It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. I suspect part of it is driven by the fact that it's cheaper and easier to meet metrics and/or look "socially engaged" by blocking students (when appropriate) from advancing. US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping. (https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm)
On an anecdotal basis, I went to an elite university in the US (mostly based on luck I think because I was a mediocre student) and there was an implicit expectation was that students seriously pursuing STEM would be starting their curriculum with multivariable calc or linear algebra as a freshmen since the single variable calc requirement would have been knocked out AP/IB credits. I've seen many of my international cohorts going even beyond. I genuinely worry that school systems such as SFUSD is doing a great disservice to its students and the society.
**DISCLAIMER: The numbers don't add up, someone's numbers are wrong see Jesson's child comment
>US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping.
This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]:
- Asian (556)
- White (531)
- Hispanic (481)
- Black (448)
- Mixed Race (501)
Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten.
The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide.
We do a disservice to students in the US by treating Algebra/Calc as advanced math. Typically, American schools judge student math aptitude prior to algebra based on rote memorization of multiplication tables. Potentially with the added benefit of more rote memorization problems if one is in the honors curriculum. Aptitude for this type of problem does not directly translate into aptitude for higher math.
There is nothing particularly advanced about Algebra or Calculus. At most, it's a question of how much time one is willing and able to put into the subject. The fact that most American students do not exit high school with a functional knowledge of single variable calculus is purely an artifact of our curriculum priorities.
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up.
It's not that surprising, though, given that they've admitted their goal is equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. That's the only way to achieve the former.
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them
It’s not “mind boggling” if you do a deep dive into the “ethnic studies” curricula that so many teachers and administrators are graduating from these days. It’s a completely parallel value system complete with revisionist history. It’s like the Wahhabist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
> administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up
It's truly disheartening to see the San Francisco school district's actions resemble something straight out of Orwell's 1984. As someone who has lived in this city for years, it's painful to witness the gradual decline and the rise of corruption overshadowing the progressive spirit that once defined it. Instead of addressing the root cause of poor math education, the district has opted for obfuscation and dishonesty.
It's a classic case of doublethink, where they attempt to hold two contradictory beliefs: that they're doing what's best for the students while simultaneously suppressing their educational growth. Much like the Party in 1984, they seem to prioritize maintaining a facade over genuinely improving education. I wish we could challenge this dystopian approach and hope to meaningfully improve the situation, but at this point, I am not even sure how one would go about doing that.
Not surprising. This kind of moronism has been happening in India for nearly 100 years.
And look at that society: it's a sub-saharan "shit-hole" that has ruined its own future because of its borrowed obsession with "social justice" (and the political vermin that exploit them); which thinks squeezing out its best talent who then achieve wonderful things outside is something to be "proud" of.
There is enough reason to hate British colonialism, but it is under them that Indians bagged the first Nobel Prizes in Asia. Now, even those universities that produced them are being destroyed due to idiotic tribal dogfighting. Worse, unlike the US case, all this caste-propaganda doesn't even have much historical evidence to begin with!
The problem is that there is absolutely no policy that could be implemented that would bring black students to the performance levels of Asian students. So they have to stop letting the Asian students perform.
Administrators are just doing what people in SF vote for - this idea and implementation of equity has been rolled into the set of positions one adopts as a progressive in CA, which is the only position to take unless you want to be socially ostracized. The ones who don't move away absolutely know they're sacrificing their kids. It's more popular though among this set to just skip having kids in the first place. Or to pay for private school, skip the consequences of this terrible idea, and let the people who can't afford that deal with them. I had my first of 4 kids at St. Lukes in the mission, but we moved out of the city before he was even a year old because of the schools.
I have been calling this behavior out for almost a decade, and all I got for it was being labeled a conservative. People are extremely close minded, and completely blind to what is happening.
Equity is literally about pushing everybody down to the lowest level. Are there any examples where that has not been the outcome? Some advocate it out of ignorance, some out of malice. The result is the same, everybody is worse off.
All of this behavior makes perfect sense once you accept they are malicious. Halons razer is not paramount, sometimes it really is malice.
Science is about creating theory that has predictive power, and the malice hypothesis in my experience has predicted future outcomes far better than stupidity.
