This stuff seems so cartoonishly bad that I feel like I'm missing something. But I've been unable to find the progressive arguments. We need popular progressive bloggers to explain the other side.
Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
191–200 of 816 posts
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#192> It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. I think it's worth it in this case. You have to be an absolute moron or someone with a sinister agenda to think that decreasing the standard helps the community in any way. Especially idiotic to call this "progressive".
>someone with a sinister agenda
If I were a country trying to subtly sabotage the future growth of another country, I would target the educational systems. Not to say that is that case with what is going on here, Hanlon's razor and all that. But it does make you think.
Either way, I worry for what the future will be like with current educational policies.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#193Just get rid of GPAs and grading altogether. If a kid wants to learn algebra, support them. Why does everything have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator?
I have a thought that GPA as KPI are for teachers and schools, not kids.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#194Stuff 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…
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You should not make that point. Society works much better if you accept the wierd beliefs of as many people as you can. Fight againt cannibalism (does any of that even exist anymore?), but be very careful about even that.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#195Is there anyone out there who disagrees with this? I have not seen a single person (aside from the few people actually implementing these changes) that agrees with it.
It's a complete straw man argument. Nobody believes that it's better to dumb down education, but that's not what's happening here. Very specifically, they are replacing middle school algebra with a data sciences class. The idea is that the data science stuff would be more practical and get people interested in math more than algebra, which is a more abstract. It doesn't sound completely crazy to me.
Read the linked article from last week. Data science as implemented in this program is probably not what you think.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/california-needs-real-math-edu...
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Private schools are mostly quite bad and worse than typical public schools. A few outliers distort the general picture.
Multiple decades of studies produced by the NAEP directly refute your argument. I would reference the confirming NAIS studies as well but they've got some self-interest in those results.
I was curious and only found:
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a...
the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Private schooling is already on average cheaper than public schools in primary education at the dollars spent per child level. The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed fre…
Private schools are mostly quite bad and worse than typical public schools. A few outliers distort the general picture.
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.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#198It'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…
Spending more doesn't seem to help. California is the best funded but worst grades.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#199Stuff 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…
There's the theory that, by forcing the kids with the most engaged parents to go to schools with the kids of less engaged parents, the engaged parents will drive school districts to implement good educational policies. In reality, though, that doesn't seem to have worked. School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents wi…
Wow you hit the nail right on the head.
That's exactly what's happened at our board level. The PTA of the school itself is the involved parents, and the schoolboard has the utmost contempt for them!
None of the involved parents are willing to put in the effort or have the desire to be elected to the schoolboard though.
Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if you could fix the system, it would have been fixed by now. If you have a kid today, you have 5-6 years to fix the system before it starts failing them. Your kid will be grown before any meaningful change is made, and any harms caused by the current system will be fully baked in. If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people. Public education doe…
Actually, public education has to mean public schools. Vouchers are a band-aid invented by right-wing nutjobs to allow religious schools to be funded by public money; they do this by taking money away from secular public schools. If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools, not break them further.
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