I live in Seattle, not San Francisco, but we have some similar issues with our schools. I'd really prefer to send my son to our local public schools, but if they aren't challenging him appropriately then my wife and I obviously aren't going to just give up on his education. We'll either pay for extracurricular enrichment like the person in this article, move to a wealthy suburb, or send him to a private school instead.
That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
Bingo, that is the issue, everybody is worried about equity.
You can't have it, we need meritocracy, equity is just cruel and unusual punishment to future. It is a recipe for driving society to the lowest common denominator.
You should demand proper education or your money back.
(Side note, this is what we will get 10x with free college, and the guaranteed loans have already driven it this way a bit more)
Growing up in Seattle in the 90s, the school district was obviously racist and classist. Advanced programs were in the richer (whiter) neighborhoods and poor kids got to go to schools with police wagons out front.
The district charter use to have a line in it saying they had to offer each kid the best education possible. My mother used that line to force the school district to send a taxi to every day to take me up to a richer part of the city with better schools. That line of the charter has since been removed as from what I can tell kids now are at the mercy of their circumstances.
There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.
So, kernel of truth behind some of these policies.
IMHO the problem is, this plan only works if the vast majority of students are high achievers. If you have 10% of the students who are high achievers and you mix everyone together, after a few years you end up with no high achievers.
America in general needs to seriously look at how we as a culture approach education, until we fix that, there isn't much the schools can do to actually improve outcomes for underprivileged students en masse.
> There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.
My understanding is research shows this "evens" outcomes. The worst students do better (Teacher has more time to pay attention to them), the best students do worse (can not get into the really hard stuff, get bored).
If you are in the bottom 25%, you WANT integrated classrooms of all levels.
If you are in the top 25%, you WANT an elite classroom with ramped up work and less distractions.
> Bad cultures exist and we dont need to celebrate them. Bad culture drags everyone down and makes society worse.
We need to ask why those bad cultures exist and take steps to remediate the underlying problems.
In Seattle, one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in all of human history, some of the public schools still have leaded drinking pipes that "may be safe" for kids to drink from.
For the vast majority of working adults in America, a job means unreliable shifts, being treated with outright cruelty by management, and pay that isn't enough to cover health insurance premiums.
Given that, why is anyone surprised that kids don't "apply themselves"? What are their parents going to say? "Work hard and you to can be in debt and barely afford to pay rent!"
People generally do what is expected of them. If you’re dropped into a class with higher expectations, you perform better. Lower expectations and you perform worse. We are all optimized to do what’s required of us and conserve excess energy.
> Growing up in Seattle in the 90s, the school district was obviously racist and classist. Advanced programs were in the richer (whiter) neighborhoods and poor kids got to go to schools with police wagons out front.
I grew up in Sacramento in the 80's/90's, and the best schools were not in the rich/white areas. The top-performing schools were in so-so neighborhoods, and the schools were very diverse. Best of all, you could test in and enroll from anywhere. We literally had a kid in HS who drove down halfway from Tahoe each morning. It wasn't perfect, but it was much, much better than what we have now, as this article shows.
Wasn't Garfield the school that had the advanced classes and the smartest kids in the district that were bused in? Its in central district of Seattle which has the highest population of minorities of any other district.
Now its sort of the opposite? We'd love to send our kid to Seattle's Chinese immersion program, but they only offer it in poorer South Seattle while we live in richer North Seattle. There was an effort to make elementary kids go to school before 8AM just to make some more bussing feasible, bussing that only applies to non-neighborhood kids attending the schools from poorer parts of the city.
> equity is just cruel and unusual punishment to future
Equality of outcome can be an undesired outcome, equality of opportunity is completely different.
The only trouble is getting the opportunities to be equal - there must be no advantage that can be unfairly given to one more deserving student than another, being able or willing to send your children to summer bootcamps must be an option for all children (who qualify), not whether you pay for it with time or money, e.g.
Free college is fantastic, but once again you confuse opportunity with outcome, and not even for the same individuals - parents are unburdened by cost, but in fact the opportunities are far from equal - money does not a quality education make, yet the majority or colleges are run as for profit institutions, not places that accept students based on their merits or potentials, nor do they actually try to actively shed students who are undeserving. Party culture does not need or require an expensive room and board situation, yet it pervades nearly every 'higher' education institution, only somewhat subsiding when graduate/doctorate programs become involved, and academics are once again taken seriously.
I.e. your meritocracy does not exist precisely because universities are busy making profits not teaching students.
No, equality of opportunity is cruel and counter productive for exactly the reasons you mention. You cannot realistically achieve equality by elevating everyone, which means you need to focus on taking away from people.
The moral and practical thing to do would be focusing on improving objective outcomes. Focusing on equality degrades objective outcomes in favor of moral perversion - taking away from some to make others feel better.
Imagine the child of two millionaire college professors. What will you do to equalize this child's opportunity with a child in the inner city of (pick a bad city)?
To answer your question first you make sure that child has the same education resources available that the professors child does throughout all aspects of their life. You also make the professors available to children from those inner city areas widening the networking effects that the children of the professor gets. they won't be as good but you open them up.
Improving objective outcomes is some Krypton level shit, "Your a black doctor and were trained to be one from birth due to the outcome we wanted." "I wanted to be an artist."
You meant at t0, the movement the baby is born to a parent optimizes education vs a baby that is born to a parent that cares much less. Impossible for government to "make sure" this happens.
That is where the problem lies, yes, the inequality is as they "systemic", rooted in practical reality.
There is no real way to perfect this - but if an effort is made a good result can be achieved nonetheless. The fallacy with the professor example is that they will have the time to teach their child, and that their child must necessarily be receptive to their limited tuition.
Unless they quit their job, and thus are no longer professors, a majority of their time will be spent teaching multiple students, and while one on one coaching has it's merits there is also value in classroom peer experiences. If an effort is made to provide tutoring to all the kids, it may even be in the parents interest not to provide tutoring services, if the quality is good, because that takes away from their own time spent being able to provide the most effective teaching experience they can offer.
We can't build perfect bridges, but we can sure as hell mandate they are good enough, it's some nonsense to say we shouldn't try because we can't get it perfect.
The child of the professors has the parents who are supposedly smart and teach him or her all the time at home, how exactly do you make this available to children from those inner city areas?
It's called a teacher you find them in schools. If you pay them properly and give them adequate resources they can achieve these goals. You also add in libraries and other places where kids can learn independently.
I am not sure how does this answer my question. "Paying properly" a teacher will make one's parents millionaire professors or as interested and capable in their children education how?
Or do you simply deny that parents educate their children? Do you believe that as long as they have the same teachers at school, who are 'paid properly', say, a farmer's son and a son of a musician will have the same knowledge and skills in animal husbandry and musical theory?
Are you saying that your parents are millionaire college professors and they have not told you anything other than to do your homework? That sucks, I imagine most parents are more involved with their children. My parents are just research scientist but I had no problem learning from them, they answered all kinds of questions for me.
Father is a plumber, mother is an accounter. I had a problem with understanding fractions, mom helped me. There was no more help, because I understood everything else myself and they don't know more advanced topics, because they had school program long ago. My brother is decently educated and knows school program, but can't help his kids - they just don't understand (their (modern) school has zero discipline).
I am sorry, I don't understand your point then. How is your case relevant to children of college professors or even mere PhDs? You apparently didn't have the same educational opportunities as them by your own account.
Teachers can only do so much, it is really hard for them to make up for deficiencies at home. Kids have to learn to learn independently, again, an advantage that kids with a better home life have over those that don't.
That seems quite different. First, lots of countries have free higher education and seem to do just fine. Second, lowering price of entry is orthogonal to lowering expected performance. Your argument does not apply.
Effectively. US universities work on a growth model, expanding their student body and capital investment for tax purposes and to increase profits. There is always some school that will accept a student for the sake of those unforgivable government supplied student loans
Maybe? The idea that "more formal education is better" is kind of silly when you dig into it. What value does it give society to have a huge percentage of people spend some of their most important years learning things which are completely perpendicular to whatever career they might do?
Education at this point feels like exploitation. We tell people that they can achieve greatness, they just have to pay huge amounts to a college to be educated, when the truth is that most of the value of college is networking and status signalling, and the value of those is pretty much directly related to how prestigious the institution is.
Yes, we should set up a system that allows all people, whatever their background, to pursue a liberal arts education if they're passionate about it. But a system that makes a pretty useless and very expensive degree a barrier for entry for completely unrelated jobs is just exploitative.
> Maybe? The idea that "more formal education is better" is kind of silly when you dig into it
If you believe that is true, then why would a country want to pay for it? After all, the world isn't limited to your strawmen.
The reason it's valuable to countries the world over, why so many want to pay for it, and why most all of them provide some level of public paid education, is it demonstrably results in a population that ends up with a higher standard of living.
Do you mean per-capita or over all? Because a very few countries with a bigger number of populations than US have free-education. If the former, can you provide a data source?
Yes but they also generally don't offer bullshit degrees that people obtain and then end up working at McDonalds.
Germany, Switzerland, Belgium all come to mind as countries with free or near-free education that while they don't graduate the same % of their population through tertiary eduction it's not for lack of available opportunity but rather many people choose not to pursue tertiary eduction.
This is actually a good thing because they are often choosing alternatives like vocational education that is more suited to their career choices.
Baristas with university degrees is the outcome of pushing everyone to get a degree and is common place in both the US, Canada and Australia as a result as all 3 have this same notion that you need a degree to get a job.
Atleast in Australia and Canada you don't also get saddled with crippling debt.
Sure. I'm not saying their approach is bad or wrong, I'm supportive of it. I'm just observing that it results in far fewer people getting degrees. Agreed that this may be for the best.
If anything free education allows you to raise your standards. The group of applicants who are academically qualified should be strictly larger than the group that's both academically qualified and willing to pay tuition. With a larger pool of qualified applicants you can afford to reject more of them.
(Caveat: This doesn't work if the point of your university is mostly to signal that its graduates came from a family wealthy enough to send them to your university.)
Without some level of equity, what exactly is the point of meritocracy?
A pure meritocracy wouldn't prioritize curing rare diseases or ending poverty, and might not reduce suffering as much as a more equitable society, even if that equitable society has less raw talent and education, so obviously there's an optimal point.
That optimal point may be a function of the current state of tech, as more and more of the stuff people need education for is done by AI.
It's not like they're ever going to have zero high achievers, even without school at all there's always going to be a few genuises.
On the other hand, the better AI gets, the less anyone outside the top 1% actually needs math, because AI may be able to do most of what an average person could learn without unrealistic amount of effort way beyond their motivation.
I think it's moreso effective co-optimization between equity and meritocracy.
I went to private schools, and even kids of parents with money can wind up very unintelligent—placing them in the same classes as overachievers is good for neither. Same concept as bright kids from underprivileged families, let's bend over backward to get them in the same classes as the overachievers too.
And "woke" originally was used in a positive sense, but does it matter? Lots of terms change their meaning or get adopted because they are useful. Meritocracy is a useful shorthand for a system in which individual skill, effort and achievement are what matters for outcomes. If we didn't use that word we'd need another but what would it be?
And apparently everyone thought the book was satirical and embraced the word as a positive concept. :p
(But then, of course, you realize that you've merely shifted the game of haves and have-nots to other kinds of "have" and feel the hubristic urge to socially engineer your way to equal outcomes.)
People bought into the seductive lie of fairness is what happened, even when the sentiment was the opposite.
Compare "blood is thicker than water", which was rooted in the opposite conclusion, that the blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb, i.e. your relationships and social bonds outcompete genetic ties.
The failing of meritocracy is that it is tautological; those who succeed did so because they must have been successful. It can't bear scrutiny because, as it turns out, we can have neither fair nor equal grounds for competition (if we're measuring results as comparative, which is the case here), but people secretly desire unfairness as long as there's a chance they will benefit, even if they are not the beneficiary of a given instance or result. See monarchies, lotteries, CEO pay discrepancies, etc... what matters is there was an arbitrary chance you're dealt out at the top.
We have two friends whose kids are in two different Seattle middle schools, and the anecdotes we hear are not going well. One middle school was considering getting rid of advanced courses entirely.
We're in East Renton, which usually follows Seattle, but they have kept honor courses. In fact, honor courses are encouraged to take, open to everyone, and from what I understand, no one is rejected (possibly only for the first year). I like this approach better than 'algebra for no one'.
Yes, the better school districts are east of Seattle, and this is why all those homes are retaining their skyrocketing value.
>> Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
We're not wealthy at all, so if the Renton school system follows Seattle, we're not going to waste our child's future on crap education.
You're not going to improve the lives of impoverished children by lowering the bar. It's absurd.
The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars (STEM, clubs, sports, arts, etc.) A student wouldn't have to be gifted in math, just apply themselves to some interest that drives them.
Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month. Playing for the school sports team, being in the band, getting involved in photography. Something positive in academics, arts, leadership, cooperation.
Paying kids would teach valuable lessons about finance and build up a reward system that would serve them later in life as they begin to associate action and achievement with positive outcomes. It should still work even if they don't have a suitable environment at home to discover this on their own.
Right now school is basically daycare. It can teach those that are properly prepared at home to pay attention, but it fails so many others.
> You're not going to improve the lives of impoverished children by lowering the bar. It's absurd.
As a poor kid in Seattle, I am now no longer poor because of a high bar.
In my high school (West Seattle High School!) we edited DNA. We spliced DNA, inserted a gene, closed it up, and made bacteria change color. It was awesome.
> The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars
Unfortunately, extrinsic motivations mess people up and don't end well long term.
Extrinsic motivation works, for a decent percentage of people, as long as the reward keeps comming.
Therefore it would probably need to be coupled with more vocational training/ apprenticeships/ internships to ease passage into the adult world of extrinsic motivations.
> Extrinsic motivation works, for a decent percentage of people, as long as the reward keeps comming.
Therein lines the problem.
Pay people enough $ and they'll go to the gym and get in shape, but once the $ stops they'll almost universally stop going.
Take people who have a regular gym habit, start paying them, stop paying them and most of them will stop going to the gym, adding in the extrinsic motivation will actually destroy the intrinsic motivation (and pleasure!) they once had around the activity.