That isn't even an elite school thing. That's an any school in the top 100 engineering/math/physics/CompSci thing. Mine was ~50ish and the vast majority of people in the program had at least one semesters worth of AP Calculus credits. Linear algebra was a first or second semester course if you followed the default recommended degree plan. That was only about 10 years ago, and other schools I considered all had similar looking degree plans.
I'm inclined to think the concern (that we will run out of supply of people that can do math or something) is overblown. There are plenty of underemployed engineering and science students that took more advanced mathematics classes than the CS kids.
This is absolutely ludicrous, unethical, and borderline criminal.
I took algebra I in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. That allowed me to take geometry in 7th grade, algebra II trig in 8th grade, pre-calc in 9th grade, AP calculus in 10th grade and then IB high math in 11th and 12th grade.
I credit my public, magnet school with giving me a huge leg up in life. All of my peers were middle class, yet a focus on lifting us up, accelerating our education, and challenging us helped me become the successful person I am today.
In contrast, my life almost took a severely different and worse path in elementary school when I was sent to the principal's office often in kindergarten and second grade for distracting the class and causing disturbances.
Thankfully my first grade teacher realized the root cause -- I had already learned the material quickly and was bored and thus distracting others. So she gave me more advanced novels and books to keep me stimulated and learning. If instead I would have had a teacher force me to slow down to the rest of the class, I likely would have ended up suspended and a delinquent.
This holding everyone to the slowest standard in the name of equity is actually very inequitable. It forces children with ADHD like myself to end up as failures instead of recognizing neurodiversity and helping each child succeed in the manner best for him or her.
> This holding everyone to the slowest standard in the name of equity is actually very inequitable.
Math in particular is a subject where there can be such a wide divergence in age where each kid is ready to absorb topics. Having a rigid schedule where topic X is taught in grade N is always going to hurt those who are capable of moving forward faster and hurt those who need more time/maturity to get there (but may well be excellent at algebra/calculus/etc if allowed to take it when ready, not sooner).
I like the schools where kids are allowed to progress through math at their pace, faster or slower, instead of being grouped by class level. Unfortunately that basically means private schools with such an approach, I haven't found any public school in the area (California) that support this.
As far as I know, there is no proven way to improve equality in a school system. Even in Norway, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world, the students from poor/less educated families still underperform [1]:
>Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. Achievement gaps by parental income, but not by parental education, increased over the time period, underscoring the different ways these two socioeconomic status components relate to achievement and the potential for policy to alter gaps.
Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like. Plomin for example claims that from twin studies a large part of educational attainment is heritable. I suspect the current school system will burn itself down before admitting that, however.
And also being poor dumbs you down real hard. When you have to worry about your food and don’t have steady sources of mood uplift, when your existence is just daily peppered by stress, your brain goes into power saving survival mode, not allowing you the luxury of deep perception, introspection or longer attention span, and most importantly, curiosity. By stress I mean such mundane things like your parents (or much more often your now single parent) being seemingly unhappy, or wearing the same old clothes and not being able to buy new ones. Why trying to learn anything if it’s just another chore in a life that sucks?
> Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like.
In studies like the Norway study you cite this could be controlled for by adoptions. Though adoptees, of course, come with their own non-genetic baggage.
I would hope that, at the very least, IQ testing would be performed to try to match based on that.
>As far as I know, there is no proven way to improve equality in a school system.
What the remainder of your post argues is that there is no way to achieve complete equality in a school system.
But we need to be clear about what that means. Most people believe that success should be rewarded somehow. It's relatively uncommon even among socialists to argue that there should be no inequality of overall consumption opportunity. Most parents want to help their children succeed. It should naturally follow that the parents who have more resources will have more successful children. It would require a massive and likely endless society-scale project to counteract the combined parenting efforts of the whole professional class in order to achieve the questionable goal of literally equal opportunity, genetics notwithstanding. Even the Soviet Union had the nomenklatura.
The real goal should be to understand the process of education and remove all actual structural barriers while providing support to the disadvantaged in ways that are reasonably understood to be effective. Obsessing over romantic ideals that seem attractive from 10000 feet is not the way.
> We show that class attainment is strongly influenced by genetics. Shared environmental factors play a modest role. Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics.
"American IQ Test Scores Show Recent Declines, According To New Study" [1]
>American IQ test scores have dropped during a recent 13-year period, a remarkable finding that runs counter to the well-established trend of increasing IQ scores throughout much of the 20th century.
