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California needs real math education, not gimmicks

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Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#351

Post by 0xy »

astrange wrote: post #178
0xy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with money homeschool, with much better results. There's even small homeschooling groups that pool resources to hire the best tutors money can buy. Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back. Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homes…

> Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 Two data points can't show something is exponential! Also, it can't possibly be exponential because the US population is not growing exponentially.

I agree, but the number was ~13,000 in the 1970s. It's now in the millions.

So homeschooling has increased over 100x, while the number of students in any education in the US has grown by around 10-20%.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#352

Post by peterfirefly »

WalterBright wrote: post #327
peterfirefly wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you incentivize IQ?

Do you really think that American kids are stupider than kids in other countries?

I think some of them are. In fact, we both know some of them are. We also both know that there are hard limits to what a person with an IQ of 100 can learn.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#353

Post by condwanaland »

WalterBright wrote: post #148
donw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It... really doesn't. Sales is a great example. In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time! No…

Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.

You have another comment somewhere here saying that 80% of companies close within 5 years. You may be making the other sides point...

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#354

Post by benglish11 »

bleuchase wrote: post #313
fn-mote wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a recipe for an ignorant underclass from which one can never escape. What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education? Functioning public school is supposed to solve that problem.

> What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education? What do they do in the current system? Get stuck in a class that can’t move faster than the average student?

I think even moving as fast as the average student is a generous assessment. My dad was a math teacher at a public high school in Southern California. At the end of his career he was the math dept chair. He retired recently but he was constantly battling administration who wanted them to focus on bringing up the bottom of the class. It was a battle that partially led to his retirement. The admins just wanted the test scores to go up and they saw focusing on the bottom as the easiest way.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#355

Post by paulryanrogers »

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…

Cultural problems within the poorer communities in the US cannot be solved completely internally. Because sadly many of the problems come from systemic racism forcing people into a box of sorts. Escaping that requires overcoming a mountain of challenges. My SO taught in some of these schools, and the circumstances in these communities is tragic.

It's a bit like telling prisoners they can all leave if they'd just try harder, meanwhile the outside world has been pouring concrete around the outside for decades.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#356

Post by solatic »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #304
solatic wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> large classes

Irrelevant to the question at hand. There are small schools with small classes, small schools with large classes, large schools with small classes, large schools with large classes.

> "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case

No, it's intended to be a technical/neutral term to describe the person(s) making the economic (as in the science of economics) choice of which school to choose.

> parents tend to optimize for...

And other parents optimize for other priorities, see e.g. Montessori schools, St. Anne's in NYC where there are no grades. Having options allows parents to make that choice. When parents are forced to send their children to the large monopolistic public option because there are no other affordable options, they don't have a choice.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#357

Post by boringuser2 »

Education interventions are historically some of the least effective endeavors of any public works project.

Countless attempts to spend beacoup bucks to bridge racial gaps in educational attainment and IQ have been made and none have ever worked.

Given the bet available evidence, not much education is necessary to bring out the potential of a population in terms of attainment and IQ scoring.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#358

Post by vacuity »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #355
vacuity wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cultural problems within the poorer communities in the US cannot be solved completely internally. Because sadly many of the problems come from systemic racism forcing people into a box of sorts. Escaping that requires overcoming a mountain of challenges. My SO taught in some of these schools, and the circumstances in these communities is tragic. It's a bit like telling prisoners they can all leave if they'd just try…

I don't mean to say that changing a culture/mindset is at all easy. It's just that if the culture were to start changing, I think we would see significant progress in terms of elevating African-Americans to decent socioeconomic standing. The other day there was another HN thread about charter schools, where some people discussed what to do about chronic trouble kids (for lack of a better term). The fact that home life is a major factor in how kids develop means that bad households generally produce bad kids, but good households generally produce good kids.

If there was some magical way to change the culture of many African-American communities instantly, and if the government bolstered schools, healthcare, and whatnot, that would really be something. I don't think all that money will be very effective if the culture isn't changed, though. And affirmative action is too late, too little in the education journey.

I recognize this is like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill right now, but that's the only feasible way out that I see.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#359

Post by yqinyn »

I went to high school in China, and the Math problems in the US from the same level are literal jokes to us. At the end of the semester, my teacher doesn't have anything else planned for the last class, so just for fun he would find these problems and share with the class :"Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with". I remember all of the problems are so dumb that the whole class would had a good laugh reading through them.

At that time I thought the whole Math education in the US is a joke, until I came here for graduate school and realized how brutally challenging the Math is in higher educations.

My 2 cents is that the majority demographics in the US don't give a damn about Math, or any kind of formal education. Most people, even the uneducated, are living a comfortable enough life, so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. As a result, these type of education are only reserved by the elite. While in a lot of developing countries, education is the only way for a normal people to not end up being extremely poor for the rest of his/her lives.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#360

Post by ryandrake »

WalterBright wrote: post #322
ryandrake wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have baked into your plan an incorrect assumption: You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output. Of all the things that lead to student education performance, the quality/performance of the teacher is very low on the list. Teachers are not factory workers, where if they are more skilled, or faster, or better trained, they'll produce more widgets faster. Most teachers…

> You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output Who needs teachers, then, if they are so ineffectual? Might as well replace them with a canned video course. BTW, every school knows who the good teachers are and who the useless ones are. They get paid exactly the same. Do you think that's a good system? > There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generall…

My parents and step-parents are all retired teachers so I've seen the system from both the student and teacher's sides (and now also as a parent). School is not like a factory where raw material (students) come in, teachers apply work onto the raw material, and then finished product (educated students) come out. You can measure the students, but you are not measuring teaching quality. Student success is probably close to 95% parents/culture/homelife/nutrition and 5% some result of teacher input. If you have a reliable way to isolate and measure that 5% independently, by all means, suggest it to your local school board. They would absolutely love it.
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