Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

> 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.

The NORMAL pace is too slow for some kids who aren't even doing any math at home. The solution to kids learn at different paces and some kids can learn at a faster pace if they have resources at home, but not all kids have resources at home isn't force everyone onto the normal pace. It's to make sure all kids have access to resources.

If it's hard to get resources, then maybe you can free up some by adjusting class sizes. Instead of 60 kids, and 20 kids / class room all at the same pace; you can take the 30 kids capable of doing a faster pace and put them in the fast paced room, then have two classes of 15 kids at a slower pace and now they've got more time for individual instruction, and you didn't have to hire anyone.

> It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others

Underneath all of this is a budgetary trade-off. Quite often there are funds to pay either for more support for struggling students or advanced opportunities for advanced students, but not both.

That budgetary problem is ultimately fueled by larger socio-economic challenges, including high cost of living that is out of pace with tax revenue for school funding, high public pension costs, and ever-increasing demands on public schools to be social service hubs dealing with fallout from things like drug and violence epidemics. Those are expensive problems to treat.

Furthermore, those problems are not distributed uniformly across society. They are heavily disproportionately present in lower income communities, whether they're urban or rural.

Schools in uniformly well-off communities don't need to worry about treating these problems to anywhere near the same degree, so they need fewer behavioural and educational specialists just to keep the classroom functional, if they can do that at all.

Well-off children from supportive homes and communities are cheaper to educate. They arrive in the classroom with years of preschool and summers of educationally stimulating camps. They don't come to school hungry.

As a society, we could address some of the deeper inequities in opportunity, to relieve low income schools of the additional societal burdens we place on them, but those sorts of measures are even more polarising than school funding.

Therefore, we end up with the default, which is individuals optimizing purely for their own interest (i.e. the push for school vouchers), not what is more sustainable for society.

So taxes the state collects from me automatically become 'public funds' I have no say over?

This is incorrect as of last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_v._Makin

There is a powerful political and legal movement behind the idea that state-funded religious indoctrination is not only permitted, but required.

Yes, as per Harrison Bergeron, as mentioned elsewhere in these comments.