>The study found evidence of a reverse “Flynn effect” in a large U.S. sample of almost 400,000 individuals tested between 2006 and 2018 in several ability areas. The Flynn effect refers to the well-replicated finding that IQ scores increased consistently through much of the 20th century, with increases ranging from three to five IQ points per decade.
Public school is no longer enough, and I don’t see it improving in the short term.
I think the only practical solution is widely-known resources and alternative curricula for low-income families so that they too can get a decent education. Hopefully people are working on these, because otherwise these smart low-income kids are wasting their potential. And when kids apply to college they need a usable metric to be compared, which their “official” high-school transcripts are not, so otherwise admission is just upper-income or lottery.
An upside to over-lenient grading, at least students can half-ass “school” while they take these alternative classes that are actually teaching them.
> I think the only practical solution is widely-known resources and alternative curricula for low-income families so that they too can get a decent education.
And the middle class end up fucked. Too rich to get extra help. Too poor to afford private. Like walking in the middle of the road... splat.
About 20 years ago, my public middle school tried to teach this new-fangled thing called “connected math“ that was conceptual and without notation or symbols, so I didn’t start learning real algebra until 9th grade when I went to private school. I was a year or more behind the rest of my peers (and in fact, my school had to open up a special section for me and one other person (!) to teach us algebra) and I constantly felt embarrassed. In college I went on to do well at linear alg and learned enough to hand wave my way through abstract alg so I ended up enjoying myself, but I’ve always felt resentful about being so far behind my peers and feeling like I needed to work harder than them. To this day I feel like I’m still playing catch up.
Hearing about kids being set back in math makes me very personally angry because I always felt that my college CS studies would have been so much easier had I been equipped with the proper math fundamentals. This shit takes a long time to train and you really can do powerful things with it.
Playing the contrarian, I'm ambivalent about 8th grade algebra. I tend to consider "school math" to be a distinct branch of math unto itself. Nobody knows why we teach it, except that it's a sorting hat for certain college majors. The purpose of each class is to prepare you for the next class.
Most of the people I know who have STEM degrees don't use their college math. The math that they need is programmed into their CAD terminals. The ones who still use math in their jobs, somehow got interested in math, in spite of school math.
Turning math into a competition sucked the soul out of it. Both of my kids got 8th grade math, and top ACT/SAT scores. My daughter skipped pre-calculus with no ill effect. Both are interested in math, but have no interest in taking more math classes.
I breezed through school math, through college and grad school. Whoop-de-doo. Two things made math come alive for me: Proofs, and computers. But proofs are nearly gone from the school math curriculum, and the schools still haven't embraced computers.
I'd actually like to see a refactoring of school math, loosely into 4 disciplines, that are introduced in a cycle, perhaps even starting in 1st grade:
1. Arithmetic -- manual symbol manipulation, up to and including calculus.
2. Computation -- use of computers to explore and solve math problems.
3. Working with data -- self explanatory.
4. Theory -- things like sets, proofs, etc.
I believe this would actually be more representative of how people actually use math in their lives. Many people will use computation and data, even if they struggle through arithmetic and develop no interest in theory. On the other hand, full exposure to all of the disciplines would adequately prepare someone for academic math study.
I don't believe in banning anything. Some kids need to be allowed to get "ahead" so they don't get bored and lose interest, or simply because solving those school math problems can be a fun escape -- as it was for me -- from an otherwise stressful adolescence.
San Francisco is a parody of itself but this is not specific to it. There is a concerted effort in California to dumb down math standards under spurious claims of advancing “equity”. Needless to say, the only people who benefit are the kids of parents rich enough to send them to private school, who will now face less competition from bright but poor Asian kids who were served by institutions like Lowell High School.
I am afraid there is an evil lurking just around the corner: mass private tuitions. I grew up in another country where public
and private education kept falling in standards and eventually there was a gap between what was expected in college and standardized tests, was no longer being taught in schools.
Solution: Private tutors to fill the gap. The kids who couldn’t afford it, kept falling behind. It got so bad that at some point school teachers would teach completely different subjects to their own students, but in private tuitions outside the school. Seems that is the way forward if nothing changes.
That's an interesting contrast to the Proof School (https://www.proofschool.org/), a private school also in San Francisco, which is the best 6-12th grade math environment for kids who love math that I've ever seen.
