'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco
joannejacobs.com
joannejacobs.com
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
(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.)
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 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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
Yes, let's embed the fundamentals of wage-slavery at even younger ages.
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.
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1. https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/support-programs/dual-...
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.
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/square/2023/03/29/cancellatio...
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.
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.
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.
LA Unified is currently ~16,000/student/year.
It looks to me like SF actually gets significantly more money per student than people in the suburbs.
California too, yet California has one of the most corrupted education systems. Case in point, the Bay Area schools couldn’t even afford school buses
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
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.
1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/03/judge-rules-h...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would add, "and how to teach it." to that.
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.
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.
Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?
"You won't, but one of the smart kids might." [1]
Dumb kids can turn into smart kids, so they need math too.
[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the most powerful tool for making your life easier
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.
https://www.greatschools.org/california/berkeley/25-Berkeley...
Slightly above average in California is a failing grade by US standards. (California schools are 43rd in the nation.)
* 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.
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).
High school in the US ends at 12th grade -- how do they teach physics without calculus?
My high school offered more than most, I was able to take multi variable calculus which served me well in college.
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.
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
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.
https://www.sfusd.edu/departments/mathematics-department-pag...
https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd-math-core-course-sequence-...
And the district position statement:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uije_05H3BtVyp55oQZ7NCa2k58...
It has a “guiding principle”:
> 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.
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.
and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's still there in high school fwiw: https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/curriculum/high-school/mathem...
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.
https://www.thestar.com/business/technology/2023/03/14/chatg...
Apparently the Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled.
What the actual fuck.
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.
This might be a good time to bring up Lockhart's Lament, which imagines what artistic education would look like if we treated it like math.
https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament
Nobody with decision-making power in a school district likes the answer which this paper proposes: very small class sizes.
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.
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.
Let me ask this: what problem are you trying to solve?
That sounds like a math question! Get 'im, boys!
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.
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."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-c...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
It was 45 mins of math.
Questions ranging from simple algebra to probability theory to physics. And I was applying for an embedded systems position.
Boy was I glad that I was good at that kind of math.
Doing a 45min test on maths seems overkill to me.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/50/1/159
>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!)
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.
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 honestly thought memorization had been disproven to be effective eons ago.
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
Yikes.
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.
> Nope
It happens all the time. You think people are born being great at Mario Kart?
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.
Is there any link to an English version of these syllabi?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-math-tutors-education-t...
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.
https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/equity-in-th...
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 ?
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.
That'll just create students who think they're great... until they experience the real world.
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.
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.
/s
It should be part of the core curriculum. I wonder how the contemporary education establishment would react to it.
Progressive nuts embracing equality over everything else have taken over.
London Breed et al. are the problem solving equivalent of giving up.
It's easy to succeed when you can't fail.
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.
[1]https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/12/uc-berkeley-stanford-pro...
It mentions Prof. Nelson's criticism among others.
7th grade (age 12/13): Pre-Algebra
8th grade: Algebra
9th grade: Geometry
10th grade: Algebra 2 / Trigonometry
11th grade: Pre-Calculus
12th grade: Calculus 1
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.
Ugh, I couldn't imagine being a high achieving student and having to be lumped in with people who don't give a shit about their education.
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.