Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

The district’s curriculum is partially available to the public:

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.

Its like people are willfully ignoring the obvious: Black and Hispanic kids do the worst in math. Understanding why and correcting for the problems is a complex task. Making big proclamations about equity isn't going to do it.

Family life matters to the growth and development of children. 64% of Black children live in single parent homes vs. 16% of Asian kids. How does this effect math results? Black children are more likely to live near highways with higher rates of air pollution and asthma. Do Black children sleep poorly and have poorer memory formation?

Black and hispanic children who are more like to be poor may have chronic background stress from poverty: food and shelter insecurity. They may have inadequate access to health care. They miss routine screenings for vision, hearing and dyslexia. Chronic absenteeism and tardiness abounds. Are these the problems?

Identifying and correcting the root cause of divergent math outcomes is likely to be a multi-faceted and complex endeavor involving families, finances and health. It is worth doing. Everyone deserves the best possible education outcome.

Unfortunately, with scant evidence, math educators have somehow convinced themselves the root cause of the problem is entirely the math curriculum and the equitable solution is to deprive advanced kids of opportunity. Madness.

> It has a “guiding principle”

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.

>The idea that you can achieve cosmic justice should be abolished. There's no such thing.

I think abandoning cosmic justice is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is educational outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status and that problem cannot be solved by the school district (unless you could institute a kind of boarding school). That said, these administrators have arrived at a solution ("equitable" education) and are now gaming the metrics to achieve it at the cost of everything else. Worse still they race to pat themselves on the back on having "solved racism".

I think it has been shown over and over again that good educational outcomes start with parents (or more broadly community outside of school) and one group has had that community dismantled over and over again over several generations. In short, while I think it's a noble goal, it cannot be achieved by the school system and SF should have a more pragmatic approach even if the performance by race makes you uncomfortable.

"outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status"

No, outcomes are tied to the culture of the parents. Parents involvement/care is the greatest predictor of child success. This doesn't mean that the parents are educated or wealthy, it's that they have a mindset that the best thing they can do for the success of THEIR child (not society) is prioritize education.

Measuring “culture” in a manner independent of socioeconomic status seems challenging, but:

> it's that they have a mindset that the best thing they can do for the success of THEIR child (not society) is prioritize education.

Parents with that mindset but who don’t have a safe home or don’t have reliable food or who both work two jobs may have a very difficult time prioritizing education.

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