I was such a mathcel growing up I took high school algebra in sixth grade. So I have every right to be assmad about things like this. And past me maybe would have been.
But I'm not, and the reasons why are complex.
First of all, algebra is hard. And not every kid can learn it in the eighth grade. Furthermore, not every teacher qualified to teach eighth grade stuff is qualified to teach algebra. What the studies have shown is that teaching algebra to everyone in grade 8 leads to worse math outcomes.
And if you agree to teach some of the kids algebra in eighth grade, you're back in the sticky wicket of tracking and "gifted kids". Show me a gifted classroom and I'll show you a classroom full of mainly rich whites and Asians -- who are depriving the poorer and more socially disadvantaged students of valuable resources.
The whole point of public education is democratic access -- to all -- of sufficient educational resources and service for basic functioning as an adult citizen, NOT educating every child to the maximum of their potential. It's kind of like how capitalism is really good if and only if you want to get as rich as possible and have the means to do so, and under social democracy you will be less rich, but the tradeoff is there are far fewer economic losers. In light of this, leaving algebra until ninth grade was the best choice for the San Francisco school system for equitable availability of education to all, given the resources and framework they have to work with.
I feel conflicted about this. I started learning algebra around grade 6 in Europe, so I think pushing it back to grade 9 is a bit far.
But on the other hand, I was always amazed by how much skipping just a week or two of school a year could impact one’s education. It’s very difficult to catch up (in Central European schools at least). A bout of pneumonia could negatively impact your whole life if you miss a week of school and you don’t have the time or teaching to catch up. Education can be very rushed, maybe it shouldn’t be. Pupils should be given time to catch up when various life events happen to them. And if this means a more spaced out curriculum, so be it.
If you go to public school in SF, you are probably poor. Well, the powers that be have decided that you’re too poor to be taught algebra so early. Probably because they don’t expect you to go to university. We need tradespeople and you have been selected for the role.
Then those who are willing and motivated to self-learn will get even further ahead... which causes exactly the opposite of the "equity" they're trying to create.
In Singapore, the default stream sees students taking basic algebra at age 11 (5th grade), simultaneous and quadratic equations at age 14 (8th grade), and single-variable calculus at age 16 (10th grade). By 17-18 (11-12th grades), students have done first-order ordinary differential equations, volumes of revolution, functions, vectors, and students have the option to take college-level linear algebra or discrete mathematics.
Nothing? I took all those classes around the same age in a public school in the midwestern United States. I didn't turn 16 until my 11th year of school so maybe there's just a difference in the way grades are numbered. (I was a little young for my grade.)
My friend moved from Taiwan to the US in 7th grade, and she felt the same way. She was totally bored, but enjoyed suddenly becoming the smartest kid in her math class. She was, at best, an average student in Taiwan.
We don’t have a homogenous population of Asians, that’s why. I was an Asian in American public school and was 2 years behind what you described, and that was going as fast as possible within the system.
"With both gaps, SFUSD evidenced greater inequities than state averages in 2015, and that relative underperformance worsened by 2019. The district’s anti-tracking public relations campaign, by focusing on metrics such as grades and course enrollments, diverts attention from the harsh reality that SFUSD is headed in the wrong direction on equity."
[+] [-] pknomad|3 years ago|reply
On an anecdotal basis, I went to an elite university in the US (mostly based on luck I think because I was a mediocre student) and there was an implicit expectation was that students seriously pursuing STEM would be starting their curriculum with multivariable calc or linear algebra as a freshmen since the single variable calc requirement would have been knocked out AP/IB credits. I've seen many of my international cohorts going even beyond. I genuinely worry that school systems such as SFUSD is doing a great disservice to its students and the society.
[+] [-] slackerchews|3 years ago|reply
>US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping.
This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]:
- Asian (556)
- White (531)
- Hispanic (481)
- Black (448)
- Mixed Race (501)
Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten.
The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi...
[+] [-] lumost|3 years ago|reply
We do a disservice to students in the US by treating Algebra/Calc as advanced math. Typically, American schools judge student math aptitude prior to algebra based on rote memorization of multiplication tables. Potentially with the added benefit of more rote memorization problems if one is in the honors curriculum. Aptitude for this type of problem does not directly translate into aptitude for higher math.