With enough extrinsic only motivators, people stop feeling any actual joy in life, everything becomes a fight for an external reward.
How can a public institution foster intrinsic motivation within an individual? Better to focus limited resources on what institutions have some competence at: throwing money at a problem.
For starters treat the kids like people. I don't know how many times kids compared their schools to prisons. Nobody wants to be in prison.
The home environment also contributes a great deal to academic success or failure. I know of households that actively dissuade kids from pursuing academic success. If parents won't intervene in their children's education for any reason that diminishes their chance of success.
> How can a public institution foster intrinsic motivation within an individual?
Honestly, it is part of the social contract that the government, or at least society, needs to maintain.
If you look at cultures where education is valued, where academic achievement is high, there is a very strong social contract in place that equates academic success to success later in life. China has had national exams for over a thousand years, with the same promise: Anyone who does well in school and succeeds can have their station in life elevated by doing well in school.
Rich or poor, rural or urban, everyone (or at least a large swath of people) in China has traditionally had this guarantee lying around.
Do good in school, and you will be taken care of after that. You can get a good spouse, a good job, and life will get easier.
America has actively worked to break such promises. Historically when a minority community worked together and excelled, their houses and businesses got literally burned down to the ground, or sometimes, less violently, just taken away from them.
That teaches a lesson right there, "work hard, and fuck you".
Rather recently, middle class white students in America studied hard only to find the social contract involved universities jacking up tuition fees to sky high levels, loading them down with tons of debt, and then leaving school for crap jobs and a life of constant interest payments.
A shit ton better than being burned out of your house, but it still shows how American society is willing to tear up social contracts so that powerful institutions can earn some extra $$$.
Housing then folds into this, it used to be American cities worked hard to expand the housing supply, they eagerly courted young families, now cities are actively hostile to anyone new coming to town.
But the fact is, maintaining that social contract pays for itself many times over with social stability, a lesson America has apparently forgotten.
Some parts of the government get this, some types of inefficient contracts (build/buy American) are in fact job creation programs, but we need to do a lot better.
Build more housing, a ton more, and force state universities to have much lower tuition by removing the obscene overhead. I rarely advocate for "just cut funding and make people figure it out", but honestly, pass a law saying State Universities aren't allowed to cut any faculty positions, then demand they cut tuition by 50%, and have their new budgets independently audited. Sure the student swimming pool may get shut down, but too bad.
This sounds nice but would quickly be abused by households with shitty parents (gamblers, drug addicts, alcoholics etc) that would take the kids money. Better to somehow subsidize higher education through some kind of credit system they can earn and then use to pay for college later on... of course the problem then is it would have to scale with the rising cost of tuition.
Why pay for college later on when you could pay for high school now? School districts charge thousands of dollars in fees per student directly to parents. Public school is not free even if it is greatly subsidized. Our state claims it costs something like $25k/year to educate one student. If taxes, etc cover 95% of that, the parents are on the hook for $1250 per child.
>>> You're not going to improve the lives of impoverished children by lowering the bar. It's absurd.
I definitely agree with this
>>> Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month.
I would love if this would work, but unfortunately there is no easy answer. In fact, MacArthur Genius Award Winner and John Bates Clark medalist Roland Fryer managed to somehow persuade entire school districts to test your very assertion at scale, and the results were not straightforward as you seem to believe [1]
Incentives dont quite work like you expect them ...
Being given rewards for hitting specific targets is the opposite of wages. Wages come more or less regardless of what you do, as long as you don't get fired. This would be more like bonuses or self-employment. Also it's not much different to rewarding kids with pocket money for doing household chores. This doesn't mess kids up, more like the opposite: it teaches them that work leads to rewards.
Luckily, everyone in the area gets access to Running Start[1]. Doesn't address the earlier years of schooling, though.
If your children are in HS, I'd really recommend sitting downing with a HS councilor to make sure that your kids take the classes that are required by the district for HS, but aren't required for a college degree (I'm thinking of speech here, but there may be others) in the first 2 years of HS. That way they get the most benefit out of their Junior and Senior years, if they decide to go that route.
I'm honestly not sure how the GPA thing works - I know AP classes can sometimes let kids increase their GPA above 4.0 for admissions purposes. But as someone who did both Running Start and AP classes, IMO, the actual college credit was way more valuable. But I also went to school in state, so those credits transferred nicely. May be a totally different story if you're shooting for Ivys.
I found the actual impact of AP credits disappointing. I ended up with no gen ed classes and started off in sophomore classes for math and physics. AP doesn’t count towards college GPA, and it turns out that others ended up with GPA padding that I missed out on. Still turned out fine overall, the GPA padding thing just didn’t occur to me in high school and no one pointed it out.
Who do you tell your GPA to? I stopped listing GPA after my first job. When I get a resume from someone that went to college 10 years ago and lists a 3.245 GPA, I laugh.
Yeah, today it doesn’t matter at all. The others I referenced in my post were other people in college, e.g. while I was applying to internships, not anyone today. Though I do still include it on my resume, I had kind of assumed that people will think it was very low if you omit it.
1. My understanding is that education is much more important in Europe than the US. From what I gather, people with long careers often still lead with their education credentials. Not sure why.
2. I think it really depends on the person's career. If they've had 7 jobs in 10 years, yeah - GPA probably isn't super relevant. But if someone's been at the same place for 10 years, maybe it's not the worst thing.
IMO, the 1 page (with large text) rule is more important. GPA should probably fall off before relevant job related stuff, but there's no harm in keeping it there if the resume has the space.
Running start is an incredible program - beyond offering far more advanced and faster paced classes, it also really helped me personally mature and see vastly different people and perspectives than where in my age group at high school.
I did this in HS decades ago and had to fight guidance counselors to get it done. Fortunately, it's much easier now. I cannot recommend this program highly enough.
Running start applies to the entire state of Washington, and since 2013, all Washington state schools are pretty well funded (even if that means taking money away from richer Seattle area property tax districts).
They don’t generally transfer for Ivys. Running start is something you do if you have no intention of going to prestigious private universities as it’s completely pointless (credits don’t usually transfer) and they don’t have a great process for evaluating such students into their programs. You’d only do it if you plan to go to a school in your state since transferring credits out of state isn’t always easy going.
Running start credits, being based on community college credits, don't even transfer cleanly to state schools. When I did running start, this was the cautious advice.
There are plenty of other reasons to do running start, aside from transfer credits. Access to higher level subjects you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
Personally, I traded high school PE for scuba and yoga, a full year of A&P, college calculus, and an intro year of psych.
Transfer credits had very little to do with it - it was just a more fulfilling curriculum.
> Running start credits, being based on community college credits, don't even transfer cleanly to state schools. When I did running start, this was the cautious advice.
My understanding is that there are been a number of reforms to WA community colleges that mean that a larger portion of community college credits transfer to public universities now. Of course, going out of state is a roll of the dice as always.
> Transfer credits had very little to do with it - it was just a more fulfilling curriculum.
Very true. I loved taking Microbiology as a HS student. Def something I wouldn't have gotten the chance to do normally. And CC offers far more advanced math than HS.
Wealthy suburbs are cutting advanced classes too. Palo Alto Unified School District is dropping dual-enrolled Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra (classes taken after AP Calculus BC).
My kid is on this track exactly and I think it is a joke that some kids take multivariable calculus or linear algebra in high school. Enrichment and AP has become an arms race for the upper middle class to get their kids into good schools. Realistically, if you are STEM major you probably are going to have to retake these classes anyway. And if you aren't you probably won't need them.
I know some kids are really exceptional and maybe ought to take this much math that young. But I think a lot do it now to get into a college.
I did have to retake multivariable (calc 3) and linear algebra, but I'm grateful for that senior year HS class because:
- the college versions were a breeze, which was a relief because the workload from other courses was high
- having a good intuition about divergence & curl made physics (electromagnetism) easier, and linear algebra was used in differential equations before I actually took linear algebra
So I think for a high school student who knows they're heading for STEM, with room on their schedule, it can still be a good choice.
Couple of points. 1) Colleges expect students to take the most advanced curriculum available. With grade inflation across the board, AP and Honors classes are not the distinguishing factor they used to be. 2) With the entire world's resources at their fingertips an ever larger cohort of kids is advancing to higher level math classes at earlier stages.
Frankly, Multivariable and Linear Alg. is on the low end of the ability of advanced high school kids these days. The ease of deploying tensor flow has gotten a lot of kids motivated to learn linear algebra.
Standards change greatly with time and it is a joke to believe that applying the same standards to everyone will get a good outcome.
Anecdata: I would have loved to get the possibility to study higher math at high school level, at school. I had to dig it out on my own since the local school topped out after basic calculus, linalg, statistics. I was not alone.
Today I would estimate that top 5% could easily and happily handle multivariate, ode/pde, etc in high school given proper support and encouragement.
Top few percent learn several times faster than average. What is the point, other than ancient ideology, to slow them down and hinder their learning progress?
I wish they would teach these classes with some context in high school. Rather than have a course on linear algebra, they could do something like Intro to Machine Learning or intro to writing a good physics engine, or perhaps computer graphics. Teaching linear algebra without context, especially to high schoolers, doesn't seem to be very useful, but adding in the context (at the expense of maybe depth) could be transformative.
I didn't take any advance math in HS and actually did quite average. By some miracle I was admitted a very good Electrical Engineering program. However they made me take these advance math classes before university to prove that I could handle the task.
Removing these options from HS just lowers the bar for everyone.
I wholeheartedly agree. Exceptions to the rule always exist and I don't want it to be impossible, but they should be entirely optional and non-standard. You are going to re-learn it anyway (and learn it better, from first principles instead of patched together).
It's also an arms race that's misplaced. STEM majors are learning math anyway, there really are diminishing returns in cramming more of it into your school curriculum. A lot of different subjects are way more useful, ideally some that do exactly not prepare yourself for a major of your choice, otherwise you end up with over-optimised education. You need some social studies and discuss current topics moving america and the world. You need to write essays about these difficult topics. You need a little bit of science and a little bit of history. And a foreign language. It's about the abstract ideals of education, afterwards you can choose the major you want.
I wish I had studied more math during highschool. University killed any free time I had and was so fast-paced that proofs were omitted, entire chapters skipped and I'm not even talking about building intuitive understanding of the subject.
In contrast, high school was three years of repeating the same equation solving with some calculus sprinkled on.
I have a hard time believing above average students (with parents with parents without engineering/science degrees) could take linear algebra and multi variable calculus at university rigor along any other courses they are required to take. Sure, maybe at Paly and Gunn there’s enough to fill a 20 person class, but those are still pretty steep courses which require math majors and not math education majors.
If the students are prepared enough for those classes, what’s the point in keeping them in High School anyway?
I had a strange experience where I had a bunch of AP courses lined up my senior year and then moved to a place which did not have nearly any of them. In hindsight, I should have really pressed for direct enrollment to college instead of faffing around my senior year in “communication skills”, AP english, and “Economics” - all three required by the school district but mostly useless.
> I have a hard time believing above average students (with parents with parents without engineering/science degrees) could take linear algebra
Linear algebra is not hard. I had a math teacher who taught the basics of linear algebra in my middle school math class. While she was an exceptional teacher (incredibly good, we still talk over 25 years later!), I can attest that the concepts presented no great difficulty to any of the students (with the caveat that all of us were in an advanced learning program)
Now calculus, I feel that at least some high school students I've talked to really didn't "get it", even for single variable. Then again I get the feeling that most people who take calculus don't get it, which I find sad because IMHO calculus is absolutely phenomenal. For me, it was when math started really connecting to the real world and making an impact on how I saw things in my day to day.
Keep in mind that this term covers a huge range of math that can be introduced at very different levels of abstraction and generality. You might think linear algebra is mainly matrix multiplication and Gaussian elimination, someone else might think it's about the representation functor in Abelian categories.
We're talking about HS intro classes, so my use of Linear Algebra was at the same level as saying, well, Algebra. E.g. Non-math major uses of those terms.
Yes. However, I read your post as suggesting (given the quote you respond to) that significant numbers of high school students can/should take university level courses of the same name as their high school courses, presumably because it's the same thing.
For many advanced kids, math is not hard. It is a tool that must be mastered to solve the next set of problems. Profound understanding comes along the way.
My senior year math course (after Calc BC in grade 11) was discrete math at the community college across the street. Felt a little embarrassing for us to take up half the classroom, sitting next to adults, and realizing that most of us high schoolers were towards the top of the class. But other than that unfortunate situation, I think it was a good system, and if anything, cheaper for the school district than finding someone to teach in-house.
This is in fact how the programs are structured at many high schools with dual-enrollment. Most top high schools in the Bay Area offer such options for Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra. What Palo Alto is doing is dropping formal support of the program - in practice that has meant bringing college professors to school sites and providing these classes without fees for students. Without formal support, students have to pay and have to commute.
These courses are the next step after Calculus BC. Lots of kids take them with the support of their high school. Paly & Gunn combined have something like 90 kids who take Calc BC their junior year.
The real problem is the insane policy of the U.S. to fund schools locally. That way, you will always have better schools in the richer areas and worse schools in the poorer areas.
In Ontario (Canada), schools are funded by the province. Schools doing worse can access addition funding and other resources. In 2020 teachers earned an average of $103,000/year including benefits. In Toronto, which has a high cost of living, the average was $108,000.
That's not to say that school quality doesn't vary, often by household income. Poorer people often have language issues (immigrants) and can't afford to pay for extra help for their kids, or don't have free time to work with them. The system is still stacked against them, but not nearly as badly.
The American "I got mine" method of school funding seems like the worst possible choice.
I grew up in Russia, and education system at the time was mostly the same as it was in Soviet times.
Still, there was a whole system of special schools, both for high and low achievers. I have went to a “math/physics” grade school from the start, and subsequently changed schools two times, each time through hard entrance exams, to finally end up in the most challenging/prestigious school in the country.
It's completely mind boggling to me that a communist country has such a system, but a capitalist country is trying to bring everyone to common denominator.
Same boat. He is in SPS now, but as a kindergartener. We will kick the can down the road and do something if he gets bogged down in a watered down curriculum. I get the equalization goal, but when kids in China are starting calculus, not algebra, in 9th grade, we can't just ignore that.
in what universe sacrificing child’s education (even if the child is from wealthy family) leads to some greater good. It is a lose-lose proposition for everyone.
