Lawsuit against "Discovery Math" in Seattle Schools

Post by Groxx » Mon, Jan 25, 2010, 6:38 PM UTC

abscondment wrote: post #30

Groxx wrote: post #21

I find it telling that the article breaks down scores by race, not by income. Note that it claims that the difficulties are for low income families who cannot afford tutors / other resources , not black children . What's the crossover? What's the pass ratio for poor white children? Granted, a book can easily be harder to read / understand for less-classically-trained children. I'm not saying it's not possible, just t…

The first table cites the pass ratios for all low-income students at 37.3%, 28.3%, and 26.4% for 4th, 7th, and 10th grade respectively -- the pass rates for black children are lower than that. So one can accurately infer that non-black low-income children perform better. Granted, this isn't as informative as breaking things down by both race and income. But, as far as I can tell, this is a limitation of the state's r…

Post by anigbrowl » Mon, Jan 25, 2010, 6:44 PM UTC

olegk wrote: post #29

anigbrowl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dispute this assertion. When I was growing up, Ireland was ethnically homogenous with poor economic security and hostility to welfare cases like those of single mothers (for religious reasons), but there was still a distribution of ability and academic application. there were poor kids that studied hard and rich kids that didn't give a fuck, though more of the former than the latter, since high schools there employ…

Ireland is very white. So there's no "acting white" problem.

Post by iterationx » Mon, Jan 25, 2010, 7:05 PM UTC

lutorm wrote: post #17

iterationx wrote: post #3

From the article >>In this approach math is substantially dumbed down for "equity" reasons and students are asked to discover age-old principles on their own. Charlotte Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, wrote the free eBook (pdf) "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/

I looked at that link. I admit that I only read the preface, but when I got to this passage: America’s transition from a sovereign constitutional republic to a socialist democracy would not come about through warfare (bullets and tanks) but through the implementation and installation of the system” in all areas of government—federal, state and local. The brainwashing for acceptance of the “system’s” control would tak…

Post by scott_s » Mon, Jan 25, 2010, 7:10 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #13

A pity that the article does not include any excerpts from the books or detailed critiques of what's wrong with them. Examining a Discovering Algebra book at http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Algebra-Investigative-Appr... suggests that the book is not so bad (though obviously this only allows previewing a few pages)...however, I'm unsure whether this is even the same book, since the OP doesn't mention the name of the…

Post by curtis » Mon, Jan 25, 2010, 7:23 PM UTC

lutorm wrote: post #9

jff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was disturbed by the "low income" vs. "white" separation. Does the white group also include low income white students? Or, to further their point, did they decide low income whites aren't really white? Nobody should have to "rediscover" the Pythagorean Theorem. I'll go out on a limb and say Newton, Leibniz, Einstein, Descartes, etc. just went ahead and read Euclid, and they did pretty well for themselves.

Learning to prove mathematical theorems is an important skill in mathematics. If you only learn to use what comes served on a silver platter, where will you learn to handle situations where you haven't had the theorem taught to you in advance? My impression of UC undergraduate students is that "find the correct formula and plug in the numbers" is the only type of math they know how to do, and encouraging that doesn't…