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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

#211

Post by hackerfooze »

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.

I disagree.

In general what you'll find is that most of these advanced classes are dominated by certain economic groups. Public funds are advancing people with more resources when all they actually need is to pass state college entrance exams. It's not that children from low income families can't do the math, it's that they're at a huge disadvantage when their parents are often working, can't hover over them to make sure they figure it out, and can't afford Kumon. If you agree with a progressive tax rate (which not everyone does), surely you understand that this is a bad thing.

I personally think all middle and high school should be bare minimum. Kids should be able to test out of classes when appropriate. The extra funds can go toward paying competent teachers for the less advanced subjects. If some parent wants their child to be advanced, they can use their own resources to help them test out of classes and take whatever APs they need.

Also many of the comments on this topic here and on Twitter to me reek of solipsism. Every upper-class parent wants the best for their child, and every hacker thinks the story of their journey into math and CS is the most important one.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#212

Post by cauch »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #135
cauch wrote: post #89

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 de…

They address that in the article: tutoring. One on one tutoring works amazingly well. I used to volunteer as a tutor. The students I worked with accelerated drastically. It's simply a matter of money. They do leave out some things: food + shelter. Many poor students have problems with nutrition and safe shelter, both of which make learning near impossible. The metro area I'm in is a perfect example of this. We have t…

They don't really address it: tutoring is OBVIOUS, everyone knows that tutoring works. The reason they are applying this measure is because tutoring is not doable.

> We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.

And we can also give poney to every kids.That's a nice thought but that is so deconnected from reality, which means that you are pushing for something that will never happen and at the same time the unfair situation will stay the same.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#213

Post by lumb63 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #115
okeuro49 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and particularly this part > There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents is really rough on the kids of engaged parents, forcing them to be responsible for "fixing" systems that they didn't create. In the UK, we used to have "grammar schools" that selected on ability based on a standardised test. They were responsible for m…

And if you could fix the system, it would have been fixed by now. If you have a kid today, you have 5-6 years to fix the system before it starts failing them. Your kid will be grown before any meaningful change is made, and any harms caused by the current system will be fully baked in. If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people. Public education doe…

> Public education doesn’t have to mean public schools.

This is eloquently put. I’ve never heard it said that way. There is no reason to believe that an entity like the government, great for accumulating and distributing the money required for public education, is a good or efficient agent for administering said education.

We see this in many other fields. For instance, non-government researchers receive government grants for research. Similarly (for better or worse), the government gives money for agricultural subsidies; nobody proposes that the government ought to run the farm. It is intuitive to us that specialists in a given field may not work for the government; it is high time we applied the same logic to education.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#214

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

scarmig wrote: post #26
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…

There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents, the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies. In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents wi…

It's a fool's quest.

Assume for a moment that my vote matters... in the sense that who I choose is elected. Further, assume that I get to craft and design these magical candidates like it the sandbox mode of some video game.

So, after all this, these candidates of mine are in charge of the school board, and no one can cockblock them. At this point, does it change the quality of the school's education? Not necessarily for my kids... that's a more difficult thing. Maybe it's a great school, but my kid's just one of those left behind by random individual circumstances. Just on average, does this school improve?

Turns out, not really. That school system is still limited in many ways beyond the school board's ability to affect on any reasonable timescale. There is not just a finite talent pool to hire from, but quite limited. And the resources to somehow expand that talent pool are limited too (and it seems likely that even if you could offer $500k salaries, you're attracting money-grubbers more than great teachers). Your capacity for the HR system to even pick the best of that talent pool is sketchy.

Textbooks? Limited by what textbooks are offered on the open market. Limited by whether parents will accept that Timmy really is a D+ student, and doesn't deserve automatic Bs for showing up and not acting the maniac. Limited by the "culture of public education"... if the best field trip ever could only happen at the end of July, that doesn't happen because we have ideas about how public schools are supposed to work and they're just not "on" during that part of the calendar.

