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

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#581

Post by tootie » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

marcusverus wrote: post #547

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.

In my opinion, much of this comes down to blind empathy. Folks are more worried about hurting people’s feelings than about their life outcomes. They would rather “lean in” and embrace the huge rise in single parent households than push back, even with the knowledge that these social changes have resulted in millions of children living in poverty who otherwise would not have! It’s absolutely bananas.

What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like? Christian fundamentalism? Think about this from a perspective of getting positive outcomes from the actual world that exists. Divorce happens. Unplanned pregnancy happens. Family planning is being actively dismantled by the same people who are pushing for increased privatization of schooling and decreases in social safety nets. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I think being overly sympathetic is infinitely preferable to merciless cynicism. Removing poverty is also much more preferable than, what?, making it harder to divorce? We could probably makes huge strides in education outcomes by adopting universal healthcare and free school lunches so single parents aren't so burdened.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#582

Post by rhaway84773 » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #519

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I know it’s vogue to ridicule DEI programs, but the reality is that as the blog post points out, these measures achieve the opposite of DEI (all 3 letters of those).

Even standardized tests. There is already evidence that standardized tests reduce equality. Which is not surprising at all because standardized tests are the one part of a college application that someone can excel at purely with concentrated hard work over a relatively short period of time.

An underprivileged kid motivated to go to a good college cannot make up for poor grades earned from K-8 when they barely had the ability to plan a day in the future, and so was driven to do whatever their friends were doing. And then that set them up behind the 8 ball in many ways from 9-12 as well.

Finally, real DEI requires listening to actual underprivileged people. The vast majority of underprivileged parents will not respond to data showing that their kids are underperforming by saying “make sure no one can do this”. They will respond by demanding the schools provide more resources so their kids can excel.

The OP wonders how Cambridge, Mass and CA are making such changes. But it’s not surprising at all because these decisions are being driven largely by upper middle class educated people who absolutely cannot relate to the under privileged people they claim they’re helping.

And this is an implementation of the worst of privilege. Making decisions for the underprivileged by the privileged without ever asking the supposed beneficiaries what will actually help them.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#583

Post by WillPostForFood » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

cauch wrote: post #453

WillPostForFood wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be misunderstanding the system. In California, you had standard track math, and advanced or accelerated track. This measure gets rids of advanced/accelerated, and forces everyone into standard. Without the measure you have 5s and 10s separated, with the measure, you have 5s and 10s together. But as the parent post points out, 10s either dominate the class, leave the class, or ignore the class and ta…

Thank you for bringing my attention to that. Looking closer, I'm even more confused: it was never question to drop "advanced math", but to replace "advanced algebra" by "advanced data science mathematics". The program was even claiming (maybe incorrectly, but it's not the point) that they wanted to replace the boring memorization of formula by real life problems more challenging for students. So, I'm now not even sur…

It is not a moral panic, it is legitimate dumbing down of the math curriculum.

You have to look further back. They are blocking middle schoolers from taking Algebra. That means they won't haven't progressed enough to get to Calculus unless they skip ahead a grade level of math, either via summer school, or other outside study.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#584

Post by gnicholas » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:16 PM UTC

hospitalJail wrote: post #531

gnicholas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get remote tutors to teach your kid skills, yes. However, if your goal is to have your kid advance to higher math classes, it isn't enough to just know the skills. Schools erect extreme barriers to advancement (Palo Alto USD has been successfully sued on this point [1]), so what students really need is to enroll in outside courses that are certified replacements in order to get credit. Finding out about which…

Go straight to college. I had a somewhat similar issue in high school and 1 summer class got me more advanced than anyone else, I was able to duel enroll after that.

Dual enroll meaning take classes at a nearby college while going to high school? Do HSs let you take just part of their curriculum? Did you go to that college full time later on, or just for a couple years and then apply to regular 4-year colleges?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#585

Post by cauch » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:17 PM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #559

cauch wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whic…

it's actually not that complicated, just look at what other schools in the country do, or what these did before the change then, with that data, you will know to replace "terribly fast" with the original "slow", and can try to make your proposal not depend purely on the semantics of inaccurately renaming "slow" to "terribly fast" remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum t…

> it's actually not that complicated, just look at what other schools in the country do, or what these did before the change

Except that you have not done that. Where are your data? Did you make sure that the group you compared are representative to each other? How do you correct for all the differences in state (unemployment level, diversity in education, political orientation, level of rurality, ...) that all have an effect? ...

So, no, it is objectively pretty complicated. You should have taken advanced data science, you would understand better that just comparing 2 states is very very naive to draw conclusions.

> remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum the normal one, when the normal one is the one they had before these changes, the one which reflected the norm (hence the name) in the US

In fact, I was not the one who started: the measure that is in question in the article has been proposed because people have done a study (a real one, comparing the numbers, you know, the thing that you say one should do before saying if it is slow or not but that you did not do) and concluded that there was a problem.

