people on those.
Well meaning if misguided attempts to address race and other social issues without improving pay or making structural changes to government and economic systems.
The amount of equity a society enforces should be inversely proportional to age. If a kindergartener is unable to succeed, we need to give them extra help. If a 45 year old is unable to succeed, they had their chances and it's their fault.
I agree with you that I was wrong to say "It's their fault." There are people who get screwed by life.
The main way they got screwed was when life taught them whining was better than working hard. We need to stop screwing people that way. We need to hold a hard line on the principle that they can succeed or fail in a free market, and we will not reward whining. This means eliminating all entitlements for adults.
I'll help kids learn to be successful adult. I'm a teacher, that's what I do. Let the kids and their families pick their schools from any school they can get to, including online schools.
I will not help some whiny adult who can not even train themselves when they have Internet access.
If you give money to whiny adults, who do you take it from? Do you take it from long-term investments in education? Do you take it from long term investments in our economy like paying off our national debt? Our (US) national debt eliminates many options we would otherwise have. It is more compassionate to provide the best education we can to the children, and let the adults pay for themselves.
Long-term benefits should outweigh short-term benefits. A society that educates and raises its children to be productive, the provides a free market will outperform a society that rewards whining.
Even if an older person’s situation is largely not their fault, it is much more difficult to correct, and society’s benefit for its investment is much lower.
On ramps for everyone are important, but as you say, far far more important and effective in people’s early years.
Children need to be educated well and given opportunities to guarantee the future of society, but ensuring adults are content or at least able to support themselves is important for stability today. More un/under-employed/unemployable people means more crime and social unrest, retarding growth and costing more resources than would have been spent supporting them.
Plenty of kids get away with being stupid. If those same kids knew that they would have to provide for themselves once they turned 18, they would be studying and learning to work.
Intelligence and education are different things. You can't train intelligence - you can teach some tools or frameworks for reasoning and such and that can help but some people will understand them and others won't.
As a simple example just look at how many people think math is useless. Even having spent 10+ years with people trying to bash it into their heads they still can't figure out any of the infinitely many useful things you can do with math.
Education is the result, intelligence is potential. Stupid people have less potential for results. Doesn't mean some of them can't pull a Forrest Gump, nor that they aren't valuable members of society. Just means they suck at learning (at least some) things so their time is better spent doing other stuff.
I know it’s vogue to ridicule DEI programs, but the reality is that as the blog post points out, these measures achieve the opposite of DEI (all 3 letters of those).
Even standardized tests. There is already evidence that standardized tests reduce equality. Which is not surprising at all because standardized tests are the one part of a college application that someone can excel at purely with concentrated hard work over a relatively short period of time.
An underprivileged kid motivated to go to a good college cannot make up for poor grades earned from K-8 when they barely had the ability to plan a day in the future, and so was driven to do whatever their friends were doing. And then that set them up behind the 8 ball in many ways from 9-12 as well.
Finally, real DEI requires listening to actual underprivileged people. The vast majority of underprivileged parents will not respond to data showing that their kids are underperforming by saying “make sure no one can do this”. They will respond by demanding the schools provide more resources so their kids can excel.
The OP wonders how Cambridge, Mass and CA are making such changes. But it’s not surprising at all because these decisions are being driven largely by upper middle class educated people who absolutely cannot relate to the under privileged people they claim they’re helping.
And this is an implementation of the worst of privilege. Making decisions for the underprivileged by the privileged without ever asking the supposed beneficiaries what will actually help them.
> They will respond by demanding the schools provide more resources so their kids can excel.
Right? Why would any parent want other kids in their class to be dumber so their kid is magically "smarter"? They want their child to grow up to be a competent person who is capable of competing in the world at large, not a wave-through at a "progressive" school.
Parents recognize that their children will be competing with the entire world for jobs, and easily see the folly of such a policy.
Such policy really does seem actively hostile toward the goals of such parents. For a group of educators to suggest that the solution is to do away with "mean grades and homework" is like saying, "We all know that you're kid isn't going succeed in advanced classes so let's not even pretend that they will."
rich white people introduce these regressive DEI policies so that smart poor and not-connected kids could not compete and enter elite ranks of society, and their (relatively dumb, but rich&well connected) kids could easily outcompete everyone.
1. It is incredibly hard for rich&connected kid to excel among smart & hard-working individuals
2. If barrier is lowered, and overall pool is "diverse" in terms of IQ and ability, then for a rich kid it gets much easier to outcompete and stand out (due to parent's $$$ and connections)
3. The only reason rich white privileged people want regressive DEI is to make it easier for their kids to stand out from competition
It won't reduce competition for college spots. Admissions committees will continue to fulfill shadow racial quotas using first names, last names, and reparations sob stories as filters to maintain the status quo. Test scores of special protected classes hardly matter as long as those primary objectives are met.
Not sure exactly what you're dancing around, but man, if some of those top schools in CA could reduce competition by, say, expanding admissions, that would be great.
Poor Californians who can’t afford tutors will lack the skills to compete with other students. (If you’re graduating without calculus, you’ll have a tough time becoming an engineer or performing on a standardised test.) That reduces those with means’ competition, ceteris paribus.
Maybe things have changed in the ~15 years since I took the ACT, but no calculus was necessary for me to get a score in the 30s. You're probably right about getting accepted into an engineering major at a prestigious school though.
Lengthen the school _year_ sure, but I'm skeptical that lengthening the school _day_ won't have, at best, mixed effects, especially given all the studies on sleep etc.
European here, I went to school from 8:20 till 16:05. You guys really have school starting at 10:00?
Who takes care of the kids after parents go to work and before school starts?
No; the comment you replied to sounded like a suggestion, not a description of reality.
In the US, it's common for schools to start at 8:00 or even 7:30. Recently there has been a push to start later to give kids more time to sleep. So pushing it back to say 8:30 or 9:00 (but not shortening the day, so basically everything just gets pushed back, and the kids stay up later, and need more time to sleep...).
In general in the US I think high schools start and finish earliest, then middle schools, then elementary schools.
The reason is purely practical- start times need to be staggered to allow schools to share buses, and having high school students get home first means they can look after their younger siblings until their parents get home from work.
Yeah school starts between 7 and 9am, but we still have the problem on the other side in the US, schools end between 1:30 and 4pm (at least here in CA). Figuring out after care is an exercise left to the reader.
It’s completely ridiculous, especially considering how sane many (most?) countries in the rest of the world have it.
It's another problem that wasn't one in a time where a single income household could maintain a nuclear family. But like most child care, it's adapted horribly and the costs have skyrocketed.
Granted, even if they were on 2 income households in the 70's, it was also a time where 10YO's were trusted to get home or even walk home unattended, so it'd only be an issue for the youngest primary students. That may still be the case in some Asian countries today, but certainly not in the US.
For primary and secondary school, the hours can vary (because generally the school districts need to share public buses) but it's generally 8-15, or 7 hours of school with an cumulative hour of recess.
For secondary school you can elect to have early and late classes or simply opt out of a period if you have the curriculum met. but I've never heard of a student starting later than 9.
>Who takes care of the kids after parents go to work and before school starts?
that's generally why primary students start earlier than secondary students. By high school it's no big deal if the student is by themselves getting ready to leave at 8:30 if the parents need to take off at 8.
Most school districts want to have students home before the evening rush "hour" starts. Mixing school buses and parent pickups with peak afternoon traffic is something they absolutely want to avoid.
It's hard to keep my attention for almost 8 hours. And generally a lot less and that's with coffee and generally being able to get up and stretch my legs. And, while the situation is much different, I've become a fan of shorter presentations, meetings, etc.
ADDED: I often think I couldn't handle high school today.
Looking back on high school, no wonder I was so damn bad at it and hated it so much. And depressed all the time. And probably picked up SAD that took me a decade beyond it to shake.
I'd quit a job as soon as I could find another, if it demanded of me what high school did. Hell, I'd quit based on the consistent 10+ hour days and constant due-tomorrow deadlines, let alone the rest of it like the before-the-sun's-up start time, having to ask permission to go take a piss, sitting in crappy chairs in bad lighting for back-to-back ~hour blocks all day, and having to keep "working" indefinitely with people who won't stop being shitheads in ways that'd get them fired from most any job inside a week. It's insanely terrible.
Like, there are multiple bad things about it that I've never had to tolerate in such abundance and variety even in low-skilled jobs I've held. WTF.
College and adult life are so much more chill than high school. It was a real shock, leaving there for the wider world. So glad the people who were like "this [shitty thing] is to prepare you for the real world, which is way harder and less forgiving!" or "enjoy it, because this is the best time of your life" were entirely wrong. I'd probably have offed myself by now, if they'd been right. Four years was barely tolerable—a lifetime of that, or worse? No, thanks.
High school's only benefit is a pseudo-forced social climate and not needing to compete for classes like you're buying concert tickets (the number of classes I was waitlisted for despite signing up the day of...).
Everything else is much worse for how I think. I don't get to choose how to time my schedule, the curriculum is mostly fixed (you would always have math/english/history, some language for 3/4 years. You only choose an elective and maybe 1 year of science) and homework tended to stack up constantly because every class was 1 hour M-F. And yea, as you mentioned it's absurd having 1 day due homework spring up when you may or may not be preparing for some other project, or test, or even competition.
You also were much more pressured against taking time to yourself. You can skip a class or take a sick day in "the real world" if you need a break or emergencies come up. those "perfect attendence" rewards were the worst grift of the education system.
Unfortunately for a lot of people work is probably a lot more like high school than we might wish. But, yeah, in college I mostly attended class, some I genuinely enjoyed more than others, spent a lot of time on extracurricular activities/sports which is where I generally formed lifelong friendships (and developed a lot of the skills I use day to day)--and squeaked through. And, as the alumni donations person I've been a friend of for almost 40 years who works for $SCHOOL likes to remind me, I've done well and $SCHOOL taught me a lot in general. And I've had a good career. Luck has played a role.
Glad you found your place. High school wasn’t quite as bad for me but I was constantly sick and battled migraines that stopped as soon as I left. Now I work hard, work long hours, but I’m happy and feel healthy and strong. It’s very different.
School for 6 year olds involves a lot of social recess time and playing with friends. 8 hours in total is not an unusual amount of time. But as far as instructional time goes, yes, it benefits older kids more.
If school wasn't also an important social benchmark that would make sense. But as it is, there is some benefit to setting a pace.
I do agree that we should encourage students to self pace themselves. Another aspect of school I had to de-program myself on: it's OKAY to repeat courses you are struggling on. Expensive, yes, but sometimes coming in a 2nd time gives you the perspective to start focus on the subtleties while you were struggling with the high level details the first time.
There's nothing keeping age peers from hanging out and being friends, just because they're at different levels in different subjects...
In actuality it's more likely that socialization would improve as kids weren't forced through stress periods where they were not permitted to socialize, grouped arbitrarily and explicitly set against each other in various programs (eg - sports, group assignments, etc)....
And that's without yet raising the fact that the kid who does well in language but not math would end up friends with the kid who does well in math but not language, helping each other and challenging each other to succeed in a positive fashion, rather than ending up pitted against each other by the fundamental structure of the class structure.
>There's nothing keeping age peers from hanging out and being friends, just because they're at different levels in different subjects
Nothing tangible. But your peers you do work with very much influences the kinds of peers that become your friends.
But that's tangential to the real point I was making: socializing around a bunch of different peers your age in a specific nigh mandatory environment helps develop a sense of public etiquette. How to socialize, how to figure out who you do/don't want to hang out with, how to manage arguments or de-escalate tension. Potentially delaying or skipping that can be catastrophic, and you can argue that there's so many people today that feel like they never got that.
This can theoretically be replicated outside of school. But given how few venues of loitering there are these days for adults, I don't have much faith that we'll create such places for minors.
>the kid who does well in language but not math would end up friends with the kid who does well in math but not language, helping each other and challenging each other to succeed in a positive fashion, rather than ending up pitted against each other by the fundamental structure of the class structure.
It's all theoretical. But my experience makes me much less optimistic of that outcome than you.
Applying behaviors borne directly of the current structure on to the outcomes from an entirely different structure is not the way we reason, is it?
It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have, as the current structure ensures suffering and pain for the majority as a result of the social structure established by the norms and systems.
At least under my suggestion those who would excel Could excel and get the hell out before they were irreparably harmed and held back by the fools and willfully stupid as we have now, let alone the fact that the "less capable" would have a real chance at leaving with a modest education rather than being shoved through and ending up in The real world either zero capacity for real thought, understanding and employability.
>Applying behaviors borne directly of the current structure on to the outcomes from an entirely different structure is not the way we reason, is it?
It's an inevitable result of reasoning. I can't know what I don't know. Short of the laws of physics, we can never truly predict the behaviors of a new universal model from scratch.
Regardless, I don't think human nature would change that drastically as a result of students being able to pace their learning. Greed, selfishness, and general malice may be lessened but not eradicated. Social castes would probably still exist as a remnant of various luck and circumstance of the elite established centuries ago.
>It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have
I never really disagreed, I just simply want to point out a less talked about point in the current educational system. It's not simply an institution of acedemia, nor a "glorified day care center" as others cynically put it. There's soft skills you don't really get except by engaging with other people, some you don't like. Some you may even outright hate.
I feel any alternative system that doesn't keep those soft skills in mind may face further issues down the road, even if it may or may not end up better than the current timeline.
You didn't actually apply the known correlaries though.
Kindergarten is about the only part of the current system which could be use as a reference for behavior, as after that all the structural features which _explicitly _ _induce_ the behaviors you reference are Forced on the kids.
So, using K as a reference, what xan we learn about free form education?
who is going to fund that? it's not just education its subsidized day care, and "it gets done when it gets done" is going to either result in a lot of 20 year old Seniors -- who are still on taxpayer funded schooling -- or else the bar gets lowered to push these kids through fast albeit at their own fast pace.
And how is your worst case scenario worse? Because the bar is already as low as it will go and instead of just leaving some behind we are actively holding a whole bunch back.
I could have graduated by 12 if they just let me go at the material, instead they had me drop out, in frustration at being forced to work at the pace of the stupidest and laziest, before returning to do exactly what I describe through an alternative education program which cost the system 5x as much per student as main track... and that without addressing that it would likely be cheaper due to fundamentally fewer teachers required per student as the teacher wouldn't be babysitting study hall like they are now but instead focused exclusively on the acts of teaching and grading.
I'm not sure I agree with your solution but I agree with he problem. No child left behind is idiotic. Some kids are just stupid, put them to work digging ditches or something. No point wasting a ton of manpower and stuff trying to teach them basic algebra, they'll never use it for anything anyway.
> The move has dramatically increased participation among traditionally marginalized children
This program may or may not be a fantastic idea, but "participation" is about the worst possible metric for measuring the overall impact of a mandatory program.
Are these children having better overall life and educational outcomes from this? Are they taking time and energy away from classes they want to pursue to struggle in math courses they might not be truly passionate about?
And what about its impact on the non-marginalized kids? Because "everybody" is now participating, are honors courses now slowed and dumbed down so actual high-achievers will be less prepared for their future?
If you would have read the article then you would know the answer to this:
> Before the change, three times as many White students as Black students enrolled in honors math; after the change, it was less than twice as many. Not perfect equity, but progress in that direction.
> But did all these new students actually learn the honors math? Yes, indeed they did:
> And the policy has not led to a decrease in student scores as some speculated: Last year’s 8th-grade Algebra I students had similar pass rates as those in years prior, the district said, with 95% of Hispanic students passing the test and 76% meeting grade-level proficiency; 91% of Black students passing and 65% meeting grade level and 95% of English learner students passing the state exam and 74% meeting grade level.
I did examine the article, and to me there's a few holes and question marks in what data was presented.
> For instance, they claimed that "Last year’s 8th-grade Algebra I students had similar pass rates as those in years prior" but the word "similar" is subjective. How about showing all of the stratified data in chronological order to make that determination for oneself? Did pass rates for the state test go from say 99% and reduce due to this? They don't mention the White race pass rates before and after this change, for example.
> The racial groups listed are Black, Hispanic, White, and Other. What is other? Are they Asians? That seems like the only place they'd fit, but the participation of "Other" before and after this change seems low for that group.
> This data tells us nothing about how the teachers are approaching teaching their courses in light of this change. Do they stop going over valuable material solely to focus teaching kids how to pass a state test so their metrics look good? (Is that what matters for their funding, by the way?) Are class sizes increasing or decreasing to make this change logistically work?
> Additionally, as I am not an educator from Texas, I don't know for certain, but the test itself seems rather dumbed down if a large portion of kids are passing it, but aren't meeting their grade level. Doesn't it raise an eyebrow that 91% of Black kids are passing the test, but only 65% of them are meeting their grade level?
> The article doesn't clarify if all Texas students take this test or just honors students, but it would be illuminating to see pass rates of this test in that school district from different groups before and after that change. If 95% of Hispanic students in this honors program are passing that test in this district after this change, what was the pass rate of Hispanics before that change?
Again, I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad program. It might be quite a good idea to really raise educational standards and force kids into tougher math programs. But the focus solely on "racial participation" makes this very suspect to me.
It's an odd combination of teaching kids too much in elementary school and too little in high. The children are exposed to a far more comprehensive curriculum at the expense of never practicing the skills enough to master them. As soon as summer resets their brains, they suddenly have large gaps in knowledge that slow next year's learning.
> As soon as summer resets their brains, they suddenly have large gaps in knowledge that slow next year's learning.
One loves to say that summer vacations are long so that pupils have time to fill the gaps for the next school year. If they don't use this time (or their parents don't urge them to), it is their problem.
> Nobody's spending their vacation studying if they can avoid it.
If you have huge gaps in the subject matter of some subjects, you hardly cannot avoid it (and your parents will likely take care that you cannot avoid it ;-) ).
meanwhile, my parent put me in summer school almost every year in some capacity. At least summer hours and classes are relaxed compared to the gauntlet of 6-7 different subjects 8 hours a day.
The results cited in the article suggest that either the answer is yes, or in fact "marginal students" are perfectly capable students who were being passed over.
The text of the article further suggests that many of the students who scored well on qualifying exams weren't taking the classes because they didn't have the parental involvement or default assumption that they would take it.
(Note that the opt-out group was selected from the general population based on the results of an exam; it wasn't a population-wide opt out. I suspect from your comment you didn't see that?)
students definitely are not all equally capable in one aspect for sure: their ability to hire or provide private tutoring outside of school hours. Cutting access to state-funded programs (such as algebra classes in middle school) just means the rich children get even more of a leg up on college admissions and life in general.
This isn’t what they did. What they did was automatically enroll kids with higher test scores into advanced classes, making it opt-out instead of opt-in.
Judging by the lack of hard numbers and some statistical fuckery they’re doing - no.
> Within two years of this policy, 94% of eligible students are taking these classes.
Preselection.
Additionally, about half of the entire student body took the advanced class.
Considering the fact that the advanced class is Algebra I, I’d wager that just being on the right half of the bell curve would be sufficient to pass. Half of the student population = the right half of the bell curve.
Additionally, I didn’t see whether they were doing individual tutoring, which would have an impact on the results.
Yes because I refuse to believe “stand and deliver” could not happen in real life!
Seriously tho I think it will. I’m sure a foundation is important in many fields but one can get pretty far by jumping in. I remember my high school physics teacher take us on a wild ride of quantum mechanics for three weeks. If nothing it opened up a lot of future reading
I'm fine with expecting more, but for those kids who just don't handle it well, it's not right to make them pariahs, just take the math down a notch. I saw kids treated as “less than” because they weren't making it in a certain level of math, and that always pissed me off. Likewise, I even had to report a calculus teacher once anonymously, I recorded the class with a mini-cassette (in the late 90s) recorder and slid it under the principal's door with a note. No the kid wasn't me, but he was a decent guy who I knew a little bit and knew he was trying hard but just couldn't get it.
STEM minded folks need to eat their own dog food; your sensibilities are not divine mandate.
The other billions don’t owe deference to scientists any more than they do priests.
No scientist is a divine being. Their attitudes can be very human; they think their knowledge and skills is irreplaceable and the social system while trying to pretend that’s objective and could never be leveraged in typically corrupt human ways given their very human being.
In the end you’re one of billions bleating for others to follow the path you lay out. Where is the real or imagine social obligation to specifically serve you or any of the rest of the people here who make up a tiny fraction of the species?
Others think you should learn to grow your own food and kill your steaks rather than exploit the labor of others.
The free market of ideas is not just for selling widgets but tent pole social movements.
It was you wonder if a foreign state adversary is influencing us to stupify our next generation. I'll keep my comments civil here but its pretty obvious who is behind this.
If it's all that obvious, you should have no problem naming who's behind this and providing evidence to support your claim, rather than merely fearmongering to no useful end.
I don't know. These "equity" arguments are indistinguishable from a deliberate attack.... the sort of attack you'd expect from a country that, having been unable to either compete with the West or conquer it, is well-known to have resorted to memetic warfare.
I'm not claiming to know anything. I'm just asking that those who do make such claims be a little less gnomic in their commentary, so that the rest of us can evaluate whether or not you're talking nonsense.
And if I knew whether or not it was nonsense, I wouldn't have prefaced the post with "I don't know." I was just suggesting that proxiful-wash's downvoted post wasn't completely out of the question.
The priors are suspicious enough: might a country that attempted to get the world to believe that the US created the HIV virus [1], successfully influenced a razor's-edge Presidential election [2], and plotted to stir up domestic racial conflict [3] try to handicap the US by originating and propagating counterproductive educational ideologies? It's certainly believable, but there's no smoking gun.
You're putting "plotted to" and "successfully" to a lot of work here, on behalf of claims your sources appear at great pains not to make or even imply.
You seem to take this whole concept very seriously, so maybe you can help me understand why. Out of the idea that Russians are responsible for all of America's worst problems, what endgame do you see that actually improves our situation? What specific and relevant changes in domestic and foreign policy would you prescribe?
Historically speaking on western social media, making a bold claim on something as generic as American primary education being influenced by foreign powers without any real evidence does tend to go down conspiracy territory. Most conpiracy theories aren't made in good faith, no.
Also isn't particularly good faith to respond with ad-hominem when asked to prove claims, which tends to happen with conspiracy that has little/no firm evidence attached.
It's a little rich of you to plead good faith at this point, don't you think? You're not that far out over your skis with those sources by mistake; they simply do not say what you claim they say. But I am legitimately curious what endgame you have in mind here.
I don't know if it's "obvious" - the United States has at least two large enemies that have the means, motive, and opportunity to do this - picking between them is difficult.
One thing's for sure, though - it's pretty unreasonable to automatically discount the possibility of foreign influence, as others in this thread are doing.
A common phrase of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is at work here. Those held to lower standards will fall to lower standards, deprived of the resources and support to achieve. The article attached provides a fantastic explanation.
For those who think this is hyperbole, see [1] for a mathematician taking down the framework.
California's new standards were written by folks without a background in math nor neuroscience. They misquote neuroscience papers [2] while making mathematical mistakes in their policy paper.
Oh my, I read your first link in its entirety and, "Yikes."
The Public comment #5 section regarding chapter 12 (which covers homework and assessments) was especially shocking.
Chapter 12 in the 2005 version of the CMF was 5 pages long. The same chapter in the current draft is 70 pages long, almost entirely due to a slew of opinions against homework and other testing practices.
The entire CMF draft was (and still is even after corrections) littered with improper citations that at times entirely contradict the opinion it's meant to support.
I find it the height of irony that a group of educators arguing against homework appear to have... not done their homework.
This brings to the forefront a concern I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread: let's put aside how such a policy might affect any particular student's performance in school... what kind of adults will this policy create?
Imo, policy like this will create adults who put in about as much effort into their work as the 20 people employed to oversee this iteration of the CMF. A single professor did their work for them, and even with his help they still haven't fixed it.
"Oh, you got an F on your assignment? No problem! Just turn it in again next week and I'll give you an A."
To be clear, the specific policy I just mentioned really is part of the document - allowing students to always redo work for a better grade.
That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later". In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".
Homework also normalizes the idea that things will be expected from you in this world if you are to be employed. It's not only about engaging with the material, it's also about practicing being a hard-working and fastidious human. Our grandparents might have said that doing homework "builds character", and I would agree with them.
Finally, the idea presented by the CMF draft that homework just isn't very useful is absolutely wrong. Case in point, piano practice. The only way to get better at playing the piano is to practice. The difference between someone who pokes around on the keyboard every blue moon and someone who practices daily is stark.
Some might argue that becoming proficient at playing a piano is inherently different than becoming proficient at math, to those folks I would ask: How is training muscle memory and engaging with new material so different between the two?
It's almost like the reason they argue against homework isn't for logical nor evidence based reason but underlying personal biases....
Hmm... what could a group who enjoy 1/4 of the year off from their primary duties and arguably have never been outside the school system (12 to Post secondary and back to k-12, nothing between but fun) have as an underlying incentive?
It couldn't be that they just don't want to mark the work, could it? It couldn't be that they expect children to do work after an 8 hr work day, where the teachers waste most of the time either engaged pointless self aggrandizing and power games or otherwise self involved, but refuse to hold themselves to the same standards could it?
>That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later". In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".
I feel that's a much more philosophical POV than you let on. But let's digress from that argument of redemption and reparations for now.
While there are certainly some careers where you don't get do-overs, I see the other extreme happening more with the current state of mind; they realize that they are out of time, feel like they can't extend deadlines, so they just say "fuck it", throw out some sloppily put together report or attend a meeting without the knowledge necessary, take their D in stride and move on.
You can't always delay in life either, but I think as a society we at least shouldn't shame when certain non-mission critical aspects of work need more time to cook (be it in the project or the people involved).
> I feel that's a much more philosophical POV than you let on. But let's digress from that argument of redemption and reparations for now.
It's not at all clear to me what you are trying to communicate in the paragraph I quoted above.
> While there are certainly some careers where you don't get do-overs, I see the other extreme happening more with the current state of mind; they realize that they are out of time, feel like they can't extend deadlines, so they just say "fuck it", throw out some sloppily put together report or attend a meeting without the knowledge necessary, take their D in stride and move on.
I'm also confused about what you are communicating here. Is this a simple lamentation, or are you trying to make an argument?
> To be clear, the specific policy I just mentioned really is part of the document - allowing students to always redo work for a better grade.
If you've learned the material and fulfill the requirements, and the course is still ongoing, why should it matter you were late?
Are you teaching the subject, or is [literally every course all the time] really mostly a study in time management?
(hint: it's not for the student's sake, it's about managing teacher time and resources. Which is obviously necessary, but not otherwise positive)
> That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later".
I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.
> In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".
Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.
> Homework also normalizes the idea that things will be expected from you in this world if you are to be employed.
Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work. Nor constant artificial deadlines that never let you truly relax. Constant stress is bad for humans, it's not something that hardens you, and pointlessly subjecting people to it "just because" is not just useless but counter productive, because you get blunted. It's important to have something extra to tap into when shit truly hits the fan and it's time to step up, but the contrast gets lost if it's a neverending blur.
> If you've learned the material and fulfill the requirements, and the course is still ongoing, why should it matter you were late?
The same reason it matters if you are late meeting deadlines for a customer or your job, because there are consequences. Turning in a paper late to school may not cause you to lose a client or get fired, but the fact remains that something was required of you and it was not delivered. Imo, students should be thankful to learn from their teachers that "yes, there really are consequences when you don't perform in your role as expected", as opposed to learning this from their (probably previous) employer.
> I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.
