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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

#371

Post by bityard »

pwthornton wrote: post #310
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 C…

Our school district has a program where teenagers can elect to go to high school at a local community college. Depending on their aptitude going on, the program starts them off on high-school level classes and moves them up to college-level classes as the semesters go on, and all of this happens on a real college campus with a real college workload and schedule. The idea is that the kids aim to graduate with at least an associates degree.

Poor grades and trouble-making will get you kicked out of the program, so the only kids that are there are the ones who WANT to be there, which is a drastic contrast to actual high school.

Our daughter will be attending this school in the fall, we are all very excited about it.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#372

Post by s1artibartfast »

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…

The USA is currently obsessed with race, and this influences all discussions.

I agree that this topic could be more accurately and inclusively framed as how to improve outcomes for low income students, or children with absentee/incarcerated parents, or children of addicts.

Unfortunately, some people care much more about racial outcomes than they do about any of those I mentioned.

The point of the racial framing IS to polarize, divide, and mobilize a political base, not to solve an underlying problem.

Talking about helping poor children doesn't get people as riled up, and has the risk of actually leading to agreement and a solution.

American politics has no hindsight and is a zero sum game. If you fix a problem in American politics, you don't get credit for it later. You only get credit for promising to fix problems in the future.

If parties agree and implement a solution, neither party comes out ahead, and even worse, you just made the opposition look more reasonable. It is a prisoners dilemma where cooperation is punished

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#373

Post by zem »

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're missing the fact that here in the US race is an extremely large factor in how students succeed, partly from correlation with socioeconomic and cultural factors, but also because it determines what sort of treatment kids get in school, from the teachers and from the administration.

anecdotally, I have a friend who, when she was looking for a school for her kid, had to drill down into the data for which schools had significantly worse results for black students, because that spoke to systemic factors in the school environment, and so even if the school looked good in its overall statistics she knew her kid would not likely get a good education there.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#374

Post by Romanulus »

pwthornton wrote: post #299

This 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…

[dead]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#375

Post by Workaccount2 »

throw9away6 wrote: post #354
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

AI is going to upend everything about education.

I can't imagine colleges doing much beyond lots of AI interviews in the near future. That's if there is even a point in getting 95% of degrees anymore anyway.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#376

Post by yxwvut »

busterarm wrote: post #70
yxwvut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world? It's not exactly going well in secondary education.

Private schooling is already on average cheaper than public schools in primary education at the dollars spent per child level. The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed fre…

My point is that vouchers distort demand elasticity, just like unchecked student loans, employer-provided health insurance, low mortgage rates, etc distort their respective markets. The fact that costs (not even prices) may be low at present is not an indicator that prices will not balloon in the wake of a voucher system. The private education profiteers are counting on it.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#377

Post by achates »

pwthornton wrote: post #299

This 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…

Does putting marginal students in advanced classes actually help them?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#379

Post by djbusby »

MostlyStable wrote: post #344
pwthornton wrote: post #299

This 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…

Lengthen the school _year_ sure, but I'm skeptical that lengthening the school _day_ won't have, at best, mixed effects, especially given all the studies on sleep etc.

Start at 10am, go till 4pm?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#380

Post by javajosh »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #294
javajosh wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one does real intelligence studies in humans because it's such a third-rail in academia. Think "The Bell Curve". Some scientists seem to believe that intelligence is intrinsic. The analogy with dog breeds, with their different temperaments and capabilities, with individual variation, applies to humans as well. See Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast https://www.…

Some people believe being homosexual is also intrinsic, despite identical twin studies showing contrary evidence. People like simple answers. It’s probably partly genetic, partly environmental. In other words, something worth studying further.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" This generalizes. Good luck funding research into a question to which people really don't want an answer to. There's some valid reasons to not want an answer - eugenics was and is a real thing, and its terrifying. For a while we seemed to skate by on a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not look into it too much. Just like there was a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not point out the facts of sexual dimorphism in humans, as a paean to feminism. When feminists start claiming superiority of females to males, or extremist egalitarians start claiming we're all the same, I think an argument could be made that they have invalidated the agreement. Unfortunately.
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