There is nothing particularly advanced about Algebra or Calculus. At most, it's a question of how much time one is willing and able to put into the subject. The fact that most American students do not exit high school with a functional knowledge of single variable calculus is purely an artifact of our curriculum priorities.
[+] [-] josephcsible|3 years ago|reply
It's not that surprising, though, given that they've admitted their goal is equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. That's the only way to achieve the former.
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
It’s not “mind boggling” if you do a deep dive into the “ethnic studies” curricula that so many teachers and administrators are graduating from these days. It’s a completely parallel value system complete with revisionist history. It’s like the Wahhabist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
[+] [-] screamingninja|3 years ago|reply
It's truly disheartening to see the San Francisco school district's actions resemble something straight out of Orwell's 1984. As someone who has lived in this city for years, it's painful to witness the gradual decline and the rise of corruption overshadowing the progressive spirit that once defined it. Instead of addressing the root cause of poor math education, the district has opted for obfuscation and dishonesty.
It's a classic case of doublethink, where they attempt to hold two contradictory beliefs: that they're doing what's best for the students while simultaneously suppressing their educational growth. Much like the Party in 1984, they seem to prioritize maintaining a facade over genuinely improving education. I wish we could challenge this dystopian approach and hope to meaningfully improve the situation, but at this point, I am not even sure how one would go about doing that.
[+] [-] hoiu4oi23443434|3 years ago|reply
And look at that society: it's a sub-saharan "shit-hole" that has ruined its own future because of its borrowed obsession with "social justice" (and the political vermin that exploit them); which thinks squeezing out its best talent who then achieve wonderful things outside is something to be "proud" of.
There is enough reason to hate British colonialism, but it is under them that Indians bagged the first Nobel Prizes in Asia. Now, even those universities that produced them are being destroyed due to idiotic tribal dogfighting. Worse, unlike the US case, all this caste-propaganda doesn't even have much historical evidence to begin with!
Such potential wasted.
[+] [-] spoonjim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcroixx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon291|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golemotron|3 years ago|reply
It's unfair that some people develop skills easily when others don't. When equity is the goal this is what happens.
[+] [-] readthenotes1|3 years ago|reply
there is no other way, though. if you desire equal outcomes, you have to shackle the best.
i believe Kurt Vonnegot wrote about this...
[+] [-] newZWhoDis|3 years ago|reply
Science is about creating theory that has predictive power, and the malice hypothesis in my experience has predicted future outcomes far better than stupidity.
[+] [-] zsssss65784|3 years ago|reply
I'm inclined to think the concern (that we will run out of supply of people that can do math or something) is overblown. There are plenty of underemployed engineering and science students that took more advanced mathematics classes than the CS kids.
[+] [-] ryan_j_naughton|3 years ago|reply
I took algebra I in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. That allowed me to take geometry in 7th grade, algebra II trig in 8th grade, pre-calc in 9th grade, AP calculus in 10th grade and then IB high math in 11th and 12th grade.
I credit my public, magnet school with giving me a huge leg up in life. All of my peers were middle class, yet a focus on lifting us up, accelerating our education, and challenging us helped me become the successful person I am today.
In contrast, my life almost took a severely different and worse path in elementary school when I was sent to the principal's office often in kindergarten and second grade for distracting the class and causing disturbances.
Thankfully my first grade teacher realized the root cause -- I had already learned the material quickly and was bored and thus distracting others. So she gave me more advanced novels and books to keep me stimulated and learning. If instead I would have had a teacher force me to slow down to the rest of the class, I likely would have ended up suspended and a delinquent.
This holding everyone to the slowest standard in the name of equity is actually very inequitable. It forces children with ADHD like myself to end up as failures instead of recognizing neurodiversity and helping each child succeed in the manner best for him or her.
[+] [-] jjav|3 years ago|reply
Math in particular is a subject where there can be such a wide divergence in age where each kid is ready to absorb topics. Having a rigid schedule where topic X is taught in grade N is always going to hurt those who are capable of moving forward faster and hurt those who need more time/maturity to get there (but may well be excellent at algebra/calculus/etc if allowed to take it when ready, not sooner).