The fact that some people give up because they weren't able to meet the requirements of a class does not justify lowering the requirements of that class for everyone else. You're attending a class, the class isn't attending to you. If that's unacceptable then it sounds like you're probably in the wrong class.
> Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.
Right. Which is why it is valuable to learn about consequences while you're still "practicing" in school.
> Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work.
You don't have "most jobs", so that statement is not based on evidence. Moreover, I didn't suggest that jobs require taking home work, simply that homework for students reinforces the idea that work will be expected from them. You mention how stress negatively affect people... can you imagine how stressed out a person who has never done homework in their life would be if they were suddenly given a huge workload? Contrast this with someone who is used to spending hours on end studying, for whom the task would likely seem much more surmountable.
Work deadlines, at least where I've worked and with some exceptions for rare hard deadlines, are rather more fluid. In the sense that they might have to be pushed, or the work adjusted, because they were too optimistic or circumstances change. Because your boss knows you know what you're doing and aren't talking out of your ass when you give them a heads up things are not on track.
More importantly they're there for some legit reason, not "so you'll learn the importance of hardship".
Getting stuff done and having an impact is motivating enough, producing worthless schoolwork of no use to anyone is not.
> lowering the requirements
They're the same requirements, just with a different, looser, time constraint. You couldn't get a better grade without actually learning the material.
Performing tasks on time, managing time, etc is incredibly important, obviously. But in an ideal world with more resources there'd be a time and a place for practicing it, reasoning about it, actually studying it, not this "absorbing it by osmosis from a constant grind" where it's all artificial. Work smart, not hard.
Consequences are still there, you still have to perform, it'd just be less time constrained.
Why would a person who has never done homework in their life be more stressed over a huge workload? They're used to working all day, _in school_. Just like how they'll be working all day, at work. Obviously I'm not talking about not having assignments/papers to write (preferably with at least some time allotted during school hours), but the kind of busywork that is the bulk of homework.
It's not fair to other students if there's a no-penalty late policy. If some students turn in their work on time, and others turn it in late, it's not fair to the former if the latter have zero penalty. The reason for this is that the students who turned in the homework on time had to make other sacrifices in order to do so. For example, they might have studied less for a test in another class in order to turn in their homework on time.
This unfairness exists unless all teachers allow for late submission for all assignments and re-taking of all tests. If this were allowed, then students would all take tests multiple times, so they could cram for the specific questions on the test (not the entirety of the course materials — the rest of the material could be forgotten/never learned).
Right but that'd actually be one of the benefits. Getting perfect grades in high school for me without spending all my time doing school stuff was a mad juggling of focusing/neglecting classes on rotation, always ensuring to get an A by the smallest possible margin, knowing how to properly front-load and have each teacher thinking of me as the kind of guy who gets an A, so I could get away with performing poorly at times before making a comeback.
A weird dance I happened to be good at, but not a skill to cherish or practice _because real work is rarely overloaded enough to make it necessary_
School should be about learning, not whatever meta bullshit the above was, at least for me.
Having more flexibility over pace would go a long way I think.
I've gone around in a few circles thinking about this. My kids curriculum is really different from when I was a kid. They've almost completely dropped grammer, spelling and cursive writing. They're teaching a lot more problem solving techniques in math. Some of this surprised me, but some of it I realized was actually pretty great.
I think there's some really necessary attempts to go back to first principles on education. Some steps will be missteps but I'm really happy some people are willing to take some risky efforts. Do kids take math class because they need to learn math? "But teacher, I'll always have a calculator". Damn right. A calculator and Wikipedia and chatgpt. Remembering the quadratic equation is literally useless knowledge to retain. "More math" isn't an end goal to anything aside from the 0.01% who will pursue math as a career and keep the wiki pages up to date for the rest of us.
So what the hell should kids be learning? Good question. I'm not really sure but I'm open minded about the answer.
>"But teacher, I'll always have a calculator". Damn right. A calculator and Wikipedia and chatgpt. Remembering the quadratic equation is literally useless knowledge to retain.
Memorizing the exact formula of the Quadratic equation may not be necessary - knowing that the quadratic equation exists and what it is does is the useful part. Even more useful is to recognize a problem and realize the quadratic equation applies to it.
Trigonometry or calculus are better examples of this. Memorizing every formula and then promptly forgetting about them 5 minutes after passing the test is not useful but learning the concepts and the fundamentals and how they apply to solving a whole slew of problems is the useful part. Algebra is extremely abstract (especially if you are a school pupil - "I'll never use this in the real world") but understanding it unlocks a whole lot of higher level conceptual ways of thinking and approaching problem solving.
You'll have far better success using a calculator (or chat GPT or Wikipedia) if you know not just what to punch into it by the why as well.
> "But teacher, I'll always have a calculator". Damn right. A calculator and Wikipedia and chatgpt. Remembering the quadratic equation is literally useless knowledge to retain.
Remembering the quadratic equation allowed you to make an educated argument against its usefulness, so it isn't "literally" useless (badum bum psh).
While I agree that there is tons of room for improvement on how/what/when we teach students different subjects, I think we should be very cautious about offloading subjects to tools before students have a firm grasp of the material.
In my opinion, one of the greatest benefits of deeply engaging with a variety of subjects is getting into the habit of asking "why". I think this is important because it encourages students to dig deeper. I can only speak for myself, but the times I have learned the most is by far when I took an interest and started asking how and why things work.
Imo, it's okay that students engage with complex subjects that they will never use, if for no other reason than that it will provide ample opportunities for them to ask why. Perhaps somewhere along the way they will discover that they are in fact in the small minority who will pursue math as a career.
>"More math" isn't an end goal to anything aside from the 0.01% who will pursue math as a career and keep the wiki pages up to date for the rest of us.
I feel like that's the point of primary education. It's a sample board of various topics and subjects to help you figure out what you like. I sure as hell wouldn't be in my career if I wasn't forced to struggle on the quadratic formula for years on end. Meanwhile, I'm sure some bio/chem high schoolers could run circles around me for how much of that I retained. It depends on the student.
>So what the hell should kids be learning?
we'll certainly never come to a consensus, but I think the primary 4 subjects taught are a fine enough base. You should understand basic arithmetic and how to speak your country's native language. You should have some underlying basis of science and how to approach experimenting as well as an understanding of the history of your country and a general world history. so general K-8 education feels fine.
it's secondary education that has you really go out in the weeds. If I could choose classes there the way I could choose in college, I'm not sure if I would have given my self 4 years of english and history, nor bothered with further biology and chemistry. Hell, the 1 quarter of english and bio/chem I was forced to take in college felt like too much (I remember literally nothing about those classes). Things by high school become less strictly defined in my eyes.
> It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family.
But it does! Very much. I just don't understand why the US tries everything other than fixing the most glaring cause. Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles.
In my opinion, much of this comes down to blind empathy. Folks are more worried about hurting people’s feelings than about their life outcomes. They would rather “lean in” and embrace the huge rise in single parent households than push back, even with the knowledge that these social changes have resulted in millions of children living in poverty who otherwise would not have! It’s absolutely bananas.
What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like? Christian fundamentalism? Think about this from a perspective of getting positive outcomes from the actual world that exists. Divorce happens. Unplanned pregnancy happens. Family planning is being actively dismantled by the same people who are pushing for increased privatization of schooling and decreases in social safety nets. I don't think that's a coincidence.
I think being overly sympathetic is infinitely preferable to merciless cynicism. Removing poverty is also much more preferable than, what?, making it harder to divorce? We could probably makes huge strides in education outcomes by adopting universal healthcare and free school lunches so single parents aren't so burdened.
> What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like?
A previous poster spelled it out:
> by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles
You seem to be thinking of "pushing back" as some sort of attack upon single parents, when I believe that the original spirit of the comment was more along the lines of:
Let's strive to spread awareness of the myriad of benefits two parents can provide in a child's life.
Let's try to move the conversation an inch or two away from 'my happiness above all else' and slightly more towards 'sometimes being part of a family requires sacrifice.'
Hell, let's create a national holiday dedicated to households with two parents raising children together as a team.
Let's remind people that they aren't freaks for not getting divorced as soon as the initial spark died down. That it's okay to continue trying to make things work for the benefit of their children.
So often today I encounter the sentiment that "there are so many fish in the sea, and it's so easy to find them, why bother putting effort into it if it isn't perfect from the get go?"
In my opinion, the prevalence of this school of thought is harmful to the propagation and stability of two parent families. American society at some point became so obsessed with "self care" that, you guessed it - they forgot about the children.
Your post is content-free, and it says much about the value of your thoughts. This is not a problem of emotions, except in that it's a useful tool for others to manipulate your emotions. The only effective solution would be to subsidize these relationships via taxes, ideally to the point where one partner can devote themselves to childcare. In this society, you want something, you pay for it. You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem, but I suspect you'll find an answer that lets you keep thinking that you're thinking, rather than being played like a fiddle.
>his is not a problem of emotions, except in that it's a useful tool for others to manipulate your emotions.
we do it with every other form of advertisement, why not use it to encourage good lifestyles too?
> You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem
simple:
- they aren't concerned about the problem to begin with. Be it apathy, ignorance, or malice. There are different solutions depending on the cause.
- they are, as mentioned above, more afraid of upsetting single families by imposing what can arguably be a healthier family dynamic
- the school board feels that issues with family are outside their purview so they do not even consider it, despite the fact that parents are the biggest strain on any given school teacher.
Maybe take your own advice? They at least gave propositions, while you are simply engaging in rhetorical attacks without contributing anything worth a conversation. What does "you want something, you pay for it" mean in a conversation about government funded education? We're all already paying for it.
Yes, I'm sure you have wonderful reasons for wanting to legislate your morality. No, that person offered zero in the way of concrete suggestions, and it staggers belief to see how you would even think that. The immediate subject at hand is not government funded education but family structures, and I was pretty explicit about the solution; since you seem not to have the correct context I suggest re-reading this discussion more carefully.
> Your post is content-free, and it says much about the value of your thoughts.
It's hard for me to get behind the logic of someone who opens their response with a direct personal attack. I stopped reading as soon as you started making abusive comments (the very first sentence). I didn't deserve to be told that my thoughts are without merit, and when you resorted to saying so it really did tell more about you than it ever could me.
I think the person you are responding to may have forgotten they are no longer posting in the Reddit tab. I've been on this site for a long time - unfortunately these vitriolic types have been bleeding over into this forum more than ever the last few years.
No idea whether it's conservative or liberal as I'm not real enthusiastic with the red/blue team stuff. Emotional is probably the best way I can describe it.
I'm saying you have no evidence for your ideas. I doubt any exists. And it seems tantamount to other disproven theories like violent video games and heavy metal music are corrupting the youth.
Stop incentivizing single parenthood. This reestablishes social norms around staying together as they (the parents) need each other. Trying to approximate that via social engineering and creating clients of the state has failed for 50+ years.
There’s 0 evidence of that. What has happened is the lower class family structure has been decimated as generation after generation of mother becomes a client of the state and dads aren’t around because they aren’t actually needed. The kids have not benefited from this (there’s no metric that shows this and in fact the achievement gap has widened and prison outcomes are increased for lower class kids) and in fact are probably worse off.
But, the state has created a massive bureaucracy to manage this and gobs of money to get distributed to both public and private managers of these clients. Yeah, it’s about the kids lol.
You're telling me there's zero evidence of my claim and yet you are going deeper down the hole of thoroughly disproven theories. Child poverty numbers in the US were the best ever recorded just prior to the pandemic and you can draw very direct lines from government anti-poverty programs as being a major contributing factor.
All that chart shows is how they have successfully ganked more and more money from taxpayers. Where does it show outcomes have been improved or that the outcomes of kids from single mothers (those that have been "lifted out of poverty") are improving relative to traditional families? The outcomes I see VS 75 years ago is that incarceration rates are through the roof, premature death due to drug use is through the roof, and suicide is too.
The fact that being "lifted out of poverty" is somehow seen as a victory when the state has aggressively promoted and incentivized single motherhood for the last 50+ years is astounding. Because that's all a dad was good for. Things.
I'm not sure if it's men that allowed this to happen or if women just fell for it. But it's clearly indicative of the massive decline the West has seen.
75 years ago? For reference, Ruby Bridges is 68 years old as of today and active on Instagram. If you think too many single moms are the biggest cultural shift of the last 75 years, then you are just drawing absolutely arbitrary connections.
Drug use, drug convictions, drug deaths are a big shift from then for sure. Some of that is deliberately abusive policy-making by legislators who had been constitutionally barred from segregating so they pivoted to incarceration. Some of it just that we're way, way better at making narcotics than we used to be. None of that seems to be caused by single parents so I really don't know what point you're making here.
You still haven't come close to explaining who has been promoting single parent households. And now I'm forced to ask what decline has the west seen? Almost everything you're complaining about is specifically about America. And there are few if any practical measures by which are declining. This very much reads like a lament for white privilege.
Means tested welfare actively discourages marriage in poor people. As we’ve added more and more of these programs the divorce rate of poor people has skyrocketed. This has actively destroyed their communities and made them reliant on the state.
The welfare state should reward and incentivize marriage. The tax system does for middle and high earners and you see lower rates of single parenthood. The fact you can lose benefits if you’re lower income and married is the worst possible incentive.
Citation needed. Absence of a legal marriage does not preclude co-habitation and co-parenting. Especially for parents who may be doing something for the benefit of the children. Furthermore, if you created incentives to marry, you'd just be inundated with fake marriages done for financial benefit (a la citizenship marriages). Go google the phrase "medical divorce" as another data point. If you are worried the system is being gamed, adding more rules and loopholes is unlikely to solve anything. And you have to ask what outcome your are trying to incentive. This thread started talking about educational outcomes for kids. Marriage is not a particular useful end unto itself. I'd posit that just adopting universal healthcare would increase the marriage rate and do so by improving outcomes.
However, a majority of the newer studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or a positive effect on fertility rather than none at all. Because of this shift in findings, the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes.
Based on this review, it is clear that a simple majority of the studies that have been conducted to date show a significant correlation between welfare benefits and marriage and fertility, suggesting the presence of such behavioral incentive effects.
But it's also just obvious.
And then the effects of kids from single-mother homes:
This is all widely known and generally agreed on. That the outcomes of kids from single-mother homes are far worse than married coupled homes when you control for income, etc.
it all comes down to Mother's decision to sustain pregnancy in unstable relationship.
Currently America incentivizes single mother childhood because all social handouts are increased if 1) mother is poor/low income 2) has dependents 3) more dependents => more handouts
Things like Section 8, Medicaid, SNAP, EBT - were supposed to have social safety net - the lowest standard that any mother can rely on.
It ended up that many mothers cannot rely on anything else.
once you are in the hood and on government's program - there is no incentive to leave them. People can't even get a fulltime job, because that would mean disqualification from Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, EBT, etc
The vicious cycle of black poverty continues... This is what keeps black people locked in the hood:
1. Black women get locked by social welfare and kids out of wedlock
2. Black males get locked by adolescent crime (culture of "background checks" with lifetime record of crime), keep themselves in the jail system forever / outside legal employment system
This reads like rational debate, but is really just pure conservative fantasy and at least a little racist. Every time you mention black people in the hood, I assume it means you have never been within 100 miles of an urban environment and have no idea what you're talking about. You act like poverty and broken families only exist with black people.
Welfare Queens don't exist. Absolutely no human being in existence since the New Deal has considered having a baby to be a profit-making venture. I can submit that maybe some, but vanishingly few consider a life on government assistance to be sustainable. The reason something like Medicaid can be a trap is because private healthcare in this country is capitalist hellscape. ACA made the miniscule effort to raise the Medicaid eligibility window and half the country rejected it. Programs like Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP are intended to prevent descent in penury and/or to protect the completely innocent children. Less so the parents.
Your opinion is really just the lowest form of victim blaming. These problems are almost entirely unique to America in the developed world. We have undeniable objective proof that being more generous with benefits improves everyone's lives and does not breed dependence.
You are exaggerating my point, but on the way you exaggerate yourself and make false arguments.
If welfare queens dont exist - then how do you call beneficiaries of these programs like meeicaid?
Poverty exists in white and asian families, but interesting fact - only in black hoods it leads to high crime, high fatality, high incarceration rates.
How do you explain the fact that poor asian neighborhoods dont have crime and have much better achievements among kids?
And I am not sure that more handouts will help, because these handouts come from taxpayers and US a lot of Us taxpayers will be against it
> If welfare queens dont exist - then how do you call beneficiaries of these programs like meeicaid?
Uh, "beneficiaries"?
I literally gave you a wall of citations that they do help. A lot of taxpayers being against it is a political argument. Of course they will. They've been fed lies by politicians who have given them fallacious rationalizations for why they don't have have any responsibility to promoting an equitable society. It's called the "I got mine" theory of civics. If you just don't _want_ to do anything, then go ahead and say it. Just stop pretending that greedy self-interest is anything but that.
It turns out that a lot of what makes a relationship work is also what causes the children of 2-parent families to do better. Namely, if you remove the stress of scrambling just to make ends meet, and remove food and housing and healthcare and employment insecurity, then people have more time to spend on their families. And provided the parents aren't terrible people, that leads to better outcomes, more stable marriages, etc etc.
Its very easy to say "if we could just keep more parents together..." as if the availability of divorce after giving birth was the problem. Solve the major reasons why relationships fail after giving birth, and you'll likely create the situation where kids have more engaged parents too.
there is relationship (as in one night stand) and there is lifelong relationship.
There is fundamental conflict:
1. All people (especially young) want hook-ups due to hormones and stuff, as many as possible. These leads to pregnancies and kids.
2. Family requires you to limit your desires only to your partners and create lifelong commitment, which means responsibilities (not only for yourself, but for your partners and kids).
There is mismatch fundamentally. Either hookups culture needs to die, or kids have to be allowed only by stable families
The birth rate (especially the teenage birth rate) has been dropping for the last 20 years. But sure, it's hookup culture that's causing single parent households, and not an evolution of how people of child-rearing age think about marriage, or that the changing shape of the economy means that marriage-as-a-mainly-financial-arrangement is dying a long-overdue death. It's definitely not that legalizing so-called no-fault divorces allows women (especially mothers) to escape abusive situations that are, for one reason or another, impossible to prosecute as such. And that's all to say nothing of the known impact from over-policing of low income communities.
Dropping birth rate is not a problem at all, Europe Scandinavia Australia has dropping birth rate but much better social situation.
The rest of your argument is incoherent and does not have a point, so I dont event understand what is it about.
Overpolicing is a myth, because cops are policing where crime actually happens. Doesnt make sense for police to patrol law abiding medium/high class neighborhoods if crime doesnt happen there. Police must be present where criminals live, this is actually the only correct approach
Eg. Police might excessively arrest in particular communities as a form of overbearing bullying .. and the arrest and conviction rates in these areas climb.
There is much written about this, your take in your comment above seems naive at best.
The world is rarely as first order simple as you appear to believe it to be.
Of interest (although admittedly not all that compelling as it's a small rich unicorn area)
The only causal link between less police leading to less crime: is fewer police reports. People give up reporting crime if police is nowhere to be found.
Look at san frasicko: people wont even bother registering crime if their car window broke or cat stolen.
On paper crime rate is lower, in reality it is different.
Your claim is that "hook up culture" is causing all these kids to grow up single-parent households. This flies in the face of all kinds of studies that show that, starting with millenials, kids are waiting longer to have sex, and are having fewer partners than e.g. baby boomers. At the same time, young adults are waiting longer to get married than baby boomers, are getting married less often, and once married are getting divorced at a lower rate than their parents generation. They're also having fewer children.
And yet, the number of unwed mothers has steadily risen in the past 50 years, only plateauing in the last 10 or 15 (at or about the time "hookup culture" became a thing that people clutched their pearls over). Why is that? I hypothesized, in my post, that there's an "(1) evolution of how people of child-rearing age think about marriage, or that (2) the changing shape of the economy means that marriage-as-a-mainly-financial-arrangement is dying a long-overdue death. (3) It's definitely not that legalizing so-called no-fault divorces allows women (especially mothers) to escape abusive situations that are, for one reason or another, impossible to prosecute as such"
So let's break those down.
Point 1 is sort of indisputable. Young people are waiting longer to get married (but also getting divorced less). Clearly, people are being more careful in who they choose to settle down with, including who they have children with.
Point 2 I claim is driven by the fact that single women are no longer obliged to treat their job as a match-making opportunity. Women make enough in the job market, and have enough jobs available to them, to not enter into marriages strictly as financial partnerships, that carry the obligation of sex and child rearing.
Point 3 is subtler, but also the main reason why just discouraging divorce will, I believe, actually lead to worse outcomes for children. Thanks to the various advances in women's rights over the last 100 years, a woman can actually get a divorce from an abusive spouse, without requiring police cooperation. This is huge. We are on a downward trend for domestic abuse, and a lot of that is because an abused partner can actually leave (and why you saw a spike in domestic violence during the COVID lockdowns) without the police getting involved. So the options are "have a single parent", or "grow up in an abusive household". Given how frequently abusers are themselves victims of prior abuse, I'd argue that growing up in a single-parent household is, ultimately, the lesser of two evils.
Speaking of police and their ability to choose not to make an arrest for a given event, there's my point about over-policing low-income communities. A person from a high-income community can get busted over 1.01 ounces of weed, post bail, and be back to work the next morning, then plea it down or have the charges dismissed, provided the police even stop them to begin with or think that an arrest is worthwhile. Meanwhile, a person from a low-income community has no choice but to take the months or years of jail time, for the same charge. And since we say "put police where the crime is", the police are themselves more likely to stop a "suspicious" person, and arrest them, because the police think there's more crime there too, and "going easy on them will just encourage them". All of this adds up to parents ending up in jail when they should be raising their kids, on charges that other people aren't even held for.
your argument is only true for normal, trouble-free, law abiding, functional families. You are right, millenials take their time to have babies later, because they plan, because it is expensive to have kid etc etc.
You are probably projecting yourself as a well-off individual to the society.
this is not true for low SES stratum: the girls in poor hoods start hookups in middle/high-school. They get pregnant at high school, have unplanned babies without father etc etc.
It is almost as if we are talking about two different Americas: white & black. Medium+ class and Poor class
Speaking as the brother to a teen mother, I am saying you're wrong, and the data backs me up. Speaking as a person who was quite poor in his twenties and early thirties, I'm saying you're wrong, and the data backs me up.
Teenage pregnancies are dropping, across the board. Children are waiting longer to start having sex, across the board. Young people are having fewer sexual partners ACROSS THE BOARD.
> as a brother to a teen mother, I am saying you're wrong,
> as a person who was quite poor
You literally proved my point, brother, maybe trend is going down slightly over time but there are still significant number of unplanned pregnancies mainly in hoods, mainly among Medicaid beneficiaries etc etc
That may have been true when my sister gave birth in 1992, but the data is clear, the teenage birth rate has dropped by a factor of 4-6x in the last 35 years.
I think increased awareness of Birth control already solved this problem. Almost every first world country's population is starting to fall under the rate needed to increase the population while most third world countries contribute to the overall global population increase.
I'd also say the lack of stigma around abortions, but ofc we know how that's going in the U.S...
My mothers been an educator for many many years now. She says the single biggest factor is parental involvement.
But hey convincing both parents to be gone all day and slave away for the corporate masters was smashing the patriarchy and breaking the glass ceiling or something, and the fact that it doubled the labor pool causing supply to go up is entirely unrelated to the fact that wages started stagnating at the same point.
But really what use is a family anyway, I mean who needs that when you can have a "community" on a platform that is dedicated to "content" for you to "consume".
Parental involvement works when there's just one parent, too, it's just harder on the single parent because they have to work so hard to be able to provide for themselves and their child; and, it only gets worse with the struggles the everyday person experiences - lower relative wages, etc.
You realize that even by applying your question to a sad scenario you are still asking the basic question, "How does parental involvement work," right?
Parental involvement "works" by taking an active interest in your child's activities and development. That's it.
“Parental involvement” as a term is misleading because it assumes there are parents and you just need to start involving them ( like Asian tiger moms are super involved, now lets just make other parents befome as involved).
More correct term would be “dysfunctional family”. Family where one parent is incarcerated, another is drug addict etc etc.
This term more correctly describes situation that kid is alone in his education aspirations and needs state assistance
You speak of parents who have landed themselves in prison and become addicted to drugs as if they have no responsibility for these things. "Parental involvement" will always be waiting right where they left it if ever those parents can manage to stop doing drugs or going to prison.
My problem with this term is it centers around parents, regardless of whether they are alive/free/sober/gainfully employed/mentally stable/etc.
But kids are going to school today and now, they cannot wait for their parents to get out of jail and get sober. These kids need solution asap and waiting for their parents to show up and get involved is a waste of time - and is a primary reason why US is failing kids from low SES and maintaining pipeline of people from hood to jail.
> My problem with this term is it centers around parents
To be fair, the term in question is "parental involvement". It's understandable that some might be confused about why the "parental" part of the phrase is offensive.
The children who *are* in a single-parent household do also need to be helped, and demanding that their parents "duh, get married, forehead" doesn't help the individuals that need that help. And there are a lot of single parents who will never want to have a significant other ever again for a multitude of entirely valid reasons.
I find it absolutely bizarre that you framed this situation as other people "demanding" that parents get married. Since when is opining that two parent households are beneficial for a child's development the equivalent of some dystopian society in which marriage is a forced affair?
It's hard to think of a less charitable interpretation. It makes me wonder, what is your point?
> Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families
I agree 100%. But how would the US government fix this? The only political movement that I'm aware of that focusses on stable two-parent families are the conservative Christians. Or are there any others?
You will get similar focus on two parent households from Orthodox Jews, Muslims, LDS, JW and several other religious groups other than conservative Christians. However, your point is still the same. With today's stance of "separation of church and state" the US government will not promote this ideology of a two parent household being desired.
Our 41st president had a Faith-Based Initiative which was successful in many areas. It cost the tax-payer 75% less to have a faith-based organization head up a relief program than it did for a similar governmental program. Why? Because it was a volunteer based organization and they were incentivized to keep costs low.
- Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they get to college (maybe the advanced students can learn single-variable calculus in high school).
- For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions.
- In order to take calculus in high school, you need to at least take algebra I (and hopefully geometry) in middle school. Wealthier parents understand they are playing the college admissions game early on, so they make sure in elementary school that their kids will be able to get on the algebra track in middle school.
- Getting on the algebra track is thus the first really consequential part of the college admissions game, it happens much earlier than the rest, and takes real scheming by parents to make sure their young kids are prepared. [actually true]
- If you could just make this impossible, it will even the playing field in a huge way and knock down one of the biggest hurdles in college admissions for people from lower-SES backgrounds. [also probably true]
- The only downside is that students will no longer have time to cover calculus in high school, which doesn't matter anyway because it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus (very advanced math!), and they can just learn it in college.
This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. It has elements of truth to it which are worth paying attention to. The problem is just that actually, it's really useful and important to learn calculus in high school, and more people need this opportunity.
edit: I thought it was clear that I think a lot more high school students should be learning calculus as early as possible, and that "no advanced math" is a terrible policy, but I guess not...
With that kind of thinking though we can reach logical results like:
- writing prose and composition is unnecessary, as at best one will write on slack and social media;
- doing pushups, calisthenics, or running is unnecessary: few jobs require that;
- learning about how the government works, civics or sociology or psychology should be skipped: all these are taken care by the employer that is not going to let you go vote anyways (still don't understand how/why it is not a mandatory holiday, but what do I know);
- debates should be banned: promotes arguing against cops and employers both having detrimental outcomes;
- art is for the rich and private schools: poor populous should not be dreaming;
I suggest -- my 2 humble cents -- the writers of this abomination take a class in logic. Unfortunately, that is math and requires fundamentals they don't want covered.
