Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity • Hacker News Board

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#311

Post by cbeach » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

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…

Algebra is fundamental to problem solving.

Learning to code would have been much harder if I hadn't grasped algebra.

Calculus is important for understanding science (especially physics) and statistics.

These are not niche subjects for "the few weird students." They are really important to grasp for many roles in the knowledge economy. Your kids will enter a world of robotics and automation. They're going to need to use their brains if they want to succeed.

I'm 100% against a dumbing down of the education system to achieve ideological leftwing aims.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#312

Post by flappyeagle » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

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…

The problem is that this point of view ignores reality: motivated parents will just have their children learn calculus in outside classes.

The reality is for these students, "standard" middle and high school math is mind-numbingly boring.

The best outcome would be that the best schools and teachers use the surplus time to teach stuff that's off-curriculum like logic, discrete math, stats, programming, etc.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#313

Post by busterarm » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

altcognito wrote: post #301

busterarm wrote: post #99

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 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 t…

My private catholic schools had plenty of stupid kids, non-catholic kids (me), desperately poor kids (also me), and kids with special needs.

The worst thing that they did to me was add a course to the curriculum about religion so that I had an extra course to pass than the public school kids. And we didn't even learn exclusively about Catholicism in that class.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#314

Post by thebooktocome » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #94

thebooktocome wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Well, then I hate to tell you how bad public education is then. It is estimated that about 10% of public school students will receive sexual abuse from a teacher or authority at some point in their education. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/02/is-sexual-abuse-... This was also backed by the US Department of Education in 2004. Since then they've been very hesitant to revisit the issue. https://files.eric.ed.g…

Your first link is pretty terrible; it took forever to find the 2000 AAUW report it refers to. Here’s a more current version:

https://www.aauw.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Crossing-the-Line-S...

The 1-in-10 number is self-reported harassment which is different from teacher-on-student abuse but I don’t really care about the distinction. Your 1-in-20 number is a different metric entirely, by the way (as abusers are not one-to-one with abused). Again, I don’t really care about these wrinkles.

Anyway, AAUW’s data doesn’t distinguish between reports from public and public charter, so you can’t use this data to draw conclusions about differences between public and religious schools.

Furthermore, and this is the most important part, their main recommendation to reduce the incidence of abuse and discrimination in all schools (i.e., one of the things I actually want to minimize) is to promote more adherence to Title IX protections.

Private schools have no legal obligation to provide any Title IX protections, and indeed some religious schools, by their very doctrine, cannot.

Next time, if you’re going to demand statistics that don’t exist (as private schools have no reporting requirements and the AAUW report demonstrates that many institutions obviously underreport) please provide better links, thanks.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#315

Post by devonkim » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

bamfly wrote: post #245

devonkim wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcom…

I'm not disagreeing that throwing money at bad schools won't really help is the thing although it might seem like that's where my line of thinking may lead. Heck, usually more money at schools from what I've seen ranges from more administrators (lol if anyone thinks that helps) to equipment for students (as if an iPad will help a disengaged kid that much?). Add in the reality that lower socioeconomic status folks tend to move a LOT (think migrant workers' children) and that has pretty bad outcomes on education regardless of potential of the child.

In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats).

As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them.

I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#316

Post by vkou » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

b800h wrote: post #289

vkou wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, it's not. Society only works when people believe in a shared fiction, and when they stop believing it, things go completely to shit. I would absolutely oppose indoctrination into a bad shared fiction, just like a religious person would oppose indoctrination into a '…

Some people would just be in favour of the rights of parents to eductate their children however they like...

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Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#317

Post by synetic » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #244

synetic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who have a higher propensity to live in a district with shittier schools overwhelmingly support an alternative. This isn’t shocking. What most people, including it seems you, haven’t thought about are the long term consequences to universal voucher programs given the current idiotic system of school funding being largely based on a how much the houses in the area are worth. The long term consequences are bad a…

>current idiotic system of school funding being largely based on a how much the houses in the area are worth. The long term consequences are bad and quite predictable. This hasn't been true for decades: > on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively. [0] Almost all federal funds go to poor areas, so much so that they have…

From the paper you cited:

While total per pupil expenditures may be greater for the typical Black or Latinx students’ districts, there is variation in how these dollars are spent. On average, both Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures exceed White per pupil expenditures for administration, instruction, and social services. On the other hand, Black and Latinx per pupil expenditures are less than White per pupil expenditures on infrastructure. Black per pupil expenditures on all other items are slightly less than in the typical White student’s district, while Latinx spending is comparable.

Table 1 also illustrates some familiar facts. Black and Latinx students’ typical districts tend to have higher levels of child poverty, on average, than the typical White student’s district (5.4 and 4.0 percentage points higher in Black and Latinx districts, respectively).

Poor students who come from food insecure homes or live in high crime areas need more help in school in terms of school lunch programs, after school care, mental health intervention, etc. As such they need a lot more funding per student.

Complex problems require more than a simplistic solution. There are cultural, sociological, and economic forces at play. Vouchers are not a panacea. For one thing, private schools don’t have to accept students they consider a problem. Wealthy schools don’t want too many undesirables so won’t accept vouchers. Public schools will end up having mostly all the problem students without the resources to deal with them.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#318

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #276

Scubabear68 wrote: post #258

This is why my kids are in private school now. The public school system here in NJ has been dumbing down its curriculum for years. And while I thought “social promotion” was only a thing in horrible inner city schools, we have it here out in the suburbs, too. The first six months was very rough as they caught up from being so far behind, but they are being well positioned to the rest of their school careers compared…

How do you know they are dumbing down the curriculum and how are you comparing your children's progress?

[deleted]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#319

Post by Dig1t » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

tomsmeding wrote: post #295

Disclaimer: European. Is it not strange how in an article arguing from otherwise a very egalitarian, leftist viewpoint, when it discusses how students perform given more or less difficult classes, it somehow thinks the most relevant statistic is the race of the students? (Approximately, even, because American race designation is kinda weird anyway.) Sure, socio-economic circumstances are correlated with race. (Unfort…

You are totally correct.

It's cultural though, we (the people in the US) are obsessed with race. Literally everything you do and talk about is colored by it, and it's pretty much impossible to escape.

The more heterogeneous the society becomes the more obsessed we become with the differences between us.

You're seeing it too in the UK and will be seeing a LOT more of it as your demographics shift to be like ours.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#320

Post by goodpoint » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

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 does not need to be said. The article is just extremely biased.