I will have to disagree with both you and GP to a certain degree.
A developed country is not where even the poor have cars, it's where even the rich use public transport - a quote attributed to many including LKY.
Extrapolating this to the current argument (disclaimer: not read the article), if the same system is thrust onto the rich and poor alike, it should get better over a period of time, no?
My child attends a small, arguably underfunded, rural public school. It does not have enough faculty to teach Chemistry or Physics every year. Spanish is the only foreign language taught.
The student body generally excels. A graduating class of 120 students might have a dozen who score 30+ on the ACT. And, of course, there is perhaps an equal number who fail to graduate.
They all go to the same school, but I wouldn't say "the same system is thrust onto the rich and poor alike." The most important system in the education of a child is not within the walls of a school. It is within the walls of their home.
It is simply true that a certain level of affluence is necessary to provide a stable learning environment * in the home *. Affluence does not guarantee that stability, but it increases the odds so dramatically that its affect should not be ignored.
That’s a very specific view of a mostly urban environment. Forcing an encumbered, Orwellian institution on a populace against their will does not seem very developed.
(I say that as a husband to a public school teacher, son of a public school teacher, and father of children attending public school.)
No, it’s the school board of San Francisco who is making the poor kids pay. They can’t afford to get private schooling, and their school is actively preventing them from succeeding.
i'm curious in what sense you mean that they "pay"... public schools could easily just offer these classes, ex idealism, but they choose not to in the name of Equity. and it's not because the rich kids go and attend private school instead-- their rich parents still pay property taxes like everyone else, so i don't really know how that flight would shift an extra burden on to the kids that don't move schools. i guess school funding is tied in some formulaic sense to the number of kids that attend that specific school? but even that roundabout justification has the causality backward: the un-offering of the course is what leads to the rich kid flight in the first place-- seems to me that the only "idealism" that is being "paid" for here is that which is being promulgated by the Church of "Equity". but it is true that the non-rich kids are the ones stuck paying for it. (but where do the kids of these high priests of Equity go to school? i have a hunch...)
and beyond that, isn't the whole point of GP's comment that the idealistic rich people are trying to / would like to leave their children in public schools? what's idealistic about sending your kids to private school instead? seems like the exact opposite to me.
so other than "pay" not making any sense, "idealism" not making sense, and randomly swapping whose (not "who's") idealism is being paid for, your reply makes perfect sense.
like, when people make comments like this, do they think that they are saying anything in particular, or is it just about the words sounding good in a certain order, like music lyrics? it's like some sort of pathos DDoS. but, hey: at least "your heart's in the right place", right?
> "Families with resources turn to fee-required online algebra 1 courses in eighth grade, outside the public school system, or enroll their kids in private schools,"
Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many private schools. If I have the means, why would I not send my kids to such schools and therefore fuck up the funding of the public schools? Not that I want to, but it furiates me that the school administrators really hurt the kids who need public education the most in the name of equity. It also saddens me that the constituents are okay with such administrators.
That's the problem. We're dealing with the critical theory definition of equity, which they define as the intentional redistribution of opportunity and resources along identity group lines to correct for present and historical injustices, as well as opportunities those groups have already had.
Critical theory and social justice adopts a distorted view of reality. Leave it to a school in San Francisco to show everyone what happens in real life when administrators adopt a policy based on that distorted view of reality -- inequality is only increased.
In fact, I'd classify critical theory alongside Marxism for adopting a false belief that some top-down forced redistribution of resources/wealth/opportunity/means of production/etc. is the way to true justice. That kind of belief backfires spectacularly when policy makers adopt it IRL.
Inequality is increased because those without resources aren’t receiving any new benefits and those with resources use those resources to compensate for the failure of the system to provide an education optimal path. It’s worse outcomes for both, except some people can shield themselves from the fallout. What new kind of self-inflicted damage will be required to realize the detrimental failure of this world view?
So you figure people should give even more resources, and their children's futures, over to these people who actively hate them and just hope things will work out, despite all evidence to the contrary?
My obligation is to my children. I'm happy to entrust them to a system if I have faith in it, or the people running it. If I don't...it would be downright irresponsible.
Also, among those who aren’t willfully ignorant, it’s well known that increasing resources increases inequality. The classic example is height: when resources are low everyone is short. But when resources are plentiful then those with the genes for height tower above those without.
In fairness, the issues surrounding height inequality tend to be more about relative height than absolute height. So sure, shorter people can still reach the same physical heights, absolutely speaking, but they are now being judged against a broader spectrum of heights relatively speaking. Which means that they're less likely to succeed at job interviews or in relationships, and therefore end up absolutely worse off than before.
Essentially, if something is a zero-sum game (e.g. there are only so many jobs around, if you get a job someone else won't), then even if someone isn't doing worse absolutely, they can still do worse overall relatively speaking.
Which isn't to say that we should be giving short people stilts and cutting the legs off tall people, but it's worth recognising that these topics are complex, and even if we're only talking about absolute benefits, people can still lose out relatively speaking.
That's exactly analogous to SF not offering algebra (for the students without the means to take extracurricular classes, which are disproportionately Black and Hispanic) - none of them get algebra, so they're all worse off in math in the future. With algebra offered, Black and Hispanic students may be less successful on average at algebra than other groups, but at least Black and Hispanic students that can handle algebra get a chance for better math education.
Well you see we just haven't tried real socialism yet. The wealthy should not be allowed to give any kind of private education including tutors to their kids. And they shouldn't be allowed to interact with their kids at all because that too causes inequity. State boarding schools all around. Then we will achieve a classless society.
Exactly, that's where this line of reasoning goes.
In reality, the political leaders in charge of this societal reordering will themselves become the next upper class, and you can bet with certainty they'll give their own kids the best education and opportunities they can (which will be better than what they offer the masses).
It must suck to be poor but not belong to any one the correct identity groups nowadays. I am lucky I was born way before that, or I would never have be able to leave poverty.
No, not at all, take 10% of the military budget, up the tax right for the high earners and make a better world. Imagine a place where no one had to be scared of living on the street, could get decent food, has access to free education and health care. What a wonderful world. It's totally within our capabilities and no one need suffer. Now I'm not saying it will be a great life but a basic life, it's been proved over and over that the limiting factor for a number of minorities is poverty, so unless you address that first nothing will be solved. Sure some people will abuse it, but think of the kids that will be able to get an education and eat properly, and its just easy.
> What a wonderful world. It's totally within our capabilities and no one need suffer.
I get really scared when I hear anyone promise utopia. Literally every large-scale society that did turned into a hellscape after a while, and the idea itself never worked.
There was always someone who didn't buy into the idea, and they were blamed for why it didn't work. "If only those people were gone, then this would work and we'd be happy."
So millions die or are sent to the gulag or whatever it's called, and the idea is still not working.
China no longer promises its citizens a utopia. All they promise is a country that is powerful on the world stage. They're getting there, but it's still happening via exploitation. And the back alleys of Beijing still ring with abject poverty.
Interesting, China has managed to lift a large proportion of its citizens in a very short time. I wasn't suggesting a Utopia, merely raising the bar so the minimum level is better than it is now, surely that should be the goal of every advanced country. The current levels of poverty are negatively influencing the next generation.
> China has managed to lift a large proportion of its citizens in a very short time
You're conveniently ignoring the cultural revolution, which caused an ideological purity spiral resulting in millions dead.
China only began to prosper when they relaxed their economic policies and began to allow property/business ownership and international trade (especially with the West) back in.
Poverty is not eliminated in China, at all. The fact that they lifted a lot of people out of poverty doesn't necessarily mean they can lift all people out of poverty. Nobody else has achieved that. It's not as easy as you make out.
Also: the way they lifted all those people out of poverty was basically by freeing them to lift themselves out of poverty, by adopting an essentially capitalist system. You could say: they simply stopped holding people in poverty.
" Imagine a place where no one had to be scared of living on the street, could get decent food, has access to free education and health care. What a wonderful world. "
This wonderful world already exists in the US. Poor people have access to Medicaid / Emergency Rooms. The debate about food insecurity is whether or not poor people can afford fresh vegetables (because living on rice, cheap meats and canned peas/beans is not nutritious enough). About living in the street - if you are living on the street when you can get a job as a limo driver for $30 / hour just by walking in then maybe is your fault???
People will willingly claim that critical theory is not connected to Marxism. We call these people wrong.
Marx is literally the godfather of critical theory, the Frankfurt school, post strcturalism and the rest of the fashionable nonsense cannon that parts of the left seem obsessed with.
Man, forget about Soviet Russia. I give you a more striking example: I was born in Brazil and started having algebra around this age, in a public school, where most of the kids, like me were either poor or at the best lower middle class. I don't even remember having a colleague that had at least one parent with a superior education.
I think the idea is that if it’s important to rich parents, they will grudgingly fund education for everyone. But as long as they have these outlets where they can just educate their own kids and leave everyone else behind, they will.
The rich will always have those outlets, and nobody is going to take them away from them, because they have the power.
Now, with the disappearing middle class, "just call them the rich, and make them pay for it" has been the default for a long time.
Denmark has had a private school system for decades, and 15% of students go into the private schools (as a parent you pay a portion of the costs so it is not necessarily extremely expensive). "Private" mostly means that you still have to teach specific basics, but you can do it in your way like Montessori.
One advantage of the private schools is they can kick out students they cannot manage easily, while the public schools have to keep everyone. Some recent strutural changes in the public shools are said to have declined their quality, enough so that many government ministers, even of the left wing, are sending their children to the private schools.
I guess it's one of those Nordic myths -- like high minimum wage (there is none in Denmark).
> Some recent strutural changes in the public shools are said to have declined their quality, enough so that many government ministers, even of the left wing, are sending their children to the private schools.
they did that before too :) couldnt possibly expect the politicians to send their kids to the same filthy schools as the plebs now could we? :)
I'm not sure that's a fair generalization. I suspect many parents have the resources to improve their own kids' educations, but not the time/energy to try changing the school system politics / bureaucracy / laws / budgets in time for their kids.
> I think the idea is that if it’s important to rich parents, they will grudgingly fund education for everyone.
it doesn't cost more for a teacher to open up an algebra book and teach from that instead of from the pre-algebra book. unless there are scheduling difficulties which somehow prevent one classroom's worth of students from being crammed into the same room in the same slot, the imagined lack of money isn't going to impact the contents of the curriculum.
this isn't like when we thought we needed to cram schools full of computers and they were going to cost money. one math class is an expensive as another to teach. we don't even need new textbooks. hell, we probably don't even need textbooks, just have them do exercises online or something.
> one math class is an expensive as another to teach
On the contrary, I'm sure that a teacher who understands algebra well enough to teach it competently costs much more than the other kind, on account of being so rare.
> But as long as they have these outlets where they can just educate their own kids and leave everyone else behind, they will.
Education is a collective action problem. Parents care more about their own child's education than the education of other children. This should not be surprising, and it cannot be changed.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
A callous way to put it, but it could also be stated that setting people up for modest success is a much kinder position than setting them up for exceptional failure.
Kids who are disruptive/discipline problems. Teachers should not be removing slow students who do not cause issues in the classroom. Teachers should remove disruptive students. Disruptive students lose their learning pass, and all would benefit from such a situation.
Teachers becoming disciplinarians is where they become authoritarian, exploitive arbiters of ones future earning potential.
I'd encourage you to think critically about the design and implementation of such a system, the incentives it would generate and the moral hazards of enacting it. It's not like labeling kids as "unworthy of learning" could be abused.
You're being intentionally obtuse. If you have the capacity to have an accelerated program for 1,000 students in a district, then you rank by test scores and bring in the top 1,000.
My intentions aren't epistemologically accessible to you.
What parents commenters are doing is laundering agency through a testing regime. It's part of the process of the absolution of responsibility of consequence.
As an aside, it's clear that parent commenters aren't mature enough to be approached socratically. I regret their schools taught them to read and write. They clearly don't want to learn.
You broke the site guidelines badly with this post. We ban accounts that do this. Your account has been doing things like this repeatedly. Can you please stick to the rules from now on?
Since we're clearly able to read each other's intentions, yours are to disrupt the legitimate line of questioning with a temper tantrum. I hope you see where assuming people's intentions ends up. I know you can do better than that.
You broke the site guidelines badly here. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how provocative other comments were or you feel they were.
Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of this (at least not from a quick look at the account's recent posts in other threads), so this should be easy to fix. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to using HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
That's the first thing that my daughter was taught at RSM when she went in for 5th grade math - Algebra. They also start you with geometry in the 6th grade. I think they start Algebra a lot younger actually - maybe 2nd or 3rd grade. When I spoke to the principal of the my local RSM she said the earlier you start the better it is.
Edit:- They get homework they need to turn in. Early on I had to spend sometime with my daughter to help her cope. But once she had her concepts down its been pretty smooth sailing.
russian school of math is very popular at the schools my kids are at. i ask the parents why and they tell me they think math is important and the public school isn’t challenging them
A private, after-school extra curricular program. It’s a national company with many local branches (possibly franchised). Like Kumon, it’s a way for ambitious parents to buy extra academic classes and extra homework for their kids.
Is a wonderful program teaching math. I cannot recommend it enough. I recommend it to all my friends. It starts from basics - in kindergarten they do problems like "there are 4 birds on a branch. 2 fly away. How many are left on the branch?". And then it builds and keeps building.
My son is taking it. My son was solving linear equations when he was 11 years old. I think this is the best education he is getting - and the one that will stay with him the most.
There are people who don't understand sociology and are only vaguely aware of pathological cultural factors (or possibly, though they are aware of them, wish to deny their existence) and demand that these problems be solved with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is only able to crudely affect these, and only in the most totalitarian of regimes. Mao or Stalin might have been able to rid their countries of pathological cultural factors (of course, instead of doing such they were more concerned with ridding themselves of potential rivals). California cannot at this point in time do any such thing.
> Mao or Stalin might have been able to rid their countries of pathological cultural factors
Mao did rid of the meritocracy-based education system, replacing it with an identity-based system. That is, if you were born with the right identity (blue-collar worker, peasant (not farmer, mind you), and soldier), then you get to go to a university without even any test. If you were born with the wrong identity (the right, the anti-revolutionary, the farmer or any family who has property, the "rich", the "bad"), then you can't go to any college. The results? Just look at China in the 70s. What a fucking hell hole.
