Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM

Years ago, students would take placement exams when they enrolled in the community college. This was great for their education. They would spend a year or two getting to college level english and math.

That program is expensive and apparently made people “feel bad”. The colleges were no longer allowed to require placement tests. Then they were no longer allowed to offer remedial courses (courses that did not count toward a degree) and students went directly into college english and math.

The failure rates are astounding. About 1 in 3 at a large CC.

This issue is trickling up from k-12 being required to “pass” everyone to the colleges with that same pressure.

We need our policy to focus on education achievement rather than number-of-degrees. The incentive is short sighted and the ramifications could result in our local economies declining with ineffective employees, fewer successful businesses, etc.

>So? Name a social intervention that did achieve all its goals.

That's not my argument though? In any case, I believe that many of the ideas that have been proposed (and actually implemented) by proponents of equity aren't just failing to meet their goals, I believe they are actively harmful to them (and to the health of society as a whole).

>Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not particularly persuasive.

Blank slatism in one form or another goes all the way back to the Greeks. In any case, belief in blank slatism is effectively a prerequisite for believing in one of the primary standards used by equity proponents to judge if a system is equitable or not: disparate impact. You can't a priori assume that disparate impact is proof of discrimination unless you also discount inherent differences in human capability and performance.

It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA. You can always get extra help with homework, projects, etc. if you have a better funded support system. Single subject/unit tests in high school are also much more narrow in scope and easier to prepare for. A standardized test on the other hand is so wide in breadth that raw abilities will shine more.

I can find no evidence that California ever tried "banning high school calculus". The chapter in the much-maligned mathematics framework on high school [0] makes no such proposal, and indeed suggests consolidating the prerequisite classes to make it easier to reach calculus without acceleration in middle school:

> An alternative to eighth-grade acceleration would be to adjust the high school curriculum instead, eliminating redundancies in the content of current courses, so that students do not need four courses before Calculus. As enacted, Algebra II tends to repeat a significant amount of the content of Algebra I, and Precalculus repeats content from Algebra II. While recognizing that some repetition of content has value, further analysis should be conducted to evaluate how high school course pathways may be redesigned to create more streamlined pathways that allow students to take three years of middle school foundations and still reach advanced mathematics courses such as calculus.

Nor can I find any evidence that they "reject the idea that some kids are more talented at somethings than other kids". Instead, their FAQ [1] includes:

> All students deserve powerful mathematics instruction. High-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated.

> All students, regardless of background, language of origin, learning differences, or foundational knowledge are capable and deserving of depth of understanding and engagement in rich mathematics tasks.

This is not remotely the same as the silly framing of "if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination". It's about not giving up on students who are undeserved by mathematics education as it is currently constituted.

I myself have mixed feelings on "de-tracking" mathematics courses. I benefited from accelerated math classes and would have been bored to tears if forced to take classes at the standard pace. But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding. It's a thorny problem. But this comment adopts the framing of right-wing propaganda rather than the actual contents of the framework.

[0] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathframeworkch8.p... [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp

Because there is such good precedents that providing unlimited resources to troubled areas actually fix problems.