Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California needs real math education, not gimmicks

noahpinion.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 386 posts

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#301

Post by pas »

bushbaba wrote: post #12

California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution. It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class…

Social issues and education are not separate. That's the problem. Most of the low-performing kids are from - you might not guess it - households that are in need of social support.

Yes, there are some issues that can be demarcated as not intertwined with education.

But of course homeless people can have kids, and now they are in the foster system, and that's likely worse than fixing the homelessness. And similarly, when poor kids or their parents have medical issues, which they almost surely will have, because they don't have the resources to have a healthy lifestyle, where do you think they will go? If they have to go to work to afford medication they won't continue their studies, or simply won't even apply for higher ed.

The problem that voters should address is high costs, lack of efficiency, run of the mill corruption and so on. (But for this voters would need to accept actual cities with functioning transit system, not endless suburbs and highways around a few corporate skyscrapers. They'd need to face the actual problem of resource deficit that's needed to actually make some progress in closing the education and income gap of the disadvantaged, and so on.)

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#302

Post by Xcelerate »

nebula8804 wrote: post #238
another_story wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long. As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any soluti…

>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc. How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism…

> How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output (its people) is in such dire straights?

That's because it's not the people educated by the U.S. systems that are producing so much. I worked at a FANG company and within my team of 50 engineers, I was one of two people who were born in the U.S. It's not just tech either — my father is a chemical engineer and most of the engineers he works with are from other countries.

The U.S. is currently still one of the top places that the world's best talent wants to move to; whether that continues to hold true remains to be seen.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#303

Post by throw9away6 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #290
throw9away6 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School choice only works because you can choose to not be in a school with high need kids. The public schools can’t choose their student so it’s a huge disadvantage

That's a feature not a bug and public school districts should do the same. Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.

I don’t think the parents of the kids sent off to prison and daycare would be all to happy with that outcome. Usually schools that do that do it in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention. It doesn’t take many pissed off parents to tilt the scales in a local election.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#304

Post by diffeomorphism »

solatic wrote: post #202
goolulusaurs wrote: post #25

In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole. The perv…

> once an organization surpasses a certain size This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones. There are some cases where this isn't…

Multiple problems with this. The most obvious one is cost: schools don't have large classes because they want to but because of budgets. The second one is that "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case and might very well be: experience in other countries shows you that parents tend to optimize for grades , test scores and "connections"; so you get grade inflation, "teaching to the test", bribery and networks and over all worse quality (just think of prejudices you have heard about some private schools).

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#305

Post by bandrami »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #279
bandrami wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.

No. Children are not the bottleneck. Parents are. All the statistics we have say that children in homes where the adults value education and urge their children to learn do better, regardless of other circumstances. Unruly children are typically the result of parental neglect. There are many many examples among poor families of well-behaved children achieving a trajectory that raises them out of poverty within a gene…

How would vouchers help? It's not like changing schools increases parental involvement. If that's your model the use of public money that makes sense is paying parents to be more involved.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#306

Post by strix_varius »

thechao wrote: post #291
strix_varius wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not supported by data. Across all universities, the education department represents the bottom of average SAT scores.

The bottom of the average of SAT scores of college attendees is the top 30%+ of students; Master's and PhD's are even more elite. This is like saying "the defensive line in the Cleveland Browns are the worst NFL players in the country": they're still NFL players.

Your misunderstanding is a great example of why we need better statistics education.

62% of recent high school graduates attend college (Bureau of Labor Statistics). 1 in 1,282 high school football players joins the NFL (0.078%). Your math is wrong by almost two orders of magnitude.

Attending college does not make one "elite" and equating the likelihood of getting a degree in education with the likelihood of joining the NFL is nonsensical.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#307

Post by s1artibartfast »

throw9away6 wrote: post #303
s1artibartfast wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a feature not a bug and public school districts should do the same. Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.

I don’t think the parents of the kids sent off to prison and daycare would be all to happy with that outcome. Usually schools that do that do it in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention. It doesn’t take many pissed off parents to tilt the scales in a local election.

It also makes a lot of parents happy. A lot of it comes down to political inertia and the dominance of reactionism.

If you have a system with a dedicated school for violent and behaviorally challenged kids, there would be a much larger number of angry parents reacting to the idea of integrating those students with their children.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#308

Post by doalldrugs »

vacuity wrote: post #284
cpursley wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful, you’re not allowed to utter the “C” word here in relation to educational outcomes. (The word is “Culture”)

Your phrasing is crude but there is truth in it. In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture, and it would be far more feasible for the government to pick up the slack and level the playing field (affordable quality education, abolish legacy admissions, etc.). Any amount of public school infrastructure and funding doesn't inherently get people to learn; studen…

[flagged]

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#309

Post by s1artibartfast »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #293
s1artibartfast wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rejecting students is a feature not a bug. If you have a student that attacks other students or teachers institutions should be able to expel them.

Then where does the rejected student go with their voucher? Segregating misbehaving students is a feature. Rejecting them is a bug.

to some sort of educator of last resort. This might be a private school that specialized in this, or a public school that can not refuse them and is therefore full of bad students.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#310

Post by t8sr »

strix_varius wrote: post #270
t8sr wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimizing for test scores is an American phenomenon. AFAIK schools in most of the rest of the developed world are not worrying about these metrics. (They do worry about how many pupils go on to graduate college, for example.) (Although of course nobody on here likely knows anything about more than a handful of countries’ systems at most.)

This is blatantly wrong. https://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132416889/chinese-top-in-test...

I mean, I did say developed world, but the link you're giving me is about China. I guess it's up to debate whether you consider that a developed country, but the IMF for example doesn't.

Being more concrete, test in Europe scores are generally not a factor in university admissions* or school funding.

I love being told I'm blatantly wrong about the world by confident Americans on the internet but, like, I did go through three of the systems in Europe for a total of 18 years and not once did the topic of test scores even come up.

*: How could they be? How do you use Swiss Matura grades to apply to an Italian university?

Post reply on HN