As a for Stalin or Soviet, they never gave up their elite education. In fact, elite officers had to be elite students as well. Those who are good at STEM could even get a little leniency when they made the so-called political mistakes.
nearly every other developed country managed to fund their schools system adequately, to provide a uniform system of education without heavy reliance on private schools. While you can't really guarantee equal opportunities for every kid due extracurricular support, at least the possible schools and classes are open to everyone independent of income.
So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
I don't think any intelligent person would make the accusation that we don't spend enough on education. On average, the United States spends an absurd amount per student. Even in the places where they spend less than this average per student, they're still spending more than throughout all of Europe.
The question really becomes not if we're spending enough, but what it is that we happen to be buying. How much of any given $1 you spend in taxes purchases textbooks, or pays teacher paychecks? Hell, how much on air conditioning in the summer so kids can concentrate on something other than the sweat dribbling down their foreheads?
How much is spent on the office building downtown that has nothing to do with teaching directly, but with people who manage the teachers? And with people who manage those managers?
> So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
If the only equality you can figure out how to manage is hammering down all the nails that stick out, what good is equality?
I wonder whether averages here "average out" the missing spending. I am not surprised that the average spending in San Francisco per kid is higher than most places, especially because of the prevalence of private schools. And, of course, more money is not always a solution if it's not used effectively. I would also guess that absolute spending per child is not really comparable without adjusting for cost of living, you can't outsource your teachers after all. The question is quite complicated.
> If the only equality you can figure out how to manage is hammering down all the nails that stick out, what good is equality?
I have not said that, but opportunities should be well thought out and available to each child. I am also convinced that there is a balance to strike here, classes should be diverse to not entrench inequality too much. Of course young mozart just needs more musical education, young warhol more art and young einstein more math.
The average spending isn't much affected by private schools. Not like you seem to think. No billionaires are spending $10million/year on their kindergarteners.
Public spending per pupil is quite high, when federal and state funding are both considered. Public students aren't being underfunded. The money's just not buying what you think it buys. Is that difficult to believe?
> I have not said that,
I don't know how to parse your first comment other than that. I don't want to live in the same country as someone who would deny my children the education I would provide for them, so that they can be turned into imbeciles in public schools. This is a deeply important issue for me. I will never allow mine to go near a public school.
There is no balance to strike. Let those who wish to do so, go their own way.
> Families face a "nightmare of workarounds" to get their high-achieving children on track for advanced math, write Rex Ridgeway and David Margulies in a San Francisco Examiner commentary.
Families in Palo Alto recently won a lawsuit against PAUSD, [1] which was denying students credit for courses taken at other institutions (mainly community colleges, IIRC). In Menlo Park, we deal with similar issues; I recently wondered to myself how much I could have taught my kids in all the hours that I have spent talking to the school/district about allowing students to receive advanced learning. Other parents with less time and more money opt for private schools. Those with less time and no more money simply resign themselves to the situation. It is shocking how hostile schools are to what used to be common sense: letting (or, gasp, even encouraging) all students to learn.
It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!!
For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake. The kids need 1-on-1 tutoring help.
Cut off the head of the problem—the school administration that continues to support our archaic system-and spend the money you will save on tutoring the kids. Or switch to mastery education. Fix the PROBLEM.
We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling.
Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless.
I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.
Honestly, it doesn’t really work without the parents. The issue is that the biggest problems with schooling discrepancies are poverty. Kids can’t eat, need to take care of siblings or their own kids or go work two jobs, have no homes, don’t get medical care, have no internet, etc.
There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.
are there no all-day schools in the US? My girlfriend went to one because of her mother being on her own and having to work and it was pretty involved compared to my "normal" school. They handled school, sports and homework. Your kid should come home with only very, very few things to do. It's a trend in germany to have it as an option at more and more schools but they have to build the infrastructure first (may schools in german didn't have a canteen) so it's taking a bit. The schools where I grew up didn't have one but now both "advanced" schools have all day school options.
I think every school should have the possibility to put your kid in an all-day school, I can't imagine the strain on single parents or parents where both have to work a lot otherwise.
Of course it's not possible to eliminate parents as an important factor of the success of your kid, but you can help.
A little bit, but I am not sure whether it is really comparable. It's a relatively new trend here in germany (started 2002). Translating a recent article: "According to this, in 2007 only 16.2 percent of children attended an all-day school. In 2017, the figure was more than twice as high, at 42 per cent."
As I understood it (not a parent and it was not available when I was at school): You have all-day classes and "normal" classes at school. The kids in all-day classes stay together during the day and the kids in the other class go home, it is not an optional add-on. My niece is attending all-day school with a musical focus and likes it very much. All day classes differ between schools and classes, with school on 3-5 afternoons until 4 pm. Supervision is given for homework and studying for exams.
Agreed. Love, shelter, food and support. Schools have kids 6hrs a day. Learning happens 24/7. There is no way schools can compensate for a bad home life. Progressive school reformers are blindingly naive to the impact that the other 18hrs of a child's day has to their performance at school.
> There is no way schools can compensate for a bad home life
There is a difference between "parents always matter to a child's education" and "let's stop trying to improve schools cause what's the point". The latter is basically the same as "schools are pointless, why have them in the first place?". If you believe that, look at some countries that don't have schools...
Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year.
In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.
Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year.
why pay students to tutor? make tutoring younger kids part of the curriculum. teaching a skill is the best way to practice and internalize the skill for yourself.
montessori is already doing this very effectively.
Doesn't university math have tutorials and colloquiums? If you go to MIT opencourseware and look at the math and applied math courses tutorials are a big part. They're done in class to guarantee some minimal understanding. I think its the case with most math departments (not just elite ones like MIT). Not sure if something like that is possible. If you scale out of tutors with maybe a 1:3 or a 1:4 tutor to student ratio it might raise the bar for everyone. It might require a whole bunch of money though.
You can try to work the parents out of the equation as much as you want, but it won’t work. This isn’t a new problem, and we don’t and won’t live in small communal villages.
I bet farmers use waaay more algebra than I do as a fullstack web programmer. I love it I just don't use it. On the other hand farmers are thinking about slopes all day, every day: irrigation rates; fuel, fertilizer, seed rates; growth rates. They don't get paid once or twice a month like I do so their finance maths are much more sophisticated than mine.
I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.
It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge).
Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.
My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra.
Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
Today we are graduating an unacceptably large numbers of functional illiterate kids from high school. If a kid graduates high school and they are functionally illiterate, that illustrates neglect by parents over many years. It has nothing to do with the academic background of said parents or whether they themselves can read or write. It has nothing to do with the state of public education, or the quality of teachers - the public system is good enough to teach literacy over 15 years of schooling. The quality of the public system may be important for the last mile of education (where you’re trying to provide kids a richer educational experience), but our bar for success is much much lower.
Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).
The kid is the one in class choosing not to read. Parents can be destructive influences on kids, but kids also do have free will and destructive influences amongst their peers who they choose to associate with.
It’s a compounding problem and each time we assign blame to one (1) thing, we’re leaving other causes untreated and not making the problem better at all.
I’d say ask find out why they’re saying they don’t want to read and address all those causes.
There are plenty of kids with great parents who are surrounded by awful peers at school and media that glorifies being uneducated. Then you leave 2 bad kids in a class of good kids, and you’ll get endless distractions that cause the others to give up and resent school. You address just one cause and you have countless others. You need to go after a load of issues and it’s honestly more complicated than we want to admit.
If you pin every responsibility to the parents you are just leaving unlucky kids behind. Having someone to blame is not helping kids succeed without much support from the parents. Of course someone will always succeed despite the odds, but the odds are still stacked agains the poor kid. It just entrenches wealth and slows down social mobility.
What's the fix? More support from the state of course.
It really is a task for the society compared to the individual, otherwise you will never ever ever have a fair system. Success in schools should not be so dependent on the parents. What about single parents? Do you just accept that it will be miserable for them to get their kids trough school? Parents without a lot of education will also have a problem of helping their kids. And what about those kids? Will you just leave them behind? It's not their fault they are born in the wrong family. This is just a take I would just really not agree with.
> More support from the state of course … Success in schools should not be so dependent on the parents
That’s the current theory and it fails. The reality is that public eduction is education at (massive) scale. There is no amount of available resources to create, say, a personalized learning environment with dedicated teachers for individual students - when you’re dealing with millions, or tens of millions of students. Parental involvement is so critical because that is the individualized focus that is needed by kids.
There is no way for you to create a public system that overcomes the success that comes out of parents who are involved and invested in their child’s education. No way.
I do not see such evidence, maybe it fails in san francisco but that can have thousands of reasons. Everything I've read here points me to the fact that the public education is not good/comprehensive enough and too inflexible. I am honestly a bit shocked what i've read here, this is definitely not my experience with public education, like not at all. San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there. There is no excuse why public education should not excel. I bet every major politician has his kids on a private school and also every other decision maker.
> There is no way for you to create a public system that overcomes the success that comes out of parents who are involved and invested in their child’s education
This is not exactly what I said. It is probably impossible in practice to eliminate this advantage. But while impossible to eliminate, you can try to minimise it and you should. It's the only fair thing to do because kids can't choose their parents. I would go further, it's the only ethical thing to do.
> Everything I've read here points me to the fact that the public education is not good/comprehensive enough and too inflexible.
Well … yeah. It’s education at scale. Anything at scale will be inflexible by definition.
> San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there.
And there’s a lot of funding. The median per student funding in the SF school board is something on the order of 2 or 3 times the median US funding (a quick Google shows ~$22k vs $7k) and when compared to global averages, it’s through the roof. It’s not the level of funding. It’s not even the administration and curriculum either (remember, our bar is very low - we just want kids that can read when they graduate).
The way I figure, optimizing public education is a last-mile problem. There is value in taking kids from a B to an A, or providing a more enriching educational experience. So don’t think I’m arguing against more funding and better management. But this isn’t going to solve the core issue - parental neglect (and it is neglect if a kid graduates high school illiterate). At scale, the state cannot make up for that kind of neglect. In fact, that’s a big reason why you see the divide growing - everything that is tried, just ends up marginally improving or marginally deteriorating educational experience of kids who are already doing reasonably well.
> But while impossible to eliminate, you can try to minimise it and you should.
And my argument is, we’ve largely hit the limit on this kind of optimization. Spending more, and/or changing the curriculum with the same cohort of teachers, isn’t going to give you anything better than trivial (at best) improvements.
> Well … yeah. It’s education at scale. Anything at scale will be inflexible by definition.
Maybe agree to disagree because I don't see that.
> ~$22k
wow...this is honestly insane. I wonder how many full-time teacher positions per class this could afford. What's the most comprehensive schools education you can get there? In germany there's been the recent rise of all-day options at schools (school until 4pm covering lessons, homework and studying for exams and optional topics like school orchestra or more intense sports). 22k should pay for that and this would help overworked or overwhelmed parents. My girlfriend and her sister was raised by a single mother and went to one when it was still the exception (roughly ~40% are enrolling at all day schools right now, but it really started nation wide ~2002). It was quite different to my experience at a "normal" school class. She liked it.
I struggle to imagine how you can raise two daughters, work a full time job in a competitive housing market (so you can't really reduce your hours because the rent is high) while finding the time to invest enough time into the education of your children. At least the amount of time my parents have put in would be straight up impossible (one was working full time, the other reduced to 50% so afternoons there was always one present at home).
Kids don't need "support at home from parents". Very few parents are competent to teach kids math properly (even those who think they are). Kids do better learning from someone else, better still if the someone else is a professional.
Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching).
In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.
My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.
If the problem was kids showing up, trying hard, and not getting it then sure. But the problem is kids not showing up and putting no effort in when they do, and that’s on parents.
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" under ideal conditions and circumstances?
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"?
Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be?
The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years.
And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.
You seem to be saying that schools are bad. Do you really think modern society can function without schools? Or that countries that don't have schools shouldn't build any?
You ask two questions that are at odds with each other.
If schools were bad, but modern society can't function without them, which would you pick? If you say it can't function without them, then are they good regardless because you want it to continue to function?
Like, no matter how bad they are? Or do you draw some line or another? "It's ok if they make kids dumb and compulsive consumers, but they can't go torturing them!"
Asking questions like this seems to be more about dogma and status quo than anything else.
You seem to have very nuanced concepts of "good and bad", which I don't fully grasp. I was starting from a rather simpler world view. Yes, I want society to function. Societal collapse is imho extremely bad.
Even regardless of collapse, I still much prefer living (and having gone to school) in a country that has schools. At no point did it seem to me what the point of school is to make people dumb. That wasn't the US and wherever yours was, your experience may be different, but I really don't understand the level of cynicism triggered here by every discussion involving schools. Access to education has brought lots of people out of poverty and I'm rather sure the vast majority of children much prefer school to hard work in the fields. I also think it's pretty clear thay on the scale of centuries schools around the world have improved tremendously. On the scale of decades and centuries, physical violence and bullying has decreased a lot, both by teachers and children, while creativity and understanding play a more important role in lessons today than was ever the case in compulsory education systems.
> Access to education has brought lots of people out of poverty
Sure. And if schools had anything to do with education, maybe they could do that here too. But you're also commenting in a thread where there is a link to credible (uncontested, uncontroversially attested) reports that the schools are shutting down education. Purportedly to help make everyone equal.
It's arguable what the cause of this is, the reasoning behind the decisions, etc. But that's what it says. They've started teaching less math. Not teaching it differently. Not teaching it at a different age. They just don't.
It would almost be a relief if you were to dispute the reports themselves, and claimed it was some weird conspiracy theory. This would be more compatible with the attitude that you're expressing.
In the US, schools and education started with little overlap, and have less year to year.
It's not that many schools and they stopped the policy again...
To my mind, the outrage is somewhat exaggerated. You could call it "outrage fetishism about culture war issues". Also an opportunity for "smart people" to feel good about "how they managed to learn things despite having to go to school" and how much better they think they could organize the school system, or how much smarter they would have been if no schools had existed.