The document is 1000 pages long, of course it covers the elements that support their proposal (and you should agree with that as you say it's not complicated). These elements were themselves critized (maybe correctly), so it is funny to see that sometimes the argument is "their base study is badly done" and sometimes it is "I claim that I know what is 'slow' or not, without study, which is fine because if someone says it's not, they have just renamed without study"

If a team came up and say "we had a look and concluded that we should replace algebra by data science" and you just say "naaah, I have ZERO study on the subject, but I want to believe that algebra is fine", when someone says "but the point is that algebra is not fine", you cannot say "you haven't done a study": YOU are the one who pretend that the measure is not supported by the data, while you are the one having not looked at the data.

(and don't get me wrong, it does not mean that the study done by the people who proposed these measures is perfect or even correct. On the opposite: such study is difficult. If you now claim their study is invalid, it just show that 1) it is true it's complicated, 2) you don't care about the reality as you didn't even consider that they may have been backed by a study, you just assumed there was none because it was more convenient for you)

> also, the last paragraph of your post presents a false dichotomy: creating a new class doesn't require cancelling advanced algebra (advanced advanced algebra?)

What are you talking about: I'm not saying they had to remove advanced algebra in order to introduce advance data science, I'm saying they decided to replace something that they think is not challenging, engaging and useful enough by something more challenging, more engaging and more useful.

And if you think "aaaah, it's awful because before there was algebra and now there is no algebra, so it tortures the poor students who like algebra", why were you not crying about the poor students who like data science that was "canceled" before this proposal.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#586

Post by s1artibartfast » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:18 PM UTC

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #551

cmh89 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

It goes back much further than that, literally to the founding of the country. Our constitution has provisions specifically protecting the slave trade. The way we elect our president was designed specifically to give slave owners more power. Racism is an integral part of US history and always has been. You literally cannot make sense of US history without it.

Slavery goes back a lot further than the founding of the US, and is important context for broad swaths of History.

Regarding the election of the president, I assume you're talking about the 3/5 compromise. I think this had the opposite impact of what you're claiming.

It gave white male voters in the south less power. Representation based on total human population would have given them more.

If you were voting white male in the North, your representation was based on the total population of your state, including those that cant vote, i.e. women and children.

In the south, your total population for the purposes of proportional representation was reduced lower than the total human population of your state

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#587

Post by jimmydddd » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:22 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #391

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

I'm not sure it will — there are still plenty of schools elsewhere that offer advanced coursework, and their graduates can more than fill the freshman class of elite colleges. For example, I grew up in Sacramento, and our public schools had a tracked program from 2nd grade. Pretty much all of us took algebra/geometry in middle school, and those who were advanced were taking precalc or calc by 9th grade. It has been a…

I think this is exactly the type of program they're trying to get rid of because it caused a disparity of outcomes of students at graduation.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#588

Post by guidoism » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:25 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #549

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.

> College level science and engineering education doesn’t make sense without a understanding of at least basic calculus. That doesn't actually mean that you need to cover calculus in high school. The calculus needed for the first year of college science and engineering can be easily taught early in the first year in the classes that need it. That's how it worked at Caltech when I was a student (late '70s and early '8…

I’m curious as to how calculus is used in those fields. I got a degree in CS and we had to take a bunch of calculus classes but never used it in any of our CS classes and in my 20+ years of programming jobs I’ve never had to use it. Any time in my professional career that I needed math I didn’t know I learned just enough of it to solve my problem and promptly forgot it. I absolutely could not tell you how to mechanically do stuff to derivatives and integrals.

This question is relevant to me because we are deciding what to teach our kids and I haven’t yet been able to come up with a good argument for why to spend time gaining the skill of pen and paper mechanical calculus algorithms.

Are there professional scientists or engineers out there that do calculus on paper?

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#589

Post by rainsford » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:26 PM UTC

nancyhn wrote: post #529

btilly wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can someone explain how DEI programs got so embeded despite being flagrantly regressive?

It only seems inexplicable if you accept as reality the most extreme characterization of DEI programs, which personally I believe should be a tip-off that such a characterization might not be entirely accurate. The more ridiculous programs naturally get the most attention, regardless of how representative they are, and DEI programs as a whole are further strawmanned by politicians and pundits looking to trigger your outrage. The discourse thoroughly ignores all the programs working on DEI as a topic in ways most reasonable people would probably be OK with.

As an example right in this thread, the grandparent comment talks about the Dallas schools looking at the issue of children unevenly taking advantage of advanced courses and coming up with a solution that helped expand access across the board. This absolutely would qualify as a DEI program (they even used the equity trigger word), but did not do anything I would think many people would find objectionable.

Re: Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity

#590

Post by vladgur » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

kiba wrote: post #246

vladgur wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public education system is definitely a positive thing that most of us will pay taxes for. However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future. My son is currently is in publi…

However when public education is not guided by improving meaningful outcomes, but by ideologues, it needs to be checked. Vouchers sounds like a good way to insert some market dynamics and to allow parents to walk away from schools that are on the path to fail to prepare their kids for the future. As opposed to parental ideologues? By letting parents choose, we'll be letting them go to different schools championing di…

Ultimately, it is your right as a parent to decide what values you want your minor children to be taught.

What is an alternative? Forbidding parents to pull their kids from schools that are ruining their future by following a system with historically worse outcomes?

Most importantly, original articles here provide data that show that teaching math the way CA is trying to do has led to worse outcomes across the ethnic spectrum(unless of course parents had a financial ability to complement with private school/lessons).