Hacker News Reader

Comment by donny2018 | Hacker News Reader

donny2018

> I am witnessing public schools take math out of the curriculum at elementary, middle and high schools.

Is that for real? If true, this is ridiculous. Do American authorities want to introduce some kind of education for plebs?

How is such low standard for basic education is even acceptable in the modern world? It’s not only about “beauty of math” but at least basic math is required to help develop some specific cognitive and thinking skills. You can’t leave that part of children’s brain underdeveloped.

And cutting out math from schools you are deleting the future for a huge number of kids. No more future engineers and scientists and programmers etc.

I don’t understand.

View on HN

Yes it's TRUE. In SF the schools district removed Algebra from the middle school curriculum. You should read The Dictators Handbook, it details why dismantling education piece by piece is a great way to stay in power. You'd expect it in a dictatorship but not in SF.

It appears that that move has increased enrollment in higher level math classes in high school: https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-mov...

See also some of the motivation behind the change: https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...

I would argue part of the problem with the American system is that trying to rush students through a rigid curriculum leaves the teachers no choice but to teach by rote memorization and cookie-cutter problems. Slowing down the curriculum is part (but not all) of the fix.

Still, whether or not this policy is good, it takes a lot of spin to turn "San Fransisco is starting algebra a year later" into "witnessing public schools take math out of the curriculum at elementary, middle and high schools", which is what you claimed.

Well, according to that article "Advanced Placement calculus courses has declined by nearly 13 percent over the past two years."

Anyway, the policy was made with intention of forcing equality, not improving math education.

You are both correct, but the comment you were replying to was definitely written in a way that feels misleading about "increased enrollment in higher level math classes in high school".

TL;DR from someone who read the full article: that change caused an increase in Precalculus enrollment and a decrease in AP Calculus enrollment.

Which I don't really feel good about. The quote closer to the end made me feel even worse:

>“For so long, people have held up this idea that AP Calculus is the gold standard (for college admission),” Lizzy Hull Barnes said, a district math supervisor

And those kids haven't entered college at the time of writing, and the article points out that they indeed don't know how this change will affect college admission prospects of those students. Time will tell, and hopefully my bad feeling about this change was misplaced. But given that this was written over 2 years ago (so most of those high school students have graduated by now), and we haven't had a follow-up "this change brought us some great benefits" article, I am afraid the results might have not shown any benefits of this approach.

Happening in Oregon too https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2021/08/gov-kate-brown-s...

Funny you mention that, this was submitted earlier today: Oregon students shouldn’t have to prove they can write or do math to get diploma

https://www.salemreporter.com/posts/4419/oregon-students-sho...

That headline sounds a bit of an editorialized interpretation of the situation. The debate doesn't seem to be whether or not they prove their skills, it is a debate over who they prove them to, and when a change should be implemented.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com