Yes, maybe the stated reasons for trying this reform were stupid and maybe it should have been obvious to people it wouldn't work. But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else. That can go a very long way given some time. And yes, that leaves us with an imperfect school system. Very different from arguing against having schools at all, a position far more outrageous to my mind than any "woke nonsense" I've been subjected to so far.
> t's not that many schools and they stopped the policy again.
And they'll start it again eventually. Maybe in a different district or a different state. This isn't the kind of thing they give up on easily or quickly, and they're not the sort to learn from their own failed experiments.
> and how much better they think they could organize the school system
No one could organize it. I couldn't. It's beyond any reform, beyond fixing. It is an intractable problem. Well, if you assume that its purpose is education.
If we examine its true, unspoken purpose, it is working far better than it ever has, and improves year to year. It is a mechanism for the government to raise children from the earliest age on up through adulthood, with parents have as little influence on that process as can be cheaply afforded.
My wife and I homeschool.
> But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else.
No, they're willing to tone things down to avoid any PR backlash, and try again later when maybe those concerned are less attentive. All they have to do is be willing to try as many times as it takes, until they get lucky with the news cycle or the like.
I mean, from your perspective... why would they care if it didn't work? Do you imagine that the government (or any of its agencies or subdivisions as the case may be) loves these children? That it would grieve if a few thousand of them were permanently undereducated or miseducated by this? Would this committee cry itself to sleep every night regretting what it did wrong?
If it can't do these things, if it can't have regret or remorse of some sort when it does bad things, how can you imagine that it would ever stop doing bad things when those bad things cause it no inconvenience or problem?
>a position far more outrageous to my mind
I'd never say that about anything. There's nothing that I hold so sacred that I'd say "it's just outrageous that you want to get rid of X" or "are you mad that you'd say we should have Y?"
For me, I'd make good arguments outlining why there should be X, or that there should be a Y. And if you failed to agree, I'd try to understand what logic (or failure thereof) caused you remain unpersuaded.
When someone says something like this phrase though, all I can figure is that the status quo is important to them for irrational reasons. I've yet to hear a better hypothesis.
Homeschooling doesn't exist in my country. I hope it works well for you. I know some teachers and strongly believe that they know a lot of things and have skills relevant to teaching children that I do not. So I would never homeschool even given the chance. Also, interactions with other children and strangers in general play a very important part in education, which school does provide in my country. I'm assuming you have your own ways to provide this education, too.
> Would this committee cry itself to sleep
It's possible to have working political systems achieving meaningful goals without anyone involved having to cry themselves to sleep. There's a lot of people who care about improving things (including those who implemented these policies). They really think they can make education better and they're really trying. Now, there will be disagreement about what the goals are and how to achieve any given goal. Over time, a democracy is very good at distilling these disagreements into policies that almost always aren't terrible (as opposed to "occasionally excellent" or something like that). The best way to get what you want is to take part in that process. I'm pretty sure trying to pretend "there's no such thing as society" and that you're living in an anarchy bites you in the back eventually (not that I think you're doing that).
> I'd never say [outrageous]
Maybe that word means something else to you than to me (I learned English in school). I would call a large part of this discussion and these comments here "public outrage". There is public outrage about a reform that made a few schools worse. The outrage lead to a change of policy. This is good and how a democratic process generally works. I also see "outrageous" as a spectrum, where you can of course discuss outrageous things but extraordinary claims (or proposals) require extraordinary evidence (or arguments). Arguing against schools is such an instance in my mind, comparable to arguing against medicine or rule if law (I assume at the very least 98% of people in my country would agree).
I'm aware of US education systems being called broken a lot. We call ours broken too but that only drives efforts to improve it, not giving up. My outside perspective is that the system you have is certainly preferable to no schools at all, that it's definitely possible to improve it, and that it will improve (over decades to centuries) assuming human civilization doesn't (partially) collapse.
Everybody needs a certain base of math to a certain age so that we can find the students that want to go on with math and so that they are able to. Society needs that.
Along the way, everybody has a chance to get a feel for math in the world, which I would say is on par with a certain base in the humanities; we should strive for every citizen to have it, even if it’s not strictly needed for survival in the job market.
I currently think finance and statistics, so people don't get fooled so easily. Both require algebra as a foundation.
Trigonometry, calculus, vectors, complex numbers, group theory, matrices? Fun, but not something I expect to be used often enough to justify making it mandatory part of everyone's education.
Being able to take an arbitrary word problem and turn it into an algebraic equation (or series of equations) and be able to solve it. That a huge percentage of kids graduate high school being unable to do that means several people (mostly parents but likely the school system too) failed them.
that hat is quite a bit higher than the basic algebra to just solve given equations. that's why I was asking. I think there are vastly different views on what's "basic".
wrt who has failed on them iirc countries like Finland figured how to largely lift the dependency from home, family, parents.
>Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!!
As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time.
What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
> As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time.
Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school.
Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math.
> What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult.
As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.
Useful to whom? I've been coding for 30 years and the most complicated math ever I used was for calculating distance between two lat/lon points and even that I looked up.
Is it useful to an average worker sitting in front of a PC? I do not believe so.
25 years doing dev work, also never used anything more than basic arithmetic. I barely passed my college math requirements - still don’t understand what calculus is for, never came up writing CRUD apps.
>Would you mind explaining why you still hate math?
I apologize if I didn't make myself clear: I hate academical math. I love math, especially once I realized how truly relevant it is to quite literally everything around me.
It was computer programming, long after and outside my academical times, that taught me what math really was about. Suddenly, all those numbers and letters had actual meanings and values to them, I learned I could manipulate them to store and mean literally anything. It was a mindblowing paradigm shift in my way of understanding and thinking everything.
All the teachers and textbooks in the world failed to teach me the true value and purpose of math, and I loathe them for wasting my time with their absolute failure.
I’m sorry you had a poor experience with math in an academic setting. I agree that this is what kids need, the problem with this particular failing of just nixing Algebra is that we’ve not actually innovated in the way we communicate the ideas and techniques used to solve problems.
Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught.
My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.
Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics.
Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them.
This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it.
It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … …
You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life.
The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun.
We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.
I don’t agree with this at all. I studied math way past high school and what you learn up until the last 2 years of a standard undergrad curriculum does not even approach what mathematicians do or care about. It’s not even putting you on the PhD track at all, to the contrary, the weird detour into calculus/statistics/non-theoretical linear algebra from an applied perspective sets you back a solid 2 years if you’re following a standard curriculum.
The current math curriculum is about giving people a strong base for using math outside mathematics itself, in case they want to study physics or some other science, or engineering. Mathematicians do not generally give a shit about the computational aspect (it’s not what math is about, generally speaking) which you spend most of your time doing in math curricula until you’re at the point where further studying math suggests you are interested in math itself.
The vast majority of people who struggle in math IME have at least one of two problems: one is they struggle with it and put up some mental barrier of being “bad at math”, the other is they fell behind at some point and the curriculum kept chugging along with no chance for the student to catch up (which just makes the subsequent material fail to stick and confusing). This has nothing to do with some nefarious mathematicians’ agenda and everything to do with the school system not allowing students to progress at different rates based on proficiency.
> You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure.
Interesting take, completely opposite of my educational experience.
I have a terrible memory for remembering random things so I always did badly in subjects that are all about memorization (like history). Math was my refuge where I excelled, as it didn't require to memorize anything. Everything could be derived by logic; I could solve all problems on the spot during tests instead of having to hope I memorized the right answers earlier.
All other classes were of the form: (1) teacher presents a bunch of facts; (2) I'm supposed to memorize them all; (3) then I need to regurgitate a random sampling of them back during the test. I hated that so much. Math was the exception to that pattern, so I loved it.
How otherwise are you going to develop abstract thinking? There's a huge boulder in front of you and you need to hire a truck to move it. But to do that you need to know the weight of the boulder. How do you measure it? Or there is a very tall tree you need to cut down, but if the tree is too tall, it might fall on your house. How do you measure its height?
Math is great, but examples like that are pretty unconvincing. The real value is in solving new problems that nobody has encountered before.
I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math.
It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in.
People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone.
Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD.
And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up.
Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool.
I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics.
And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it.
I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration.
Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.
>You were never tasked with solving e.g equations? E.g x + 4 = 13 - 2x?
Sure I was, but what does "x + 4 = 13 - 2x" actually mean?
That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. WTF is the point of it all? The answer is there is no point, other than scoring adequately on tests so teachers can collect their paychecks and schools their funding.
>You gotta understand somewhat this stuff.
I was never taught to understand, I was only ever taught to do. That is meaningless and, as far as I've experienced, still irrelevant in my life to this very day.
>That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math.
Isnt this beautiful?
Math doesnt need context, especially cultural context.
We dont need examples with apples, cars or money to do the math.
Sure, they are helpful for kids, but at some point they are so used to abstract concepts that theres no need for that.
So not only logic is being practiced, but also abstract thinking.
>still irrelevant in my life to this very day.
We dont do math just to apply some random ass formulas. As ive said it improves logical and abstract thinking. Both of them can make significant impact on someones life.
It can be seen everywhere in real life, especially during arguments.
It's interesting how path-dependency makes these things seem like controversial reforms, while nearby districts have always done it this way. In Berkeley, for example, there isn't any course called "Algebra I" or II. Through 8th grade there is just math, with no differentiation. Then for 9th grade you can test into an advanced track, and people take either Math 1/2/3 or Advanced Math 1/2/3. In senior year any of these people can take AP Statistics or Calculus AB, but only the advanced track can take AP Calculus BC.
So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. It gives one the impression that San Francisco's issues are other than with the reform.
If you look at the breakdown of that 7/10 rating, test scores are 9 and “college readiness” an 8, while “equity”, whatever that means, is 4, which is what pulls the overall rating to a 7. This rating is not really a measure of the quality of the school.
A school filled with wealthy families will always have solid readiness and test scores, just because the families can afford whatever help is needed. A quality school wouldn't just let underprivileged children slip through.
I agree with you that this is important on a societal level, but making such a vague, contentious, and poorly defined input, which individual schools have a questionable ability to influence, 33% of a school's overall rating is nonsensical.
Imagine a school with a 10 for equity, but a 6 for test scores and 5 for college readiness. It will get the same 7 rating as Berkeley High. Which would you rather send your kids to?
* College Readiness, 8/10: This school is above the state average in key measures of college and career readiness.
* Test Scores, 9/10: Test scores at this school are far above the state average, suggesting that most students at this school are performing at or above grade level.
* Equity, 4/10: Underserved students at this school may be falling behind other students in the state, and this school may have significant achievement gaps.
> So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect.
If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade, it's not getting even halfway decent results. If they're better than the results in San Francisco, all you can learn from that is that Berkeley has extreme problems with student quality, and quality is even lower in San Francisco (or rather, the part of San Francisco that's being measured).
You memorize the equations for position and velocity without learning how you can derive one from the other. In my school we took no calc physics sophomore year then senior had the option to take AP physics which finally introduced calc.
My high school offered more than most, I was able to take multi variable calculus which served me well in college.
There are three different AP Physics tests—1, 2, and C—and only AP Physics C requires calculus. The others presumably give you the formulas and expect you to memorize them and use algebra rather than being able to derive them.
I don't know what they actually do, but the calculus needed in first year physics is simple enough (both in what things from calculus you need and in what functions you have to do those things on) that's it is reasonable to teach it on the fly as part of physics class. It goes pretty fast when you aren't bothering with rigorous proofs.
My mom helped write the Texas math curriculum and had high hopes for San Diego Unified when my kids just happened to hit the roll-out years for "common core" (the math 1/2/3 you refer to). She was compelled to admit it was a catastrophe for my daughter and useless for my son.
My daughter's story is tragic. I think it basically came down to teachers just not giving a shit about the outcomes and presenting rote lessons. So when my daughter came home for help (my undergrad is in physics) I would try to explain how to solve a blazingly obvious problem (e.g. solve for x where 2x + 3 = 2y, and y is 4) she would lose her marbles, telling me that's not what her teacher said, and best I could figure, she had been taught some weird path through something geometric, and there was no way I was going to figure that out. So, my knowledge of math was completely invalidated, despite my having a more advanced math education than her teacher. This went on for a couple years and she finally failed a course.
She fixed the grade over the next quarter and we incidentally moved to another school district for my job. She excelled and got an A in pre-calc as a junior. But the new school district enrolled her in calculus and then decided they didn't have enough students to justify the section, so they cancelled it and rolled everyone into other courses. They decided my daughter had only taken 3 years of math so they had her take Algebra 2. After getting an A in pre-calc, they had her take Algebra 2. The next year she enrolled in college and they decided that she had to take a math class, but she would be best served by taking pre-calc again! What. The. Literal. Fuck!
My mom, the math teacher who wrote the Texas curriculum, and adores the whole Berkeley math education scene, leaned in to help her (mostly just to recover from the crushed self esteem) and near the end of the semester my mom called to tell me my daughter should not be pressed to do any more math. She hates it, feels terrible about herself whenever she thinks about it, and it would be best to never think about it again.
She's now a philosophy major, finishing junior year at a top college with a 3.9, straight As last quarter, and as long as we don't equatr logic to math, she can rock logic all day long
Fuck every math department. Every fucking math teacher, professor, and administrator who buys into this math reform shit can fuck right off.
Ok. So, my son. What of him? He was ahead a year when we went to that other school district. And they wouldn't have been able to keep him up with his peer group. So 18 months before the pandemic we pulled him out for home school, my mom taught him, and got him through 3 years of math in 1 year. He started high school in pre-calc.
Same parents, same grandparents. He just happened to avoid common core entirely by virtue of circumstances and is now going to UCSC as a math major, having finished every math class at Foothill Community College a semester before graduating high school.
"Fuck every math department. Every fucking math teacher, professor, and administrator who buys into this math reform shit can fuck right off."
Essentially no mathematician buys into this stuff. In general professional mathematicians and mathematics educators are little involved in the processes that design curricula in public schools. They are simply not included. No one feels more threatened by expertise than education school professors.
i've reviewed multiple resumes from people in cali for east coast jobs and noticed fresh grads who went to great schools wrote down 'advanced math' on their resume and i thought it was so strange for it to be that vague that i definitely overlooked quite a few of them because other people named courses more clearly
> noticed fresh grads who went to great schools wrote down 'advanced math' on their resume
I assume you are reviewing the resumes of college grads. Writing "advanced math" still seems weird to me.
