Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

>But Bobby Baptist's kids going to Jesus Is Lord Day School is assimilating those kids into their society at large and Jesus Is Lord Day School still needs to meet the curriculum and testing standards that any other school in the state has to. And more often than not those private schools are _exceeding_ the standard of the public education system.

Are they? There are a lot of folks who would disagree (and many of those are graduates of such institutions) with that assessment[0]:

   The city has determined that four Orthodox yeshivas are failing to provide
   an education “substantially equivalent” to what’s offered in public schools — 
   and recommends the state reach the same conclusion for another 14 yeshivas 
   the city says are ultimately under state authority.
   
   The findings are the results of a long-stalled and politically thorny 
   investigation that has stretched on since 2015.

   The city found that just seven schools they investigated met standards. 
   That’s in addition to two it found were up to standards in 2019.
   [...]
   The investigation was spurred by a complaint from a group called Young 
   Advocates for a Fair Education, or YAFFED, headed at the time by a yeshiva 
   graduate who argued his education left him ill-prepared for the world outside 
   of religious studies. YAFFED and other critics argue many so-called ultra-
   Orthodox yeshivas provide little to no secular instruction, particularly for 
   boys, and instead focus on religious studies. Representatives of the schools 
   have pushed back strenuously on those claims.

   The schools are private, but do receive some state funding and, like all 
   private schools in New York, are required to provide children with an 
   education “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools. 
   The investigation kicked off a debate of what exactly substantially 
   equivalent means, prompting the state to develop rules for determining it. 
   

And that's just one city in the US. I am unaware of such reviews in other places (some likely do exist, I just haven't heard about it -- please do jump in if you're aware of similar investigations), but religious schools (of whatever stripe) exist to support their preferred religion above all else.

Public funding (and especially taking funds away from secular public schools) of religious schools is antithetical to the idea of a secular government and society.

[0] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/06/30/new-yor...

Good point with a little nit.

Usually in data science, you "mine" for features or combination of features. That is you collect as much as possible, then actual find the critical features e.g. to construct a random forest/decision tree/ ...

Here they are going as you point out the other way. And the more I study U.S. history (and politics) the more racist I find it.

That’s exactly what I envision. I want thousands of school startups.

Yes, this!

It’s crazy that we spend a decade of a person’s life forcing them to learn a skill that is so completely irrelevant to their lives and yet we ignore skills that could help them from being manipulated or forced into debt slavery.

I need to come up with a better analogy, but it’s like we were still forcing our children to manipulate a cotton gin and know the ins and outs of maintaining and repairing one. I mean, I’m sure it’s interesting and now I want to look up a YouTube video about cotton gins, but do we really need to force this upon everyone? And then we decide that if you didn’t memorize how to change out the plumbus in the cotton gin perfectly then you aren’t allowed to do further study in marine biology.

If I believed in conspiracy theories then I would think that Big Scary Corporations are in cahoots with The Government to keep the public from knowing how not to be manipulated and forcing them to work for low wages for their entire lives. But I don’t believe this because I think the reality is a lot more mundane and stupid. I think it’s just like the story you hear about why your mom learned to cook the ham by cutting off the end and finding out after some investigation that the only reason was because her grandmother had a small pan and we all just tend to continue doing what has sorta kinda worked without thinking about it. But in this case we can’t just make individual decisions to do something different because we’ve decided that the API between secondary school and college is an admissions test that includes certain irrelevant things that we can’t change because of history and the API between college and a job is something completely different.

As far as I can tell you don't need an official transcript from an accredited school to get into college. We are homeschooling our kids and what I've read is that homeschoolers write their own transcript, the kids themselves write it, and they describe what they've accomplished and learned during their schooling career and admission depts in colleges tend to favor these kids over traditionally schooled kids.

I'm guessing that a traditionally schooled kid could just do the same. Especially since there's so much that they are probably learning outside of school. It would be a shame to ignore all of those skills and knowledge just because they weren't taught during the hours of 8 and 3, M-F.