P.S. My grad school anecdote: our perception and experiences as "international" grad students of the math understanding of incoming undergrads was abysmal to put it lightly. I don't want to be in any future TA shoes.
I don’t see how that is a logical conclusion. There’s such a thing as opportunity cost and interests. If someone wants to learn something, they should, but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else. There are basic things that everyone should know, like reading. Instead of calculus, logic would be better, and especially probability and statistics.
Essentially what I am saying is suppose the politicians' reasoning, that @currymj suspects and offered above, and I agree with them is the likely one, was to be true.
Then the word calculus (and university admission perhaps with other goals in life) can be treated as variable(s). There is no inherent reason the set of deduction rules are dependent on the choice of topic. Let us denote the reasoning for brevity as a proposition p(s, g) with s\in Subjects g \in Goals:
Start substituting other subjects in there. Their reasoning goes that for an s \in Subjects to be in AcceptedSubjects \subset Subjects it must hold that:
p(s,g):=\(For the majority of students), \exists g \in Goals: p'(s,g). Where p(s,g) relaxes also the goal here -- doesn't have to be college admissions. Then start adding art, debates, writing and other topics I mentioned.
>but the problem is forcing those to learn something when they would rather learn something else.
so, most of my high school classes? I'm not against a more customizable high school experience, but that seems like a harder sell than trying to convince these boards why this initiative is a horrible idea.
>Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.
Depends, I guess. Physics has the same issue. Where introductory physics can be taught with formulas, AP physics expects you to understand the calculus behind the formulas and not simply spout out random factoids. There's no particularly best approach here.
I agree. Though I loved calculus (and took it in HS and college) my brother hated math in general and forcing him to take it or other advanved math class and get a bad grade is unfair.
It doesn’t, especially at the introductory level. Sure, at a certain point, it would be needed, but that would be for someone wanting to become a statistician, not the general population.
To be fair to the above poster: probability and statistics definitely does need calculus and other math beyond an introductory level. And you see that gap when you read social sciences work applying statistics and making rudimentary, and requiring insight otherwise, mistakes.
Beyond introductory level both probability and statistics have a lot of "counterintuitive" pre-probability and statistics results, that also explain a lot of the misconceptions the public faces in not understanding the notions.
Probability and statistics are topics that our democracies would be better of if people understood them: then they would understand perhaps topics like polling, and we wouldn't perhaps have misuse of the topics in Court like Sally Clark's case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
[But I guess we would have to drop lotteries as a taxation system also. [/s]]
>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies.
You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, or because it's somehow inextricably tied to ways in which equity-seeking populations are oppressed, or used as a tool of oppression.
O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction is so popular in academic circles partly because it plays to this mindset.
This viewpoint dovetails with some of the points you've highlighted, for example many believe that everyone is equally capable, but the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it. So in their view it is rational to get rid of it, replacing it with something (the data science course) that's not advanced math.
For these people, the goal is not to improve equity by getting everyone up to speed in advanced math. It's to bypass it.
> the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it
I ... I don't understand. This is literally the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Here's the thing: if a shadow cabal of lizard-people were actually using space lasers to mind control everyone into thinking the Earth is round so we never discover their hidden evil lairs at the edges of the flat Earth, or what have you ... if any those wacko theories were actually true, it would actually represent a terrible evil that humanity should fight to overcome. Such a plot might even make a decent movie. But this? Advanced math? What? Math is conspiring against humanity? I cannot even fathom a B-movie plotline where that holds together at all. No suspension of disbelief makes this make any sense. Math!?
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the objections are not typically phrased in the type of language you're using.
A typical example is something like this, from Louie (J.Res.Math.Ed. 2017):
>Through the lens of the culture of exclusion, students who appear mathematically gifted are viewed as intelligent, whereas others are myopically perceived as “slow,” “remedial,” and “special needs.” These perceived differences are used to justify stratification such that the culture of exclusion in mathematics education shapes access to intellectually stimulating learning opportunities, prestigious educational programs, lucrative careers, and high-status identities. Furthermore, because ability categories are mapped onto other socially constructed categories, the culture of exclusion is both a product of and a tool for the maintenance of racial, gender, linguistic, economic, and other hierarchies.
It is at its core a form of anti-intellectualism, that is true, but often emanating from other intellectual ideas from the academy.
Okay, have these guys seen how people who are really good at football are treated? And all those guys who are great at guitar keep getting all the chicks, goddammit!
There's no reason to think that mathematics has any more of a "culture of exclusion" than any other field of study, vocation, or sport.
Well, haven't you noticed how the DIE cult is already all over entertainment? Sports teams kneeling down because of "oppression" and pop culture being absolutely dominated by sex and violence propaganda? Specially those being produced targeting the "minorities".
I don’t know. I have met plenty of people during my life who didn’t like math. Would they vote to remove Calculus from high school curriculums, if they believed it would level the playing field? Yes, and without blinking.
>> Such a plot may even make a decent movie.
A “plausible” one, yes. Incidentally, have you noted how movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership? The same can be said about fiction in general. I bet our culture-makers would vote in-masse to suppress math from whatever curriculum they could.
> movies don’t ever have any actual hard science, and they never require mathematical thinking on their viewership
Um, no, I haven't noticed that. In fact I've seen "this movie is based on hard science!" as being a generally positive selling point for movies, especially sci-fi. I also don't really understand your point: movies and pop novels generally do well when they require very little thinking of any kind. They don't require musical thinking or spatio-temporal thinking or logical thinking or kinesthetic thinking or intrapersonal thinking either. Nor do most of our passtimes. That does not make them anti-intellectual.
There is a world of difference between a selling point and the actual thing, but I would be delighted to be proven that there are movies where the viewership requires hard science to understand the plot.
> that does not make them anti-intellectual
Math is old, and therefore, a vital aspect of human culture. By purposefully producing something that “does better” by excluding math, we are effectively doing our darn best to push math out of our collective thought. If doesn’t matter if we call that “anti-intellectual” or “junk-food-for-the-mind.”
> By purposefully producing something that “does better” by excluding math, we are effectively doing our darn best to push math out of our collective thought.
Strongly disagree, and in fact imo movies that are "junk food for the mind" serve a valuable purpose. The mind requires rest in order to digest new information, and so if we were constantly being reminded to "remember your math!" it would likely become very fatiguing very quickly. Being able to disconnect while still being entertained effectively allows your mind to rest. It's not as good as sleep, but it's better than never stepping away from your math homework to allow it to sink in.
I suspect that 'liberals believe "Everyone is born equally capable"' is a strawman. I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this. Interestingly, the article actually lists out a more nuanced, realistic version of this idea (with a link to research):
> But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources.
And we're talking about high school educational attainment here, not world-class achievement. To use a fitness analogy, not everyone has the anatomy to be a world-class deadlifter. But pretty much everybody can get to deadlifting 1x/1.5x their (healthy) bodyweight with some training.
Usually no liberals actually will echo that line, or even are aware of it. But the very philosophy dictates that it must be true. And ask them the difference between a checkout clerk and an MIT grad, and they'll tell you it was all about opportunity.
It's also why liberals have a very strong anti-science approach to fields like behavioral genetics, while falling over themselves to praise the social sciences.
> I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this
There is a broad streak of illiberality running through left-leaning Americans who call themselves liberal. At its core liberalism maintains not that everyone is equal in every way, but that virtually everyone is equally capable of flourishing if given the same opportunities.
Liberalism must believe that since its unit of measure is the individual, not a faction or state.
If someone who calls there’ themselves liberal doesn’t believe that I’d like to know what they think liberalism is.
But the only way to make people equal is to sabotage, sabotage and sabotage. And, of course, if parents have the means, this won't work. This is just robbing a lot of lower class kids from any chance of getting higher, just because not everyone will make it.
That's stupid.
Of course sabotaging kids is also slightly cheaper, and creates the need for more administrators, the ones making these decisions, to decide exactly what is "equitable".
The entire point of liberal ideology is to gather a variety of viewpoints because we accept that everyone is not born equal. That doesn't make some people better than others, they just bring different skills to the table.
There is a way to have time to cover Calculus in high school while still taking it slower: Block scheduling.
My high school shifted to it. It's like a college day where you have four longer classes instead of eight shorter ones. Courses are semester-long, not year-long. This means you can take two math classes in one year (algebra in the fall and geometry in the spring).
This also enabled my high school to offer AP Calculus B, which is part-two of AP Calculus.
The other advantage of this type of schedule is that it is also easier to offer other kinds of math that may be more critical to most students, such as a dedicated class on statistics.
Our school district has a program where teenagers can elect to go to high school at a local community college. Depending on their aptitude going on, the program starts them off on high-school level classes and moves them up to college-level classes as the semesters go on, and all of this happens on a real college campus with a real college workload and schedule. The idea is that the kids aim to graduate with at least an associates degree.
Poor grades and trouble-making will get you kicked out of the program, so the only kids that are there are the ones who WANT to be there, which is a drastic contrast to actual high school.
Our daughter will be attending this school in the fall, we are all very excited about it.
My HS one of the first to have block scheduling. I would say the only negative about it was the AP/IB exams were held in early May. The high school year ended early June. So, there was a mad scramble to cram for the AP classes you took in the fall and a scramble to cover topics in 4 months instead of 5 (80% of a normal semester) for the spring semester.
If I could do it again I probably would have focused on getting the required classes out the way in the fall and focus on the AP in the spring to prepare for the exam in May.
That's what my high school did. 4 block periods per day. We had "A" days and "B" days. A days were 1st, 3, 5th, and 7th period. B days were 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th period. I never had two math classes in the same semester though.
When I was in high school, IIRC we did 55 minute classes with 5 minutes between classes, 4 core classes 2 or 3 electives + lunch. It doesn't work, by time you start, the class settles, late arrivals show up, homework is collected, questions asked and whatnot, there's probably only 30 mins of real instruction. Class would boil down to either teaching or worksheets but not both.
So my school did block schedule of 90 minutes classes on alternating days. But I am wondering if 30 minutes of instruction is about right?
I mean a lot of evidence point to people having difficulty focusing on a single thing or learning for more than 20 minutes at a time? 30 minute bite-sized lessons might be perfect.
Students in other countries in the world (for this assumption India, China, Canada, UK, Germany given my experience with the following) are tracked and/or calculus is optional.
We've traditionally had tracking within the US system (hence why AP and Honors classes matter) which helped filter students accordingly.
The issue is our "Hail Mary" pipeline - community colleges - are unnecessarily viewed as negatively, even though they help students remediate any knowledge gaps they might have.
‘Tracked’ is doing some heavy lifting here. A vast majority of students in these countries end up learning calculus in school to keep college options open.
Most students in these countries don't end up college track.
1. College Matriculation rates are low. Only 36% of Germans aged 25-46 have attended Tertiary Education (University as well as Vocational School) [0]. This is a similar story in the UK and Canada as well.
2. In countries like Germany and UK, college track HS admissions are competitive. Attending a Gymnasium or a uni track independent school or public school requires having a mix of high scores in grades 6-8 or competitive exams.
3. Calculus is not in the default curriculum. For example, in Canada Advanced Functions only teaches a bit of Calculus for a semester. The course is optional, only allowed at Grade 12, and sometimes isn't offered in HS. This is a similar case in the UK with "Further Maths" as an optional A-level and Germany with the Maths curriculum in Realschules.
I see India and China missing from your rebuttal, that is close to half of the worlds population and likely more than 2/3rds of all students who go to college.
Because for this conversation, I felt like talking about comparable first world countries and explaining the Chinese and Indian education system to a (fellow) American is annoying and tiring.
Points 1-3 are the same for India and China as well.
In China, Gaokao (college admissions exam) is only allowed to those who attend College Track high schools (Sr Secondary School).
To enter a Sr Secondary School (10-12) in China, you need to pass the Zhongkao, which is de facto limited to the top 40% scorers of the exam.
Zhongkao is not mandatory btw, and a number of (often rural or migrant) students end up failing to take the exam.
If you don't pass the Zhongkao, your options are either expensive private schools or going to a vocational school which will technically count as a tertiary program by giving a diploma and an extra year, but doesn't include as rigorous STEM classes as the Sr Secondary Schools.
This is similar to India as well, where Calculus isn't introduced in the CBSE or a number of State Board Exams. ICSE introduces Calculus at Grade 12, but ICSE is limited to elite private schools and elite/competitive public schools.
In both India and China, Tertiary education is low (it's difficult to get exact statistics as both countries have now begun obfuscating tertiary level with vocational programs). That said, given the Gaokao filtering, it probably doesn't exceed 30% in China, and India is most likely half of that given the 15-20 year head start China had on India.
CBSE is literally just the limits and basic derivatives. It's literally Pre-Calculus as it is taught here in the California (Pre-Calculus with Limits, Ron Larson).
With the Chinese curriculum, same story if not at a Sr Secondary School. Here's the curriculum for the Secondary Vocational Schools (aka the schools most Chinese students end up attending) - http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/s5743/s5744/A07/202001/W02020...
> That said, given the Gaokao filtering, it probably doesn't exceed 30% in China
* Zhongkao Filtering, not Gaokao filtering
Also the Zhongkao IS mandatory, but heavily limits admissions into Sr High School (college track) Programs
Also, since 2022, Senior Vocational School students can now take the Gaokao, but given the curriculum in a Sr Vocational School as shown below, it's highly unlikely they'd meet the scores required to get into a university in China.
> College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus.
That doesn't actually mean that you need to cover calculus in high school. The calculus needed for the first year of college science and engineering can be easily taught early in the first year in the classes that need it.
That's how it worked at Caltech when I was a student (late '70s and early '80s). Around 75% of an incoming class had no calculus. It only took a lecture or two in Phys 1 to cover all the calculus that would be needed for the rest of first year science and engineering.
That calculus taught in Phys 1 wasn't rigorous and proof based, but high school calculus usually isn't either. By second year everyone had a year of Ma 1, which was rigorous and proof based calculus.
I’m curious as to how calculus is used in those fields. I got a degree in CS and we had to take a bunch of calculus classes but never used it in any of our CS classes and in my 20+ years of programming jobs I’ve never had to use it. Any time in my professional career that I needed math I didn’t know I learned just enough of it to solve my problem and promptly forgot it. I absolutely could not tell you how to mechanically do stuff to derivatives and integrals.
This question is relevant to me because we are deciding what to teach our kids and I haven’t yet been able to come up with a good argument for why to spend time gaining the skill of pen and paper mechanical calculus algorithms.
Are there professional scientists or engineers out there that do calculus on paper?
You've gotten a whole lot of replies that seem to miss your point, but I'd say that I've experienced that exact thing - to get to Calc in your senior year you needed to have gotten on a very specific track of math courses back in middle school, and likely your parents needed to know about it to make sure you got in. Otherwise, what appeared to be a very inconsequential choice at middle school actually decided your entire math track. Getting back on the track after you get off basically doesn't happen.
I definitely think we should teach more advanced math (and other) courses, but that particular way of doing it is just not very good - plenty of people who probably could have managed Calc just fine didn't get to take it, due to choices made for them years past probably by parents who didn't understand the significance. The structure and order of classes needs to be redone, which is hard.
I will say though I find it funny how much people are coming to Calc's defense. I'm in software development and it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us. I'm still happy I learned it but for software development it's definitely less useful than the other advanced math you'll learn.
> it's a pretty common joke how virtually inapplicable calc is to us
If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples:
- Calculus was the first math class I took that gave a clear definition of what a "function" really is. Do you use functions?
- Analyzing the properties of functions to see what operations made sense to do or not (e.g. continuous vs discontinuous).
- The concept of taking a function at various points and adding a small value to it to see how it changes is extremely important in sensitivity analysis and optimization.
- Anything involving non-uniform probability distributions, like sampling a random number from various distributions, requires understanding the relationship of PDFs and CDFs, which is one of derivative/definite integral. This means any form of realistic simulation, any estimations of time to failure, performance of anything, etc.
- Gradient descent and backpropagation in neural networks are completely opaque if you don't understand derivatives.
- Most games or simulations deal with rates of change.
- The concept of infinitesimals applies to finding tangents to curves, showing up in vector graphics all the time.
- Anything involving elevation in GIS, analysis of water flow, even topographic maps
I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments like "I'm in software development and I literally never use calculus / linear algebra / type theory / lambda calculus / algorithms and data structures / boolean logic / binary trees / linked lists / stacks / queues / geometry / algebra / arithmetic" <-- then you're artificially limiting yourself and you're a much worse software developer than the ones who actually do use those things. What do you do all day, copy code from StackOverflow and hope it works? Don't discourage other people from learning just because you were too lazy: in fact that's literally what this entire post is about. You're part of the problem.
Unless you're using Haskell or something similar, mathematical functions and what most programming languages call "functions" are very different and are better referred to as procedures. Mathematical functions don't have any concept of some basic constructs like variables (state in general), I/O, or even sequential computation. Pure functional languages have to use things like monads to model procedures.
Sure, but you know what has state? ODEs and their discrete-time analogue, recurrence relations. You first meet ODEs in calculus. Even if you say “who cares about continuous time, my computer is fundamentally discrete!” you won’t have a concept of limiting behaviors without calculus.
> I'm honestly sick and tired of seeing these crazy anti-learning comments
I don't know why you're mad at me, I _literally said_ "I'm still happy I learned it", along with saying we should be teaching more advanced math. I said it was a common _joke_, not that we literally never use it. I went on to say it was "less useful" than other math you'll learn, not "not useful at all". Perhaps you should read the whole comment before getting so angry.
And no, just because I don't use calculus all day doesn't mean I "copy code from StackOverflow", I honestly don't know how you could come to such a silly conclusion (or how you think knowledge of calculus is necessary to understand most data structures). Do you think self-taught developers who never learned calculus are just incapable of learning or using data structures and algorithms, and don't know what functions are? I can tell you quite confidently that they can and do, because I know many of them.
> If you think calculus is not important to software development than you are not bothering to look. Just a few examples:
Half of what you listed isn't really Calculus at all: for comparison my highschool taught functions, continuous vs discontinuous, rates of change, and topographic maps in Math classes which happened years before taking Calculus. Then the Calc class was like 70% memorizing "whats the integral of cosecant?", was which I think we should be able to agree is absurdly useless even for people who actively work in a math-heavy field.
I suspect this form of calculus is what people are responding to when they say calc is useless; they should be teaching the things you're saying (including how to think about functions) and e.g. introducing Euler's method getting into what happens when your step size become arbitrarily small are all useful things to a broader set of people, but the actual implementation of Calculus classes in practice is instead entirely useless trivia that provides almost no insights if you wanted to do any of the things in your comment.
I definitely benefit from knowing calculus. But I always disliked it, it was taught in such a mechanical fashion.
I only really started to get math when I learned about linear algebra, combinatorics, proofs, A&D, algebraic structures, mathematical logic etc. And quite frankly those topics helped me much, much more than calculus.
I think learning other areas of math would better serve most people. I think logic and probability then maybe combinatorics and statistics would be much better than calculus and especially trigonometry.
I like to call it "the math ladder" for this reason. Math is uniquely cumulative, so being shoved off the ladder prematurely precludes future advancement in a way that gaps in knowledge of the US Civil War have minimal impact on learning East Asian history.
(A) problem is that, if you're going to start getting very specific about what math kids need to learn if they're not going into STEM, you end up with a pretty short list and you end up, in practice, with not really learning math or developing numerical intuition at all. (And let's ignore the fact that I directly used very little of what I learned in university engineering either.)
When was the last time I did a geometry proof? Used trig? OK, I use some algebra now and then though probably not simultaneous equations. Not calc.
But I'm pretty sure the path is not to make numerical literacy basically optional. Why know how to multiply in a world with calculators? Well... Though I wouldn't argue with more emphasis on things like basic stats and probability early on.
It’s crazy that we spend a decade of a person’s life forcing them to learn a skill that is so completely irrelevant to their lives and yet we ignore skills that could help them from being manipulated or forced into debt slavery.
I need to come up with a better analogy, but it’s like we were still forcing our children to manipulate a cotton gin and know the ins and outs of maintaining and repairing one. I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting and now I want to look up a YouTube video about cotton gins, but do we really need to force this upon everyone? And then we decide that if you didn’t memorize how to change out the plumbus in the cotton gin perfectly then you aren’t allowed to do further study in marine biology.
If I believed in conspiracy theories then I would think that Big Scary Corporations are in cahoots with The Government to keep the public from knowing how not to be manipulated and forcing them to work for low wages for their entire lives. But I don’t believe this because I think the reality is a lot more mundane and stupid. I think it’s just like the story you hear about why your mom learned to cook the ham by cutting off the end and finding out after some investigation that the only reason was because her grandmother had a small pan and we all just tend to continue doing what has sorta kinda worked without thinking about it. But in this case we can’t just make individual decisions to do something different because we’ve decided that the API between secondary school and college is an admissions test that includes certain irrelevant things that we can’t change because of history and the API between college and a job is something completely different.
> Most high-school math classes are still preparing students for the Sputnik era. Steve Levitt wants to get rid of the “geometry sandwich” and instead have kids learn what they really need in the modern era: data fluency. [1]
I do agree probability and statistics would be much better than calculus, trigonometry, and some minutiae of algebra and geometry.
As someone who did all of it and ended up majoring in engineering, in my opinion calc is the least practical of the senior high school math courses— geometry and data management (stats/probability) are both much more likely to be useful to normal people doing their taxes, understanding elections, fitting furniture into rooms, whatever.
That said, I think calculus is helpful in the way that learning a niche programming language is helpful: it teaches you about new kinds of abstractions, how to think in a different way, and gives particular language with which to talk about that kind of thing.
The problem is that this point of view ignores reality: motivated parents will just have their children learn calculus in outside classes.
The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring.
The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.
Maybe true but that won't get them a calculus credit on their transcript.
> The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring.
>The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.
This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. We did things like clock math, and observed how these other mathematical systems did or did not observe things like the associative property. It was amazing because it made math more than just doing calculations. This class is still one of my fondest educational memories.
As far as I can tell you don't need an official transcript from an accredited school to get into college. We are homeschooling our kids and what I've read is that homeschoolers write their own transcript, the kids themselves write it, and they describe what they've accomplished and learned during their schooling career and admission depts in colleges tend to favor these kids over traditionally schooled kids.
I'm guessing that a traditionally schooled kid could just do the same. Especially since there's so much that they are probably learning outside of school. It would be a shame to ignore all of those skills and knowledge just because they weren't taught during the hours of 8 and 3, M-F.
I’m just now starting to really look into this since our eldest is now twelve years old. We do unschooling if our home, which is a form of self-directed education, so my focus has been on those experiences.
> This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics.
What textbook / textbooks did your class use for this?
I like this effort to understand/summary of the other side in good faith (even though one can believe math education is important).
I think way of rationalizing it is that there are some parents that feel that orchestra, art exploration, debate, sports or <insert subject/extracurricular of choice> at the collegiate level. After all, many students excel at these and could get into an Ivy league/Big 10 college based on their performance in these subjects. At one point a district may decide to offer collegiate level coursework to students.
Then funding dries up and cuts need to be made. Which courses should be kept and which should be cut and how should resources be allocated is a real question.
Perhaps competitive math courses or multivariate calculus should be considered an "after school extracurricular" similar to the many after school extracurricular sports programs and schools should just focus on providing basic "PE level equivalent" math.
I made a whole career out of publishing NLP research based on the evidence from competitive debate. 11/10 would recommend.
Debate is also the best and most robust pipeline there is to getting into law school, and good law schools at that. Model UN and mock trial don’t even hold a candle to it in rigor.
> it's only a small number of unusual people who need to learn calculus
Any STEM career. Finance and economics. Data science--the component they're replacing middle-school algebra with, the CMF's authors know as much about data science as about math.
Californians whose parents can't afford tutors have been effective gated from these careers.
It also depends heavily on how you define "need". Calculus changed the way I view many, many concepts and phenomena. I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible, and only to those blessed few who we perceive as able to understand it, and in doing so, we deprive so many people of a useful new way of considering problems. Whether it ends up being critical to their chosen career seems like a really narrow and poor criterion.
> I think we present things like calculus as dryly as possible
A lot of this is because the hiring pipeline has dried up. I went to a top hs here in the Bay Area and had teachers who were very knowledgeable and invested in STEM education.
Because of extremely low salaries when factoring in CoL, a replacement pipeline hasn't formed. I had 4-5 of my classmates in HS end up majoring in STEM and minoring in Education at the big 3 UCs, but all of them decided to become Data Analysts or SWEs instead because they would be provided a living wage without having to go get a masters for an additional $30-40k and/or a formal teaching credential for an additonal $12-15k. They were looking at a $150k bill just to earn $70-80k starting AT BEST in Silicon Valley.
I have friends who are/were teachers. I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that. Low pay, spoiled out of control children, their evn worse parents, active shooter drills/real active shooters, fucking TikTok.
I wouldn't do that job if it paid double what I make now.
I've seen antisocial behavior rise in both kids from well off backgrounds as well as from kids from less well off backgrounds. In both cases, the parents aren't an active participant in their kid's lives.
The kids (both rich and poor) with present parents always ended up well established and this was irrespective of race.
The only benefit that money had was it could open some doors if the kid f**ed up.
One of my acquaintance's HS going kid has an active drug problem and has ended up in in the drunk tank a couple times, but because my acquaintance is a white collar professional who can afford to live in a well off neighborhood, they can afford the legal fees. If this was some black kid in West Oakland or a Latino kid in East San Jose or a Vietnamese kid in Newark, they would have ended up in Jail/Juvie, lost critical learning time, and have no real options or safety net to fall on.
I know that older people complaining about younger people is literally ancient, but I can't help but feel that cell phones + social media is doing some real damage. It hurts adults, I can't imagine experiencing it with a developing mind.
This is a good analysis, but you're missing another angle: quite a few kids are not developmentally ready[0] for algebra in 8th grade but most are ready in 9th grade. By forcing kids who are not developmentally ready into algebra you generally do more harm then good (most of those kids will hate math for the rest of their lives). This problem also occurs earlier in school life with fractions.
When I was in education I saw pushing students too early like this do a lot of damage that had to be cleaned up by tutors at a later date and was totally unnecessary.
I even think Calculus could still be achieved by the end of high school with the right curriculum choices - you can teach a lot of calculus concepts to grace schoolers if you elide the actual mechanics of computation. Anecdotally, students who were pushed through that sort of curriculum earlier in middle school tended to breeze through high school calc.
>For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions.
I mean, it really depends on the school and the major. If you're taking a STEM major in college, having calculus on your resume is the equivalent of having a degree on your resume. You may not need it to succeed (I do not use calculus in my day to day job), but you can see why it makes you stand out.
But sure, if you're more on a medical/law/humanities track, calculus shouldn't really matter for your admissions. It only matters in that calculus makes you understand math better, and math is one of the core subjects used by the SAT/ACT. Naturally, knowing calculus makes those tests much easier to reason about. Maybe we should revisit why Math is weighed so heavily in national tests if we feel this way about math in the curriculum.
I can see the intents, but it feels like it sweeps the core problems under the rug. As usual for education.
Learning to code would have been much harder if I hadn't grasped algebra.
Calculus is important for understanding science (especially physics) and statistics.