In this case, the comment you were replying to referred to the high school curriculum in the town of Berkeley, not the eponymous university located in the same town.
I don't specifically know about Berkeley, but my experience has been there's always an accelerated track for some students whose parents push the school system to let them into the right classes. At some point in middle school I was bussed to a local high school along with some of my peers to take advanced math not offered in middle school, and in high school all of my math classes were with people 1-2 years older than me.
What's your source for "math outcomes are way better in every aspect"? Figuring this out is trickier than it seems. Not only do students vary in demographics, socio-economic factors, and English-learners, but there are also relatively way more children of professors at Berkeley schools than in SF.
The state test scores are broken down by all those factors (except for "child of professor" which I am not sure is really a difference, since there is a UC and a CSU and several other universities in SF) so you can make apples-to-apple comparisons for yourself.
The world's foremost university is 500 meters from Berkeley High. I assure you that no person who ever wanted to study math was denied the opportunity. Anyone with 2 years of high school can enroll in multivariate calculus or linear algebra at UC Berkeley. In fact, anyone on Earth can study them virtually, for credit!
> Students’ academic success in mathematics must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs.
That’s amazing! While it may be laudable to hope that a math education program could be so strong that socioeconomic status and race make no difference, the rest of this is absurd. There are people with special needs who are at a disadvantage in math. The only way that their special needs would not predict the distribution of their academic success would be to have an implausibly amazing special needs education program, to redefine success, or to hold everyone else back.
Its like people are willfully ignoring the obvious: Black and Hispanic kids do the worst in math. Understanding why and correcting for the problems is a complex task. Making big proclamations about equity isn't going to do it.
Family life matters to the growth and development of children. 64% of Black children live in single parent homes vs. 16% of Asian kids. How does this effect math results? Black children are more likely to live near highways with higher rates of air pollution and asthma. Do Black children sleep poorly and have poorer memory formation?
Black and hispanic children who are more like to be poor may have chronic background stress from poverty: food and shelter insecurity. They may have inadequate access to health care. They miss routine screenings for vision, hearing and dyslexia. Chronic absenteeism and tardiness abounds. Are these the problems?
Identifying and correcting the root cause of divergent math outcomes is likely to be a multi-faceted and complex endeavor involving families, finances and health. It is worth doing. Everyone deserves the best possible education outcome.
Unfortunately, with scant evidence, math educators have somehow convinced themselves the root cause of the problem is entirely the math curriculum and the equitable solution is to deprive advanced kids of opportunity. Madness.
False & racist. Please see https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo for an extended explanation of why this is a horrible position. We don't even have strong scientific evidence that Spearman's g factor is more than a statistical convenience.
Not the OP, but it's a debunking of a fairly long book (and associated claims by one of its authors), so probably not. While threads like this reliably attract HN's substantial contingent of so-called 'race realists', the consensus among experts is that Murray is wrong. Therefore I really think we should be putting the burden of proof on people who think this consensus is false.
Murray's claims should be evaluated independently of his personal flaws, but you can also get some idea of where he's really coming from by checking out his Twitter feed. As a commenter on the video perspicuously puts it:
> The best argument against people who claim that the Bell Curve isn't racist is the fact that Murray isn't some incorporeal being who manifested out of thin air, wrote the book, and returned to the ether. He's a real person with a Twitter account, and oh boy.
So, a few comments down from a substantive comment by testfoobar, we've arrived at the inevitable comment saying almost explicitly that black people are dumb. If you want to just say this out loud, there are corners of the internet where you can do it. Hopefully this is not one of them.
>The idea that you can achieve cosmic justice should be abolished. There's no such thing.
I think abandoning cosmic justice is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is educational outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status and that problem cannot be solved by the school district (unless you could institute a kind of boarding school). That said, these administrators have arrived at a solution ("equitable" education) and are now gaming the metrics to achieve it at the cost of everything else. Worse still they race to pat themselves on the back on having "solved racism".
I think it has been shown over and over again that good educational outcomes start with parents (or more broadly community outside of school) and one group has had that community dismantled over and over again over several generations. In short, while I think it's a noble goal, it cannot be achieved by the school system and SF should have a more pragmatic approach even if the performance by race makes you uncomfortable.
"outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status"
No, outcomes are tied to the culture of the parents. Parents involvement/care is the greatest predictor of child success. This doesn't mean that the parents are educated or wealthy, it's that they have a mindset that the best thing they can do for the success of THEIR child (not society) is prioritize education.
Measuring “culture” in a manner independent of socioeconomic status seems challenging, but:
> it's that they have a mindset that the best thing they can do for the success of THEIR child (not society) is prioritize education.
Parents with that mindset but who don’t have a safe home or don’t have reliable food or who both work two jobs may have a very difficult time prioritizing education.
math is just the beginning of these backwards policies. public schools in california have been removing advanced classes in the name of “equity” for years. the racial enrollment in those classes did not reflect the racial enrollment of the school.
the result? parents moving kids to private school. at the school nearest me they kindergarten enrollment is dropping. they are likely going to only have a a single class in a couple years
california is making it very clear the public school system is not going to help your children succeed beyond a base level. it seems to have the completely opposite goals of when i was in public school in california
>the result? parents moving kids to private school.
as someone who went through the public school system in California during a time where classroom sizes hovered between 35-50 students under a single teacher, I have a hard time thinking that won't bring at least some benefits to those that aren't being put into private schools.
Don't get me wrong, as a delinquent/mischievous/criminal youth I loved it; the dating pool was huge, parties everywhere, drugs abound -- but I never received any kind of decent scholastic education until college.
Probably not as much benefit as you'd think. The state funding that student would have been bringing goes with the student to the private school so the student/teacher ratio stays about the same
> The state funding that student would have been bringing goes with the student to the private school
No, it doesn’t.
There was a proposed 2022 ballot initiative that would have done that with about 2/3 of the state funding, but it got less than 1/3 of the signatures required to be placed on the ballot.
Fair enough, I'm way out of date there. I went to a charter school for part of my high school and it was free to me. Their funding came from the funding the state would have have been sending to a public school had I gone there instead.
“Charter schools” are part of the public school system, whether publicly or privately operated. They are different from private schools, which are outside of that system.
Half right. Technically part of the schools funding is tied to a per student allotment. If a student goes to a private institution the school looses money and government keeps it for redistribution elsewhere.
Honors English has been removed from many schools in the name of equity. Kids barely read novels for school anymore. Writing assignments are often limited to two page essays. Anything more significant requiring research, drafts and multiple revisions is not done.
Schools - and this is a problem in the UK as well - are incentivised to optimise for evenly distributed mediocrity, instead of allowing people to reach their potential.
Now, I'm not talking about race here - this is from my perspective in the UK.
Ultimately we need to split the education system up. Putting the next Einstein and a violent, disinterested drug dealer in the same school, let alone the same class, is a recipe for disaster. And no amount of giving the idiots targets will fix them, but it will make life hell for people who actually want to learn.
This one-size-fits-all, optimising for mediocrity attitude is evident in the move towards mixed sets. The idea is that by putting the intelligent kids and the violent, intentional failures in one class the intelligent kids encourage the others to improve. But in practice they're vastly outnumbered, so they just get relentlessly bullied and don't learn anything. I know, because it's happened to me.
And it's evident in the way schools handle behaviour. I was kicked in the head at school, twice, by a load of thugs. I'm still very slowly recovering from the post concussion syndrome. At this rate, I am likely to fail my exams and not get into what used to be my backup uni. It was an entirely preventable incident if only:
- The school had entry requirements (it's meant to be a specialist technical school, but thanks to our enlightened government new grammar schools are banned.)
- The school was able to expell them before it happened, what with them spending the whole time messing about and attacking my friend
- The school had temporarily suspended more than the single person who punched my friend in the face when the whole group was there
- The police, with it's restorative justice, letting under-18s get away with anything, policies, had actually done something the first time
But they didn't, and now my life is ruined, and they got away with it. Because of a series of brain dead policies that are disconnected from reality and pushed by people similarly disconnected from reality.
The school system should have separate schools for high achievers to allow them to succeed without violence and with the fast pace and high expectations they deserve. If people want to go to those schools they can put the work in, behave, and pay attention. It's time to stop feel-good policies about second chances and equity and optimise for success and meritocracy.
>Schools - and this is a problem in the UK as well - are incentivised to optimise for evenly distributed mediocrity, instead of allowing people to reach their potential.
and that is the crux of the problem --- the best school would be one which would help students explore what they are interested, find what best suits them, and then best prepare them to be successful at that.
I disagree w/ separation though --- this really should be achievable in a single building/system.
One of the best programs ever for fostering educational success was the one California had where land-grant colleges were required to accept the student with the highest GPA from each high school who applied and provide a full scholarship (so if the top 3 students got a better deal, then the student w/ the 4th highest GPA was guaranteed to be able to apply to a land-grant college and be accepted, and get full tuition and room and board). This was dismantled after college students began protesting the Vietnam War and draft.
> I disagree w/ separation though --- this really should be achievable in a single building/system.
It should be achievable in a single building/system. And it would be great to have the funding, expertise, and coherent strategy to build a school system which helps students explore what they're interested in and find what suits them, and helps students in a personalised way.
However, to execute that you would need those three things - funding, expertise, and a coherent strategy. And I think part of the problems with schools is that they're on paper meant to do all of these amazing things - they're meant to have everyone under one roof and not have problems, they're meant to be endlessly forgiving to those with rough backgrounds and have them improve as a result, regardless of how many times they hurt those around them. Their ability to expell/suspend is heavily restricted, because schools shouldn't need to expel people. Schools are built around the assumption that they're close to this perfect utopia where everyone gets on well, and if we just make a few refinements to the implementation we'll be there. But they're nowhere near perfect, and I don't think that kind of utopia is anywhere near achievable. I don't know of anywhere where that's been achieved at scale.
What has been achieved at scale is building an education system that may not be able to provide for each student individually, but which at least has separate paths for the types of students they accommodate.
The EU publishes a document of the composition of European education systems (https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/d78...). While I haven't got first-hand experience of any of them (besides the UK one), I have spoken to people about it. The German system in particular appears to be quite well designed (though I may be wrong - this is from conversations with one person.) There are multiple tracks you can go down, which cater to different students. People can transfer between the tracks, generally at age 16, if they want to go to (state-paid-for) university.
What is clear is that single-track education systems are a rarity. If anyone here has first-hand experience I'd be interested in what you think of it.
> One of the best programs ever for fostering educational success was the one California had where land-grant colleges were required to accept the student with the highest GPA from each high school who applied and provide a full scholarship (so if the top 3 students got a better deal, then the student w/ the 4th highest GPA was guaranteed to be able to apply to a land-grant college and be accepted, and get full tuition and room and board). This was dismantled after college students began protesting the Vietnam War and draft.
That sounds like a great system. Robust education systems that support success and scholarships to allow people to continue in those systems regardless of background are some of the best tools for equality of opportunity and social mobility. There should really be more of that kind of thing - and without any identity-based strings attached.
The really great aspect of the California land-grant program was that it provide de facto integration because the schools were de facto segregated.
(and I say that as an Asian-American who was bussed in to an inner-city Indianapolis school, taking a bus which went past a school I had previously walked to)
How would you recommend a soon-to-be-parent keep track of what's actually being taught in schools, before their kid is in a given year? I see a lot of headlines but have no idea how this is different or if I should be concerned.
talk to principals. i’ve talked to a few and heard pretty consistent responses. the early grades k-5 don’t really matter. middle school 6-8 you need to get into algebra so you are doing geometry in 9th grade. other honors programs for english need good grades but rarely require this kind of years in advance track / planning. but you have to make sure the high school you are targeting (when you get there) has the classes
Make friends with parents of kids who are a couple years older. We've gotten the runaround from the school and district. They are familiar with stalling tactics and they know how to deploy them effectively. They start out saying things that sound promising, then string you along for a year or two, blaming special circumstances. By the time you realize it was all a game, your kid is about to graduate from that school. If you had talked with other parents, you would know their playbook and how to politely but effectively push back.
Memorizing things like SOHCAHTOA and FOIL may not be a vital life skill for everyone, but everyone can benefit from the base logical thinking required to identify a variable, break a problem down into steps, plan and execute a solution.
At a bare minimum, the basics of algebra (and to a lesser extent precalc, such as understanding limits and differentials) foster a type of abstract thinking and skills that pretty much anyone can benefit from.
Can you define what you mean by abstract thinking skills?
Everything else you've listed can be acquired as a dishwasher or a line cook.
Anyways, the classes always seemed to me to tend more towards shut up and calculate than they did building a robust understanding and perhaps most important of it all: a mathematical intuition. I always found it profoundly stupid that there were never any essay questions in math, I expect those who elect to teach the subject are often wont to expediency (which would explain the number of coaches in the department) rather than an inclination towards the subject itself.
I grew up in the midwest US, and what we called "word problems" were a pretty common component to learning (classes), practicing (homework) and verification (testing). The one that stuck with me is the explanation of how speedometers and police radars actually calculate speed using derivatives in pre/entry calculus. We also learned to write very basic proofs. I would consider both of these to be the essay equivalent of mathematics.
Students who didn't show an interest in higher maths courses either took slower versions of the earlier courses where they could get more time with the material, or more business oriented maths such as basic statistics and accounting.
AP Calculus was the closest I experienced to "shut up and calculate", if only because our teacher somehow managed to get behind the lesson plan in our first week and we ended up doing homework for lessons the night before the class where she would actually explain it. That was the second most brutal experience of my academic career, only after the semester in college where I was taking a macro economics course taught by a Polish grad student and a micro econ course taught by a Greek grad student; neither of them pronounced things (especially, and perhaps obviously, the greek letters in equations) the same way, and it turned into a nightmare keeping things straight.
When did you receive your education? I, too, grew up in the Midwest but my experience has always been "shut up and calculate" rife with mostly process-learning and unrelatable problem sets. Certainly important, yes, but also boring. Nothing creative, nothing playful, just very mechanical, very dull. Word problems were infrequent, and anything with real world application was jammed into the margins and given only the most cursory glance. Not to mention doing the online homework was awful.