I like the schools where kids are allowed to progress through math at their pace, faster or slower, instead of being grouped by class level. Unfortunately that basically means private schools with such an approach, I haven't found any public school in the area (California) that support this.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Gatsky|3 years ago|reply
>Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. Achievement gaps by parental income, but not by parental education, increased over the time period, underscoring the different ways these two socioeconomic status components relate to achievement and the potential for policy to alter gaps.
Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like. Plomin for example claims that from twin studies a large part of educational attainment is heritable. I suspect the current school system will burn itself down before admitting that, however.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X221142...
[+] [-] j_crick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymouskimmer|3 years ago|reply
In studies like the Norway study you cite this could be controlled for by adoptions. Though adoptees, of course, come with their own non-genetic baggage.
I would hope that, at the very least, IQ testing would be performed to try to match based on that.
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
What the remainder of your post argues is that there is no way to achieve complete equality in a school system.
But we need to be clear about what that means. Most people believe that success should be rewarded somehow. It's relatively uncommon even among socialists to argue that there should be no inequality of overall consumption opportunity. Most parents want to help their children succeed. It should naturally follow that the parents who have more resources will have more successful children. It would require a massive and likely endless society-scale project to counteract the combined parenting efforts of the whole professional class in order to achieve the questionable goal of literally equal opportunity, genetics notwithstanding. Even the Soviet Union had the nomenklatura.
The real goal should be to understand the process of education and remove all actual structural barriers while providing support to the disadvantaged in ways that are reasonably understood to be effective. Obsessing over romantic ideals that seem attractive from 10000 feet is not the way.
[+] [-] tyho|3 years ago|reply
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mncet/
TLDR:
> We show that class attainment is strongly influenced by genetics. Shared environmental factors play a modest role. Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics.
[+] [-] Jerry2|3 years ago|reply
"American IQ Test Scores Show Recent Declines, According To New Study" [1]
>American IQ test scores have dropped during a recent 13-year period, a remarkable finding that runs counter to the well-established trend of increasing IQ scores throughout much of the 20th century.
>The study found evidence of a reverse “Flynn effect” in a large U.S. sample of almost 400,000 individuals tested between 2006 and 2018 in several ability areas. The Flynn effect refers to the well-replicated finding that IQ scores increased consistently through much of the 20th century, with increases ranging from three to five IQ points per decade.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/03/23/amer...
[+] [-] armchairhacker|3 years ago|reply
I think the only practical solution is widely-known resources and alternative curricula for low-income families so that they too can get a decent education. Hopefully people are working on these, because otherwise these smart low-income kids are wasting their potential. And when kids apply to college they need a usable metric to be compared, which their “official” high-school transcripts are not, so otherwise admission is just upper-income or lottery.
An upside to over-lenient grading, at least students can half-ass “school” while they take these alternative classes that are actually teaching them.
[+] [-] qwerpy|3 years ago|reply
Me: You seem to not care at all about public schools dumbing down the curriculum. It could happen here too.
Wife: Why should I? This doesn’t affect us. We’ve already decided our kids are going to private school.
Me: Sure. Just sucks for smart but poor kids.
Wife: Good for us. Weaker competition for our kids.
[+] [-] bcrosby95|3 years ago|reply
And the middle class end up fucked. Too rich to get extra help. Too poor to afford private. Like walking in the middle of the road... splat.
[+] [-] misssocrates|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nifty3929|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexchantavy|3 years ago|reply
Hearing about kids being set back in math makes me very personally angry because I always felt that my college CS studies would have been so much easier had I been equipped with the proper math fundamentals. This shit takes a long time to train and you really can do powerful things with it.
[+] [-] analog31|3 years ago|reply
Most of the people I know who have STEM degrees don't use their college math. The math that they need is programmed into their CAD terminals. The ones who still use math in their jobs, somehow got interested in math, in spite of school math.
Turning math into a competition sucked the soul out of it. Both of my kids got 8th grade math, and top ACT/SAT scores. My daughter skipped pre-calculus with no ill effect. Both are interested in math, but have no interest in taking more math classes.
I breezed through school math, through college and grad school. Whoop-de-doo. Two things made math come alive for me: Proofs, and computers. But proofs are nearly gone from the school math curriculum, and the schools still haven't embraced computers.