These are not niche subjects for "the few weird students." They are really important to grasp for many roles in the knowledge economy. Your kids will enter a world of robotics and automation. They're going to need to use their brains if they want to succeed.
I'm 100% against a dumbing down of the education system to achieve ideological leftwing aims.
When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way.
It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others.
> It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others
Underneath all of this is a budgetary trade-off. Quite often there are funds to pay either for more support for struggling students or advanced opportunities for advanced students, but not both.
That budgetary problem is ultimately fueled by larger socio-economic challenges, including high cost of living that is out of pace with tax revenue for school funding, high public pension costs, and ever-increasing demands on public schools to be social service hubs dealing with fallout from things like drug and violence epidemics. Those are expensive problems to treat.
Furthermore, those problems are not distributed uniformly across society. They are heavily disproportionately present in lower income communities, whether they're urban or rural.
Schools in uniformly well-off communities don't need to worry about treating these problems to anywhere near the same degree, so they need fewer behavioural
and educational specialists just to keep the classroom functional, if they can do that at all.
Well-off children from supportive homes and communities are cheaper to educate. They arrive in the classroom with years of preschool and summers of educationally stimulating camps. They don't come to school hungry.
As a society, we could address some of the deeper inequities in opportunity, to relieve low income schools of the additional societal burdens we place on them, but those sorts of measures are even more polarising than school funding.
Therefore, we end up with the default, which is individuals optimizing purely for their own interest (i.e. the push for school vouchers), not what is more sustainable for society.
>When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way.
A lot of people in the equity/equality movement have been following "the means justify the ends" for quite some time now and that approach has been growing in administrators. One of the reasons the supreme court ruled against affirmative action is the implementation of affirmative action in college admissions turned into shameless racism.
Affirmative action meets the definition of systemic racism.
Policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization, and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race[1]
Not sure what you mean by "best funded" but California spending is fairly middle-of-the-pack compared to all U.S. states. ~14k per pupil, compared to most North East states spending over 20k per pupil. [1]
But if you take these rankings at face value [2] it does seem there's more than spending at play here. Though perhaps spending simply has to be normalized against Cost of Living?
Im having trouble reconciling these numbers with with total spending in California. Does it include local and federal funding?
The California department of education puts[1] per pupil k-12 spending at 23K, almost double that listed in the census.
>The total overall funding (federal, state, and local) for all K–12 education programs is $124.3 billion, with per-pupil spending of $21,596 in 2021–22. For 2020–21, per-pupil funding increased from $16,881 in the 2020–21 Budget Act to $23,089 in the 2021–22 Budget Act.
There is a minimum state funding of $13,976, which is pretty close to the census numbers. There could also be a difference due to comparing the 2023 CA budget to 2019 census data, but a near doubling in 4 years seems pretty extreme.
Very interesting, I didn't realize there was a recent sharp increase in spending.
I think you're right, the census is out of date. However, given spending likely has a lagging effect, the historically low budget - coupled with harsh covid lockdowns - does begin to explain why CA ranks low among public schools.
Perhaps it is a cost disease issue with high cost of living driving up expense of mostly labor expensed fields with little automation fields like education?
This seems such an obvious thing to me, and I'm not even in the field of Education. I agree with everything the writer wrote and found myself nodding repeatedly, thinking, it's obvious.
So why can't our so-called professionals see this too? Taking away learning opportunities from kids does them no good!
I remember once when I was in 9th grade and my elder brother was a sophomore in college. I found a textbook of his titled "Matrices and Determinants" (or something to that effect), for one of his courses. I picked it up and started reading it. After a few pages I had some questions, asked my dad. He didn't blink and just helped me out. Soon I had finished a couple of chapters and had learned more about matrices, determinants, etc. than I would ever learn in High School. Nobody told me not to read it; they just helped me along whenever I needed the help.
I can't even imagine how toxic this discouragement would be to a curious mind!
The effect is even greater on younger students. My kid went into elementary school loving math and wanting to learn more. They refused to accelerate or even test her to see what she knew. She had to do endless busywork and sit through lessons on topics she'd mastered years earlier. She learned no math for years on end. The only lesson she learned is that "school doesn't care whether I learn".
> I remember once when I was in 9th grade and my elder brother was a sophomore in college. I found a textbook of his...
I'm curious if/how your teachers reacted?
I wrote a book Freshmen year of high school and started programming on my own. When I presented a physical copy of my self-published book and my computer programs to my teachers they gave me a metaphorical pat on the head, but not one point of extra credit or a special tutor. In computer class I was still expected to learn about Microsoft Excel and in English class I was still required to write two page stories. In my experience, the education system did not empower my curious mind. It felt like I was assigned busy work because the other students lacked motivation otherwise. I can only hope that one day the education system will tailor to the individual.
Is it not strange how in an article arguing from otherwise a very egalitarian, leftist viewpoint, when it discusses how students perform given more or less difficult classes, it somehow thinks the most relevant statistic is the race of the students? (Approximately, even, because American race designation is kinda weird anyway.)
Sure, socio-economic circumstances are correlated with race. (Unfortunately still in this day and age.) Not perfectly, but there is a correlation, so absent other data, it can be used as a proxy for the socio-economic circumstances in which the student grows up. But there are multiple problems with this:
1. If we are to lessen discrimination, the very first thing we should do is stop discriminating. Is this considered normal in the USA? Stop tracking race! And even if you do track it (or an approximation of it) to double-check you're not inadvertently disadvantaging certain minority groups, certainly (1.) there are better measures to designate minority groups, and (2.) one can do this without telling all the world about it and giving society even more fuel for discrimination. If people see other people treat people equally, and see that as normal, they will tend to do the same. We should lead by example, not start a discussion on equality with the worst kind of discrimination.
2. Surely there are better indicators for socio-economic circumstances than race? What about the salary of their parents? This is a typical measure in The Netherlands (where I live). Or even where they live. And if you say that we cannot track those things because that would be an infringement on privacy: how on Earth is tracking parents' salary an infringement on privacy but not tracking race?
Like, I agree that teaching less math is bollocks. But that's not the thing that surprises me most when reading OP.
The USA is currently obsessed with race, and this influences all discussions.
I agree that this topic could be more accurately and inclusively framed as how to improve outcomes for low income students, or children with absentee/incarcerated parents, or children of addicts.
Unfortunately, some people care much more about racial outcomes than they do about any of those I mentioned.
The point of the racial framing IS to polarize, divide, and mobilize a political base, not to solve an underlying problem.
Talking about helping poor children doesn't get people as riled up, and has the risk of actually leading to agreement and a solution.
American politics has no hindsight and is a zero sum game. If you fix a problem in American politics, you don't get credit for it later. You only get credit for promising to fix problems in the future.
If parties agree and implement a solution, neither party comes out ahead, and even worse, you just made the opposition look more reasonable. It is a prisoners dilemma where cooperation is punished
>Talking about helping poor children doesn't get people as riled up, and has the risk of actually leading to agreement and a solution.
Funny, but let's not underestimate how much class warfare there is in modern politics. Even if they do a great job using identity politics to lampshade it.
I think Occam's razor suggests the reasons of race are much simpler: race is considered a public statistic, one not trying to be hidden behind welfare, stocks, shell companies, tips, etc. Financial status is much more complex and varies based on COL. Easier statistic, easier to focus on.
To give a bit of context to all the sibling comments:
We are talking about a history where:
a) A decision to not occupy a defeated country was made because they were impure/non-white (Mexico)...
[I don't think I have encountered a similar historical example. I will spend some time looking/reviewing just in case I am forgetting some similar situation.]
b) Called Germans and Finnish immigrants "non-white":
Italians and Greeks faced the same treatment.
Everything and everyone had to be assigned at some class/color. The wikipedia article goes even more in depth about the issue that also posed for Asians in the U.S. which is a whole lot different rabbit hole, and which I am still confused about.
c) Gun control and argumentation started because of racism. NRA actually did support gun control at one point: when the Black Panthers tried to exercise their right to bear arms. And when Reagan introduced the Mulford Act in response, evidence shows it was enforced based on race.
There is the claim that the 2nd amendment was enacted to ensure slaves wouldn't revolt. Not sure yet how much weight one should place to that claim; but the world history supports such considerations. [Review cf. Spartans for instance or the Japanese class system.]
Do you have a source regarding the theory that the race was the primary factor in deciding the territory following the Mexican American war? I haven't encountered this example before. I'm obviously skeptical but willing to read more.
As a counterpoint, the last several centuries are full of examples of countries establishing territories or colonies in foreign lands with different ethnicities. In those cases, the local population was generally not given much power for self governance, if at all.
The US has a pretty long history of returning militarily conquered territory back to locals for self governance. These countries usually remain within the US sphere of influence of course, and often retain a US military presence, but we dont call it occupation or the territories colonies. Instead we call them allies (e.g. Germany, Japan, the Philippines, S Korea, ect).
>The USA is currently obsessed with race, and this influences all discussions.
The United States has always been obsessed with race. The south had completely different schools based on a child's skin color. What makes you think this is new?
I totally agree that racial issues have always been a topic in American politics. from the colonial period, to secession from Brittan, to the failed secession of the south, to the civil rights movements, to now.
That said, the relative importance of the issue and satisfaction obviously shifts over time. Gallop polling shows that that by many metrics, perceptions of racial Injustice are at a multi-decade high. It is interesting that far fewer people feel that black people are treated fairly than in the late 90's. It would be interesting to see data going back even further.
So the actual issue that we've started talking about how our obsession with race effects the people on the losing end of that deal.
>. It is interesting that far fewer people feel that black people are treated fairly than in the late 90's. It would be interesting to see data going back even further.
It seems intuitive to me. If you have a problem and then activists put in a ton of time to make that problem more visible, its going to change people's perceptions of social issues. For example, if you asked people in 1990 and 2020 if the Catholic church adequately protects children from sexual predators, you're probably gonna get a pretty drastic difference in responses.
Keep in mind my point was that the political emphasis on race is at a high point.
I agree that if activist put a lot of emphasis on this and make it more visible that this feeling will be stronger. That doesn't negate the point above, it supports it.
Sure, people can argue over how productive the additional attention is for actually resolving issues, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I merely staying that attention is very high right now
>Keep in mind my point was that the political emphasis on race is at a high point.
A high point compared to what? The 90s? You have some recency bias in your understanding of this topic.
> agree that if activist put a lot of emphasis on this and make it more visible that this feeling will be stronger. That doesn't negate the point above, it supports it.
You didn't make a point, you said something was 'interesting' which I commented on because its really not, it just makes sense.
>Sure, people can argue over how productive the additional attention is for actually resolving issues, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I merely staying that attention is very high right now
I think you're mostly trying to backtrack a hot take
It goes back much further than that, literally to the founding of the country. Our constitution has provisions specifically protecting the slave trade. The way we elect our president was designed specifically to give slave owners more power. Racism is an integral part of US history and always has been. You literally cannot make sense of US history without it.
Slavery goes back a lot further than the founding of the US, and is important context for broad swaths of History.
Regarding the election of the president, I assume you're talking about the 3/5 compromise. I think this had the opposite impact of what you're claiming.
It gave white male voters in the south less power. Representation based on total human population would have given them more.
If you were voting white male in the North, your representation was based on the total population of your state, including those that cant vote, i.e. women and children.
In the south, your total population for the purposes of proportional representation was reduced lower than the total human population of your state
Not so. The 3/5 rule and the Electoral College gave slaveholders drastically more power than they should have had.
If the president was elected strictly based on votes cast, the North would have dominated every election.
Not only did the South have completely disenfranchised slaves who nevertheless added to their masters electoral votes, but they also had much more limited franchise even for white males.
The constitution was set up to let the South prevent the vast majority of their people from voting without giving up much political power as a result.
Neither of this North nor the South supported proportional representation based on both votes cast. Your assertion that the 3/5 compromise the South more electoral power begs the question in comparison to what alternative. If you're hypothetical is that became more power than the number of Voters, then sure. But no one at the time was advocating for proportional representation based on the number of men in the state.
Nobody supported the vast majority of people voting. The Electoral College was never based on voter numbers.
It's cultural though, we (the people in the US) are obsessed with race. Literally everything you do and talk about is colored by it, and it's pretty much impossible to escape.
The more heterogeneous the society becomes the more obsessed we become with the differences between us.
You're seeing it too in the UK and will be seeing a LOT more of it as your demographics shift to be like ours.
you're missing the fact that here in the US race is an extremely large factor in how students succeed, partly from correlation with socioeconomic and cultural factors, but also because it determines what sort of treatment kids get in school, from the teachers and from the administration.
anecdotally, I have a friend who, when she was looking for a school for her kid, had to drill down into the data for which schools had significantly worse results for black students, because that spoke to systemic factors in the school environment, and so even if the school looked good in its overall statistics she knew her kid would not likely get a good education there.
This is actually a good point; I had not considered that the equality that people are trying to achieve here is equality between races. And if that's what you're interested in, surely that's what you need to track.
I'm sorry for your friend; that situation sounds like a very odd mix of empowering (having the data — albeit after drilling) and deeply discriminatory and marginalising.
Over here we do actually have at least some of the race inequality problems, but we're putting much less emphasis on them. The approach has advantages but clearly also disadvantages. Thanks for the thought-food.
The most relevant statistic to Noah is the race of the students because the most relevant statistic to the implementors of the new math framework was the race of the students; when you see the word 'equity' being brought up in American politics, it always, always, always means addressing an observed disparity between black and white populations. Find any article about the math framework written by its proponents and you will see that race takes up the entire page. You are right that it is stupid; Noah is not saying 'I think this is important myself', he is saying 'the framework does the exact opposite of what its proponents want, down to the last detail'.
Usually in data science, you "mine" for features or combination of features. That is you collect as much as possible, then actual find the critical features e.g. to construct a random forest/decision tree/ ...
Here they are going as you point out the other way.
And the more I study U.S. history (and politics) the more racist I find it.
Conversely, many European countries have a history that includes slavery and an arguably better track record of successful abolition and reconciliation. Maybe there's something the US can learn.
European countries' history with slavery largely consists of having it in far off colonies and then cutting those colonies loose. The US doesn't have the luxury of making a clean break.
This is why my kids are in private school now. The public school system here in NJ has been dumbing down its curriculum for years. And while I thought “social promotion” was only a thing in horrible inner city schools, we have it here out in the suburbs, too.
The first six months was very rough as they caught up from being so far behind, but they are being well positioned to the rest of their school careers compared to where they would have ended up academically in the public schools.
1) The kids State Standardized test scores were abysmal, but they were given great scores by the school. If they failed tests they were given unrelated “makeup work” to being their grade back.
2) during Covid, everything went online and we could see all the work being given. Our daughter was specifically given topics 2 grades below her actual grade to keep her grade up. Her teachers told her this, and they didn’t assign homework “because of need for school / life balance”. My son’s work was dumbed down as well.
For private school, we see it because we had to help get them back up to par. I have helped my son understand algebra and read Shakespeare, and my younger daughter age appropriate math and English.
Both are now able to take over their own studies, which are far in advance of where the grade equivalent public school is.
Our public schools also have almost no AP courses at all. The private school has only college-prep courses, and the question is only what level - basic to advanced to honors AP.
NJ is pretty highly ranked according to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for reading and math. They have data on grades 4 and 8 for the year 2022 [1]
Grade 4 - Math #10 Reading #5
Grade 8 - Math #7 Reading #1
Wallethub.com said it's #3 overall [2]
US New and World Reports said it's #2 overall for education[3]
In 2019 EducationWeek ranked it #1 [4]
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"they didn’t assign homework “because of need for school / life balance”.
Covid was a stressful time for kids and parents alike. Is school/life balance not a valid concern for teachers especially under unique circumstances? You also mentioned everything was online, not sure if that was part of your criticism but weren't private also doing that?
"For private school, we see it because we had to help get them back up to par. I have helped my son understand algebra and read Shakespeare, and my younger daughter age appropriate math and English."
You could have helped your children in Public school as well right? Isn't it possible that you changing schools also caused you to involve yourself more. That the end result is not so much the private school but an attitude change due to the new school. Similar to how someone moves and it gives them motivation to find a job or get their life together.
You also talk about how your kids are learning the way they did years ago and that your 5th grader (at the comment's time) is learning Latin. However you mentioned that the first year of the private schooling was difficult because of the transition and the amount to overcome (related to your children being behind?)
Isn't it possible that Covid caused a distinct change in your mental state. Think about it, you have your two children home all the time unexpectedly , both with learning disabilities, and you had schools that had to adapt to remote learning quickly. There's stress everywhere. So your children don't score well on standardized tests, it's understandable to be concerned. The school, having trouble implementing a completely new way of learning drops homework and is generous with the grades. Maybe that's not unreasonable considering the situation for schools at the time.
"The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of children and adolescents is multifaceted and substantial. Survey studies regarding child and adolescent mental health amid COVID-19 indicated that anxiety, depression, loneliness, stress, and tension are the most observed symptoms." [5]
Note that school systems in NJ as a rule are not state run, but locally run. Quality varies wildly by district. In fact, real estate prices vary in direct proportion to quality of schools in NJ towns very closely.
We happen to be in a lousy district. Yes, Covid uniformly hurt all schools. But don’t presume to know our kids, our schools, or our context. Our public schools have always had lousy standardized test results, even pre-Covid. Post Covid it is getting worse and worse - a few weeks ago our Superintendent rejoiced that we should all just ignore those scores, because more and more colleges are not requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission. He said this and wrote it in a presentation. A celebration of ignorance. Paid for by my tax dollars.
Edit: I know school quality varies between district but I only knew your state. You also mentioned that it's about money but then complained about your tax dollars being wasted. Wouldn't an increase in spending help your district? What would happen if you spent half of what you paid for private schools on tutors and kept your kids in public?
---- edit end
Your fixation with standardized tests is unusual for this site. It's a complicated debate but you seem to have a strong opinion about the value of standardized tests
Some colleges don't even require them anymore [1] as you mentioned. The NEA claims they don't properly measure student value [2].
Finally, I know many children of immigrants who literally have burned out because of a singular focus on education by their parents. That's anecdotal of course and I almost stupid mentioning the steretype. However, this may be a real issue even if it's not all[3].
You have focused on these tests often in your comments. Do you have evidence these are a good measure of intelligence or ability related to either to college or the workplace?
Pretend this wasn’t education, but literally any other field.
You want KPIs that you can measure that are based somehow on reality.
The problem with public education in the US is teacher’s unions fiercely fight against any sort of KPI, because they would then be evaluated on actual results. They much prefer to have bullet proof tenured jobs for life with no accountability.
To me, it seems like the people who are pushing these policies are doing so to "juke the stats" and make it look like certain demographics aren't as behind academically as they actually are. Statistically, bipoc kids don't do as well in school as white/asian kids, right? I am not trying to make this about race, and I am not suggesting anything other than that statistical reality. But that sentiment seems pretty common when I read about these "equity" programs. "We are doing this to reduce the inequalities between groups X and Y".
One way to fix the statistical aspect of that problem is to reduce the possibility for such disparities to exist, which could be accomplished by removing "higher level" classes, such as algebra in middle school. If the upper limit of what a student can learn is lowered, then the students below that limit are "closer" to the students who are are at or above it.
Can anyone convince me this isn't what's happening? It just seems like a entirely ineffectual political move with the singular goal of making the people behind it look good, so that they can retain power. I cannot provide evidence, because part of my theory is that everyone involved in enacting these policies is either lying, or they incorrectly think that these policies help. I just can't see how anyone can think this is a good idea, or that it will help anything other than the stats. But why shouldn't I think this?
Yeah—but part of the reason for this is because we aren't capable of addressing the actual causes of educational inequality (among other forms...) which have very little to do with schools. Instead we focus on schools and ask them to do the impossible. The results are, predictably, absurd, and harmful to other worthy goals schools ought to have, because the only way to make serious progress is by faking it one way or another, or just getting lucky.
But this is far cheaper than actually fixing our entrenched poverty problems, screwed-up justice system, and terrible social safety net, and school reform programs are easy and often fairly popular (as opposed to what we actually need to do, which is guaranteed to be controversial and probably end up sabotaged no matter which plausible set of solutions one proposes) plus the real solutions would take many years to yield results, which is far too long for our political cycle—so we keep trying, then act surprised and/or outraged when the results are very stupid, when we've set things up such that we're basically asking for stupid results.
> To me, it seems like the people who are pushing these policies are doing so to "juke the stats" and make it look like certain demographics aren't as behind academically as they actually are. Statistically, bipoc kids don't do as well in school as white/asian kids, right? I am not trying to make this about race, and I am not suggesting anything other than that statistical reality. But that sentiment seems pretty common when I read about these "equity" programs. "We are doing this to reduce the inequalities between groups X and Y".
They're trying to make the schools fix poverty (whether caused by racism or anything else), in order to avoid directly fixing poverty. It's an endeavor doomed from the start because it rests on the religious belief that success is directly proportional to merit, and merit is best shown by achievement in school.
But we can't have a society of middle-class strivers, because no ditches will be dug, so all you end up with in the fantasy case is a bunch of well-educated ditch diggers who now have massive student loan debts. What you get in the real case is a bunch of people who realize that they can either A) be depressed baristas lamenting their failure to do better with the expensive degree that has given them a lifetime of debt, B) be depressed baristas who don't owe $100K for a useless degree.
It's not compulsory and free primary education that will fix poverty, and it's not the job of teachers to repair all inequity in society (although to the most egomaniacal, it's all they think their duty is.) Just like it isn't college's duty to fix racism. The way you fix these things is by directly addressing them, not explaining to children how to use a bootstrap.
> The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware.
I was wondering if some people are aware of studies supporting this strategy.
I could try to dig them up, but I remember few studies demonstrating that school success is more correlated to the socio-economical situation of the parent than to the child intrinsic capacities (I think one usual method is to compare success of twins adopted in different families to remove the naive argument "higher socio-economical situation means that these people are intrinsically smarter").
If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).
I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some. A bit like if your professor was saying "we have an exam on chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, I will tell you the chapters 1 and 3, the chapters 2 and 4 are in the books but I'm going to give this book only to some students and not other". If a professor does that, people will obviously say that it is stupid, that the professor should teach chapters 1 and 2 to everyone and then do a test on chapters 1 and 2, and nobody will pretend that this is "dumbying down" the students.
> If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).
> I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some.
The NORMAL pace is too slow for some kids who aren't even doing any math at home. The solution to kids learn at different paces and some kids can learn at a faster pace if they have resources at home, but not all kids have resources at home isn't force everyone onto the normal pace. It's to make sure all kids have access to resources.
If it's hard to get resources, then maybe you can free up some by adjusting class sizes. Instead of 60 kids, and 20 kids / class room all at the same pace; you can take the 30 kids capable of doing a faster pace and put them in the fast paced room, then have two classes of 15 kids at a slower pace and now they've got more time for individual instruction, and you didn't have to hire anyone.
Let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of our class and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they are? -Bart Simpson
People who fall behind don't need a slower pace. They need to move faster. That means not just more attention but longer hours. But there is only so much time. A school wanting to maximize its graduation rate needs to spend less energy on teaching people who are good at a subject in order to divert resources to those who need more. That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.
> That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.
Maybe it's the right thing to do, but you're not going to get a lot of support for letting the kids who are good at school go home after an hour. All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class. Might as well try to have something for them to do other than throw paper airplanes after ten minutes and distract the kids who need the whole hour.
Anyway, I suggested 2x the pupils for the fast math class, so that the normal math class got more resources. If you've got smaller schools, it's harder to allocate resources, and that's understandable, but a lot of schools have enough kids to push the ratios around to get more attention to the kids that need it.
It's unnecessary for all high school graduates to have taken AP Calc; but it's a waste of students' time for those who could have made it through that not to have had the opportunity. Just like it's a waste of students' time for them to be in classes that are beyond their current level so much that they can't catch up and then just passing them because there's no alternative, so they just zone out. Admittedly, the daycare function of school doesn't really care about wasting students' time, but that's only part of the function of school.
All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class
But why? This is a very dysfunctional way of allocating teaching time, especially if the classes are not split along learning ability. What ages are we talking about here?
At my school, we didn't even get subject-specific time slots until 13/14 years: before that, we all spent the same time in class but everyone worked on their own subject. The teacher's job was to make sure that every child spent time on each subject according to their needs, not according to alotted time.
And after that, when we did get separate classes and separate teachers for the different subjects, only 70% of our school time was scheduled for the whole class; the other 30% was for teacher "open hours": the students were expected to fill that time according to their own needs.
What is measured is what gets done. If schools are judged by graduation rates, then yes, fewer scientists but more people graduating highschool. Or we go the other way and judge schools by how many elite scientists they produce. Identify the best students early. Give them everything so that they can all become neuroscientists. Abandon all those who struggle in order to focus resources on the future doctors. Imho a public school should only start diverting resources to elite students once the school has achieved a reasonable graduation rate (90+% imho.)
I can see how that would help with the feelgoods, but how will this advance science and technology? The very things that allow you (and me) to be here pontificating about this instead of sustenance farming.
Apparently, the measure was not to "cancel advanced classes", but to replace advanced algebra by something more challenging, more engaging and developing more the scientific brain of student (in this case, advanced data science).
It looks like a lot of people who are screaming at the end of science haven't even realized the problem may just be in their head.
Unfortunately, many social scientists are pushing the idea that students learn better by having far less hours in school. There is also a lot of sketchy science claiming that homework is detrimental.
I think you are correct, but you are pushing against the headwinds of academia.
I agree with you, and I think AI-based tutors and software assisted personalized education could help a lot in this regard [1]; however, I'm not that optimistic in terms of implementing this in the USA.
About two years ago I chatted with a professor at ASU who was developing AI tutors and other sorts of systems and was able to show in research papers that they enhanced the learning of the class overall. However, he claimed that adoption among teachers and schools was largely rejected because teachers hated having imbalanced knowledge among the students.
Speaking as a parent with a child in private school, even there they have a strong resistance to teaching kids who already knows materials from the current year, where I was explicitly told those topics wouldn't be covered for two more years rather than embracing my child's curiosity and interests. K-12 education seems extremely non-optimal except for enabling parents to work, but my complaints about education aren't new [2] and our K-12 education certainly doesn't cultivate geniuses [3].
No-one does real intelligence studies in humans because it's such a third-rail in academia. Think "The Bell Curve". Some scientists seem to believe that intelligence is intrinsic. The analogy with dog breeds, with their different temperaments and capabilities, with individual variation, applies to humans as well.
Some people believe being homosexual is also intrinsic, despite identical twin studies showing contrary evidence. People like simple answers. It’s probably partly genetic, partly environmental. In other words, something worth studying further.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" This generalizes. Good luck funding research into a question to which people really don't want an answer to. There's some valid reasons to not want an answer - eugenics was and is a real thing, and its terrifying. For a while we seemed to skate by on a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not look into it too much. Just like there was a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not point out the facts of sexual dimorphism in humans, as a paean to feminism. When feminists start claiming superiority of females to males, or extremist egalitarians start claiming we're all the same, I think an argument could be made that they have invalidated the agreement. Unfortunately.
They've studied it extensively already. Twin adoption studies have conclusively proven that intelligence is mostly genetic with environment playing a small role.
But then engaged parents will take their kids to Kumon, and rich parents will take their kids to private school.
Their kids will then mop the floor against all other kids, including engaged kids without engaged parents, that would have benefited from more advanced classes. Is that equality?
That does not make any sense: without this measure, the kids that you are trying to save from moping the floor will ... mop the floor twice.