During graduate school I interacted with academics working in math education who felt similarly, that math should be taught through essay questions, e.g. "explain the concept of a limit", and the like. I've always felt it was a deeply misguided pedagogy and I hope it does not become popular. Solving well crafted exercises requires a deep understanding of the material, it's unnecessary to check understanding in some other way.
Well for one it's prompting you to make a meaningful linguistic exercise of the matter, which is at once a creative task and secondly it enforces a more dynamic approach to whatever problem is presented.
I wonder if you could get a professor to do anything more than plug and chug, and that's a skill we've long ago delegated to glass. Not only do I want to explain these things in my mother tongue, I expect to know why some variable is in some such place, and how a cube of some other variable is related to the problem at hand. Calculation is banal.
Except that the traditional way of teaching the subject does not reason from first principles which is what you are advocating. The new math stuff does... I think parents hate it cause we don't understand it and it screws up the college pipeline.
To illustrate my point of the uselessness of our conventional mathematical training. ChatGPT gets a 700 out of 800 on the SAT Math section, but ask ChatGPT a reasoning question that requires math... it can't do it. That shows you just how useless the SAT actually is except for training kids to pattern match.
ChatGPT 4's math abilities are really hit or miss. I asked it to act as a "Socratic tutor" for the de-biasing terms in exponential moving averages. And it walked me through the problem, and it actually pointed out errors in my derivation (even though I was using a half-baked mix of Unicode and LaTeX). That was honestly pretty impressive.
On the other hand, GPT 3.5 is painfully bad at basic arithmetic. Apparently it can add long numbers, but you actually need to explain the addition algorithm and give it some examples. Then it can walk through the process step by step, just like an elementary school student.
In a lot of cases, I suspect ChatGPT 4 is pulling from a tiny corner of the training distribution. It has seen most of the web, and it doesn't need to see things often to talk about them. I've seen it successfully summarize the contents of obscure personal blogs, or of a very minor news story that was current for a week in 2009.
So it wouldn't surprise me if GPT 4 performs well on tasks that are mentioned on a half dozen obscure web pages, or something like that.
This is about dropping algebra I in 8th grade which is where you need to take it in order to prep for AP exams and the SAT basically. Algebra I (8th), trig/Geometry 9th, Algebra II 10th, pre-calc/ calculus 11th, AP calc 12th.
Anyway, these are all basically memorization and it is more important to teach mathematical reasoning and understanding skills vs pattern matching.
I mean ChatGPT LLMs score a 5 on AP calc now for god sakes. However, it scores a 2 on ap English language comprehension and literature. Oh the irony.
Even if they aren't taking AP Calc, starting algebra in 8th grade means they get an extra year of practice with it. What is the benefit of having less practice with algebra?
The best school I ever attended was one which strongly divided classes between social and academic. Social classes (homeroom, gym, social studies, home ec., shop class) were attended at one's grade level, Academic classes (English, Reading, Math, science) were attended at one's academic level, though there was a 4 year cap on advancement until 8th grade, at which point students could test to determine what classes they were eligible for, and begin taking college classes (the school was affiliated with a local college and many teachers were accredited as faculty members there --- for classes where there wasn't a teacher, arrangements were made to either bring one in from the college, or to arrange for the student to attend classes.
Apparently the Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled.
Which is stupid because you can't actually achieve equity here.
Stick kids with an IQ 120+ in the same room as the others and they will teach themselves out of curiosity (in some subjects at least), or retain more than the other kids.
If we're using the classic fence example where each person gets a box just tall enough to see over the fence, then what were trying to do here is dig a fuckng hole for the taller (smarter) kids to stand in.
The essay's thesis is that math is an unusually useful art form that we typically teach by diktat. Students are asked to memorize formulas, but they would learn more effectively (and have more fun) if teachers could work closely with them to derive and understand the solutions. Or better yet, encourage and guide them to find their own interesting formulas and patterns.
We should teach engineering classes and students would learn math to solve engineering problems. That solves the “when are we going to use this?” problem.
How much do school districts in California spend (as a percentage of total budget) on staffers who do not teach children directly?
If it is (for the sake of argument) a quarter of the budget, then I ask would 33% more funding be able to shrink class sizes to a degree that would meet your approval?
If instead it were half the budget, would a 100% increase in funding not be able to shrink the class sizes enough?
Does anyone know what the actual percentage of staffers vs teachers is, or what proportion of funding goes to each? Not just payroll, but also the office buildings for staffers vs school buildings for classrooms, etc.
> How much do school districts in California spend (as a percentage of total budget) on staffers who do not teach children directly?
Probably over half.
I downloaded the 2020 data for SFUSD from https://transparentcalifornia.com/. According to those data, only 45% of SFUSD's spend on pay & benefits goes to people whose job category contains the string 'eacher'.
Another 4.5% do to people whose job title contains the string 'incipal'.
Inquiry: small class sizes doesn't work? Could you show me sources/papers/studies/etc? It's is unintuitive, so I'd like to be educated on the factors at play here.
I could easily believe the constraint being the tiny number of k-12 teachers who themselves understand math well enough to teach it like this, no matter how small you'd like to make classes.
> The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam
That’s the worst part. It just shows either complete ignorance and incompetence or deception. “Look how failure rates have decreased. We all deserve a bonus!”
They knew exactly what they were doing if they went about bragging about it.
> That didn't happen, concludes a study by a team of Stanford professors. "Large ethnoracial gaps in advanced math course-taking . . . did not change."
Is there anything that will get these people to realize that maybe they are working with a hypothesis that is fundamentally flawed?
It doesn't take a large amount of thinking to imagine what might have more predictive power in explaining what's going on here.
"The word algebra comes from the Arabic: الجبر, romanized: al-jabr, lit. 'reunion of broken parts,[1] bonesetting[2]' from the title of the early 9th century book ʿIlm al-jabr wa l-muqābala "The Science of Restoring and Balancing" by the Persian mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi."
I mean the word we use for it just happens to be Arabic. If anything it's more Indian and Hindu we, the west that is, just happen to get most of our exposure to it via the people who lived between us and them.
Remove the ability to compete in math because you are poor and cannot enroll in private school. Don't allow the poor to do algebra? I left SF (and took my poor kids with me).
However, the SF policy that was truly evil to the poor was randomized school selection. Tell a poor kid in western addition they need to go to school in pacific heights. Tell the pacific heights kids they need to go to school in western addition. So what happens? The poor kids miss school (a lot) since their parents are working crappy jobs for rich people and can't do bus commutes each day. The pacific heights parents just enroll in private school. So tons of schools in SF just close. Awesome work SF. I am confident if you do the exact opposite in all SF policies you would have a great city.
In 1st grade it was an unspoken understanding that Latin kids are put in the slow class. It's understandable since most of us didn't speak English at home. But my teacher realized that I was advanced for my age so she put me in the back of the class with another classmate who didn't know any English. An hour or two a day we would sit in the back and I would read to her, translate words, and practice spelling. She seemed happy that someone was helping her and I felt great helping a classmate.
One day I mentioned this to my parents. They didn't understand/believe it at first. But the next time I mentioned it they understood and instead of feeling proud they were clearly upset. Then a few months later I wrote a poem that impressed the school teachers and at that point they moved me to the "fast" class and I never tutored again until college.
Why couldn't I have done both? Would I have learned more if I had been forever in the slow class but tutoring half of that time ? That seems better than where it we are headed -- where everyone is in the metaphorical slow class and the advanced kids likely become numb and disinterested.
If you were a hardcore racist and systematically wanted to keep Black and Brown kids uneducated, you would throw out all expectations and requirements and let them pass every year until they graduated high school with almost no education. The white kids and the rich kids will find a way to educate themselves, either through tutors or private school but the poor kids with no options would be stuck in this worthless system and graduate high school completely uneducated.
This is exactly what’s going on right now in SFUSD, and it’s so blatantly bad I honestly believe they are white supremacists in charge of the curriculum. What we are seeing is true systematic racism. How do they expect these kids to compete intellectually when they have lived an entire lifetime with lowered expectations?
It's absurd that you blame this on "white supremacists". This entire ethos is the egalitarian morality whereby they cannot have differentiated learning or high standards that expose differences in outcomes by racial group.
This elimination of curriculum, and testing requirements, particularly as application criteria at elite colleges, is allowing for more under-performing students to gain entry to elite school while doing away with merit based, race blind enrollment. We are seeing systematic anti-racism. You have anti-racists in charge of the curriculum. This is what it looks like. Don't get it twisted.
It’s creating a generation of black and brown students that are uneducated and won’t be able to compete against anyone else. It’s the ultimate in racism. Overt racist policies couldn’t be more effective and de-educating these students more than these ”progressive” policies have. Half of Black SF high school students can barely read.
Decades of EXCLUSIVELY PROGRESSIVE policies have lead to this end result. There aren’t any Republican boogeymen you can blame for this damage these policies have created.
It is a reaction to generations of black and brown students that have been uneducated and haven't been able to compete against anyone else. So, eliminate the courses and the testing standards.
It is because these brown groups were never performing at near the level of say Whites or Asians, that these policies are implemented. Eliminate any courses of distinction or difficulty, eliminate high standards that produce any outcomes of disparate performance. Flatten the overall strata of students by getting rid of opportunities of out-performance and differentiation.
And then, filters of credentialism at elite or high level institutions drop standardized tests as qualification for enrollment. What results? Massive increase in brown student admittance [0], particularly from low-quality schools into high quality universities. Who loses the most? Whites and Asians who would have had opportunity through advanced course selection and standardized test over-performance. But both the courses and the tests are being eliminated.
Does any of this help brown students become smarter? Of course not. But "Browns hurt the most, Whites supremacists victorious" is absurd. Look beyond the first level.
"Last week, millions of college acceptances and rejections were sent out to high school seniors. While the 2023 data won’t be available for some time, using 2022 numbers we can now begin to assess the impact of 2020’s dual body blows to higher education: the “racial reckoning” and the Covid-excused Not So Great Reset in which standards were lowered and policies made lazier and stupider."
> There aren’t any Republican boogeymen you can blame for this damage these policies have created.
Kind of a non-sequitur, this is obviously a massive left wing disaster, but the mainstream right is at least guilty of being so milquetoast in not hammering this nonsense harder, and many of them make the silly mistake like you of only ever saying a thing is bad if it harms Browns. No one ever sticks up for the Whites or Asians. The overall policy is an egalitarian disaster that aims to limit outperformers from advancing or being elevated above the broad masses of lowest-common-denominator "education". It's a leveling-policy. Democratization of education in the worst way.
In the interest of dogpiling, I'll also never give up my support for standardized testing.
My childhood school had 99% pass rates on standardized state tests and we literally never prepped for it. Time wasn't wasted studying directly for the state tests because there was no further score on which to grow. If a school of students is unable to meet the trivial ability required to pass the state tests then they have significantly worse problems than wasting time studying specifically for state tests.
As time passes, it looks more and more like policy in SFUSD is being set by various individuals whom, for their own reasons, think that "math education" is bad and that it must be avoided for "reasons", probably that they say involving "promoting equity".
But they're still all in on STEM which cannot be pursued at all without some facility in math. Then when those who are lacking the necessary education to do the work drop out of their STEM freshman college program it's social inequity to blame for these failures rather than the "math class is tough" Barbie mentality.
I think these one size fits all policies almost never work as I think many here will agree.
But I also think the public school system has many one size fits all policies that no one questions.
Many people advocate for smaller class sizes so teachers can spend more time with each student, but this is very expensive so if tends to come with compromises.
I did very well in HS including advanced math but class size had nothing to do with it. I did well because I ignored the instructor and just did homework and studied in every class; often to the annoyance of the instructor.
In college this effect was even worse since class size is a key metric for US News college rankings work. Small class sizes mean college costs more. If college costs even $10 more per class-hour then you loose about an hour of time to study (per hour of class/instruction!) if you're working to afford college.
But weed-out classes are often taught via large lectures while easier electives tend to be smaller class sizes so it'd be difficult to observe this in metrics.
If you A/B tested large very small class sizes would you see an improvement? Probably, but you would never see the effects for an individual student. I keep wondering why offering different size classes isn't the solution? I think a lot of students would prefer the hands off approach of large classes while some really need smaller class sizes.
Why don't policies go through double blind trials or more A/B tests? And attach automatic rollbacks to policies based on metrics. I'm all for trying new solutions but they should be iterated on quickly.
The facetious answer, of course, is that because the people designing these policies learned math in the California public school system.
Less facetiously: A/B tests are great at lots of things. But these results really shouldn't surprise anyone. The idea that you will improve things for one group of students by making things worse for another group is really not only silly, it cost real kids a year of potential progress. An A/B test would cost some percentage of kids that year, which is better than hurting the whole group, but A/B testing on something that obviously would hurt their future does not seem fair to those hurt by the proposed changes.
Even ignoring the consent and ethical issues, doing something double-blind in a government ran system impacting statistically significant number of children simply can't be done. You can't maintain the blinding.
'Automatic rollbacks' are, frankly, absurd. How do you 'roll back' a child in 8th grade that failed algebra? Your quick iteration turns into dozens of cohorts to be tracked and managed.
I meant rollback of a policy that performed poorly. It is an interesting point you bring up about rolling back a child that I haven't considered. That might be a good policy to have.
A question to ask is it better for a kid to score 90% in algebra and it takes 2 more years or is it better that they score 50% and then move on to calculus. That would be a good A/B test to compare their lifetime earnings. My hypothesis is that calculus is a pretty useless skill and basic maths is more important in life.
There could be ways of doing A/B tests if the standardized tests are the same between states that have different curriculums.
Although correlated, high math skills aren't a great proxy to the desired analytical skills you'd want. It is easily gamed with rote memorization if this test was discovered by an applicant pre-interview, as they would just prep for it (in which case, it ceases to be a good metric).
Yes, but it’s still pretty common. When I was interviewing for my first job, they were much more impressed with a couple of math puzzles I solved than my actual programming ability.
It seems the government and schools keep trying to parent kids for some reason.
Alright, you want kids to have racially equal-ish academic progress? Make it the parents' problem.
I don't mean that parents should tutor their kids but rather pressure them and expect them to be #1. Unless your kid is mentally challenged then it is the parents' expectation and lack of discipline and parenting skills that is the problem.
