Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely don’t want religious brainwashing. I also definitely do not want the indoctrination that is taking place in our public schools.
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Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
351–360 of 816 posts
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#352This is the way. Teach kids more, not less. Ask more of them, not less. If you need to lengthen the school day and school year to do so, do it. Do it now. "So what should we do instead? Dallas came up with an answer: Teach kids more math instead of teaching them less. In 2019, Dallas Independent School District implemented a new equity policy that encouraged many more people to take honors math classes: Many capable…
It was you wonder if a foreign state adversary is influencing us to stupify our next generation. I'll keep my comments civil here but its pretty obvious who is behind this.
If it's all that obvious, you should have no problem naming who's behind this and providing evidence to support your claim, rather than merely fearmongering to no useful end.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 expe…
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...
Being a progressive and seeing real-world data crush your entire world view time after time must be a strange feeling.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#354This is the way. Teach kids more, not less. Ask more of them, not less. If you need to lengthen the school day and school year to do so, do it. Do it now. "So what should we do instead? Dallas came up with an answer: Teach kids more math instead of teaching them less. In 2019, Dallas Independent School District implemented a new equity policy that encouraged many more people to take honors math classes: Many capable…
> with the goal of improving opportunity for all I'm chatting with some friends who are parents in the Bay Area. Their admittedly very Californian response is that at least this should reduce competition for college spots. (Their kids are obviously going to get tutoring.)
Ha that’s not actually happening though because college admissions aren’t going to be based in knowledge but on ability to jump through hoops perfectly
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You need a decent school option within an acceptable travel distance. There are many who don't have a good choice like that.
If there is money available the choices will appear. When it stops being about the building and government curriculum and starts becoming about satisfying parents desire to have their child educated, anybody can become a teacher or organize a school. If the teacher fails to deliver the parents will go elsewhere.
The free market for schools and teachers is created the moment Department of Education is eliminated and replaced with education vouchers for all.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#356You 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.
Maybe true but that won't get them a calculus credit on their transcript.
> 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.
This is also true I was one of these students. My middle school did almost exactly this. They had a per algebra class that explored all sorts of random topics. We did things like clock math, and observed how these other mathematical systems did or did not observe things like the associative property. It was amazing because it made math more than just doing calculations. This class is still one of my fondest educational memories.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#357Stuff 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…
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You are against poor people not having school choice? Rich people already have that choice. Giving poor people choice is the right thing to do.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#358Earlier 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…
This depends a lot on the state & county. Where I used to live in VA & NC, property taxes went to the local district to spend, and the wealthier schools had better programs & facilities. In CA, where I live now, property taxes are aggregated at the county level and doled out to districts based purely on student population. Superficially, this results in rough parity when it comes to government-funded services (things like lunches, Pre-K, music/PE/libraries/art/etc). However, this all falls apart because of the piece that can't be controlled this way: direct parent contribution. Some bay area schools receive >$1000/kid/year in direct parent support, not to mention volunteerism. These schools will always do better than ones without this, and not just because of the $. The $ & time investment makes the parents even more vested in how schools spend, and the outcomes.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#359You 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…
As someone who did all of it and ended up majoring in engineering, in my opinion calc is the least practical of the senior high school math courses— geometry and data management (stats/probability) are both much more likely to be useful to normal people doing their taxes, understanding elections, fitting furniture into rooms, whatever.
That said, I think calculus is helpful in the way that learning a niche programming language is helpful: it teaches you about new kinds of abstractions, how to think in a different way, and gives particular language with which to talk about that kind of thing.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Some kids are educatable. Some are not. Citation needed. Why wouldn't they be, unless there's a disability? I have seen good teachers do wonders for 'problem' kids.
Because they don't want to learn.