Without this measure, the kids that are not able to follow classes that needs things they cannot afford will just fail the lecture and drop from school, from THE WHOLE SCHOOL.
Without the measure, you have people who drop out of school and get a mathematical education close to 0 and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10.
With this measure, the same people will get a mathematical education closer to 5, and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10.
I think you might be misunderstanding the system. In California, you had standard track math, and advanced or accelerated track. This measure gets rids of advanced/accelerated, and forces everyone into standard. Without the measure you have 5s and 10s separated, with the measure, you have 5s and 10s together.
But as the parent post points out, 10s either dominate the class, leave the class, or ignore the class and take math outside school. None of that help's the 5s, and all of it hurts, or is wasteful for the 10s.
Thank you for bringing my attention to that. Looking closer, I'm even more confused: it was never question to drop "advanced math", but to replace "advanced algebra" by "advanced data science mathematics". The program was even claiming (maybe incorrectly, but it's not the point) that they wanted to replace the boring memorization of formula by real life problems more challenging for students.
So, I'm now not even sure where this "dumbing down" the students comes from. Maybe it's yet another moral panic.
It is not a moral panic, it is legitimate dumbing down of the math curriculum.
You have to look further back. They are blocking middle schoolers from taking Algebra. That means they won't haven't progressed enough to get to Calculus unless they skip ahead a grade level of math, either via summer school, or other outside study.
> They are blocking middle schoolers from taking Algebra.
By replacing it by another challenging mathematical content. How is that "dumbing down".
It's like saying "they are making students less musical because they are replacing piano lectures with guitar lectures".
And, yes, I get that Algebra is not the same as Data Science, and that Algebra may cover some foundation needed for a math specialization. But a lot of students don't end up doing a specialization in math: for them, Data Science may make them SMARTER than Algebra which give tools rather than train the brain to think differently.
I had a strong math cursus at uni, and I've observed that it takes a while for the "math point of view" to "click" and suddenly make sense. It is also the case in some comments here. I have never seen someone saying they have "clicked" before uni (I'm sure there is some, the point is that they are too rare to be the reason we waste all the other students' time). The reality is that teaching 1 year of something that you need 2-3 years before "clicking" means that it is just wasted on people who just do one year.
And, of course, Algebra is not limited to that. But it is also just true that a lot of it is learning formula by heart, which makes it difficult to pretend teaching a more challenging, engaging and practical math domain will make people somehow less smart.
They address that in the article: tutoring. One on one tutoring works amazingly well. I used to volunteer as a tutor. The students I worked with accelerated drastically. It's simply a matter of money.
They do leave out some things: food + shelter. Many poor students have problems with nutrition and safe shelter, both of which make learning near impossible.
The metro area I'm in is a perfect example of this. We have two small cities side by side. Pretty much the same socioeconomic makeup in both. One invests massively into education, tutoring, summer programs, etc. In the other the schools are literally crumbling, but hey, the police budget is at an all time high! The city investing into education ranks 9/10-10/10 on state tests, the city that allows its buildings to literally crumble (the library was off limits for a while because the ceiling tiles were falling so often they were injuring the children), ranks 2/10.
We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.
They don't really address it: tutoring is OBVIOUS, everyone knows that tutoring works. The reason they are applying this measure is because tutoring is not doable.
> We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.
And we can also give poney to every kids.That's a nice thought but that is so deconnected from reality, which means that you are pushing for something that will never happen and at the same time the unfair situation will stay the same.
Why? It's always appeared available on an opt-in basis as far as I can remember. It should be possible to drastically expand this through various means, outside of standard classroom hours.
We can tax corporations and billionaires. Building a functional education system isn't an unrealistic pipe dream, its an imperative for a well adjusted society.
Billionaires aren't the unlimited money piñata that you might hope; their total assets are less than federal yearly tax revenues, and good luck getting even a tiny fraction of that per year. As for corporations, I assume you're proposing raising the corporate tax rate -- but we're already near the revenue-maximizing peak of the Laffer curve on that particular tax, and there's just not much room to get more money that way.
(Also, only about a third of the incidence of corporate taxes falls on shareholders, with the rest being split about equally between lower wages for workers and higher prices for customers. It can be surprisingly regressive!)
The Laffer curve is a laughably poor model to inform tax policy:
- There are many taxes, not a single tax rate
- It completely ignores the idea of progressive taxation: rich individuals and giant megacorps can afford to pay higher tax rates without the same issues that would occur by applying those tax rates on lower and middle classes and small business.
- It cannot be empirically validated without cherry picking data because it ignores many crucial factors.
It's basically just propaganda paid for and promoted by the rich to convince the proles to let them keep more money.
I would love that (more money for education), and I'm pretty sure the people who proposed this measure would drop it immediately in exchange for more money for education.
But you are obviously not the first one coming up with this idea. Plenty of people have tried and are still trying, and it still does not work (it does not mean we should not try). In the meanwhile, we still need to improve the situation for people who are being the victim of it.
This is why this measure has been created while your measure is still far from being reality.
You are on to something here. The thing I'd contribute is that then we need teacher training to improve math teaching in the US. Math teaching in the US is often of poor quality, as teachers may not be trained well and are often not confident in their own mathematical ability. Curricula are often haphazard.
The US generally takes the approach that changing the curriculum or changing standards will change outcomes, but rarely invests in teacher quality, which would have very high impact (compare to Korea, Finland, etc.).
> The problem is not allowing people to take more advanced classes, if they so choose.
The article itself says that students who want to go ahead will get private lessons.
The idea is not stopping people to get more advanced classes, the idea is to cancel more advanced classes as long as "normal pace" classes are not present.
The way it works is that if you put an advanced class and no normal pace class, people who need the normal pace class will fail school over and over again and finally drop out of it, and people will just say "the advanced class is just a normal pace class" without realising it's not the case.
> The article itself says that students who want to go ahead will get private lessons.
This is a ridiculously privileged view that hurts the people it claims to help.
As a child, I was heavily invested in math, but I was raised by a mother who had no resources or inclination to pay for private lessons. Luckily my public school district had a few advanced classes available for all, and along with my own initiative, I was able to scrounge up a passable math education.
> The way it works is that if you put an advanced class and no normal pace class,
Caveat: I didn't grow up in California. I don't know how public schools are run there. That being said, this sounds like nonsense to me. There were always normal pace classes for students who excelled less. These were, in my experience, the most populated classes.
> This is a ridiculously privileged view that hurts the people it claims to help.
I'm not saying it is what it will happen, I'm saying that some says "this measure is stupid, smart students will get private lessons anyway" and other are saying "this measure is stupid, smart students are forced to not learn".
All I was saying was: if you think that the "private lessons" argument is elitist or unrealistic, then you should disagree with the author of the article.
> Canceling advanced classes quite literally prevents people from taking those classes.
1) You've cut my sentence, which says "cancel more advanced classes IF ...", which means that not all advanced classes are cancelled.
2) You are therefore asking to cancel "beginner's classes". I'm saying "cancel advanced classes as long as there are not enough beginner classes", so you are in practice canceling beginner classes. As any "advanced class" student was first a "beginner class" student, you are canceling the path towards advanced class.
> This is about allowing people to take the advanced classes if they choose, and allowing others to take normal classes.
Quickly looking closer to this, it was NEVER QUESTION TO CANCEL ADVANCED CLASSES. Simply, instead of algebra, do advanced data science (basically statistics), which is probably 1) more challenging, 2) more engaging, 3) more practical.
> Just allow people to take those advanced classes if they choose, and allow others to take take the normal classes. Problem solved.
Which problem exactly? It looks like the "no advanced classes" is just people on the internet getting all exited for something that was never considered.
> You are therefore asking to cancel "beginner's classes"
No, people are not asking to do this, lol. The complaint is about the education report that opposed students being allowed to study algebra in advanced classes.
Thats what this is about.
> Simply, instead of algebra, do advanced data science
Ok, so algebra classes are being cancelled. Yeah, thats the problem!
> Which problem exactly?
The problem of not being able to take algebra classes.
> No, people are not asking to do this, lol. The complaint is about the education report that opposed students being allowed to study algebra in advanced classes.
Obviously, nobody is just coming and saying "lol, I hate children, I want people to be dumb, I will stop them being educated".
The reason this report proposes to replace algebra by data science is because this report argues that data science is making people as smart as algebra, but also, unlike algebra, it does not stop some people to get smart.
(in more details: algebra is a lot of "learn by heart" and is mainly a preparation for higher studies with a learning curve that blocks more people, which means people who have not the luxury to take it will not take it)
> Ok, so algebra classes are being cancelled. Yeah, thats the problem!
They are replaced by something better, and removing them stop some students to end up less smart. Is that really a problem?
I'm sure algebra have some good sides (it's good to get good foundations when someone wants to study math, for example, without being indispensable), but is it worth the cost on other students?
> The problem of not being able to take algebra classes.
And yet before this proposal, no one was able to take data science classes, and no one (and not you) were complaining. Isn't that a bit unfair: you don't mind a world without data science classes (despite the fact that they are better than algebra), but a world without algebra is suddenly a problem (well, not "without algebra", you can still do algebra, just not in the same order)
> The reason this report proposes to replace algebra
Ok, so it is replacing stuff! Not sure why you had to go through so many posts to just admit that.
And people have a problem with what is being replaced.
If you wanted to say that support the replacement of algebra, you should have just said that from the beginning instead of doing this whole rigmarole.
But other people very much do not want this option taken away from them and step one to talking about this is at least admitting that, yes, algebra is being replaced.
> But other people very much do not want this option taken away from them and step one to talking about this is at least admitting that, yes, algebra is being replaced.
Of course algebra is being replaced, where do I say anything different.
I guess my mistake is assuming my interlocutors are not idiots and want to debate the reason of the replacement rather than just staying on "I like Algebra so I'm crying like a baby".
> And people have a problem with what is being replaced.
This is what I don't understand. They don't have any arguments to support the fact that the replacement is not bringing more supported "pro" than "con".
All they say is "I can see one good thing to Algebra, so it implies that this measure can only be a bad one", which is obviously incorrect. In real life, measures usually replace things that are not all bad by things that are better. The point is that you need to weight the pros and the cons. Here, it feels like people are just saying "I don't want to hear the pros, I know one con, and it means it's a bad idea".
I personally like Algebra, and I would have loved it to stay. The same way I like the convenience of some fastfood. But when a study shows that for the same price, they can replace a fastfood menu to a better menu in a school, the normal thing to do is to weight the pros and cons, not just cry because I prefer fastfood.
It is interesting to see that some people who present themselves as on the side of reason will act so irrationally to oppose some proposal without caring of the pros and cons, just because it feels negative in their feelings.
replace "normal" with "slow" and "advanced" with "normal", and you will discover:
1. Why this initiative is a problem
2. That simply rewording "slow" to "normal" and "normal" to "advanced" seems to constitute the majority of your argument, without which there isn't a good one
And replace "slow" by "terribly fast" and "normal" by "advanced" and, magic, now everyone gets advanced classes.
Estimating if the pace is "fast" or "normal" is very very complicated. Only an idiot will pretend they know for sure that "this is too slow" (unless obvious extreme cases which don't correspond to what we have here)
Also, apparently, the measure was to replace advanced algebra by advanced data science which was in fact more challenging than the initial recite-by-heart-the-formula algebra lessons.
it's actually not that complicated, just look at what other schools in the country do, or what these did before the change
then, with that data, you will know to replace "terribly fast" with the original "slow", and can try to make your proposal not depend purely on the semantics of inaccurately renaming "slow" to "terribly fast"
remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum the normal one, when the normal one is the one they had before these changes, the one which reflected the norm (hence the name) in the US
if you think that one is actually "advanced", that's upon you to convincingly make the case for, otherwise we default back to the above, but a purely semantic argument is pretty weak on its own anyways
also, the last paragraph of your post presents a false dichotomy: creating a new class doesn't require cancelling advanced algebra (advanced advanced algebra?)
> it's actually not that complicated, just look at what other schools in the country do, or what these did before the change
Except that you have not done that. Where are your data? Did you make sure that the group you compared are representative to each other? How do you correct for all the differences in state (unemployment level, diversity in education, political orientation, level of rurality, ...) that all have an effect? ...
So, no, it is objectively pretty complicated. You should have taken advanced data science, you would understand better that just comparing 2 states is very very naive to draw conclusions.
> remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum the normal one, when the normal one is the one they had before these changes, the one which reflected the norm (hence the name) in the US
In fact, I was not the one who started: the measure that is in question in the article has been proposed because people have done a study (a real one, comparing the numbers, you know, the thing that you say one should do before saying if it is slow or not but that you did not do) and concluded that there was a problem.
The document is 1000 pages long, of course it covers the elements that support their proposal (and you should agree with that as you say it's not complicated). These elements were themselves critized (maybe correctly), so it is funny to see that sometimes the argument is "their base study is badly done" and sometimes it is "I claim that I know what is 'slow' or not, without study, which is fine because if someone says it's not, they have just renamed without study"
If a team came up and say "we had a look and concluded that we should replace algebra by data science" and you just say "naaah, I have ZERO study on the subject, but I want to believe that algebra is fine", when someone says "but the point is that algebra is not fine", you cannot say "you haven't done a study": YOU are the one who pretend that the measure is not supported by the data, while you are the one having not looked at the data.
(and don't get me wrong, it does not mean that the study done by the people who proposed these measures is perfect or even correct. On the opposite: such study is difficult. If you now claim their study is invalid, it just show that 1) it is true it's complicated, 2) you don't care about the reality as you didn't even consider that they may have been backed by a study, you just assumed there was none because it was more convenient for you)
> also, the last paragraph of your post presents a false dichotomy: creating a new class doesn't require cancelling advanced algebra (advanced advanced algebra?)
What are you talking about: I'm not saying they had to remove advanced algebra in order to introduce advance data science, I'm saying they decided to replace something that they think is not challenging, engaging and useful enough by something more challenging, more engaging and more useful.
And if you think "aaaah, it's awful because before there was algebra and now there is no algebra, so it tortures the poor students who like algebra", why were you not crying about the poor students who like data science that was "canceled" before this proposal.
>Except that you have not done that. Where are your data?
It's your responsibility, not mine, to prove that what was normal before is now "advanced" by the standards of the country, and that slow is now "normal"
> I'm not saying they had to remove advanced algebra in order to introduce advance data science, I'm saying they decided to replace something that they think is not challenging...
this contradicts the assertion that the class was too advanced, now it's not advanced enough? Doubt.
Plus, you yourself are using the word "replace", here meaning removing 1 class and adding another: two acts. There's nothing requiring them to remove the first class, and there doesn't seem to be a convincing case for doing so. If you want to have a new class, go ahead, but don't nuke good, unrelated classes in the process.
>...by something more challenging, more engaging and more useful
is it, though? That's what they say, on 1 side of the issue, but it doesn't seem like that's the case, and again, both are useful, so that's not a valid excuse for nuking 1
> It's your responsibility, not mine, to prove that what was normal before is now "advanced" by the standards of the country, and that slow is now "normal"
I've answered that already: the demonstration is in the 1000 pages of the report supporting the measure debated here.
> this contradicts the assertion that the class was too advanced, now it's not advanced enough?
This is not complicated.
I'm saying we need a correct entry-level, followed by a correct advanced level.
I was just saying: "This measure does not dumb down people if they allow them to enter something they were not able to enter before. Moreover, I've also noticed that some people here seems to think that this measure implies that everything will ever be entry-level, which is not true, they are also doing advanced-level for students who have a faster pace"
> Plus, you yourself are using the word "replace", here meaning removing 1 class and adding another: two acts.
That's correct, well done. Let's see another example: yesterday, I've downloaded a movie, this morning, I've replaced this activity by listening to music. 2 acts. Yet, no false dichotomy.
> There's nothing requiring them to remove the first class, and there doesn't seem to be a convincing case for doing so. If you want to have a new class, go ahead, but don't nuke good, unrelated classes in the process.
Say the person who has absolutely no idea of the intricacy of designing an education program. They have to compose the program. Having parallel subjects means multiplying the work for the design, for the teacher, for the controlling bodies, ... Not something impossible, but certainly not something you want to do unless you really have to.
But then, you say "good class", and this is the problem: the reason this initiative exists is because IT IS, according to them, NOT A GOOD CLASS. It creates problem: inadapted learning curve, inequalities, early tracking of students, ... while not being intellectually very interesting.
Again: ACCORDING TO THEM. It does not matter if you don't agree with them: it is impossible for them to do a proposal where every one agrees. You are not special, and you can repeat "it's a good class", THEY HAVE A 1000 PAGES REPORT, they did not just wake up a morning and decided "it's not a good class", it's a result of a reflection that may be wrong but is certainly way more solid than yours. (just in case: it is not an "argument from authority", I'm not saying they are right, simply, painting them as if they are equivalent to a random HN commenter is just either intellectually dishonest or the proof that the person who does that is themselves really stupid)
> is it, though? That's what they say, on 1 side of the issue, but it doesn't seem like that's the case, and again, both are useful, so that's not a valid excuse for nuking 1
You realise too that if you propose to keep the 2, you will have people complaining about that, right? Some people like the color orange, some people like the color green. You may like green. Sometimes, people choose green, and you are happy. And sometimes they choose orange, but don't pretend that "green" is somehow "the good one", especially if you have nothing else than feeling and vague idea of how it works. But also, importantly, when we have the green-vs-orange, there is always an idiot who say "it's easy, let's just mix green and orange together" thinking that magically, both green and orange will be happy.
No, having both Algebra and Data Science is not "the best of two worlds". There are plenty of reason why it is very very stupid: more work, more confusion, we dont fix the early tracking of student (we increase it in fact because the uni will even less adapt to people who haven't done Algebra if they can just say "you had to choose Algebra"), we don't help diversity (Algebra will be even more non-diverse now that the "bad ones" who loves math will be pushed to do Data Science), ...
I don't follow this debate closely. In the late 1970s, I had the option to take algebra in 8th grade. I was stunned that I was selected, because I was terrible at arithmetic, and honestly I still am. I got Cs, maybe a B every now and then, in math up through 7th grade. My parents didn't apply any pressure (that I know of) to get me in. I remember taking the assessment test for algebra and I didn't even finish it. It was very stressful. But somehow I got in. And starting with algebra, something clicked. I could actually see how math could be used to solve practical problems. I got mostly As in math after that.
More recently, my kids had the option to take algebra in the 8th grade. I don't see any good reason to not keep it available. Sometimes kids need a challenge (or at least need to see a point to it) to engage in a subject.
My guess is that the districts that want to eliminate it are looking at poor math achievement and thinking that applying more resources to getting all the kids up to some minimal level of math literacy is better than diverting some of those resources to a smaller number of kids who are ready for more advanced topics. And yeah, sad to say but there are some teachers who are not themselves capable of teaching algebra or anything more advanced. So teaching it in junior high leaves a smaller pool of qualified teachers for high school math.
So the problems they are trying to solve are really a scarce resource problem. They need more resources to try get the low performers up to some satisfactory level. The real answer of course is always the same whenever you have a supply problem: you need to pay more. Wealthy families will do this. They will hire tutors, either personal or virtual. For the rest of the kids who only have public education available, we've shown a consistent unwillingness to properly fund it. And I don't necessarily mean in terms of total dollars. We spend a lot of money on public education, but we spend it poorly.
> I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some [...]
You don't need to have a unified "goal". Just let the faster students learn more. Note California public schools started *removing* optional classes for faster students.
The Dallas experiment is interesting, and it’s not surprising at all that the students actually learned more than if they had been in less-advanced classes.
The question I have is what the grades look like for the kids who were somewhat involuntarily included in the class. In junior high, grades don’t matter all that much, but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depending on how hard the GPA hit is.
I understand that grades matter for getting into college, but this mindset is viscerally horrifying to me. It almost reads to me as: "What if people were appropriately challenged and learned more? Wouldn't that be horrible?" Grade inflation is a terrible thing, even if it is likely an intractable problem because of the incentives that go into it.
Grades are a score that parents can use to compare their children to other children.
It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything.
The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-administrator conferences (and sometimes parent-lawyer-administrator conferences) and you end up with school-wide policies like failure quotas where you are not allowed to have more than 5% of your students fail your class (ie the responsibility of the students grade falls on the teacher, not the student). And that is how grades stop being a measure of a student's understanding of the material.
The pathology about grades is caused by colleges giving far too great a weight to high school GPA. If it falls below a 3.5, your chances of getting into the kind of school that people who give a shit about their or their child's education are gunning for drops precipitously.
Meanwhile, universities don't take the time to seriously consider what courses a student took, save for a few APs. That leads to a situation where it may well be in the student's best interest to coast through an easy A rather than get a B or C in a more challenging course. An example I can think of immediately was a friend who got an offer rescinded from a UC because they failed Discrete Mathematics as a senior, despite the fact that taking the class at all was completely optional for him.
Most people are at school because their parents need daycare, not to learn. Schools perform the important social function of sorting and ranking by academic ability and what students learn isn’t all that relevant to the sorting and ranking. One sixth of students in US high schools are bored in every class, every day and two thirds are bored every day[Highschool Study of Student Engagement].
I wouldn't advocate for grade inflation, and there's no indication here that's what happened. I would advocate for analyzing which types of students were well-served by the change, taking into account their learning and the effect on their GPA.
I would expect that it wouldn't be that difficult to select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class. This would be more fine-grained than simply shunting all kids into an advanced class.
> select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class.
That's how it works now, pretty much everywhere. Your 7th grade teacher recommends you to take the 8th grade algebra class based on your performance (or, at least, their interpretation of your performance)
The question is, where do you draw the line that qualifies someone to take 8th grade algebra? Who do you let in when there is 1 seat left and 3 eligible students to fill that seat? How do you make sure that the grades you are using to determine who makes the cut are accurately measuring mathematical ability of the students and not biased in some other way?
I'm not advocating for either the California or the Dallas solution to this problem, but both those school districts have identified that letting the 7th grade teachers make this placement decisions is a problem.
This is only realy relevent for college admissions. Having a high school degree is a credential that matters, but few people will look at the GPA on it.
For college admissions, the admissions offices aren't stupid. They generally don't look at "GPA", but compute it themselves. A small private school might need to worry about how colleges interpret their transcripts. But a system as large as California? Colleges will learn very quickly how to weight grades from different levels of classes. They already need to deal with grades being wildly inconsistent between schools. They also get other signals such as the SAT, which provides a consistent measure independent of class level.
Last I checked was decades ago, but even then colleges were looking at class rank as GPA could not be compared between schools. SAT scores can be compared, but even then only to others taken the same year (realistically the yearly test changes are small enough that you can safely compare over a few years and be close enough)
>but come high school it could be worse to have lower grades in more challenging courses, depending on how hard the GPA hit is.
At least when I was in high school, the regular, pre-AP and the AP classes each had a different grade scale. Core classes were a 1.0(70%)-4.0(100%), pre-AP were +1 (1-5) and AP were +2 (2-6). So in theory they were taking into account how difficult the classes were. Since this was in the DFW area, I'd expect something similar in Dallas.
In the age of Zoom, won't even slightly well to do parents get tutors from a remote country for a reasonable price for their kids if the school stops teaching math. The only kids who will suffer are the kids where parents are not so much focused on education, thus increasing the disparity.
You can get remote tutors to teach your kid skills, yes. However, if your goal is to have your kid advance to higher math classes, it isn't enough to just know the skills. Schools erect extreme barriers to advancement (Palo Alto USD has been successfully sued on this point [1]), so what students really need is to enroll in outside courses that are certified replacements in order to get credit. Finding out about which courses these are, getting your kid physically to the courses, etc., will always be easier for parents with more means.
The article you linked is incredibly confusing. I assume the issue is, which is typical of any advanced courses in school districts where helicopter tiger moms live, that little billy didn't qualify for the advanced math course because he's not smart enough but mom knows he's actually a genius. The pressure to let in little billy builds and builds until the districts relent and fill the classes with buffoons and the educational quality is lowered for everyone.
The crux is that many students would take the 9th grade math course via private courses to then jump ahead a year or two when they get to the high school. The school tried to prevent people from doing this and the parents sued.
I went to this high school ~10 years ago and at the time a handful of kids every year would do this. I'd imagine it's much higher now though.
The lawsuit was filed because (1) the district refused to allow students accelerated placement based on their prior outside coursework, and (2) used acceleration exams with a pass threshold that was comically too high (requiring students to know much more than was actually taught in the classes they sought to pass out of). These tests ended up having a wildly disparate impact on girls, who passed at a much lower rate than boys.
The district lost on (1) but not on (2) because it is illegal in CA to refuse placement for a student who has completed a course that would qualify for UC/CSU credit — which is what PAUSD was doing.
In 9th grade, to accelerate from Geometry to Algebra 1 (10th grade) you needed a 95% on the exam, which was 1 hour long and around 90 questions. And this was despite taking Algebra 1 and 2 at a certified private school with UC/CSU credit that the C-suites of Tech companies send their kids to.
Why would you accelerate from geometry to algebra 1? Do you mean algebra 2?
My understanding is that at PAUSD they had two tests, one part that measured if you understood the core curriculum, and another that was more along the lines of brain teasers/math competition problems. You had to pass both (many passed the first but not the second). One issue was that the district seemed to cherry pick students to let them through; students would get access to accelerated classes even if they scored worse than other students who were blocked.
It sounds to me like there may have been an intermediate step, which was for little billy to be enrolled in some sort of third party course as a catch-up / qualifier for enrollment in the advanced class, and the district not accepting that.
Dual enroll meaning take classes at a nearby college while going to high school? Do HSs let you take just part of their curriculum? Did you go to that college full time later on, or just for a couple years and then apply to regular 4-year colleges?
Yes went during high school hours, they let me out 2 hours early. I didn't get high school credit, but you could fail/skip 2 classes and still graduate. I went to college after this, graduated about 1 year early.
Not a kid, but I got a math tutor remotely. 1:1 a lot of the group remote problems go away. And market differences make a huge difference in affordability.
People will get/prefer normal tutors when they can afford, yes. But good high school kids would be able to learn from remote tutors too, and those would be affordable for most families.
This is what I'm most excited for in LLMs. GPT4 Code Interpreter was created by taking the Base Model GPT4 + Layer of programming questions. I hope they do the same for a math tutor model or open up the base model for others to do so.
How does that follow from GP’s point? If remote interaction with a human doesn’t quite measure up to face-to-face interaction, how does an LLM improve upon that?
I don't think you need to get a tutor from a remote country. I would just enroll them in an after-school math program like Kumon. But yes, enhancing the education after school in general is likely what motivated parents with means would do.
> The only kids who will suffer are the kids where parents are not so much focused on education, thus increasing the disparity.
It’s almost like whenever the government tries to “fix” as issue and put its thumb on the scale it backfires. The results end up being the exact opposite of the government’s stated goal, unless that was the plan all along.
No, it is just people who are trying to do something would achieve more in that area than people who are not trying, regardless of conditions. You could change things so that trying is not really required, and it might work wonderfully if the barrier was made up to begin with, but that fails hard when that clashes with reality.
It probably needs to be said because of situations like that in Baltimore, Maryland. The city spends more than 97% of what other major school districts spend, and yet it's students are on average some of the worst performers: https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
The answer is simple, though. When you invest the money exclusively in the schools and what happens in the schools, your reach is extremely limited.
In Baltimore, and everywhere else, raising the minimum wage, offering free daycare & preschool, and improving the social services that prevent many low income kids from learning outside of the school (and parents from supporting them) is what will make the real difference. But, at least half of this country is opposed to spending money on those sorts of things because the "I got mine" attitude is more pervasive than "What's good for my neighbor is what's good for me".