If I was some angsty nihilist, I'd be ranting about how school boards cockblock everything public schools should be doing. But it's so much worse than that. If they did cockblock those things, it'd mean they had some idea what they should do, and were for some reason opposed to it. They don't know. And if they did, it wouldn't matter.

The system is designed in such a way as to be completely orthogonal its imagined purpose.

And you don't have to be especially intelligent or attentive to recognize any of this enough that you just don't bother with the school board elections. Why would anyone bother to vote? The truth of the matter is it's mostly between worse-and-worst candidates who have no true desire to see any sort of real improvement, and your one vote's not enough to sway it to one or the other.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#215

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pierat wrote: post #146
LexiMax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate on your equivocation. On first glance, you're comparing apples and oranges, and it doesn't make much sense.

[flagged]

> Places with public school vouchers as law allow said vouchers to be used at 100% religious schools

This isn't a requirement for vouchers. You can simply state that religious schools aren't eligible.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#216

Post by eitally »

1MachineElf wrote: post #58
mydriasis wrote: post #33

> Guess what? Children are educable. If you invest the resources of the state in poor kids and underrepresented minorities, they will learn. It is shocking to me that this has to be said. What in the world...

It probably needs to be said because of situations like that in Baltimore, Maryland. The city spends more than 97% of what other major school districts spend, and yet it's students are on average some of the worst performers: https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...

The answer is simple, though. When you invest the money exclusively in the schools and what happens in the schools, your reach is extremely limited.

In Baltimore, and everywhere else, raising the minimum wage, offering free daycare & preschool, and improving the social services that prevent many low income kids from learning outside of the school (and parents from supporting them) is what will make the real difference. But, at least half of this country is opposed to spending money on those sorts of things because the "I got mine" attitude is more pervasive than "What's good for my neighbor is what's good for me".

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#217

Post by [deleted] »

tmpz22 wrote: post #190
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 is a really important discussion and as a non-parent who hasn't been through the process i'll reserve judgement. But I wonder: Are there circumstances where the availability of vouchers results in a parent making a worse educational selection for their student? Would this leave educational marketing to lean towards populist institutions (like Kanye West's "schools" or Megachurch-derived schools)?

[deleted]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#218

Post by Justsignedup »

scarmig wrote: post #26
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…

There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents, the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies. In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents wi…

It only works when everyone is committed. When there can be no private schools.

If everyone is committed, everything must improve for you to see changes. If everyone is not committed they'll just send their kids to the best schools and ignore the problematic ones.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#219

Post by okeuro49 »

harimau777 wrote: post #121
okeuro49 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I am from the UK, so view the issue impartially.

The issue is, from my view, very much a problem of the Left-wing in the US, introducing victim/oppressor politics into schools, teaching children primarily to regard themselves as activists first, and students second.

I can also see it is causing a mental health crisis in students, who increasingly are under pressure to identify as an oppressed minority, in order to be marked out as an oppressor; victimhood conferring social status.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#220

Post by underlipton »

JohnMakin wrote: post #44

I don’t know why this author needs to use this issue as a political cudgel against “progressivism” - I don’t see anything particularly progressive about this policy vs the Dallas one he also mentions - the goals are exactly the same, to bring more equity to disadvantaged and minority students. Here is what Jo Boaler has to say on the issue: https://patch.com/california/across-ca/lets-move-past-acrimo... she claims th…

It's a common manifestation of the dissonance in American politics. TFA is advocating for a fundamentally progressive stance, but he's arguing against ostensible Boston lefties. What's unspoken is that the people making these decisions for public schools in Cambridge are elites who send their own kids to private schools, often prep; this is just another way to bleed a public institution so that they're not on the hook. Bonus points: their darling children have less competition for the local universities.

IME, tracking is only a portion of the issue, anyway. A confluence of factors stymied my growth; having to take Algebra 2 and Trig separately and Precalc as a standalone course didn't help, but poor instruction from "sink or swim" advocates was probably more consequential, and having parents distracted by a messy divorce and economic stresses from the 07/08 crash even more so. Between those, I went from starting middle school on track to take college-level Differential Equations or Calc 2, and ended up almost flunking AP Calc. Never really recovered.

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