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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

#301

Post by altcognito »

busterarm wrote: post #99
bamfly wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system. I spent years in both public and private schools. The worst part of pu…

> The worst part of private schooling was that a few underperforming kids were pushed/passed along with everyone else.

I also went to both. When I didn't have good enough grades they just passed me to public schools. Shocker, the private school passed off difficult children somewhere else. You know who else they didn't serve? Special needs? And who else? Anybody who couldn't afford it, or didn't believe in the holy trinity.

I realize that a lot of libertarians believe that everyone should fend for themselves and that there's some sort of natural selection that justifies poor outcomes for some based on "fair rules". As I've gotten older in life, nothing seems less true.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#302

Post by themitigating »

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…

"We should be assessing schools on how many kids get As"

Then based on your logic schools would just pad grades.

Also the rest of your comment is a pile of right wing garbage

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#303

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

cauch wrote: post #243
stale2002 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace Nobody has a problem with there being options for students to learn at their own pace. The problem is not allowing people to take more advanced classes, if they so choose. > nobody will pretend that this is "dumbying down" the students. If you prevent students from taking more advanced classes, if those students choose it, then yes it would be dumbing down their education.…

> The problem is not allowing people to take more advanced classes, if they so choose. The article itself says that students who want to go ahead will get private lessons. The idea is not stopping people to get more advanced classes, the idea is to cancel more advanced classes as long as "normal pace" classes are not present. The way it works is that if you put an advanced class and no normal pace class, people who n…

replace "normal" with "slow" and "advanced" with "normal", and you will discover:

1. Why this initiative is a problem

2. That simply rewording "slow" to "normal" and "normal" to "advanced" seems to constitute the majority of your argument, without which there isn't a good one

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#304

Post by JumpCrisscross »

eitally wrote: post #296
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> changes aren't "refusing to teach kids math", they are a better approach to math Every mathematician disagrees. The Stanford professor pushing this policy has no math education. (She does have consulting gigs with school districts where they trade a teacher's annual salary for a few hours of Zoom calls [1].) I grew up in Cupertino and am flying back to the Bay Area. Every friend who is a parent is planning on circu…

Every mathematician disagrees because their focus isn't learning or teaching children foundational number sense and math concepts that will help them lead successful lives. You guys are talking past each other, and the guidelines in question are aimed at the kids in primary math education, not academic and applied math, where your statement applies better.

> their focus isn't learning or teaching children foundational number sense and math concepts that will help them lead successful lives

They teach undergrads. They are saying a student graduating from this framework, without outside tutoring, would not have the skills necessary to learn entry-level undergraduate math.

The data-science component, additionally, seems entirely designed to support a private consulting complex. That time would be better returned to students, given the content's outright inaccuracies.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#305

Post by themitigating »

linuxhansl wrote: post #251

I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron We are not, should not, and cannot all be the same. I am bad at languages. Should I now demand that everybody please slow down so that I do not have to feel bad about myself? ... Nope.

You could get extra help after school. Should a teacher just move as fast as the best student? You seem to want the education system to mirror capitalism which I find morally reprehensible.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#306

Post by OkayPhysicist »

hdctambien wrote: post #101
timerol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that grades matter for getting into college, but this mindset is viscerally horrifying to me. It almost reads to me as: "What if people were appropriately challenged and learned more? Wouldn't that be horrible?" Grade inflation is a terrible thing, even if it is likely an intractable problem because of the incentives that go into it.

Grades are a score that parents can use to compare their children to other children. It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything. The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-admin…

The pathology about grades is caused by colleges giving far too great a weight to high school GPA. If it falls below a 3.5, your chances of getting into the kind of school that people who give a shit about their or their child's education are gunning for drops precipitously.

Meanwhile, universities don't take the time to seriously consider what courses a student took, save for a few APs. That leads to a situation where it may well be in the student's best interest to coast through an easy A rather than get a B or C in a more challenging course. An example I can think of immediately was a friend who got an offer rescinded from a UC because they failed Discrete Mathematics as a senior, despite the fact that taking the class at all was completely optional for him.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#307

Post by persedes »

busterarm wrote: post #210
persedes wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious and only found: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a... the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.

They release this very easy to find data every year (although items in the chart may be ~10 years old). https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa... Private schools outperform in nearly all subjects.

thanks, but I think that comparison is not fair, if you're throwing all demographics in one bucket. E.g. I'd bet income explains most of those differences. I'm on the fence about public schools in the US as I'm originally from a different country where private schools are a rarity, but I've learned how bad schools can be here. Anecdotally here in NC public schools have a much better reputation than private.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#308

Post by autoexec »

gotoeleven wrote: post #250
eitally wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differenc…

You know they tried all this stuff right?

Baltimore has free day care? You'd think that'd drive down the average cost of daycare there (which is like $900 a month)

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#309

Post by altcognito »

busterarm wrote: post #281
duskwuff wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large No, I think you're missing the parent's point -- it's assimilating those students into a specific religious subculture whose beliefs and values may be at odds with civil society at large. (If you have trouble seeing this, try substituting "Jesus Is Lord Day School" in your head for some other implied re…

But that's exactly my point. Would you deny this same right to kids that attend Jewish day schools? Could you even argue for that without sounding like a massive bigot? Religious people are part of your community and have the right to their religious identity and to be a member of your community. If they want a school just for them, you don't suffer for it. Religion is not at odds with society. We're not the USSR. Re…

At least in the US, The community is not religious by definition in the constitution. The whole gambit with vouchers is that you are laundering money for religious institutions by putting it under "personal" choice.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#310

Post by pwthornton »

currymj wrote: post #274

You can imagine the following perspective: - Most people don't need to learn calculus at all, and it's fine if the few weird students who do start when they get to college (maybe the advanced students can learn single-variable calculus in high school). - For pure signaling reasons, taking calculus in high school has become very important for college admissions. - In order to take calculus in high school, you need to…

There is a way to have time to cover Calculus in high school while still taking it slower: Block scheduling.

My high school shifted to it. It's like a college day where you have four longer classes instead of eight shorter ones. Courses are semester-long, not year-long. This means you can take two math classes in one year (algebra in the fall and geometry in the spring).

This also enabled my high school to offer AP Calculus B, which is part-two of AP Calculus.

The other advantage of this type of schedule is that it is also easier to offer other kinds of math that may be more critical to most students, such as a dedicated class on statistics.

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