Baltimore is a segregated, poverty-ridden, drug-addicted city. Try performing at or even caring in the slightest about schoolwork if your parents are uneducated junkies and you haven't eaten for a day or two.
You are only taking into account one factor. Is the money being spent well? Do you need more money because of external situations that may affect a child's learning?
For example in a poor area with more crime a child may need after school programs, which cost more money, to keep kids out of trouble.
Urban school districts in the US are disproportionately in old buildings that have high maintenance costs, low efficiency for utilities, and have all sorts of problems that need remediation, like lead or asbestos. There is generally no capex money to replace these buildings, and even if there was, finding a suitable property in an urban area is pretty difficult, since schools are big.
Some kids are educatable. Some are not. (and this also depends on subject and other factors)
That's true across all races, classes etc.
I say this because I actually think the biggest issue in education is that we waste resources on kids who are not educable and hold back whole classes for the one kid who refuses. This, and 101 other issues stem from that policy. A big part of what parents get at private schools or schools in nicer neighbourhoods is fewer kids holding the class up.
We should be assessing schools on how many kids get As and go to college. Instead we assess schools on how many kids pass or attend. So schools spend their time and energy dragging truants into classes and turning Ds into Cs. Anyone trying hard is just ignored, there is no news story, reward etc for getting a B kid to get an A etc...
> Citation needed. Why wouldn't they be, unless there's a disability?
They come from a sub-culture (mostly based on social-economic status) that is aggressively anti-intellectualism.
Being bullied, shunned, etc. for being able to do things like read, do “basic” math, and/or speak anything outside of the local vernacular (e.g., something like a more neutral sounding “TV English”) is a thing.
This type of research is abundant in the education literature. That said, it is not always presented as straightforwardly as one might expect since it doesn’t match up with certain agendas in the education research and policy worlds.
> So if a kid is being bullied for learning to read, the answer is to stop teaching them to read? Is that really your suggestion?
Definitely not. Quite the contrary, actually.
My point is that folks shouldn’t be surprised that some kids in these types of environments have low or negative motivation to learn.
> And by the way, the statement "Some kids are educatable. Some are not." also comes from a sub-culture that is aggressively anti-intellectual.
All kids are able to learn — in fact, they are sponges.
The issue at hand is what do they learn and in what contexts.
Formal school-based learning is a tough sell in some contexts.
People continue to be shocked that throwing money at low SES students doesn’t meaningfully improve education outcomes, despite decades of data showing that it doesn’t.
The interventions that have been shown to work over and over again are:
1. Early interventions like the (old?) Head Start.
2. Increasing engagement at the community level, specifically with parental buy in. This is very hard to do, but can be done.
Once a community has embraced anti-intellectualism, all the school can really do is create a safe space in at least part of the school for those who want to learn.
You seem to be offended by my ideas. The ideas I present here are based on actual research. I encourage you to look into the literature and (if possible) talk to researchers and practitioners in environments that you are not native to (low SES rural, urban, and non-native speaker communities are good places to start).
>I have seen good teachers do wonders for 'problem' kids
Exactly.
If you have a 1h lesson and 30kids you have 2minutes per kid. Assuming there are no "fixed costs" like registering them etc.
So EITHER that teacher somehow changed a kids whole mindset in 2minutes per lesson (and that's what, 10min a week if you're lucky?).
OR they neglected a big chunk of the kids that turned up already wanting to learn etc and gave those kids time to that 1 kid.
This is the fundamental problem I am talking about: "good" teachers neglect 80% of the class to go after 1 kid who does not want to be there. Turning that one F grade into a C grade is given more attention than turning 20 other Cs into Bs and As.
It makes a great Hallmark Moment, but it's terrible actual educational policy.
Then people wonder why education has so little affect on outcomes.
Let me be really clear here: I am not making a moral argument about leaving that one kid behind. Just purely a practical one: when you neglect the majority and focus most resources on the least productive cases you get very poor outcomes for the average person. And the outcome for the group is highly dependent on how many and how bad those worst cases are.
From everything I've read, it's nearly entirely the case that low income and ESL students do the worst (and there's a large overlap between those groups) and it has almost nothing to do with the kids' educability or intelligence. They are in a difficult spot due to no fault of their own and require more support than what a typical teacher in a typical school in a typical city can provide without meaningful investments in broad social services Americans don't seem to have much appetite to invest in.
It's not exactly like that. Average IQ is very different between races. That explains many discrepancies. And it also explains these policies that revolve around cutting down the tall poppies.
Wow, I thought we left this nonsense back in the 1960s. Study after study shows that every additional confounding factor you account for lessens this supposed difference. Nutrition, health, environment, socioeconomic status, cultural attitudes toward learning, implicit bias in the IQ tests themselves, blood lead levels, iodine levels; race is confounded with hundreds of variables. The more of those you hold constant, the less you see any difference in racial averages. I suspect people who still spout this nonsense know this, and/or don't care.
In most of Europe we have gymnasiums (advanced secondary) and lyceums (advanced high) schools, while primary is "just school" and the same for everyone. After primary education, usually 4 years, entry exams are held at gymnasiums, which have a lot of profiles (PhysMath, ChemBio, Philology etc, mine was Informatics), and those talented enough to pass them are transferred there, while the majority is filtered out and stays in "just schools". After secondary education (4 more years) people could get their high school level education at their "just school" or gymnasium, or either go to lyceum (requires exams) or college (as well). Lyceums are usually for those who aim at doing science at universities, and colleges for those for whom associate's degree is good enough (like me). What is really useful is that with associate's degree people could admit to the 3rd year of university of related profile to get their bachelor's in usually 2 more years. The profitable outcome of such a system is that everybody gets treated depending on their ability, resources are spent effectively and least common denominator doesn't sinks talents. Btw all of those are totally free, so no "social class" advantages are held by anyone. Maybe it's time for US to have gymnasiums and lyceums as well?
Does anyone have a less biased article about this to tell if this is actually a thing?
I remember the controversy over Common Core Math and I realized a lot of people complaining about it weren't very good at math and their criticism was more a reflection of that than valid criticism.
Now it's hard to believe when people complain about something when education is involved.
There's been a trend in secondary and higher education for the past ~5 years or so in favor of removing more rigorous classes (advanced math) and more objective evaluation* (standardized testing) in the name of equity.
Proponents argue that it advances equity and removes stigma. Opponents argue that equity is a bad goal and even if you thought it was a good goal, this perversely accomplishes the opposite.
Same, I'm dubious of anything that doesn't directly quote CA's own docs about the new standards. Instead the quotes are from random people complaining about it.
Yeah the article reads as biased, but Dallas is a majorly democrat city probably more than California. So both are 'progressive' policies. One just seems to be geared towards giving kids more access to advanced classes, and tutoring opportunities. It's a no brainer that this is better for outcomes but people will pearl clutch and say 'we have to abandon public education' because some school district tried something.
In the name of progressivism, epistemology in humanities has been dismantled, and business schools soon after were captured by the DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) religion.
Finally the demented Paulo Freire idolaters are coming for stem fields. Let's see if the push back is too little, too late, or if there's hope. Otherwise, do tutoring or homeschool your children.
Edit: and of course, the result of those last 2 proposed actions will be that the gap between social economically well off kids with good structured families and those in difficulty will soar sky high. And progressives will use that increased gap to double down on asinine policies.
The content and curriculum that has been excised from public education in past decades should draw the attention of anyone wanting to learn the mechanics of power. When control of childrens' upbringing (for 7 hours a day) is up for grabs, what is and isn't taught is critically important to understanding motive and intent.
Has anyone tried giving kids a vote in school-board elections?
Teachers' unions are increasingly compromised. Electeds use kids as pawns to appeal to radicals to promote random social causes. And parents seem to focus on grades going up at the expense of an actual education.
Maybe they'll just vote themselves candy. But in my experience, kids understand--at least as well as the median adult voter--what they need to succeed. Enfranchising them in their own educations seems worth exploring.
California, in particular, has high-school only school districts. We don't have to start with whether the kindergarten block is aligned with less nap time.
A year ago, a kid in our district made a presentation to the board asking for homework to be eliminated. The district is now undergoing a review of the homework policy, with equity-focused board members/administrators pushing for all homework to be eliminated, or at least reduced. One board member literally made the argument that "we don't actually know if homework increases learning, do we?".
Granting student children rights would be a disaster for career administrators and bureaucrats, undermining the entire institution and all of its conceits.
If you want to see how well it works, look at the Sudbury Valley School model. (It works extremely well.)
Asians outscore all other ethnic groups in school.
The schools are under government order to equalize educational outcomes, but because Asians dominate in educational performance the only feasible way to get outcomes is to crush the top, i.e. it's easier to make everyone dumber than make everyone smarter.
It's not OK to harm Asians to elevate other groups when Asians have been victims of racism in America for hundreds of years.
Just curious, how can we homeschool if we are not teachers ourselves. I understand the Math that's for sure, but I don't have the confidence to serve as a good Math teacher. How do you proceed if you are in the same shoes?
First of all understand it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. Many homeschooling parents enroll in a part-time education co-op with other likeminded parents. I guarantee there's one near you right now. In these groups you essentially take turns teaching. There's almost always a parent there who is competent in an area where you lack expertise. It really just works out.
The late-game strategy that I see is enrolling in community college for advanced classes in math, physics, science, etc. In Washington state you can start this your junior year in a program called "Running Start" and it's free. At this point your homeschooling with that child is essentially over and they're taking college classes for college credit.
There are lots of home school resources and programs. Things range from sitting your kid in front of a video lecture to being the teacher yourself. Some programs are great some are just enough to satisfy the law that your kids are getting education. Frankly if you don't already know the above then you are not ready to wade through the mine field of homeschool. You need to figure out which programs are good and which are just marketing.
In the end though, while many homeschooled kids do well on tests, they all show the narrow mindedness that comes from never meeting someone who is different (religion, and political background are big ones here)
Something like Khan Academy can help with both problems. Just do the exercises, obviously they'll go wrong, explain until they go better. 1:1 feedback is much better than even great teachers.
This solves both how to teach and the bigger problem, what to teach so your kid passes the SATs.
Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.
We have a generation if activists and policy makers that have grown up seeing measurements as the ground truth, that they have list sight of what they were trying to accomplish.
I went to public school in the 2000s in South Florida and there were after school programs hosted at the schools to help with all sorts of subjects. Do these school districts not provide these services anymore?
Also, in high school & college I tutored people in mathematics (algebra and pre-calc usually). What I found is that everybody can learn anything (I truly believe this), they just need help and for people to be patient with them. What saddens me about this policy is that:
1. It feels like its giving up on students. Instead of trying to help them they're just throwing their hands up.
2. It also feels like a very lazy and uncreative solution. let's assume there are people who just can't do math. Why not create tracks for them to succeed in topics they are good at and create separate tracks for people good at math? It feels like the school districts are trying to fit everybody into the same bucket when maybe people should be put into different buckets. This is how it was in my public school system (gifted vs. honors vs. regular track) and nobody complained. Regardless of the political association (progressive or not) it feels very very lazy.
Is there anyone out there who disagrees with this? I have not seen a single person (aside from the few people actually implementing these changes) that agrees with it.
Read the article linked at the start: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/california-needs-real-math-edu..., and you'll find that there are quite a few people supporting this, importantly in school boards, and education departments and such. They don't care about the rest of the world, because they are "the experts."
In general what you'll find is that most of these advanced classes are dominated by certain economic groups. Public funds are advancing people with more resources when all they actually need is to pass state college entrance exams. It's not that children from low income families can't do the math, it's that they're at a huge disadvantage when their parents are often working, can't hover over them to make sure they figure it out, and can't afford Kumon. If you agree with a progressive tax rate (which not everyone does), surely you understand that this is a bad thing.
I personally think all middle and high school should be bare minimum. Kids should be able to test out of classes when appropriate. The extra funds can go toward paying competent teachers for the less advanced subjects. If some parent wants their child to be advanced, they can use their own resources to help them test out of classes and take whatever APs they need.
Also many of the comments on this topic here and on Twitter to me reek of solipsism. Every upper-class parent wants the best for their child, and every hacker thinks the story of their journey into math and CS is the most important one.
In addition this, at least in California, kids can dual-enroll in community colleges to take supplementary or more advanced (or even vocational) courses that mostly do transfer for college credit when applying to UCs & CSUs.
I sometimes wonder if this is how the German system came about, where there's a hard split in high school / gymnasium between the academic track kids and the vocational track kids (and there absolutely is not any shame in taking the vocational route).
So shouldn't the solution be to get kids from lower economic groups into those classes? Rather than stop teaching anyone?
The solution you're proposing takes away any chance of accessing these advanced classes for lower economic groups, and keeps the economic inequality moving.
What happens when the low income kids test out of the remedial class? Oh well, they're just done with school then?
> Every upper-class parent wants the best for their child
I'm not sure how to read into this. Why did you purposefully qualify this to only upper-class parents?
I'm genuinely not. I'm honestly fascinated by your thinking. It appears we have similar goals, yet I cannot wrap my head around your logic. There must be some deep, first/zeroth principles that we disagree on or something.
It's a complete straw man argument. Nobody believes that it's better to dumb down education, but that's not what's happening here. Very specifically, they are replacing middle school algebra with a data sciences class. The idea is that the data science stuff would be more practical and get people interested in math more than algebra, which is a more abstract. It doesn't sound completely crazy to me.
I read that. It was just as bad and didn't really explain it. My favorite part was when he told me how society teaches girls they're bad at math, linking an article that said nothing of the sort. Both of these articles read like Fox News pieces. Lot's of anger and non objective opinions. It's such a turn off. But there were some interesting bits too. I quite like the idea of making AP classes opt out instead of opt in. That could be done in conjunction with replacing algebra with data sciences. I don't really have an opinion on which is better for middle schoolers, but this article failed to make up my mind.
Yes, technically it will improve ‘equity’ by dumbing down everyone. I believe this is the script of the movie Idiocracy playing out in real time. We all laughed and now we will cry because politicians decided that they’ll be inspired by the movie.
Motivated and rich parents don't care about it. If you don't provide the learning opportunities to the gifted students, those parents will just look for somewhere or someone else to get the job done. Only the poor and the underprivileged gifted students are deprived of the opportunities. At the end of the day, that's how things work in the real world
In my home country of South Africa the department of education decided the best way to deal with high failure rates among students with maths was to lower the bar by introducing a "maths literacy" course and allowing people to take it instead of proper maths.
There's only one equal state, among many states of being. We'll probably never have true equity at all, and if we do it is vanishingly unlikely to last. It's like getting a coin to land on the edge.
What we should probably strive for is an environment where you can catch back up if you fall behind as long as you're willing to put in effort. This can be accomplished by helping everyone who is disadvantaged (e.g. poor) equally. This will disproportionately help any group that has been disproportionately harmed for whatever reason, so it's self-correcting over time and only gaps in effort will remain.
Math major here. Go for it CA. The current "STEM pipeline" is garbage and underserving. A larger populace not excluded from the pipeline (because it wont exist) and not being turned off by math before high school is actually a step in the right direction.
It will take an economy the size of CA to upend things, and they need to be upended. If it's progressive to have a larger base of the mathematically literate, then so be it.
The current system just hires who resembles the incumbents the most. I think that can be broken if enough students and resources go another direction.
Math is no different than any other subject at its core. So it needs to go back to being a regular subject, not among the few in the pipeline, which should never have existed. (Why do I need 3 sophomore level prerequisites, Applied Linear Algebra, Calc 3, Diff Eq's, for a junior level class, mathematical modeling? And there's worse examples at my university too, I followed the least pipelined path. That structure doesn't exist as directed for most subjects. The pipeline needs to go. Math doesn't have to be this way).
I feel like your complaint has more to do with the teaching structure in university academia, then the high school and middle school level. Nevertheless, a much greater focus on algebra two as the capstone would even help kids for pre-engineering where they just would need to learn some rudiments of calculus in college.
I'm sure at some point people will be advocating that kids who do better at math be given shots of whisky until their performance is at par with other kids.
You could get extra help after school. Should a teacher just move as fast as the best student? You seem to want the education system to mirror capitalism which I find morally reprehensible.
What if you can't get extra help, what if that's not enough? A child doesn't have that much control over their lives, who knows what is going on at home. Maybe class is all they have.
You're right about my interpretation as black and white. I still think it's an issue if some or even one child (assuming they don't have some mental issue) is left behind in a class. Meaning that the teacher won't slow down for one child but the pace is acceptable for everyone.
> But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources.
Yes, they are. But they won't be equally educable, and that's what matters to critics.
>> The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.
Is that the goal? I don't think it is. I think that schools serve a host of purposes, some of which we don't like to talk about. They are a place where the government can literally inspect children. They are where the malnourish, sick or otherwise distressed children can get noticed by people in a place to help.
They are daycares that free up parents to work more and be more productive. They are centers of indoctrination where kids are taught societal norms. They are cultural melting pots where kids learn to navigate self-defining social structures. They are also proving grounds, places where children are judged and assigned numbers (grades) that will either grant or deny them access to higher levels of education or other opportunity. The three Rs have never been the entire mission. Looking at what kids do at schools these days, education seems very much secondary to everything else that schools do.
The author is looking at the topic from a quite narrow perspective. The reasoning 'why' what he observed is happening could be due many other reasons. I think he also misunderstood some fundamental reasons why school exists in the first place, such as functioning as a "day care" for bigger kids allowing parents to work.
The article is based on an assumption of why something was done. It is positioned in a way that it immediately invokes a reaction "how can they be this stupid". But... What if that is not what those who made these decisions actually think? If he just assumes that is the case?
I'm no expert, but maybe it would help here to do a thought experiment of "what I might be missing from the puzzle?".
Lack of resources is one thing that was mentioned here. It is not that they drop the class and do nothing else. So what was the alternative? Where are the resources put now?
I'm quite sure there are other things we are missing too. I'd like to step into those people's shoes who are making the decisions to understand better why they chose what they chose, instead of assuming what they think.
Of course, if the goal is to actually improve equality, it is really stupid. Somehow I just doubt people are that dumb. There must be something more to it that I'm missing.
This blog post treats a tired subject. At least a dozen front-page HN pieces have lamented cuts to algebra.
But what makes it worthwhile is Noah's coverage of the Dallas experiment. That is a much less-told story. If you came directly to the comments, it's very much worth clicking on the link and scrolling down to the second half to see the data from Texas.
25 years ago I was part of my National Honor Society outreach committee. One of the things I and my committee co-chair did was go to all the "normal" (rather than IB) classes and tell students that with a good GPA they could join NHS (as NHS did have a demographic makeup that wasn't reflective of the school). Students had no idea. The outreach did make a difference. The Dallas experiment, and the tutoring discussion in the article, resonate deeply with my later experiences as a math prof as well. Pushing kids results in higher achievement.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup, " said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They
weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway.
They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces
were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty
face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the
vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get
very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his
thoughts .
It reminds me of one practice in communist China under Mao; university students were forced to spend some time now and then working on the land, to let them feel that they were not any better than the farmers who lived there.
But actually this is even worse.
fwiw, these are guidelines, not rules, and districts can themselves choose their curricula. I'm in the bay area, and even though SFUSD has removed algebra from middle school math and tried to remove calculus from high school, my kids' district still has an advanced math track that teaches algebra in 7th or 8th grade, allowing public school kids to reach Calc BC their senior year, and/or have an elective slot for other AP math options (Stats, etc).
I really appreciate some of the comments in the blog post talking about how most people don’t need algebra or anything beyond basic maths for anything in their lives. How those people have done just fine without understanding anything beyond addition and subtraction.
It’s finally explained something I never really understood. How do so many people fall for pyramid schemes. How are there so many Americans that don’t understand the difference between their net worth and their credit limit.
If you haven’t built a basic intuition for abstraction, which one pretty much learns only through algebra in K-12, all these things will be extremely difficult for you.
"the ABC and the 123" are no longer sufficient. we need the xyz (allusion to algebra) AND the fgh, which stand in for the f(x), the g(y), and the h(z) better known as functions, BUT at the depth of lambda calculi.
In the US, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending on public education has roughly doubled in the past 50 years. If money were the real constraint, I would expect 1970s schools to be absolutely horrible compared to the schools today -- but standardized test scores for things like reading and math have been roughly flat over that time span.
The proposal sounds pretty moronic, but I don't understand the need to call Dallas conservative vs Cali 'progressive'. Dallas probably has more democrats ratio-wise than California, it's a major city.
This stuff seems so cartoonishly bad that I feel like I'm missing something. But I've been unable to find the progressive arguments. We need popular progressive bloggers to explain the other side.
The idea behind delaying algebra is that if you teach math more slowly, the people who do worst in math will be able to progress somewhat further because they have more time to drill and repeat things. Someone who would have received an F in algebra in 8th grade might be able to scrape a D+ if they spend a year preparing and then take it in 9th grade. Empirically, they did indeed see a greater percentage of people passing algebra when they delayed it by a year. Of course, they also saw fewer people taking AP Calculus, since the slower pace of education meant that fewer people had the prerequisites in time.
So the big question is, why make everybody take the slow track? Why not offer the option of 8th grade algebra to students who are ready for it? As far as I can tell from listening to advocates, it actually is the Harrison Bergeron thing, but with a twist: the achievement gaps that they're trying to narrow have strong correlations with race and class, which makes closing those gaps almost a sacred cause. And that typically is where the arguments stop, in much the way that a mathematical proof stops when you say "QED".
I don't really think it is progressive, just dumb. The Dallas project the author defends as a better alternative is also in mostly democrat voting city
If someone is blocking a child from learning more and moving faster than others because of “equity”…then some school districts need to start firing some bureaucrats. Take away teaching licenses if someone is unwilling to uphold an oath to do their best with each student even if it means some students are smarter and faster than others. You cannot escape reality. You will not stunt the brightest in the name of this false god you call equity. Harrison Bergeron is a dystopia, not a training manual.
>Harrison Bergeron is a dystopia, not a training manual
There are people, many people, who disagree with you. In good faith. They want the best for everyone, and they see inequality as the source of much suffering, and does it not make sense to address the core of the problem?
The problem with such people is that they lack the imagination and humility to understand the downsides to their proposed "solution". They choose to ignore the old addage about "the cure is worse than the disease". Ultimately the sin is hubris. They will read Harrison Bergeron and call it propaganda, hyperbole, designed to derail right-thinking, good people from pursuing utopia.
I think a good solution is universal basic income that increases in size as automation unlocks more for everyone. Then over time, everyone becomes increasingly empowered to self-actualize at their localized maximum learning velocity without needing to stunt someone brighter.
Sam Altman has a correct understanding on how automation will reduce the marginal cost of doing business so much so that universal basic income becomes not only feasible but logical.
People are not equal learners - some are smarter than others and some learn faster than others. Ignoring this reality does not change it. What you can do instead is allocate resources more efficiently by leaning into the disruption of AI and other efficiency gains to give people an equal gift that respects individuals - namely, a universal basic income that creates a society of people who are always learning and getting smarter at their best possible speed. The reason this won’t be fronted as often is because distributing cash directly to people is too simple a solution to hide ideologue-bureacrats-in-the-middle.
It's a nice thought. However in practice it will require a great transfer of wealth from AI providers to the public. E.g. if MS office copilot eliminates 10M jobs, and they make some fraction of those wages in revenue, only tax laws on MS will extract that as UBI revenue.
It may also be that we discover how many truly BS jobs there are such that it was all a house of cards to begin with. Not sure what we do then.
This does imply some innovation is needed in how taxation happens. That is also something Sam Altman agreed with in his piece. This is an easy and simple problem to solve and all the leadership at that level has agreed on the spirit of the query as far as I've seen in their commentaries. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it yet, it's really good:
I think once tens of millions of jobs are going away and everyone needs to retrain into the types of work that are still available, we'll pretty seamlessly be able to transition into a UBI model where everyone affected becomes a college student or learns a trade or craft again, with UBI making it a graceful and exciting Great Reset without anyone falling by the wayside. Because at that point, the real economic efficiency gains still exist except at a marginal cost of effectively 0. This means that with automation you can just print what you need and everyone's standard of living skyrockets.
This is because commodities are plentiful on a big planet like this one and others.
I think the "BS jobs" concept is missing the mark a little. Those aren't BS jobs. They're just the jobs that have been most visibly automated the fastest. They may still retain, say, 25% of the useful and necessary functions that those roles require. But because of how culture and legislation lag behind technology in rate of adoption, people still feel the need to put up with appearances of working a specific amount of time or quota in order to placate someone who only counts the beans so to speak.
Tens of millions of people enjoying a Great Reset is a beautiful and achievable outcome if we do it properly.
When everyone is affected, we will just work on art, music, self-improvement, learning for joy, and spending time with loved ones. And making more loved ones. This will happen.
I should have been clearer. BS jobs had to be created. They had to be created as a kind of UBI that can exist without challenging neoliberal economic orthodoxy. If that is the case, then increasing those worker's productivity is actually counter-productive! You've destroyed the value of redistribution-under-a-fig-leaf that those jobs represented.
And you've traded the current mostly working solution for the political difficulty of getting UBI done. People aren't rational, especially in today's radicalized political zeitgeist. I wish it weren't so. Heck, only 1 in 5 GOPers think climate change is real. UBI will be fought, perhaps with violence, as a form of socialism.
I was told that it was written as a satire of what conservatives believed, mocking what they would believe about affirmative action. If this is true, it's even more bitterly ironic.
Equity is nonsense. Leftism (as demonstrated by California) is a race to the bottom. But life is competition to reach the top. Your kids are competing with others. Available resources are finite, population is increasing, therefore competition is required. And competition/adversity breeds development. Teach your kids to do better than other kids. Give them every tool you can to help them succeed and do better than their peers.
Yeah, as best I can tell, this article is making stuff up. Referencing the article he cites and fails to link to, it's clear that no one is refusing to teach kids math.
The headline and the rhetoric used in the article are misinformation at best if I assume the author is simply ignorant.
It's honestly nonsense. The way he frames the other side of this argument as "dumbing down" the education system in the name of racial equality. If this doesn't immediately set off your BS detector you need it tuned up.
> It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness.
I think it's worth it in this case. You have to be an absolute moron or someone with a sinister agenda to think that decreasing the standard helps the community in any way. Especially idiotic to call this "progressive".
If I were a country trying to subtly sabotage the future growth of another country, I would target the educational systems. Not to say that is that case with what is going on here, Hanlon's razor and all that. But it does make you think.
Either way, I worry for what the future will be like with current educational policies.
(Not trying to start a flame war). There's a strain of left-wing thought (of course not ALL left-wing thinking) that accepts economic prosperity as unconnected to competence.
Something that's just there in larger or smaller amounts, like the weather.
To these people, standards is just another word for gatekeeping. In this frame of mind, something like communism actually makes sense - the prosperity is there by default, and those at the top get most of it, so why not put everyone on the same rung of society.
There's another school of thought a step closer to the centre which holds that competence exists, but has no innate component and is purely environmental. This leads to the conclusion that if you put everyone in the same environment, you'll get the same outcomes.
Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life. No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this.
Pull your kid. Find them a school that gives them the greatest opportunity to succeed and use the funds earmarked for their education to ensure they receive it.
Currently, options are restricted to parents who can afford to move to a different school zone, afford private school or have a parent available who can facilitate a home school environment.
Letting parents vote with their kids placement will force schools to truly advance.
