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Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

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Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#121

Post by harimau777 »

okeuro49 wrote: post #82
altcognito wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing. The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcom…

> One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. From what I have observed of the US's education system, the problem is that the public education system is assimilating children into values that are _not_ shared by society nor their parents.

I think that part of the problem is that I have no idea what values you are talking about that don't match society/parents.

That is to say: I'm a leftist and I'm worried about schools indoctrinating kids into a whitewashed, anti-LGBTQ+, jingoistic understanding of the world. However, I'm sure there are Republican parents that are concerned about kids being indoctrinated into a "woke" understanding of the world.

I don't know how you manage things when you have the country split down the middle with two completely separate worldviews.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#122

Post by devonkim »

bamfly wrote: post #81
altcognito wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing. The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcom…

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 tha…

One of the key problems in the US funding system is that population clustering effects will cause exacerbating effects where people of increasingly similar socioeconomic and cultural strata all stick together - of course this will cause rising inequality and unequal outcomes. The people living in the gated communities fund their local school primarily, not the poor one on the other end of the street that can't get or retain teachers there besides from ideologically driven sources like Teach for America because students are absolutely horrible when coming from poverty-stricken homes that use public education as a meal program while the working poor parents do 12+ hour shifts frequently.

The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#123

Post by stickyricky »

jedberg wrote: post #68
brightball wrote: post #19

Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life. No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this. Pull your kid. Find them a school that gives them the greatest opportunity to succeed and use the funds earmarked for their education to ensure they receive it. Currently, options are restricted to parents who can afford to move to a…

This only works if you require all schools getting vouchers to accept all students. Otherwise you end up with all the special needs kids in the public schools that are required to take them and all the high performers in private schools. And even then you still have the problem of transportation. Only the more well off families have the time and means to get their kids to somewhere that isn't their closest home schoo…

> Unless you [...] provide them transportation, you're still going to get inequalities of outcomes.

I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Rich people buy homes near good schools. Poor people live in homes they can afford next to bad schools. Removing the option for poor parents to drive their kids is not equity. Its damnation.

I live in a state where you can _pay_ (yes not a voucher - you PAY) to attend a school outside your district. I knew several poor families which took advantage. I don't know of a single middle-class family which did the same.

Not a scientific study. But it seems to me totally excluding the possibility of going to a better school is not kindness or progress or equity. Infantilizing poor people who "don't have time to drive" is silly. Some don't but there's always car pooling. When you're desperate you make it work.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#124

Post by lxe »

> It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness.

I think it's worth it in this case. You have to be an absolute moron or someone with a sinister agenda to think that decreasing the standard helps the community in any way. Especially idiotic to call this "progressive".

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#125

Post by misterbishop »

This just is a total misunderstanding of what's being proposed, and a hamfisted excuse to dress up reactionary stupidity as a defense of "Math". The changes aren't "refusing to teach kids math", they are a better approach to math. Modern approaches emphasize number sense (aka actual understanding) over formulas. Algebra has historically been a kind of gatekeeping in middle school between kids who plug in the formulas vs the kids who "arent good at math". Neither of these outcomes are positive for learning.

In general we need deeper foundational knowledge beyond memorization of notation. True math understanding enables students to independently discover common formulas rather than deploy them from rote.

Noahpinion doesn't begin to speak to this, and is in fact a moron.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#126

Post by vladgur »

bamfly wrote: post #81
altcognito wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing. The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcom…

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 tha…

Public education system is definitely a positive thing that most of us will pay taxes for.

However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future.

My son is currently is in public elementary school here in Bay Area. If this idiocy persists, i dont believe i will keep him in non-STEM focused public school and will seek out better education for him that i will need to pay out of pocket.

I can afford it, but those who are less fortunate will remain trapped and thats a travesty of CA public education

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#127

Post by RavingGoat »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #66
eitally wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't completely disagree with you, but where's the incentive for a government to give you vouchers to spend on non-governmental education, directly taking away funding from the schools the same government is responsible for managing? If it was a different pool of money, I get it, but -- speaking specifically about the Bay Area -- one of the reasons public schools have suffered is because of attrition toward paroch…

> And it isn't even that all the private options are superior, By what metric are the private options not superior to the Bay Area Public Schools?

No education requirements for private schools is one way they aren't superior. I would pose that segregation would be the other way private schools aren't superior.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#128

Post by TheBigSalad »

rco8786 wrote: post #23

Is there anyone out there who disagrees with this? I have not seen a single person (aside from the few people actually implementing these changes) that agrees with it.

It's a complete straw man argument. Nobody believes that it's better to dumb down education, but that's not what's happening here. Very specifically, they are replacing middle school algebra with a data sciences class. The idea is that the data science stuff would be more practical and get people interested in math more than algebra, which is a more abstract. It doesn't sound completely crazy to me.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#129

Post by barry-cotter »

lostapathy wrote: post #86
jdminhbg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm for vouchers because I don't think I should have to pay with my taxes for religious indoctrination masquerading as public education.

100% this. I even went to catholic school 7-12th grade. It was in no way a superior product like they want you to believe anyway. It was obvious in college that I had inferior math and science education, and I was considered a high performer in my high school! They even turned me off religion completely, so fail on all counts.

You misread the post you’re replying to. It is in support of vouchers and is implying that public schools are pushing a viewpoint that is as faith based as any religion and as open to falsification. There are people upthread singing the praises of state schools as tools of assimilation. The point of the comment you’re responding to is to point out that many people have no desire to be assimilated to the new dispensation and as such the political system will accommodate them or not. Not is left as an exercise.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#130

Post by bigbacaloa »

busterarm wrote: post #70
yxwvut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world? It's not exactly going well in secondary education.

Private schooling is already on average cheaper than public schools in primary education at the dollars spent per child level. The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed fre…

Private schools are mostly quite bad and worse than typical public schools. A few outliers distort the general picture.
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