Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

Yeah, I'm OK paying taxes to get to live in a society with universally-available (mostly) fee-free primary and secondary education that aspires to some set of standards.

I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use that for the vouchers. I'm not interested in handing people my cash to fund private education. I'm interested in having a public education system. That, I'll pay taxes for.

I mean... It's not entirely "true"

Some kids are educatable. Some are not. (and this also depends on subject and other factors)

That's true across all races, classes etc.

I say this because I actually think the biggest issue in education is that we waste resources on kids who are not educable and hold back whole classes for the one kid who refuses. This, and 101 other issues stem from that policy. A big part of what parents get at private schools or schools in nicer neighbourhoods is fewer kids holding the class up.

We should be assessing schools on how many kids get As and go to college. Instead we assess schools on how many kids pass or attend. So schools spend their time and energy dragging truants into classes and turning Ds into Cs. Anyone trying hard is just ignored, there is no news story, reward etc for getting a B kid to get an A etc...

[flagged]

Charter school vouchers are a corrupt way to siphon off public funds.

The author says

> The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware.

I was wondering if some people are aware of studies supporting this strategy.

I could try to dig them up, but I remember few studies demonstrating that school success is more correlated to the socio-economical situation of the parent than to the child intrinsic capacities (I think one usual method is to compare success of twins adopted in different families to remove the naive argument "higher socio-economical situation means that these people are intrinsically smarter").

If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).

I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some. A bit like if your professor was saying "we have an exam on chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, I will tell you the chapters 1 and 3, the chapters 2 and 4 are in the books but I'm going to give this book only to some students and not other". If a professor does that, people will obviously say that it is stupid, that the professor should teach chapters 1 and 2 to everyone and then do a test on chapters 1 and 2, and nobody will pretend that this is "dumbying down" the students.