I'd actually like to see a refactoring of school math, loosely into 4 disciplines, that are introduced in a cycle, perhaps even starting in 1st grade:
1. Arithmetic -- manual symbol manipulation, up to and including calculus.
2. Computation -- use of computers to explore and solve math problems.
3. Working with data -- self explanatory.
4. Theory -- things like sets, proofs, etc.
I believe this would actually be more representative of how people actually use math in their lives. Many people will use computation and data, even if they struggle through arithmetic and develop no interest in theory. On the other hand, full exposure to all of the disciplines would adequately prepare someone for academic math study.
I don't believe in banning anything. Some kids need to be allowed to get "ahead" so they don't get bored and lose interest, or simply because solving those school math problems can be a fun escape -- as it was for me -- from an otherwise stressful adolescence.
[+] [-] fmajid|3 years ago|reply
https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...
[+] [-] darth_avocado|3 years ago|reply
Solution: Private tutors to fill the gap. The kids who couldn’t afford it, kept falling behind. It got so bad that at some point school teachers would teach completely different subjects to their own students, but in private tuitions outside the school. Seems that is the way forward if nothing changes.
[+] [-] jasongrout|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|3 years ago|reply
But I'm not, and the reasons why are complex.
First of all, algebra is hard. And not every kid can learn it in the eighth grade. Furthermore, not every teacher qualified to teach eighth grade stuff is qualified to teach algebra. What the studies have shown is that teaching algebra to everyone in grade 8 leads to worse math outcomes.
And if you agree to teach some of the kids algebra in eighth grade, you're back in the sticky wicket of tracking and "gifted kids". Show me a gifted classroom and I'll show you a classroom full of mainly rich whites and Asians -- who are depriving the poorer and more socially disadvantaged students of valuable resources.
The whole point of public education is democratic access -- to all -- of sufficient educational resources and service for basic functioning as an adult citizen, NOT educating every child to the maximum of their potential. It's kind of like how capitalism is really good if and only if you want to get as rich as possible and have the means to do so, and under social democracy you will be less rich, but the tradeoff is there are far fewer economic losers. In light of this, leaving algebra until ninth grade was the best choice for the San Francisco school system for equitable availability of education to all, given the resources and framework they have to work with.
[+] [-] clnq|3 years ago|reply
But on the other hand, I was always amazed by how much skipping just a week or two of school a year could impact one’s education. It’s very difficult to catch up (in Central European schools at least). A bout of pneumonia could negatively impact your whole life if you miss a week of school and you don’t have the time or teaching to catch up. Education can be very rushed, maybe it shouldn’t be. Pupils should be given time to catch up when various life events happen to them. And if this means a more spaced out curriculum, so be it.
[+] [-] opisthenar84|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umeshunni|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|3 years ago|reply
So “school issues” easily end up being implementations of ideologies, rather than of services provided.
People aren’t asking “are my kids learning” because they don’t have kids. And neither do their friends and coworkers.
[+] [-] givemeethekeys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yetanotherloss|3 years ago|reply
Seems like standardized testing and goals is killing things about as predicted.
[+] [-] delta_p_delta_x|3 years ago|reply
In Singapore, the default stream sees students taking basic algebra at age 11 (5th grade), simultaneous and quadratic equations at age 14 (8th grade), and single-variable calculus at age 16 (10th grade). By 17-18 (11-12th grades), students have done first-order ordinary differential equations, volumes of revolution, functions, vectors, and students have the option to take college-level linear algebra or discrete mathematics.
What is wrong with the US?
[+] [-] Spivak|3 years ago|reply
“Basic Algebra” is what we call 7th-8th grade (age 11-13) math.
“Simultaneous and quadratic equations” is what we call Algebra which is 9th grade (age 14-15) with logs and exponentials thrown in.
Most places do a split year of Geometry and Trig in 10th grade.
Single variable calculus and first order blah blah is Calc 1 for 11th graders.
Volumes, vectors, integrals, infinite series, taylor expansions is Calc 2 for 12th graders.
[+] [-] RandallBrown|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimt1234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrancesPastel|3 years ago|reply
> What is wrong with the US?
For a developed country, they can be frustratingly archaic.
[+] [-] qwerpy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jcn|3 years ago|reply
"With both gaps, SFUSD evidenced greater inequities than state averages in 2015, and that relative underperformance worsened by 2019. The district’s anti-tracking public relations campaign, by focusing on metrics such as grades and course enrollments, diverts attention from the harsh reality that SFUSD is headed in the wrong direction on equity."