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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

#441

Post by s1artibartfast »

disambiguation wrote: post #387
sieabahlpark wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spending more doesn't seem to help. California is the best funded but worst grades.

Not sure what you mean by "best funded" but California spending is fairly middle-of-the-pack compared to all U.S. states. ~14k per pupil, compared to most North East states spending over 20k per pupil. [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-s... But if you take these rankings at face value [2] it does seem there's more than spending at play here. Though perhaps spending simply has to be normal…

Im having trouble reconciling these numbers with with total spending in California. Does it include local and federal funding?

The California department of education puts[1] per pupil k-12 spending at 23K, almost double that listed in the census.

>The total overall funding (federal, state, and local) for all K–12 education programs is $124.3 billion, with per-pupil spending of $21,596 in 2021–22. For 2020–21, per-pupil funding increased from $16,881 in the 2020–21 Budget Act to $23,089 in the 2021–22 Budget Act.

There is a minimum state funding of $13,976, which is pretty close to the census numbers. There could also be a difference due to comparing the 2023 CA budget to 2019 census data, but a near doubling in 4 years seems pretty extreme.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/yr21ltr0811.asp#:~:text=For%....

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#442

Post by ghaff »

AlexandrB wrote: post #428
CydeWeys wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, start at 10am go to 6pm. That's still less than 8 hours of instruction considering there's lunch, gym/recess, etc.

This really should vary with grade. It's hard to keep a 6 year old's attention for almost 8 hours. Far more possible in High School.

It's hard to keep my attention for almost 8 hours. And generally a lot less and that's with coffee and generally being able to get up and stretch my legs. And, while the situation is much different, I've become a fan of shorter presentations, meetings, etc.

ADDED: I often think I couldn't handle high school today.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#443

Post by tomsmeding »

zem wrote: post #373
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…

This is actually a good point; I had not considered that the equality that people are trying to achieve here is equality between races. And if that's what you're interested in, surely that's what you need to track.

I'm sorry for your friend; that situation sounds like a very odd mix of empowering (having the data — albeit after drilling) and deeply discriminatory and marginalising.

Over here we do actually have at least some of the race inequality problems, but we're putting much less emphasis on them. The approach has advantages but clearly also disadvantages. Thanks for the thought-food.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#444

Post by AlexandrB »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #400
AlanYx wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is my best guess about the line of thinking that motivates these "no advanced math" policies. You've explained the thought process of the "reformers" fairly well, but there is another additional element that's important as well: a sizeable contingent of people believe that advanced math itself is intrinsically bad or negative. Usually this is either because math is fundamentally exclusionary in some core way, o…

At it's very foundation liberal ideology cracks pretty badly if "Everyone is born equally capable" is false.

I suspect that 'liberals believe "Everyone is born equally capable"' is a strawman. I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this. Interestingly, the article actually lists out a more nuanced, realistic version of this idea (with a link to research):

> But whatever you think about the morality of this idea, it simply will not work. The reason is that the strong hereditarian hypothesis is wrong; practically all kids are educable, with the proper investment of resources.

And we're talking about high school educational attainment here, not world-class achievement. To use a fitness analogy, not everyone has the anatomy to be a world-class deadlifter. But pretty much everybody can get to deadlifting 1x/1.5x their (healthy) bodyweight with some training.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#445

Post by zer8k »

OGWhales wrote: post #241
zer8k wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, but the private schools in my large city are miles ahead of the public schools. The difference is so dramatic. I graduated from the same public school system. The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place. Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.

> The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place. Is this a result of the private schooling or does the socioeconomic status of their parents play a significant role? I attended both and the people that were rich enough to attend private school but were sent to public school anyway still did very well for themselves, not obviously different from those that attended private school.

Could be parenting too, yeah. I don't think it can be discounted the level of violence in public school. Even when I was in school it was closer to a prison than a learning environment. Both in culture, and in construction. I'm sure this had an effect on kids.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#446

Post by throw9away6 »

bluescrn wrote: post #418
Workaccount2 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The internet should have transformed education. For curious self-learners it has, there’s incredible resources online for those who seek them out. But it hasn’t made much of a dent in ‘the education system’

Because ability to asses knowledge is poor everywhere. programming might be a bit better at it but everyone else relies on signaling. Also many industries are essentially government adjacent so they continuation of college entrenchment continues

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#447

Post by josephcsible »

bamfly wrote: post #81
altcognito wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the purposes of public education is also assimilating children into the shared values of society. In the US this has been forgotten despite guys like Jefferson talking about this exact thing. The free market can be good at optimizing for certain outcomes, but I don't think you're going to get a lot of buy in with the current political climate being what it is, and a lack of consensus around what kind of outcom…

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…

> I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School.

Would you be okay with the exact same amount of your tax dollars being used to send his kids to public school? If so, then why the difference?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#448

Post by x3qt »

In most of Europe we have gymnasiums (advanced secondary) and lyceums (advanced high) schools, while primary is "just school" and the same for everyone. After primary education, usually 4 years, entry exams are held at gymnasiums, which have a lot of profiles (PhysMath, ChemBio, Philology etc, mine was Informatics), and those talented enough to pass them are transferred there, while the majority is filtered out and stays in "just schools". After secondary education (4 more years) people could get their high school level education at their "just school" or gymnasium, or either go to lyceum (requires exams) or college (as well). Lyceums are usually for those who aim at doing science at universities, and colleges for those for whom associate's degree is good enough (like me). What is really useful is that with associate's degree people could admit to the 3rd year of university of related profile to get their bachelor's in usually 2 more years. The profitable outcome of such a system is that everybody gets treated depending on their ability, resources are spent effectively and least common denominator doesn't sinks talents. Btw all of those are totally free, so no "social class" advantages are held by anyone. Maybe it's time for US to have gymnasiums and lyceums as well?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#449

Post by alephnerd »

fooker wrote: post #331
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…

Students from the rest of the world learn calculus when they 15-18. It’s interesting to see how quickly America is being dumbed down by stupid policies. College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus.

Not really.

Students in other countries in the world (for this assumption India, China, Canada, UK, Germany given my experience with the following) are tracked and/or calculus is optional.

We've traditionally had tracking within the US system (hence why AP and Honors classes matter) which helped filter students accordingly.

The issue is our "Hail Mary" pipeline - community colleges - are unnecessarily viewed as negatively, even though they help students remediate any knowledge gaps they might have.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#450

Post by throw9away6 »

candiodari wrote: post #409
throw9away6 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And what, exactly, do you expect administrators to do? They don't have any actual knowledge and if they do, they absolutely do NOT want to use it, so tests are out. There are now more administrators than teaching staff. We're not far off from having more "social" workers in schools than teachers. First and foremost, these people want to decide what is equitable. Firstly, without taking actual ability (or "conscientio…

That’s exactly what I expect. With no ability to differentiate candidates by ability all you can do is chase diversity metrics or look for people that haven’t made any mistakes yet (4.0 vs 3.9 etc)
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