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

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#511

Post by sergiogjr » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:17 PM UTC

In the name of progressivism, epistemology in humanities has been dismantled, and business schools soon after were captured by the DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) religion.

Finally the demented Paulo Freire idolaters are coming for stem fields. Let's see if the push back is too little, too late, or if there's hope. Otherwise, do tutoring or homeschool your children.

Edit: and of course, the result of those last 2 proposed actions will be that the gap between social economically well off kids with good structured families and those in difficulty will soar sky high. And progressives will use that increased gap to double down on asinine policies.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#512

Post by petsfed » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:17 PM UTC

eitally wrote: post #64

brightball wrote: post #19

Stuff 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…

I don't completely disagree with you, but where's the incentive for a government to give you vouchers to spend on non-governmental education, directly taking away funding from the schools the same government is responsible for managing? If it was a different pool of money, I get it, but -- speaking specifically about the Bay Area -- one of the reasons public schools have suffered is because of attrition toward paroch…

The Bay Area has a really interesting synergy of situations that all contribute to really terrible public schools. A big one is that even in the best school districts, the salaries do not match the cost of living, so teachers cannot afford to live in the communities they work. Another one is that, thanks to prop 13, low property taxes on long-held properties create a serious bottleneck to funding for the schools. Both of these serve to strangle off the quality of education, which in turn drives parents to private schools, landing us at the point where enrollment is dropping off and, as you say, lowering school funding as well.

I would argue that until the Bay Area housing crisis is resolved (probably in part by repealing prop 13), the private-school exodus will continue.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#513

Post by t-writescode » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:17 PM UTC

kneebonian wrote: post #492

msravi wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family. But it does! Very much. I just don't understand why the US tries everything other than fixing the most glaring cause. Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles.

My mothers been an educator for many many years now. She says the single biggest factor is parental involvement. But hey convincing both parents to be gone all day and slave away for the corporate masters was smashing the patriarchy and breaking the glass ceiling or something, and the fact that it doubled the labor pool causing supply to go up is entirely unrelated to the fact that wages started stagnating at the sam…

Parental involvement works when there's just one parent, too, it's just harder on the single parent because they have to work so hard to be able to provide for themselves and their child; and, it only gets worse with the struggles the everyday person experiences - lower relative wages, etc.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#514

Post by alephnerd » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #477

alephnerd wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most students in these countries don't end up college track.

1. College Matriculation rates are low. Only 36% of Germans aged 25-46 have attended Tertiary Education (University as well as Vocational School) [0]. This is a similar story in the UK and Canada as well.

2. In countries like Germany and UK, college track HS admissions are competitive. Attending a Gymnasium or a uni track independent school or public school requires having a mix of high scores in grades 6-8 or competitive exams.

3. Calculus is not in the default curriculum. For example, in Canada Advanced Functions only teaches a bit of Calculus for a semester. The course is optional, only allowed at Grade 12, and sometimes isn't offered in HS. This is a similar case in the UK with "Further Maths" as an optional A-level and Germany with the Maths curriculum in Realschules.

[0] - https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=...

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#515

Post by racl101 » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

Race to the bottom.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#516

Post by bamfly » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #442

AlexandrB wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Looking back on high school, no wonder I was so damn bad at it and hated it so much. And depressed all the time. And probably picked up SAD that took me a decade beyond it to shake.

I'd quit a job as soon as I could find another, if it demanded of me what high school did. Hell, I'd quit based on the consistent 10+ hour days and constant due-tomorrow deadlines, let alone the rest of it like the before-the-sun's-up start time, having to ask permission to go take a piss, sitting in crappy chairs in bad lighting for back-to-back ~hour blocks all day, and having to keep "working" indefinitely with people who won't stop being shitheads in ways that'd get them fired from most any job inside a week. It's insanely terrible.

Like, there are multiple bad things about it that I've never had to tolerate in such abundance and variety even in low-skilled jobs I've held. WTF.

College and adult life are so much more chill than high school. It was a real shock, leaving there for the wider world. So glad the people who were like "this [shitty thing] is to prepare you for the real world, which is way harder and less forgiving!" or "enjoy it, because this is the best time of your life" were entirely wrong. I'd probably have offed myself by now, if they'd been right. Four years was barely tolerable—a lifetime of that, or worse? No, thanks.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#517

Post by cmh89 » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #372

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…

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

The United States has always been obsessed with race. The south had completely different schools based on a child's skin color. What makes you think this is new?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#518

Post by feoren » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:20 PM UTC

AlanYx wrote: post #487

feoren wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reason they're not all getting competitive scores with good shots at college is because advanced math (being intrinsically negative/evil) is ruining it I ... I don't understand. This is literally the craziest conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Here's the thing: if a shadow cabal of lizard-people were actually using space lasers to mind control everyone into thinking the Earth is round so we never discover their…

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the objections are not typically phrased in the type of language you're using. A typical example is something like this, from Louie (J.Res.Math.Ed. 2017): >Through the lens of the culture of exclusion, students who appear mathematically gifted are viewed as intelligent, whereas others are myopically perceived as “slow,” “remedial,” and “special needs.” These perceive…

Okay, have these guys seen how people who are really good at football are treated? And all those guys who are great at guitar keep getting all the chicks, goddammit!

There's no reason to think that mathematics has any more of a "culture of exclusion" than any other field of study, vocation, or sport.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#519

Post by btilly » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:23 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343

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…

> 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.)

Don't worry. DEI programs have this covered as well.

Stop using standardized tests to get in. And then just aim for the perfect "socially desirable" mix. Regardless of ability.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#520

Post by gnicholas » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 8:23 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #476

gnicholas wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you accelerate from geometry to algebra 1? Do you mean algebra 2?

My understanding is that at PAUSD they had two tests, one part that measured if you understood the core curriculum, and another that was more along the lines of brain teasers/math competition problems. You had to pass both (many passed the first but not the second). One issue was that the district seemed to cherry pick students to let them through; students would get access to accelerated classes even if they scored worse than other students who were blocked.