There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents, the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies.
In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged."
> There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents
is really rough on the kids of engaged parents, forcing them to be responsible for "fixing" systems that they didn't create.
In the UK, we used to have "grammar schools" that selected on ability based on a standardised test. They were responsible for many working- and middle class children being propelled into high positions in industry and politics, including Prime Minister.
However the whole idea was deemed inequitable, so they were dismantled. Now privately school educated children have less competition.
And if you could fix the system, it would have been fixed by now. If you have a kid today, you have 5-6 years to fix the system before it starts failing them. Your kid will be grown before any meaningful change is made, and any harms caused by the current system will be fully baked in.
If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people.
Public education doesn't have to mean public schools.
> Public education doesn’t have to mean public schools.
This is eloquently put. I’ve never heard it said that way. There is no reason to believe that an entity like the government, great for accumulating and distributing the money required for public education, is a good or efficient agent for administering said education.
We see this in many other fields. For instance, non-government researchers receive government grants for research. Similarly (for better or worse), the government gives money for agricultural subsidies; nobody proposes that the government ought to run the farm. It is intuitive to us that specialists in a given field may not work for the government; it is high time we applied the same logic to education.
Compare how much money US spends on average per student in public education verse other countries. How do students rank academically in US compared to other countries?
Consider this
If you look at the system without vouchers, there is no market mechanism to correct the situation everyone is complaining about.
There are no incentives. Each year, more and more money is dumped into the system.
If you introduce competition, then schools have to start fixing problems if they want to get the funding.
Yes. If it were the case that public schools were universally regarded as great, and everyone felt well served by them, it would be right to be skeptical of private interests coming in and trying to capture some of that money for themselves. But we have the exact opposite of that situation.
If there is money available the choices will appear. When it stops being about the building and government curriculum and starts becoming about satisfying parents desire to have their child educated, anybody can become a teacher or organize a school. If the teacher fails to deliver the parents will go elsewhere.
The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.
Actually, public education has to mean public schools. Vouchers are a band-aid invented by right-wing nutjobs to allow religious schools to be funded by public money; they do this by taking money away from secular public schools. If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools, not break them further.
> If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools
Who defines what fixed is? How do you call success on those fixes? The process is a problem today and it's similar to politics.
I'll give two issues of issues in fixing things...
First example, if there is a problem leaders can come up with a policy/process/thing to deal with it. And call success at having that in place rather than seeing results. If the policy/process/thing doesn't work success has already been called. They aren't going to walk that back. There is a lot of this.
Second example, schools are being used for social change. And the topics of some of the social change are not agreed to in society. Who gets to decide what's right? Should schools be agents for this change? This is being fought in society right now. It's not really discussed or debated but more fought if you look at the tactics and behaviors.
How do you fix things in this form of environment?
I don't care if public funds go to religious schools. I want an educated populous. I could not care less if kids are also taught religion along with philosophy, math, history, physics, science and communication. Actually, I don't even care if schools teach the same subjects. Above a base of knowledge required to achieve a depth of knowledge I would not mind if schools received public funds to start specialization earlier in a child's life if they are capable. The key to this is parents getting to choose where the money goes.
There is a first amendment case to be made about withholding education funds from religious schools. By withholding funds from schools that are deemed to be "religious" the government is creating a preference for schools that are not on the list of religions but may be every bit as ideological. The government cannot prefer one ideology or religion over another. It is required to be agnostic.
I'm almost 50. I've watched this scam play out my entire life. We've gotta fix the public schools, they said, when I was in public school. They said it year after year, generation after generation. It's never happening.
We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.
It may surprise you to hear this, but intentionally destroying the public school system and hoping that the private sector will step in with a replacement is not a viable solution to public schooling. Private schools are not required to serve all students, either in a socioeconomic sense or a geographic one. Allowing public schools to fall into terminal disrepair does a massive disservice to those students who wouldn't be served appropriately by private schools.
Public schools as they exist today are already in a state of terminal disrepair and do a massive disservice to all their students. Note that the original article is about public schools banning the teaching of algebra for all students before high school because too many students fail it.
Parents complain about this and fight against it but are ignored. So what are we supposed to do? There are only so many school board meetings you can attend only to get eye rolls from officials.
Grammar schools do still exist in a few hold-out counties like Kent.
One thing that was repealed by the last Labour government was the Assisted Places Scheme [1]. If you scored highly enough the government would pay for a child to go to private school.
There are still some grammar schools, but they are badly distributed, because it’s based on political views from past ages. For example, the city of Southend in Essex has about 7000 grammar school places. Entire counties of Norfolk and Suffolk have none.
> School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged."
Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children.
Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parents the enemy of the state.
I dunno--if you want to see America's mental illness problem on full, public display, just do a YouTube search for "school board meeting outrage". It's great when concerned, non-ideological, rational parents show up to have a voice in how the school is run, but the flip side of that coin is ugly, belligerent, and counter-productive.
For some of the decisions these boards make, outrage happens to be the only rational response anyone who cared could possibly have. If they were crippling my children for the rest of their lives, I wouldn't get up in front of the room and drone on in monotone about how there are more reasonable choices to be made. No one could do that in full confidence that it could work even some of the time, nor do anything but react when it was proven to you that it didn't ever work.
As for ideology, I doubt it's possible to be non-ideological. I have children not because they are accidents or the abortions my wife didn't bother to have. Not even because we just didn't know any other way to go through life. We had children because children are a good thing unto themselves. So good that I hope they grow up to have their own and enjoy that experience. Schools are hostile to that and seem to be doing what they can to encourage sterility.
The ideology that it is possible for a human male to transition to a human female (or the inverse).
Not everyone believes in this and that is ok. I choose to respect the wishes of adults around me for social cohesion. I draw the line when we’re talking about children.
Even worse, most people don't believe in it, the ones that do are typically just following a popular fad. Which is a truly awful reason to permanently disfigure the children and adults who have been caught up in this nonsense.
I’m confused, your comment talks about schools and the government making parents the enemy and being anti-parent but your linked articles are about parents making threats over things like Covid mask policies. What exactly is your point?
> “We are coming after you,” a letter mailed to an Ohio school board member said, according to the group. “You are forcing them to wear mask — for no reason in this world other than control. And for that you will pay dearly.” It called the member “a filthy traitor.”
Ah yes, this is clearly a 'both sides' issue where parents are the victims.
Parents are merely exercising their First Amendment rights when they threaten violence against school teachers & staff? That’s an interesting position.
I find it hard to believe that you find it hard to believe that law enforcement was called in to deal with individuals threatening violence on others, regardless of whether these were parents at a school board meeting.
Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students.
Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.
One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing.
The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcomes should be required.
Furthermore, making schooling a purely financial transaction? Where do you think that leads?
Yeah, I'm OK paying taxes to get to live in a society with universally-available (mostly) fee-free primary and secondary education that aspires to some set of standards.
I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.
But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system.
I spent years in both public and private schools.
The worst part of public schooling was that everything was scaled down to the poorest-performing child's level.
The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.
The latter outcome is _significantly_ better for society than the former.
> But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large
No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large.
(If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied religions.)
But that's exactly my point. Would you deny this same right to kids that attend Jewish day schools? Could you even argue for that without sounding like a massive bigot?
Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it.
Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Religious freedom is an enshrined right in this country.
I'm Jewish, I went to Jewish day school for awhile, and I definitely don't think tax money should be going to Jewish day schools. Nor Christian nor Muslim schools. What religion you raise your kids in is your business, and no we're not the USSR.
Keeping religion out of publicly funded institutions, including schools, is done as much to safeguard free religious practice in this country as anything. The point is that the public institutions should be entirely civil and not under the sway of any one religion, because each religion once in control of society ends up discriminating against the others. That's why you don't allow them power in the civil sphere.
At least in the US, The community is not religious by definition in the constitution. The whole gambit with vouchers is that you are laundering money for religious institutions by putting it under "personal" choice.
If the political arm of the fundamentalist movement focused on morality policing its own members, instead of trying to force its values on the rest of us, we'd have way less of a problem with it.
It is very actively 'trying to fuck us over'. And it's winning, hard, in both the 6-3 sphere, on the legislative bench, and in many others.
>But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system.
Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]:
The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide
an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools —
and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas
the city says are ultimately under state authority.
The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny
investigation that has stretched on since 2015.
The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards.
That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019.
[...]
The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young
Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva
graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside
of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra-
Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for
boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools
have pushed back strenuously on those claims.
The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all
private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an
education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools.
The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially
equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it.
And that's just one city in the US. I am unaware of such reviews in other places (some likely do exist, I just haven't heard about it -- please do jump in if you're aware of similar investigations), but religious schools (of whatever stripe) exist to support their preferred religion above all else.
Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society.
> The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.
I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity.
I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.
My private catholic schools had plenty of stupid kids, non-catholic kids (me), desperately poor kids (also me), and kids with special needs.
The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.
One of the key problems in the US funding system is that population clustering effects will cause exacerbating effects where people of increasingly similar socioeconomic and cultural strata all stick together - of course this will cause rising inequality and unequal outcomes. The people living in the gated communities fund their local school primarily, not the poor one on the other end of the street that can't get or retain teachers there besides from ideologically driven sources like Teach for America because students are absolutely horrible when coming from poverty-stricken homes that use public education as a meal program while the working poor parents do 12+ hour shifts frequently.
The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.
The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcomes—not to say we shouldn't even out funding or even give poor-performing schools extra funding (which we already are doing, and if we just evened out funding, we'd be taking money away from the schools in very-poor areas and giving it to "richer" ones) but it very much does not look like doing that will have much effect on educational outcomes.
Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor.
Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.
I'm not disagreeing that throwing money at bad schools won't really help is the thing although it might seem like that's where my line of thinking may lead. Heck, usually more money at schools from what I've seen ranges from more administrators (lol if anyone thinks that helps) to equipment for students (as if an iPad will help a disengaged kid that much?). Add in the reality that lower socioeconomic status folks tend to move a LOT (think migrant workers' children) and that has pretty bad outcomes on education regardless of potential of the child.
In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats).
As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them.
I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.
The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.
We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.
I’m a big proponent of leveraging Amdahl’s Law in social policies and that freedom of movement should be promoted culturally given the nature of markets to solve a lot of problems although we have serious gaming and regulatory capture issues in the US that make this pretty naïve. If command economies oftentimes fail to attain resilience and markets have horrific social side effects detrimental to civil society / collective problem solving, as a society we should probably accommodate people to relocate given it’s probably cheaper than encouraging specific groups to relocate geographically. There’s no clear social contract at a point given so many holes and inconsistencies over many decades of back and forth bad faith approaches along with institutionalists myopic to the individual scopes of their well intentioned policies.
Much like the original architecture and UX of welfare in the US had assumptions like a family with a cook at home I don’t think education as an institution is really meeting the needs of the public to be better informed and critical thinking citizens invested in communities and society as a whole.
There’s a big cultural issue currently where people are resistant to move for better opportunities when much of the US immigrant population has thrived over generations specifically by migrating to opportunity areas. Now, many that try to leave impoverished areas are shamed and become pariahs for leaving basically job deserts and the social costs are horrific as people find less and less connection to others.
Public education system is definitely a positive thing that most of us will pay taxes for.
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.
My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket.
I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education
However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.
As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing different value system and the customers will be parents, not the children they ostensibly are charged with educating.
By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
> By grouping parents with like-minded parents, we'll amplify groups and clusters, leading to not only further stratification but also further decoupling society and greater inequality.
This effect is super obvious if you've ever sent kids to a private school. A big part of it is that you're opting in to a certain approach and set of attitudes and beliefs, even in secular ones. If you're not a fit for their program, you don't get to meaningfully agitate to change things as you might in a public school—they just tell you to go somewhere else, then pluck another candidate off the wait list to replace your family.
This can be awesome (though still risky, in some ways) if it's a good bubble, but of course they aren't all good ones....
Ultimately, it is your right as a parent to decide what values you want your minor children to be taught.
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
Most importantly, original articles here provide data that show that teaching math the way CA is trying to do has led to worse outcomes across the ethnic spectrum(unless of course parents had a financial ability to complement with private school/lessons).
Ultimately, it is your right as a parent to decide what values you want your minor children to be taught.
So, we have the right to indoctrinate bullshit to children?
What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?
We work by improving public schools. That's going to be easier said than done, but it's the right solution.
If the question is whether the state or the parent has the ultimate power to decide on what to teach their kids, the individual parent must almost always win in my opinion.
It sounds like you're in a good spot where the taxes extracted from you go to support a value system that you are in favor of. Given that taxes aren't a choice, and given that value systems vary between people, can you envision a case where somebody with a different value system would be unhappy about where their taxes go?
Sure. Lots of people have ideas or preferences I think are terrible. I hope they lose at the ballot box.
[EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.
> One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society.
From what I have observed of the US's education system, the problem is that the public education system is assimilating children into values that are _not_ shared by society nor their parents.
I think that part of the problem is that I have no idea what values you are talking about that don't match society/parents.
That is to say: I'm a leftist and I'm worried about schools indoctrinating kids into a whitewashed, anti-LGBTQ+, jingoistic understanding of the world. However, I'm sure there are Republican parents that are concerned about kids being indoctrinated into a "woke" understanding of the world.
I don't know how you manage things when you have the country split down the middle with two completely separate worldviews.
The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.
I can also see it is causing a mental health crisis in students, who increasingly are under pressure to identify as an oppressed minority, in order to be marked out as an oppressor; victimhood conferring social status.
>The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.
Where is this being done? What school districts specifically? What are the specific topics that "introduce victim/oppressor politics into schools?"
I'd really like to know, as I'm not aware of any of that stuff. Since you're obviously a "disinterested observer," without an agenda, I assume you've gathered actual evidence for your assertions.
My view (as an American "with an agenda") is very different from yours. If I'm wrong, I'd like to adjust my view. As such, please provide me with specific examples of what you're asserting.
For one example, Abigail Shrier's book "Irreversible Damage" covers the mental health crisis amongst girls identifying as transgender.
An excerpt from the section "Trans as an intersectional shield":
> "“Of all of these badges of victim status, the only one that you can actually choose is ‘trans,’” Heather Heying, visiting fellow at Princeton University, pointed out to me. “All you have to do is declare ‘I’m trans’ and boom, you’re trans. And there you get to rise in the progressive stack and you have more credibility in this intersectional worldview.”
And earlier context:
> Kindergarteners are introduced to the “Genderbread Person”15 and “Gender Unicorn.”16 Kindergarten teachers read from I Am Jazz, and the little ones are taught that they might have a “girl brain in a boy body” or vice versa.17
> Teachers present an array of gender and sexual identity options and appear pleasantly surprised when a child chooses wisely (that is, anything but cisgender).
> The schools are not forcing adolescents to identify as transgender, but they are greasing the skids. The LGBTQ safe house they’ve fashioned is avant-garde and enticing, framed with moral superiority, insulated with civil rights...
Thanks! I can recommend those for reading lists in the public schools near me.
That doesn't answer the question I asked, nor does it show anything even close to encouraging a "victim/oppressor" environment.
No one is trans because its' "cool" or because someone mentioned that trans people (less than 1% of the population) exist. Do you know anyone who is trans? It's certainly not some golden road to peer/social acceptance and popularity. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In fact, trans folks are routinely subject to harassment, ridicule, threats and physical violence. Stopping such abuse is the goal, not creating more trans folks -- which is ridiculous on its face.
That you take your own trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature don't make them so.
None of what you posted makes your point, rather it just points up that you don't like what certain people have to say and you want such ideas and people suppressed. What are you afraid of?
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter
I'm not claiming that "I just want to have a debate," nor did I "pursue" you (I made exactly one request to detail evidence of your assertions) and none of what I asked about was "tangential" or "previously addressed." And I'm not "feigning" ignorance. I know quite a bit about trans folks and the issues and discrimination they face.
What's more, the tired tropes (which you trotted out rather than have a substantive discussion) are more akin to the "Gish Gallop"[0] than anything I might have written being "sea lioning."
I have no interest in debating anything with you. You're just flat wrong.
Regardless, you have your ideas/beliefs and as a decent human being, I don't despise you for those beliefs, nor do I advocate for you to be silenced (as you do about others).
Please do speak your mind. It's an important part of having a free and open society. And I will do the same.
assimilating children into the shared values of society
The US no longer has universal shared values, it has many different sets of values that are all competing for survival. Schools have become the front line in this battlefield.
>The US no longer has universal shared values, it has many different sets of values that are all competing for survival. Schools have become the front line in this battlefield.
I disagree completely. Our shared values include belief in the rule of law, equality under that law, equality of opportunity and a whole bunch of other stuff that has always been the rhetoric, but much of which has only grudgingly been implemented for wider and wider swathes of Americans over the past 230+ years.
That some folks are at odds some issues most certainly does not mean we don't have shared values. It means that we don't share all the same values/ideas. Which is exactly how it's been here since well before the founding of the US.
> purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society
Regulate voucher schools. Content requirements. Restrictions on religion. Maybe even standardized testing, or requirements that voucher students not be subject to extra fees.
The public is paying, after all. It can attach strings to its money.
Or, unengaged parents will blame the school for their kid's poor performance and move their kids over, thus bringing down the metrics that gave everybody the impression that it was a good school in the first place.
> the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies.
This assumes that it's actually possible for parents to override insulated bureaucrats whose heads are stuffed completely up their own derrieres.
Political hyper-polarization doesn't help either. If your local crazy-left school board abolishes merit in the name of equity, you could always replace them with crazy-right Republicans who believe the Earth is 6000 years old and Qanon is real.
That's exactly what's happened at our board level. The PTA of the school itself is the involved parents, and the schoolboard has the utmost contempt for them!
None of the involved parents are willing to put in the effort or have the desire to be elected to the schoolboard though.
My experience coincides with yours with respect to the disregard school boards have for, not just the PTA, but the will of parents in general. Although I don't think that, at its base, it started with contempt-- I think it began with actual disregard or maybe apathy in favor of their own pet projects and ideas of how things should be regardless of the parents' wishes. Contempt only entered the picture when parents voices dissent. But that's only what I see locally for my district, I'd certainly believe you if you reasserted that no, in your district it did actually begin with contempt as well.
With respect to the GP comment, I don't think things are quite as pre-planned as a deliberate effort to have engaged parents sort of subsidize the lack of effort by less engaged parents. That might be the net result, but attributing that to a deliberate and coordinated plan on the part of school boards or the broader public education system is, to my thinking, giving them too much credit in their ability to so coordinate and engage in such complex efforts. They bicker far too much among themselves pursuing their own agendas to agree long enough for that level of strategy.
And there are on occasion parents truly willing to put in the effort and get elected, but end up quickly disillusioned on their hopes for affecting any change and leave to spend their time more productively. Often enough those who seek & stay in these board position aren't even parents of children who currently or even attended the schools in the district.
Again though, I'd temper my statements with the caveat that they're based on my own singular experience, and I'd readily believe that elsewhere there are boards who arrive at the same state of affairs with a bit more deliberate actions. It's all a mess.
I strongly suspect that in practice, those engaged parents handle it by moving to the next polity over that's not trying to use them to improve policies.
They often don't have a choice. They can stay, but as just one vote they cannot reform the system. They can fight for thier kids, but they may have limited results. (My mom faught hard in ~1965 to be able to take shop, but it was a boys only class and she didn't win)
I'd bet that the school she went to would let a girl into shop class today (assuming the school and class are still around). Change is possible, but it's slow. It also matters if there's one girl who wants to take shop class vs many girls who are asking for it. Parents and students can work to change the ways their schools are run. They may have to campaign for and promote their causes so that "one vote" grows into more votes, but votes still mater.
Sure, but it was too late for my mom. My mom would have been better off finding a different district that would let her in (this may not have been possible), instead of fighting a system that ultimately failed her.
>Sure, but it was too late for my mom. My mom would have been better off finding a different district that would let her in (this may not have been possible), instead of fighting a system that ultimately failed her.
An interesting and important anecdote. But rather than focusing on your mom's inability to take shop class, perhaps you might reflect on the fact that your mom (and many other women/girls) fought for such changes and, eventually (albeit too late for your mom), won.
That's how change happens. If you just throw up your hands and say "well, I/my mom/whoever couldn't have something that was good and important. So there's no reason to ever fight for change," seems incredibly reductive and doesn't reflect how change has been wrought throughout history.
Please understand, I'm not poking at you or your mom (in fact, I don't know her, but I think she's fabulous!). Rather, I'm taking issue with the idea that we "can't win, so don't try." That's a recipe for those who understand how change is made to create the world in their image, whether you like it or not.
There are two different issues here. Long term change and short term better. Both are very important. There is no reason you cannot work on both at the same time and many reasons you should. My mom trying to get into shop class was part of both, and if she could have switched schools to one that allowed it (see the other reply) that would have done even more as it would prove women are not too [weak, stupid...] to do so.
It's interesting to think what might have happened if every girl who wanted to take that shop class just found another school that allowed for it instead of putting up a fight. I'd like to think that all schools would eventually abandon the arbitrary restrictions left over from outdated gender roles, but it's not impossible that without repeated pressure from a growing number of frustrated parents/children they'd continue to keep that shop class male-only hurting those girls who weren't able to switch schools
I get that it's hard to ask people to think of the wider implications when they've got their own life to consider though.
>the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged."
There are grim economic shifts behind this. The majority of people are now priced out of raising their own kids to a good standard (i.e. stay-at-home mum). So, more and more people feel envy towards those who can, and various "equity" movements pop out (that all focus on bringing top performers down, rather than bottom performers up).
The only way to fight it is move to an area where most people can still afford kids, and in our generation it may mean moving out of U.S. entirely.
Assume for a moment that my vote matters... in the sense that who I choose is elected. Further, assume that I get to craft and design these magical candidates like it the sandbox mode of some video game.
So, after all this, these candidates of mine are in charge of the school board, and no one can cockblock them. At this point, does it change the quality of the school's education? Not necessarily for my kids... that's a more difficult thing. Maybe it's a great school, but my kid's just one of those left behind by random individual circumstances. Just on average, does this school improve?
Turns out, not really. That school system is still limited in many ways beyond the school board's ability to affect on any reasonable timescale. There is not just a finite talent pool to hire from, but quite limited. And the resources to somehow expand that talent pool are limited too (and it seems likely that even if you could offer $500k salaries, you're attracting money-grubbers more than great teachers). Your capacity for the HR system to even pick the best of that talent pool is sketchy.
Textbooks? Limited by what textbooks are offered on the open market. Limited by whether parents will accept that Timmy really is a D+ student, and doesn't deserve automatic Bs for showing up and not acting the maniac. Limited by the "culture of public education"... if the best field trip ever could only happen at the end of July, that doesn't happen because we have ideas about how public schools are supposed to work and they're just not "on" during that part of the calendar.
If I was some angsty nihilist, I'd be ranting about how school boards cockblock everything public schools should be doing. But it's so much worse than that. If they did cockblock those things, it'd mean they had some idea what they should do, and were for some reason opposed to it. They don't know. And if they did, it wouldn't matter.
The system is designed in such a way as to be completely orthogonal its imagined purpose.
And you don't have to be especially intelligent or attentive to recognize any of this enough that you just don't bother with the school board elections. Why would anyone bother to vote? The truth of the matter is it's mostly between worse-and-worst candidates who have no true desire to see any sort of real improvement, and your one vote's not enough to sway it to one or the other.
It only works when everyone is committed. When there can be no private schools.
If everyone is committed, everything must improve for you to see changes. If everyone is not committed they'll just send their kids to the best schools and ignore the problematic ones.
There’s a reason that folks who are all about “equity” and “centering black voices” are silent about the fact that black people overwhelmingly support school vouchers: https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/new-survey-shows-black-pa.... Many of the issues the “equity” folks talk about recieve far less support from black people, including racial preferences in admissions and hiring (which the majority of black people oppose) and even the notion that government has a special duty to help the social and economic status of black people (which is 50/50) or even the idea that the government has an obligation to racially integrate schools (which is also 50/50).[1]
People who have a higher propensity to live in a district with shittier schools overwhelmingly support an alternative. This isn’t shocking. What most people, including it seems you, haven’t thought about are the long term consequences to universal voucher programs given the current idiotic system of school funding being largely based on a how much the houses in the area are worth. The long term consequences are bad and quite predictable.
EDIT: There are lots of papers regarding school vouchers and private schools and why it’s a bad idea. Simplistic solutions to complex problems tend not to work and have bad unintended consequences.
>current idiotic system of school funding being largely based on a how much the houses in the area are worth. The long term consequences are bad and quite predictable.
This hasn't been true for decades:
>on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively.[0]
Almost all federal funds go to poor areas, so much so that they have more funding on average.
While total per pupil expenditures may be greater for the typical Black or Latinx students’ districts, there is variation in how these dollars are spent. On average, both Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures exceed White per pupil expenditures for administration, instruction, and social services. On the other hand, Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures are less than White per pupil expenditures on infrastructure. Black per pupil expenditures on all other items are slightly less than in the typical White student’s district, while Latinx spending is comparable.
Table 1 also illustrates some familiar facts. Black and Latinx students’ typical districts tend to have higher levels of child poverty, on average, than the typical White student’s district (5.4 and 4.0 percentage points higher in Black and Latinx districts, respectively).
Poor students who come from food insecure homes or live in high crime areas need more help in school in terms of school lunch programs, after school care, mental health intervention, etc. As such they need a lot more funding per student.
Complex problems require more than a simplistic solution. There are cultural, sociological, and economic forces at play. Vouchers are not a panacea. For one thing, private schools don’t have to accept students they consider a problem. Wealthy schools don’t want too many undesirables so won’t accept vouchers. Public schools will end up having mostly all the problem students without the resources to deal with them.
I don't understand how you can read that and think that the issue is spending.
The answer is (and always will be) human capital. You could airdrop TJHSST kids into a literal warzone and they would do well. Smart kids are smart because they are smart. There is no magic dirt, and "muh multicausal forces" is pure cope.
People like you got ahold of SF's school system and made Lowell lottery entrance. They swore that it wouldn't have a big impact on test results and that the new class would benefit from being on the magic dirt of Lowell High School. Of course that's what their theories would support. Lo and behold it was an abject failure as anyone who wasn't a psychotic leftist could predict.
I don’t think the issue is spending. My main point is that school vouchers are bad. I did say that the method of school funding is idiotic.
Smart kids dropped into a war zone may or may not do well. They might die for one thing. They might get so traumatized by the event that they are unable to cope in life. Change someone’s circumstances drastically enough then it won’t be possible to know what the outcome is.
I’ve mentioned some of the bad effects vouchers would have. That would be a supporting argument in my mind. The bad consequences are easy enough to deduce though so that should not be necessary. This is not an academic forum. This is a place where people post their perspective and opinions. I have no desire to hunt down links. Interested people can do that for themselves.
It’s worth pointing out that people who support vouchers haven’t posted links to papers showing that vouchers are good. At least not in the thread started by rayiner. There have been papers posted on ancillary topics but not on the efficacy of vouchers. This isn’t a complaint on my part. I’m showing an asymmetry in the view that you posted above.
As for downvotes. I don’t care about internet points and never complain about downvotes or are otherwise affected by them. If you think what I’ve written is poorly stated or otherwise bad then downvote.
The person who said that smart kids dropped into a war zone would do just fine said something moronic and without attribution to its veracity. Why don’t you downvote them and ask for citations? Are you consistent in your view on this? I doubt it because if you were you’d be downvoting the overwhelming majority of comments on every thread on HN.
