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

Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

noahpinion.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 816 posts

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#221

Post by [deleted] »

zer8k wrote: post #197
bigbacaloa wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anecdotally, but the private schools in my large city are miles ahead of the public schools. The difference is so dramatic. I graduated from the same public school system. The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place. Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.

[deleted]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#222

Post by lizardking »

brightball wrote: post #39
scarmig wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s a good case for vouchers. Instead, kids with engaged parents will flee to better schools. The other parents will either follow, growing the new school and model, or the other school will adapt in order to retain students. Engaged parents are your early adopters. Without vouchers, most people can’t even afford to enter the market.

Or, unengaged parents will blame the school for their kid's poor performance and move their kids over, thus bringing down the metrics that gave everybody the impression that it was a good school in the first place.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#224

Post by LexiMax »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #215
pierat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

What is the realistic likelyhood of this being mandated, given how many religious private schools there are and how much money they have to lobby with?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#225

Post by duskwuff »

nsxwolf wrote: post #188
KerrAvon wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, public education has to mean public schools. Vouchers are a band-aid invented by right-wing nutjobs to allow religious schools to be funded by public money; they do this by taking money away from secular public schools. If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools, not break them further.

I'm almost 50. I've watched this scam play out my entire life. We've gotta fix the public schools, they said, when I was in public school. They said it year after year, generation after generation. It's never happening. We absolutely should allow vouchers to go to religious private schools and secular private schools alike. It's time to bleed the public schools dry and use their lots to build more housing.

It may surprise you to hear this, but intentionally destroying the public school system and hoping that the private sector will step in with a replacement is not a viable solution to public schooling. Private schools are not required to serve all students, either in a socioeconomic sense or a geographic one. Allowing public schools to fall into terminal disrepair does a massive disservice to those students who wouldn't be served appropriately by private schools.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#226

Post by pwthornton »

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…

On the math front, what we have seen a lot is that parents from families with means or who really care get their kids tutors or math services outside of school like Kumon. Some do pull their kids from school, but if you just want accelerated math, you can do so without needing an expensive private school. Something like Kumon is like $200 or less a month.

The best argument I have heard for not getting into algebra too quickly is that kids are often not getting enough time spent on foundational math skills, and then that leads them not to have those foundations as math ramps up in difficulty.

I don't think eliminating advanced math for equity's sake makes any sense, but we should also be careful not to rush through lower-level math and leave even strong students without foundational skills.

Math education in the U.S. is not working for the vast majority of students. We need to find a way to make it more engaging and applied. We may also need to just spend more time each day on math.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#227

Post by ihsw »

OGWhales wrote: post #117
vuln wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged." Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children. Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parent…

I’m confused, your comment talks about schools and the government making parents the enemy and being anti-parent but your linked articles are about parents making threats over things like Covid mask policies. What exactly is your point?

[dead]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#228

Post by cauch »

zzleeper wrote: post #149
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…

But then engaged parents will take their kids to Kumon, and rich parents will take their kids to private school. Their kids will then mop the floor against all other kids, including engaged kids without engaged parents, that would have benefited from more advanced classes. Is that equality?

That does not make any sense: without this measure, the kids that you are trying to save from moping the floor will ... mop the floor twice.

Without this measure, the kids that are not able to follow classes that needs things they cannot afford will just fail the lecture and drop from school, from THE WHOLE SCHOOL.

Without the measure, you have people who drop out of school and get a mathematical education close to 0 and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10. With this measure, the same people will get a mathematical education closer to 5, and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#229

Post by b800h »

vkou wrote: post #113
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…

> No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this. You say this, but what you actually mean is no wealthy parent should be stuck without options . The hoi polloi that can't afford the voucher plus mountain of money private school tuition will still be quite stuck without options, except that you've also created an explicit two-class system. I hear those do wonders for soc…

Bit of a weird position to take that you're in favour of schools doing indoctrination, just as long as it's away from the viewpoint you don't like. That's pretty authoritarian; seems to be on the rise these days.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#230

Post by eitally »

LatteLazy wrote: post #83
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...

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…

Citation needed.

From everything I've read, it's nearly entirely the case that low income and ESL students do the worst (and there's a large overlap between those groups) and it has almost nothing to do with the kids' educability or intelligence. They are in a difficult spot due to no fault of their own and require more support than what a typical teacher in a typical school in a typical city can provide without meaningful investments in broad social services Americans don't seem to have much appetite to invest in.

Post reply on HN