Even facing racist teachers and kids a child can come out on top and prove them wrong. It is not a school teachers's job to discipline a child, morivate them or teach them perseverance. It is also not their job to reward and celebrate a child's achievements.
How then can you make parents do a good job at parenting when it comes to academics? Most people care about money so reward parents of academically performing kids with tax credits. This way you won't raise taxes or add fees but especially for poor parents having an extra grand or two on their tax refund is huge motivator. And if it really is the kids fault then they get the same amount of tax burden as usual.
And what if they get abusive? Well they'll get abusive anyways if they are so terrible anyways.and you can say that abour teachers and standardized tests as well.
There are quite a lot of Indians with dedicated teaching setup teaching from their homes -- to American kids -- mostly Math and Science. The good ones are in hot demand and are difficult to get and/or are very costly (against the average Indian tuition fees).
My wife set up a tutor from our hometown (a north-eastern corner of India) and I did a Zoom setup complete with a separate camera mount that streams my kid's table (where she writes) (we are in Bangalore). The teacher on the other end is earning much better than the local counterpart for an hour a day, five days a week. And we have a good teacher to work with. In fact, a few other teachers have approached us by now.
The recent Pandemic has taught everyone that it is indeed possible to learn from anywhere in the world and stay anywhere (almost). A few families had had their kids enrolled in schools (USA, UK, Australia) which were (I think) meant and started for home-schooled kids, and those that do not want to be in physical classes, etc. but accelerated for everyone during the Pandemic. So, an Indian kid might just be sitting at her home learning from teachers across the globe speaking native languages - English, French, and what not.
One problem in San Francisco is that the private schools are truly expensive. One good high school, Urban, has a tuition of 55K year. That means it is hard to leave the public system even when it has these awful flaws.
San Francisco has never really gone whole hog in trying innovative programs with underachieving programs for minority youth. This trick of trying to drag down high performers to disguise the other failures is typical of the district.
The article mentions a study which is showing that the 'Algebra for none' approach has failed - despite that official want to adopt this policy to all of California.
Does that mean that they ignore the feedback of the study, because of ... ideology?
(it's linked in the article as the decision to push math back a year). But I'm having trouble understanding why not exposing students to a subject earlier would be better for their development with that subject.
Are they supposed to absorb the knowledge for that between 8th-9th grade somehow without knowing what it is?
>We find no evidence of a positive mean impact of acceleration in any specification and significant negative effects on performance in both Algebra I and the traditional followup course, Geometry. Accelerating algebra to middle school appears benign or beneficial for higherperforming students but unambiguously harmful to the lowest performers. We consider whether the effects reflect the reliance on less-qualified teachers and conclude that this mechanism explains only a small fraction of the result.
Anecdata, fwliw: I learned multiplication and division in preschool, and I still loathed math to the point of neglecting it later (maybe because of how hellish math kept on being through 1st and 2nd grade overseas). I didn't even fully understand fractions when I took the SAT. (I'm just lucky my reading/writing were stellar. ;) (So that I could go on to fail both calc 1 and 2 when taking CS in uni. Made it through the second time though, mwahaha!)
They were saying they split the old 1-year course across the two new 8/9th grade courses, but added in a bunch of extra stuff to the each of the replacement courses- useful modern stuff like data analysis and statistical modeling. They were making the point of focusing on deeper understanding through real world applications instead of rote memorization, which sounds good in theory, but takes up the time that was previously spent on the second half their Algebra class.
The part that boggles my mind is that these kids wont even see polynomials until high school! I'm pretty sure we were learning that stuff in 5th grade.
> modern stuff like data analysis and statistical modeling
but without teaching the fundamentals like algebra and polynomials, which is foundational to understanding statistics (and how one would use it to model something to perform data analysis)?!
It's like trying to teach english by teaching novel writing, but without teaching any grammar.
I think they are searching for a way to engage the uninterested/unmotivated kids that are struggling by using real world stuff as motivation. It seems like a method that could have potential, but also heavily contingent on good teachers. But yea, if I was in charge I'd be pushing those fundamentals in 5/6th grade not high school.
I'm pretty sure I was too...and I did not go to an elite middle/high school by any stretch of the imagination. Also, maybe I was just lucky in my math teachers as a kid, but I can't for the life of me remember rote memorization in math for almost anything outside of maybe being forced to memorize times tables at some point.
I honestly thought memorization had been disproven to be effective eons ago.
Memorization was the wrong word - I think they are referring repetitive processes like solving algebra equations over and over again until it's second nature. Probably an essential component of mastering basic math as a useful tool, at least it was for me - but focused on procedure not broader understanding I guess.
Because "Racial achievement gap" sounds a lot better and gets more $$ for panels, committees, researchers, administrators, unions and co. Then "Yes we still suck at teaching math please give us more $$"
Has any child ever gotten better at something they don't have to do? It seems the practical effect will be to simply place these children farther behind and never catching up.
SFUSD does not appear to be run by intelligent people, however. I don't say that as some Internet slur. I mean that as a descriptive term. Should you disagree, it is worth watching this 2 min video of a meeting from one of their committees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdekUXyAAzI
>Has any child ever gotten better at something they don't have to do?
Nope, and it's compounded by the fact the vast majority of academical math is irrelevant to life unless and until you make your way into a path of life that requires some of it.
Math education is fundamentally flawed because it attempts to teach irrelevant factoids in a manner that explicitly avoids teaching the hows and whys. No wonder most people end up hating the subject.
Are you implying playing Mario Kart isn't a must-do for a child? I would argue that as far as they are concerned, it is: It's fun.
Must-dos fall under those dictated by our surroundings (eg: life, work, etc.) and those dictated by ourselves (eg: it's fun, it's for a greater purpose, etc.).
> I would argue that as far as they are concerned, it is: It's fun.
and it's fun _because_ it's evolutionarily important to learn new things, and thus natural selection for humans have made learning (and mastery) "fun". Mastering mario cart takes lots of learning.
Maths isn't fun only because the kids aren't learning in class, and isn't gaining mastery. It's taught poorly - maths can certainly be fun.
I wouldn't argue Mario Kart or games in general are "evolutionarily important", but we both agree it's fun.
>It's taught poorly - maths can certainly be fun.
My point exactly. Math is fun and valuable, but academical math is terrible; it teaches nothing of importance and most people end up hating math because of how irrelevant and worthless the way it is taught is.
I see here echoes of problems in the Finnish system (at least as far as I understand it).
The system is designed to be inclusive and promote equality of opportunity. In practice this means classes with uninterested and preternaturally disruptive kids who spoil it for kids who actually want to learn.
A related question: can anyone provide a link to what the K-12 syllabus of the former Eastern bloc actually was? Certainly USSR and Hungary must have had impressive curricula. I had a Croatian friend who said that his basic skills in algorithms (which were very advanced from my viewpoint) was based on his math schooling in the former Yugoslavia, which he said treated very advanced concepts early on.
Is there any link to an English version of these syllabi?
All that'll do is break-up the organized tuition system (which may be a good thing and probably has the biggest impact in organized tuition-crazy places like China) and encourage small-scale/individual setups (also may be a good thing but depends). How will you ban individuals across the globe offering lessons over Zoom? That is what has been the net result of the ban as per the article - people are resorting to "underground" means.
Plus a ban only extends to within a country so people in other countries will go right ahead with their tuition. Competition is global and such bans, beyond dismantling the tuition "business" and putting up hurdles in front of parent's craze for the rat-race, don't do much. Nobody is talking about the root cause, which is the fear of unemployment due to scarcity of opportunities.
All the while, the very well-off will continue to manage perfectly with plenty of workarounds available to them, as usual. All these bans would do to create another class of have's and have not's.
Dumbing education down in the name of democracy is the best way possible to promote authoritarianism. Guarantee a uniformly uneducated populace with a small exception for the children of the rich and elite.
> Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes.
I don’t get this idea that everyone should finish at the same time ?
why not let kids test into algebra in 8th grade and take pre-algebra when they are ready ?
As I understand, the argument goes like this: kids are required by law to go to school until 12th grade. If you let some kids test out of math classes and take higher level classes, then by the end of the required schooling (12th grade), those students will be smarter and look better to colleges. Smarter and college educated people tend to make more and therefore there's an advantage of kids who test out.
Meanwhile, kids who don't test out look worse at the end of 12th grade. In theory, yes, we should let kids finish at the same time. But required school is over at the 12th grade mark, which is also around the time colleges are looking at you. Most kids won't do non-required schooling to get to the same level as the other kids.
> Test data from 2015 to 2019 shows that racial "achievement gaps have widened,"
I'm finding the statistics in the second article linked to in this sentence difficult to read (because I'm not smart). Can someone tell me if this is because the top achievers are doing better, or that the bottom achievers are doing worse?
If it's the former, then this could be considered a good thing. You could certainly look at it and say "well we haven't made things _worse_ for the people who weren't doing well, but we have made things better for those who were already doing well". I get that wasn't the goal, but it's another way to look at things that could be interesting, because then you could take that apart and see if there's anything to learn there.
I have no insight into SF school politics beyond things like this and Lowell High School. Who's voting for the school board members that are driving this?
What's the problem? I remember at the beginning of each school year they gave us math textbooks for the year. I took me a week to read it all and do all the exercises. Today there is internet, Wikipedia, youtube, everything is so much easier.
My kid is currently in elementary school in a desirable district in Menlo Park. On the first day of school, the teacher sent home a list of expectations for what the students should be able to accomplish by year-end for math. There were expectations for multiplication and division problems (x number correct in y minutes, up to 12s). I had my daughter attempt this a couple times that week, and messaged the teacher on Thursday to ask what the process was for demonstrating her proficiency.
We were told that she could not test out of the standard path. She literally had to do 1s and 2s multiplication tables worksheets alongside students who are learning this material. She is allowed, during free time, to do Khan Academy, where she is several grade levels ahead. However, she is so loaded down with busywork that even though it's now April, she still hasn't yet finished all of the multiplication and division worksheets. As a result, there has been very little free time during which she could actually learn anything.
The most frustrating thing is that we're not even looking for the teacher to provide advanced instruction — just to let her go off and do KA on her own.
Used to think that story was a fiction, that clearly anyone would realize didn’t make sense and could draw the right conclusions. Unfortunately in our modern era it seems some people took its lessons as a playbook. It’s hard to push for equality across the board when some people are clearly just better at certain things. Let people achieve what they can without limit.
The movie did an excellent job of fleshing out the story while remaining true to the tone and content of the original. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113264/)
It should be part of the core curriculum. I wonder how the contemporary education establishment would react to it.
oh yikes, yea didn't even think to read, why wouldn't they be a dumpster fire? They're anonymous comments on an article on the internet, seems about right.
In my view, the only way forward is providing more educational opportunities that are accessible to underserved groups, not reducing the total number of educational opportunities.
Growing up in San Diego the accelerated cohort did algebra in grade 7. Some of us who were passionate took math over the summer and got even further ahead. It’s a little surprising to see in this day and age when things should move faster that algebra is delayed to grade 9.
Same for me, growing up in Sacramento (and going to a public magnet school). I was shocked to learn that what is described on Silicon Valley school tours as "super-duper advanced math" is literally what we had 35 years ago in Sactown.
The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.
I grew up with rote memorization of math concepts and applying that through memorized math tables. That doesn't work for my spectrumy dyscalculic brain. If I had more advanced math education that started with elements of computer programming & interaction (actually, even at the "basic" level too), I'd wager I'd actually be relatively good at math today, with a much better lower level understanding of concepts. Instead, I'm effectively helpless when it comes to math.
From second-hand knowledge, the Stanford GSE is really bad at understanding equity and minorities, and routinely, minorities in STEP (the teacher training program) get less support and empathy
Yeah, we can just delay classes because the students weren't properly prepared in prior classes... no reason to fix the preasons the prior classes didn't prepare them.
Fascinating article. Unclear if this stops the Boaler initiative, though. Considering the tussle between her and Jelani Nelson of Berkeley [1], I wonder what actions she'll take against her own colleagues.
Why must "college level" be uniform in all subjects for all students? Vast majority of math (algebra, calculus etc) are of little use in most careers (even quantitative ones). So why must the society strive for equal outcome in a subject that is of questionable use? Why not prepare kids instead for something thats actually useful for a job?
I don't know enough to suggest what form it should take. But taking a broader view of 'job', I'd say expose them to possible career paths. Then, make clear the mapping between the broad job areas and the needed skills. This may at least provide motivation and context for the regular subjects. The down side is that folks don't know what they like until college and often much after that. So I also feel some reservation about this approach. All in all, my feeble understanding of this subject does not really allow me to take an informed position.
In the public school I went to up through 7th grade (in the late 90s), the top 10% to 20% took algebra in 8th grade. In the private high school I went to, most of the 9th grade class had algebra the previous year (whether they went to public school or private for middle school). While by no means universal, it's been pretty common for a while.
In contrast, a relative got into the special ed group for smart kids.
During orientation, the moderator said that it is just as silly to put kids in the top 2% in a classroom with everyone else as it is to keep the kids who can't tie their shoes on their own in that same classroom.
If anyone wants to hear some excellent talks on mastering mathematics, listen to Sal Khan on youtube. It is a stark contrast to Boaler's utopian way of thinking.
What's with the comments on that site? Bunch of right wing paranoid reactionists. It's like a disease.
Soros this Mao that Communism blah, wtf?
Is this what ~50% of America is like in real life as well?
Hell, I took honors history instead of AP history my junior year (it was the only class I took that was "merely" honors; everything else was STEM magnet/AP level). And that class sucked, and was way too dumbed down, and was full of people who (comparatively) didn't care about their education. God forbid I would've had to take a normal level class at any point; the boredom might've killed me.
I can, fortunately not until first semester in a state university.
I remember asking one of my teachers for a reference when I was transferring and she replied that if I hadn't been in her class she would have thought herself an utter failure because of how little attention the other students paid. Without doing much work I regularly set the curve. I'm not brilliant, but I did study some.
It’s all just a race to the bottom in the name of “equality”. Everyone with the means to do so is moving out of SF because of the terrible schools, and the kids suffering the most as a result are from poorer families.
That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.