If you read the paper cited by the person I responded to above you’ll see merely comparing dollars spent is not an adequate analysis. Poorer districts have to spend more on ancillary costs - school lunches, mental health resources, social services, etc. Poorer districts have higher administrative costs, spend less on teacher salaries, and spend less on other areas related to educational success.
It’s not a strange feeling seeing data contradict my beliefs. I welcome such occurrences as they provide an opportunity to get rid of false beliefs. In the present circumstance I’ve not argued that more money needs to spent. I have suggested a better method of allocation of expenditures and that school vouchers are not the answer. Do you have evidence that I’m wrong on this? If so please show the evidence.
This depends a lot on the state & county. Where I used to live in VA & NC, property taxes went to the local district to spend, and the wealthier schools had better programs & facilities. In CA, where I live now, property taxes are aggregated at the county level and doled out to districts based purely on student population. Superficially, this results in rough parity when it comes to government-funded services (things like lunches, Pre-K, music/PE/libraries/art/etc). However, this all falls apart because of the piece that can't be controlled this way: direct parent contribution. Some bay area schools receive >$1000/kid/year in direct parent support, not to mention volunteerism. These schools will always do better than ones without this, and not just because of the $. The $ & time investment makes the parents even more vested in how schools spend, and the outcomes.
This only works if you require all schools getting vouchers to accept all students. Otherwise you end up with all the special needs kids in the public schools that are required to take them and all the high performers in private schools.
And even then you still have the problem of transportation. Only the more well off families have the time and means to get their kids to somewhere that isn't their closest home school.
Unless you require the school to accept vouchers from anyone who wants to go and provide them transportation, you're still going to get inequalities of outcomes.
> Unless you [...] provide them transportation, you're still going to get inequalities of outcomes.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Rich people buy homes near good schools. Poor people live in homes they can afford next to bad schools. Removing the option for poor parents to drive their kids is not equity. Its damnation.
I live in a state where you can _pay_ (yes not a voucher - you PAY) to attend a school outside your district. I knew several poor families which took advantage. I don't know of a single middle-class family which did the same.
Not a scientific study. But it seems to me totally excluding the possibility of going to a better school is not kindness or progress or equity. Infantilizing poor people who "don't have time to drive" is silly. Some don't but there's always car pooling. When you're desperate you make it work.
> you're still going to get inequalities of outcomes
There is inequality in aptitude with respect to education. Forcing equality of outcomes is a design for crushing cruelty. Some people having good schooling is better than nobody in the name of equity. Pursuit of this policy is undermining public support for state-run schools.
I think you can ignore the transportation part, if for no other reason than impracticality - not all districts offer effective or workable transportation now.
I'd suggest that additional funding for special education, on a per student basis could be based on some sort of disability index, whereas the more services they require gets the district more money. Ideally some formula that is a mix of numbers based on local assessments, and weighted to similar districts in size and socioeconomic backgrounds of their residents. Like if a district games the system, the weighting should result in them being brought back into some mean.
No. Why should I accept less from a private school when the public school already guarantees it? This is incredibly important for special needs students and families.
> I'd suggest that additional funding for special education...
This already happens. In part, it depends on the state and county. Schools get more money for special needs students. I'm fine with them getting more money, but let's not pretend that the school receives the same funding for special-needs and non-special needs students.
There are also highly specialized schools that focus on special needs kids. Would we end up with more of those? Are the services available in public schools as good as what a specialty school may be able to provide?
> Letting parents vote with their kids placement will force schools to truly advance.
That's naive. How much effort will be required to get your kid to a better school? Daily effort? Schools get selected because of convenience (distance, cost), and because the neighborhood friends go there as well. Homo economicus does not exist.
Furthermore, it presupposes an open competition between schools without restrictions on placement, and all information available and understandable to everyone. It's not going to work.
There's also the effect of mixing children with different backgrounds. A good school with can absorb a small amount of deficient students and stimulate them. Having everyone fight for the same school will cancel that, certainly if there also are programs that advance one group over another.
The only result of a free market for schooling will be that well-informed parents with some means will be able to select better schools for their kids. This being a (near) zero-sum game (you can't find a million good teachers), it'll mean the rest will be off worse.
I don't completely disagree with you, but where's the incentive for a government to give you vouchers to spend on non-governmental education, directly taking away funding from the schools the same government is responsible for managing?
If it was a different pool of money, I get it, but -- speaking specifically about the Bay Area -- one of the reasons public schools have suffered is because of attrition toward parochial & private options. When school attendance shrinks, so does funding, which creates a downward spiral of performance in many cases. And it isn't even that all the private options are superior, but because public school funding is dependent on attendance, they detract from the capability & capacity many of these schools have to deliver high quality education. I'm sure it isn't unique, but I've never lived in a place that had such a high proportion of kids in parochial & private schools, and it absolutely does harm the public schools. Compare this to somewhere like Massachusetts, which is equally progressive, treats teachers equally well (better), and has much higher performing public schools -- largely because fewer families with means to pay for private actually do, and those kids & households further support the teachers and administration of their neighborhood schools.
> where's the incentive for a government to give you vouchers to spend on non-governmental education, directly taking away funding from the schools the same government is responsible for managing
The schools are there for the kids. They aren't cattle to be used as a commodity input to a jobs and spending program.
The incentive is because it saves the government money, and educated the student better.
If costs the government 20k per year to educate 1 child, and a private school can do a better job of it, for 15k, then the government saves money by having the private school do it instead.
The Bay Area has a really interesting synergy of situations that all contribute to really terrible public schools. A big one is that even in the best school districts, the salaries do not match the cost of living, so teachers cannot afford to live in the communities they work. Another one is that, thanks to prop 13, low property taxes on long-held properties create a serious bottleneck to funding for the schools. Both of these serve to strangle off the quality of education, which in turn drives parents to private schools, landing us at the point where enrollment is dropping off and, as you say, lowering school funding as well.
I would argue that until the Bay Area housing crisis is resolved (probably in part by repealing prop 13), the private-school exodus will continue.
No education requirements for private schools is one way they aren't superior. I would pose that segregation would be the other way private schools aren't superior.
Private schooling is already on average cheaper than public schools in primary education at the dollars spent per child level.
The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed free money for universities without any underwriting process and an albatross on the neck of the middle class.
Tuitions will remain high for as long as they have students desperate or ignorant enough to make poor financial choices.
The sad part is that this continues despite universities largely not meeting society's needs nor the needs of the students.
My point is that vouchers distort demand elasticity, just like unchecked student loans, employer-provided health insurance, low mortgage rates, etc distort their respective markets. The fact that costs (not even prices) may be low at present is not an indicator that prices will not balloon in the wake of a voucher system. The private education profiteers are counting on it.
Anecdotally, but the private schools in my large city are miles ahead of the public schools. The difference is so dramatic. I graduated from the same public school system. The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.
Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.
> The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.
Is this a result of the private schooling or does the socioeconomic status of their parents play a significant role?
I attended both and the people that were rich enough to attend private school but were sent to public school anyway still did very well for themselves, not obviously different from those that attended private school.
Could be parenting too, yeah. I don't think it can be discounted the level of violence in public school. Even when I was in school it was closer to a prison than a learning environment. Both in culture, and in construction. I'm sure this had an effect on kids.
The public schools in my city weren't even accredited when I graduated, as the students were not able to achieve the graduation rates and test scores required. This was despite the influx of billions of dollars to modernize the facilities, equipment, and lesson plans. Beyond that they were dangerous from middle school through the end of high school. Private school was really the only option for anybody who had the funds to escape the public school system.
the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.
thanks, but I think that comparison is not fair, if you're throwing all demographics in one bucket. E.g. I'd bet income explains most of those differences.
I'm on the fence about public schools in the US as I'm originally from a different country where private schools are a rarity, but I've learned how bad schools can be here. Anecdotally here in NC public schools have a much better reputation than private.
> What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world?
This assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. In general schools that accept vouchers generally operate on much smaller per-student budgets (especially if you include the capital budget -- buildings and facilities) than public schools do. In many voucher states, the public school gets some level of funding for a student even a parent gets a voucher and sends their child somewhere else.
The funding wouldn't be unlimited. Schools would have to figure out how to deliver services with the funds available. This is not totally different than how many public school systems are funded. My local government sucks $12,000 a year out of my paycheck. About 70% of it funds the pensions of local public school teachers, the remaining 30% pays for the actual schools, with a smidge left over for police and fire department, etc.
They can and do raise my property taxes, but it's much harder than colleges simply demanding higher and higher tuitions.
I understand why you would want the choice but I think history has already shown that vouchers don't work. You have to remember that the thing vouchers do is take money out of the school you are leaving. (A better approach would be for there to be a private school tax deduction alongside programs like 529). This leaves the students that are already behind fewer resources to catch up. We need school reform desperately and this new program is very bad and not it. However, allocating extra resources for those who needed most hasn't been a priority writ large either or we wouldn't be where were are now. We also forget that there are many social aspects that drive under performers. Food insecurity, family stability, safe quiet place to read and do homework, etc. have a huge impact on student performance. School breakfast/lunch/dinner should be free for all students. We should have more after school programs built into the schools for students that need it so they can get tutoring on-prem before they even return home to a potentially unstable home life. Unfortunately we don't approach all the interconnected issues holistically. (Similar to how trivial it would be solve most homelessness if we had the political courage to change our approach).
You claim that you shouldn't be "stuck" with a bad school program but you aren't. You can run for school board along with other like minded student-focused parents and get the thing corrected.
So the answer is to take on a second job, spending several years fixing the system (and contending with people who don't agree with you) so that it will be fixed near the time my child has moved on? That isn't a real answer.
What will really happen is what happens today. Kids whose parents have options just get put in private schools and the problem gets ignored. The kids whose parents have no options get left behind.
1) A good public education should be available to all students, with reasonable transportation provided. This is an axiom for me.
2) Private schools do not seem consistently provide a better education, but they do enable siphoning and segregation of students. Students with disabilities of various types can be excluded; the education can be explicitly religious; private education can really enable exclusivity of many kinds. On one level all that is fine -- but I don't want taxpayer dollars to support it. Raise money thru your church to send kids to that stuff.
In addition, I think your premise is false. In the school district I live in, children can apply to attend any school in the district. Charter schools are available as well as public schools. Choice is available with a publicly funded model, and as a parent I am partaking in that and switching a kid from a high-scoring school that I'm nevertheless not fully satisfied with to another high-performing school that rivals the privates for about $30k less a year.
But in the end, I actually don't think competition forces improvement. The misalignment of incentives is too great. Individual teachers want to do their best for their kids, in general, and they also want to improve their income. To do their best, they try to help the visible high achievers if they can but they absolutely must take time on the kids acting out. Administrators have to deal with district edicts and teacher demands, but they don't have the money to support teacher development (which would be the #1 thing to help both teachers and kids). School districts/boards need to show they're "using technology" and "being equitable" and "being innovative" and all sorts of stuff that is not the same as improving outcomes. Everyone is supposed to do well on the tests, even when the tests are stupid (and whoo-hoo are some of them terrible). Schools have to deal with homelessness and hunger, because no other regional agency deals with all the kids in the area. Nothing lines up and so we end up with free lunch that's not so nutritious but does hit a calorie bar, attempts at equity without supports (putting kids with behavioral problems into crowded and understaffed classrooms), a bunch of teachers who are scared of math yet have to teach it, who would benefit most from upgrading their skills....
except this is histrionics. there was a fervent backlash against this and they revised the proposal to make it a schools choice to teach it or not.
> Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life.
The only thing that does is line the pockets of fundamentalist christian schools with money and increase the inequality. schools should not be tied to local taxes by and large... there should be a equality of funding.
This is a really important discussion and as a non-parent who hasn't been through the process i'll reserve judgement. But I wonder:
Are there circumstances where the availability of vouchers results in a parent making a worse educational selection for their student? Would this leave educational marketing to lean towards populist institutions (like Kanye West's "schools" or Megachurch-derived schools)?
On the math front, what we have seen a lot is that parents from families with means or who really care get their kids tutors or math services outside of school like Kumon. Some do pull their kids from school, but if you just want accelerated math, you can do so without needing an expensive private school. Something like Kumon is like $200 or less a month.
The best argument I have heard for not getting into algebra too quickly is that kids are often not getting enough time spent on foundational math skills, and then that leads them not to have those foundations as math ramps up in difficulty.
I don't think eliminating advanced math for equity's sake makes any sense, but we should also be careful not to rush through lower-level math and leave even strong students without foundational skills.
Math education in the U.S. is not working for the vast majority of students. We need to find a way to make it more engaging and applied. We may also need to just spend more time each day on math.
And now you've limited education to families that can drive their kids 20 miles one way, twice daily, during work hours. If American cities were known for amazing public transport, and changing schools only meant changing the subway stop, I'd agree with you.
> No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this.
You say this, but what you actually mean is no wealthy parent should be stuck without options.
The hoi polloi that can't afford the voucher plus mountain of money private school tuition will still be quite stuck without options, except that you've also created an explicit two-class system.
I hear those do wonders for social cohesion. As will opening a firehose of money into the insane fundamentalist indoctrination that so many parents wish to inflict on their children, but can't in public school.
Bit of a weird position to take that you're in favour of schools doing indoctrination, just as long as it's away from the viewpoint you don't like. That's pretty authoritarian; seems to be on the rise these days.
>
Bit of a weird position to take that you're in favour of schools doing indoctrination, just as long as it's away from the viewpoint you don't like.
No, it's not. Society only works when people believe in a shared fiction, and when they stop believing it, things go completely to shit.
I would absolutely oppose indoctrination into a bad shared fiction, just like a religious person would oppose indoctrination into a 'religion is the opiate of the masses and must be purged from society' shared fiction, or like a pro-democracy person would oppose indoctrination into 'the way forward is installing an autocracy that will seize power through force of arms' shared fiction, or like how most of us would probably have issues with pro-ISIS indoctrination.
I'm not aware of any religious public schools that kids are forced into through zoning/districting. I am aware of MANY families who choose parochial schools because of the school quality & culture, but are absolutely not religious (they tolerate the religious part in order to unlock the educational & cultural parts).
Well, then I hate to tell you how bad public education is then. It is estimated that about 10% of public school students will receive sexual abuse from a teacher or authority at some point in their education.
The New York Times was also admitting, way back in 1995, that about 5% of public school teachers are abusers. Considering how many teachers a child goes through, they'll probably meet a few.
I think that if it wasn't for the fact that it was school, sending your child to any place where there was a 1-in-10 chance of them being sexually abused would be a crime.
The 1-in-10 number is self-reported harassment which is different from teacher-on-student abuse but I don’t really care about the distinction. Your 1-in-20 number is a different metric entirely, by the way (as abusers are not one-to-one with abused). Again, I don’t really care about these wrinkles.
Anyway, AAUW’s data doesn’t distinguish between reports from public and public charter, so you can’t use this data to draw conclusions about differences between public and religious schools.
Furthermore, and this is the most important part, their main recommendation to reduce the incidence of abuse and discrimination in all schools (i.e., one of the things I actually want to minimize) is to promote more adherence to Title IX protections.
Private schools have no legal obligation to provide any Title IX protections, and indeed some religious schools, by their very doctrine, cannot.
Next time, if you’re going to demand statistics that don’t exist (as private schools have no reporting requirements and the AAUW report demonstrates that many institutions obviously underreport) please provide better links, thanks.
Lots of claims; but no statistics or estimates of prevalence there. I can point to the US Department of Education… you are pointing to anecdotal news reports.
Hilarious strawman that is not backed by real statistics. I went to a religious jesuit private school, i talk to coworkers about their highschool experiences and they talk about gang violence and drug dealing. Meanwhile the most interesting thing that happened for me is some kids got in a fight once.
I'm sure it's different in other places, but around here the only alternative school in town is run by an organized religion. Come to think of it, that's also true of the next town. Are the voucher people envisaging some eduVC funding source that allows me to spin up a school to complete with the legacy one?
100% this. I even went to catholic school 7-12th grade.
It was in no way a superior product like they want you to believe anyway. It was obvious in college that I had inferior math and science education, and I was considered a high performer in my high school!
They even turned me off religion completely, so fail on all counts.
You misread the post you’re replying to. It is in support of vouchers and is implying that public schools are pushing a viewpoint that is as faith based as any religion and as open to falsification. There are people upthread singing the praises of state schools as tools of assimilation. The point of the comment you’re responding to is to point out that many people have no desire to be assimilated to the new dispensation and as such the political system will accommodate them or not. Not is left as an exercise.
> I'm for vouchers because I don't think I should have to pay with my taxes for religious indoctrination masquerading as public education.
are you missing a NOT in there? as in `I'm NOT for vouchers because I don't think I should have to pay with my taxes for religious indoctrination masquerading as public education. `?
because as it stands, your comment makes as much sense as saying
> if you are not paying for the product you are the product
Just because you are paying does not mean you are NOT the product, to spell it out.
Similarly, just because people have the option to pay for their Islamic Madrasah or whatever Jewish or Christian equivalents are with vouchers, does not mean they will not try to shove their ideologies down everyone in public education in the next election cycle.
No, I'm not. A vision of equity advanced by kneecapping math education in public schools is no less faith-based than creationism taught in private schools. If anything, I'd guess creationism is less damaging to students.
What is the realistic likelyhood of this being mandated, given how many religious private schools there are and how much money they have to lobby with?
> What is the realistic likelyhood of this being mandated
Just under a third of Californian's aren't religious [1]. Nobody is proposing to ban religious schools.
If you can't swing it, make the choice local. Each county or whatever can vote on whether to permit religious vouchers. The Bay Area will ban it. The Central Coast won't. This remains better than the status quo.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
> I’m against vouchers because I don’t think I should have to pay with my taxes for religious indoctrination masquerading as private education.
Uh huh. And if you are a homeschooler, or go to private school, you are taxed right now to pay for secular indoctrination masquerading as public education. /s
But seriously, by this logic, what is the justification for using taxes paid by people who don't attend public school, to fund the public schools?
Your question reduces to "Why should my taxes pay for a public good, when I choose to have my kids not experience it directly?"
I think the answer becomes a lot clearer then.
Miss Manners has a quote something like "School taxes are what we pay to the future in hopes that it has things like nice young geriatric doctors in it."
Also, what precisely are you claiming is "secular indoctrination"? Evolution? The separation of church and state (in the US)? People who went to religious school have confidently told me that both are myths. They also told me that their school absolutely should have gotten tax funding.
Besides, the state can mandate a minimum curriculum which includes civic education to receive the voucher, with the state managing standardized end of years test for the mandatory curriculum.
The options to handle it well are there, society just needs the will.
You should not make that point. Society works much better if you accept the wierd beliefs of as many people as you can. Fight againt cannibalism (does any of that even exist anymore?), but be very careful about even that.
It'll get USA screwed on the World stage too. For me getn tracked in math classes pretty much the whole time, n to the point we had a class w four people in it, smallest class-size in the school already w the smallest class sizes in the country, all four of us, on that table getn the closest thing to tutoring the Chilean education system could give us in its most expensive school International School Nido de Aguilas, n then it's like...without tracking i would have hated math, got bullied much more for always cracking the curve, all that shit.
Elon Musk already complained about the basic difference between the CCP politicians n the American senators n congressmen is the former have a distantly n vertically superior knowledge of math n science than their American counterparts, being engineers w a v rigorous sink-or-swim training, than the American politicians who are generally lawyers n only one of which has a PhD. There's as many PhDs as comedians in Congress for fuck's sake, like not hating the comedian i appreciate there being one, that's cool, but for there only to be one PhD, what the fuck?! Some people need to have a PhD, it matters sometimes it is generally a good way to get technical expertise spesh w subjects w high stakes that require planning for executing correctly, which is why i went into algorithms instead, my laptop had no choice but to obey n compile what i wrote, n run it, automaton after all, that computer was my only audience but an audience nonetheless. There it's fine, n that's why coders don't need degrees for the most part, low cost of failure, not like a civil engineer which i would not allow building a bridge j like that.
It won't make everyone equally useless, but it will lead to even less equitable outcomes. Per the article, parents who value education will either teach math to their kids themselves or hire private tutors. Kids without that luxury effectively get robbed by the state in the name of equity.
I don’t know why this author needs to use this issue as a political cudgel against “progressivism” - I don’t see anything particularly progressive about this policy vs the Dallas one he also mentions - the goals are exactly the same, to bring more equity to disadvantaged and minority students.
she claims that having different math tracks creates a “mathematical nowhere” for some students that stop at algebra 2, but absolutely nothing in her system really alleviates this non-issue or makes it better. It’s honestly such a nonsensical policy to me that has nothing to do with politics whatsoever, in my mind, but people will inject what they believe into what they see.
Public education is political. It is run by directly elected boards, with funding provided by the legislature, and under the laws of the legidlature.
Education policy is difficult, and every political movement that has worked on it has had at least 1 stupid and counterproductive idea. The particular stupid idea under discussion here happens to be one done by the movement that identifies itself as progressive, and in a state where progressives hold a lot of political power.
What evidence do you have that this policy is influenced by any kind of "movement," and what are the differences of this "movement" compared to the Dallas policy mentioned in the article?
To be fair to the author, he is not the one who framed this as a progressive issue, many of its proponents did that. I agree that it isn't progressive, or maybe just that it is an example of when something goes so far in one direction that it looks exactly like its opposite. In any case, it deserves to be called out as a dumb idea.
Came here to say the same thing. Progessivism, wokeism, etc are being hit by a propaganda campaign by the uber rich. Because they can't profit from the healthy public policies that people like me grew up under in the 80s and 90s. Before they got systematically undermined and replaced with whatever all this is.
If any young people out there are reading this and scratching their heads, let me offer a small piece of advice: if someone's argument hinges on generalizations against a group of people, it should give one pause.
Edit: I just made a generalization about the uber rich. Please, think of the uber rich. They suffer so.
It's a common manifestation of the dissonance in American politics. TFA is advocating for a fundamentally progressive stance, but he's arguing against ostensible Boston lefties. What's unspoken is that the people making these decisions for public schools in Cambridge are elites who send their own kids to private schools, often prep; this is just another way to bleed a public institution so that they're not on the hook. Bonus points: their darling children have less competition for the local universities.
IME, tracking is only a portion of the issue, anyway. A confluence of factors stymied my growth; having to take Algebra 2 and Trig separately and Precalc as a standalone course didn't help, but poor instruction from "sink or swim" advocates was probably more consequential, and having parents distracted by a messy divorce and economic stresses from the 07/08 crash even more so. Between those, I went from starting middle school on track to take college-level Differential Equations or Calc 2, and ended up almost flunking AP Calc. Never really recovered.
I took AP calc in highschool and much later in life got placed in trig for college. I was greatly annoyed that the subsequent precalculus class was the exact same stuff I learned in trig, to the point where I asked the professor if I would learn anything new, and they said no.
Then they spend the whole year “studying” for the standardized test and learn nothing. That’s how it currently is and I don’t see that changing. Standardized exam scores are utilized for funding.
A kid takes a French class. Can he speak French afterwards? Can he read/write in French? I guess that's how you'd know if he learned it. Is that a test? I guess so but I'd like to see grades take a backseat to actual learning. Maybe that's a bad position to take.
Language curricula are not any more effective (i.e. pretty terrible) at teaching language than they ever have been. So since these data-driven improvements haven't shown up yet, we shouldn't be worried about risking them.
>So if people need some extrinsic motivation to engage in my class, one of two things might be happening. Maybe they’re just not interested in what I have to offer. That’s fine! They should take a different class. More likely, though, the problem is me: I'm somehow subverting people’s natural curiosity. Maybe I’m doing that by inflicting evaluation on my students—rules! points! policies!—instead of just showing them what they came to see.
This paragraph shows the difference between college and other education. This applies to college because everyone there paid to learn. This does not apply to public schools, ESPECIALLY if it's in an area where the culture is bad for education. There are a ton of kids who absolutely do not care at all about anything you have to say if there are no consequences for being apathetic.
Why do we all need to be impacted by the "bad for education" areas?
Maybe kids that are ready can just start going to college earlier or even skip high school altogether. Yes, they'll have to pay but a community college will suffice. They could probably just take the GED test and pass at 14 years old. I can only imagine how dumbed down that test is.
A lot of people in positions of power are currently obsessed with achieving equality of outcomes (aka equity) and dumbing down to the lowest common denominator is an only working way to achieve that goal for large groups of people.
Why is that inherently a problem? Some people will always learn/advance quicker than others in just about any are of life for a variety of reasons. The only way to "solve" that problem generally would be some very dystopian form of social control.
This just is a total misunderstanding of what's being proposed, and a hamfisted excuse to dress up reactionary stupidity as a defense of "Math". The changes aren't "refusing to teach kids math", they are a better approach to math. Modern approaches emphasize number sense (aka actual understanding) over formulas. Algebra has historically been a kind of gatekeeping in middle school between kids who plug in the formulas vs the kids who "arent good at math". Neither of these outcomes are positive for learning.
In general we need deeper foundational knowledge beyond memorization of notation. True math understanding enables students to independently discover common formulas rather than deploy them from rote.
Noahpinion doesn't begin to speak to this, and is in fact a moron.
> changes aren't "refusing to teach kids math", they are a better approach to math
Every mathematician disagrees. The Stanford professor pushing this policy has no math education. (She does have consulting gigs with school districts where they trade a teacher's annual salary for a few hours of Zoom calls [1].)
I grew up in Cupertino and am flying back to the Bay Area. Every friend who is a parent is planning on circumventing this policy by enrolling their kids in more tutoring.
California is dumbing down its poor to sate a private education and education-consulting industry.
Every mathematician disagrees because their focus isn't learning or teaching children foundational number sense and math concepts that will help them lead successful lives.
You guys are talking past each other, and the guidelines in question are aimed at the kids in primary math education, not academic and applied math, where your statement applies better.
> their focus isn't learning or teaching children foundational number sense and math concepts that will help them lead successful lives
They teach undergrads. They are saying a student graduating from this framework, without outside tutoring, would not have the skills necessary to learn entry-level undergraduate math.
The data-science component, additionally, seems entirely designed to support a private consulting complex. That time would be better returned to students, given the content's outright inaccuracies.
> In general we need deeper foundational knowledge beyond memorization of notation.
This sounds like you're advocating for more memorization of notation, earlier, so children will have the time to be taught the deeper "foundational" knowledge that requires that notation. Otherwise, I don't know what you're talking about.
> Algebra has historically been a kind of gatekeeping in middle school between kids who plug in the formulas vs the kids who "arent good at math."
Any child can be good at math. A lot of children are traumatized by the unforgiving nature of quantitative reasoning, get discouraged, and are told by innumerate or condescending adults that it's alright to quit because they don't have a math brain, or that the equationa are just military-corporate imperialism used to distract people from their deeper, innate, math-senses.
"So what should we do instead? Dallas came up with an answer: Teach kids more math instead of teaching them less. In 2019, Dallas Independent School District implemented a new equity policy that encouraged many more people to take honors math classes:
Many capable Hispanic, Black and English learner students did not elect to join these classes on their own or were passed over by their instructors. And their parents were often unaware they could make the request.
Dallas ISD, which serves some 142,000 children, took note of the disparity and in 2017 formed a racial equity advisory council — some of whose members had children in the district — with the goal of improving opportunity for all…It decided to move from an opt-in model to an opt-out policy in the 2019-20 school year. Since then…students cannot opt out [of advances classes] without written parent permission. The move has dramatically increased participation among traditionally marginalized children."