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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

#471

Post by cauch »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #303
cauch wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

And replace "slow" by "terribly fast" and "normal" by "advanced" and, magic, now everyone gets advanced classes.

Estimating if the pace is "fast" or "normal" is very very complicated. Only an idiot will pretend they know for sure that "this is too slow" (unless obvious extreme cases which don't correspond to what we have here)

Also, apparently, the measure was to replace advanced algebra by advanced data science which was in fact more challenging than the initial recite-by-heart-the-formula algebra lessons.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#473

Post by [deleted] »

snowwrestler wrote: post #328
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 don’t have the historical or cultural context to be commenting on race relations and policy in the U.S. Sorry; it’s not personal. Few Europeans do unless they have lived here for a long time (and even then I see many struggle with the topics).

[deleted]

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#474

Post by chriskanan »

toast0 wrote: post #262
cauch wrote: post #89

The author says > The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. I was wondering if some people are aware of studies supporting this strategy. I could try to dig them up, but I remember few studies de…

> If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced). > I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is imposs…

I agree with you, and I think AI-based tutors and software assisted personalized education could help a lot in this regard [1]; however, I'm not that optimistic in terms of implementing this in the USA.

About two years ago I chatted with a professor at ASU who was developing AI tutors and other sorts of systems and was able to show in research papers that they enhanced the learning of the class overall. However, he claimed that adoption among teachers and schools was largely rejected because teachers hated having imbalanced knowledge among the students.

China is apparently pursuing this education strategy, though: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/02/131198/china-squ...

Speaking as a parent with a child in private school, even there they have a strong resistance to teaching kids who already knows materials from the current year, where I was explicitly told those topics wouldn't be covered for two more years rather than embracing my child's curiosity and interests. K-12 education seems extremely non-optimal except for enabling parents to work, but my complaints about education aren't new [2] and our K-12 education certainly doesn't cultivate geniuses [3].

[1] https://slejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40561-...

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201107...

[3] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-mak...

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#475

Post by bamfly »

josephcsible wrote: post #447
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…

> 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?

One contributes to building a public institution accessible to all, and the other does not.

I'm also OK with taxes for public libraries, but wouldn't like my taxes going toward vouchers to help people pay for access to private libraries.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#476

Post by alephnerd »

gnicholas wrote: post #275
gotoeleven wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you linked is incredibly confusing. I assume the issue is, which is typical of any advanced courses in school districts where helicopter tiger moms live, that little billy didn't qualify for the advanced math course because he's not smart enough but mom knows he's actually a genius. The pressure to let in little billy builds and builds until the districts relent and fill the classes with buffoons and the…

The lawsuit was filed because (1) the district refused to allow students accelerated placement based on their prior outside coursework, and (2) used acceleration exams with a pass threshold that was comically too high (requiring students to know much more than was actually taught in the classes they sought to pass out of). These tests ended up having a wildly disparate impact on girls, who passed at a much lower rate…

I experienced this first hand.

In 9th grade, to accelerate from Geometry to Algebra 1 (10th grade) you needed a 95% on the exam, which was 1 hour long and around 90 questions. And this was despite taking Algebra 1 and 2 at a certified private school with UC/CSU credit that the C-suites of Tech companies send their kids to.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#477

Post by fooker »

alephnerd wrote: post #449
fooker wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 negat…

‘Tracked’ is doing some heavy lifting here. A vast majority of students in these countries end up learning calculus in school to keep college options open.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#478

Post by jonfromsf »

ghaff wrote: post #433
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…

(A) problem is that, if you're going to start getting very specific about what math kids need to learn if they're not going into STEM, you end up with a pretty short list and you end up, in practice, with not really learning math or developing numerical intuition at all. (And let's ignore the fact that I directly used very little of what I learned in university engineering either.) When was the last time I did a geom…

Everyone needs to understand probability and statistics maybe 10X better than they currently do. That should be the focus!

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#479

Post by baremetal »

lispisok wrote: post #438
mabbo wrote: post #92

It's hyperbolic and not a totally fair comparison, but reading this, I had to go find and reread "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge... When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way. It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in…

>When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way. A lot of people in the equity/equality movement have been following "the means justify the ends" for quite some time now and that approach has been growing in administrators. One of the reasons the supreme court ruled against affirmative action is the implementation of affirmative action in college admissions turned into shamele…

Affirmative action meets the definition of systemic racism.

Policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization, and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race[1]

[1]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/syste...

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#480

Post by cauch »

cwkoss wrote: post #291
cauch wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't really address it: tutoring is OBVIOUS, everyone knows that tutoring works. The reason they are applying this measure is because tutoring is not doable. > We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education. And we can also give poney to every kids.That's a nice thought but that is so deconnected from reality, which means that you are pushing for something that will…

We can tax corporations and billionaires. Building a functional education system isn't an unrealistic pipe dream, its an imperative for a well adjusted society.

I would love that (more money for education), and I'm pretty sure the people who proposed this measure would drop it immediately in exchange for more money for education.

But you are obviously not the first one coming up with this idea. Plenty of people have tried and are still trying, and it still does not work (it does not mean we should not try). In the meanwhile, we still need to improve the situation for people who are being the victim of it.

This is why this measure has been created while your measure is still far from being reality.

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