California Discourages Schools from Offering Advanced Middle School Math (2023)

"reducing achievement gaps between demographic group" come on now. As long as budgets aren't being cut for normal or extra class for struggling students in order to have advance classes this is bad policy.

The article also sites that those that want to take Calc as seniors would need to double up or take summer classes. This means that if you're gifted you also need to have parents that can support summer school. When in reality kids should have summers to be kids.

I took Calc 2 junior year of High School, the class size was maybe 6 people. Graduating class was 100~.

Gifted kids with parents of means will just hire tutors or elect to do college classes sooner.

> However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

It's worse than that—if public schools don't offer the kinds of advanced courses that wealthy parents expect their kids to have, the wealthy parents don't just shrug and say oh well. They pull them out of public school and put them into private school or homeschool or get them a tutor. It doesn't matter why a public school is inadequate (whether it's because of policy like this or simple underfunding), inadequate public schools invariably increase achievement gaps between socioeconomic classes. There's no other possible outcome. There's no world where everyone gets held down equally.

... Are the biases of Reason not familiar to the HN crowd? It doesn't seem like disclaimers like this are treated as necessary for most other partisan publications.

If you're aware of facts that undermine the argument being made here, or have good reason (heh) as to why their argument is not well supported in this case, it would be better to present those things explicitly.

That seems to be often the pitfall with socialism-within-capitalism as often done in California imo - many of these socialist-ish policies only work if there's no easy "escape hatch" or it's at least uncommon. But not having access to private alternatives also often goes against free-market ideas.

Afaict, the wealthy and/or well-connected often "drive" the quality of public services - they're not going to insist on improvement if they can easily check out and pay for a private alternative.

I'm not saying to stop private alternatives, just that policies that might work other places probably don't work 1:1 in the US.

Race gaps are a societal atrocity and a national embarrassment. It is the enduring humiliation of a society that yearns to displace itself from its history.

Mandating equality by removing opportunity only obscures the metrics. This is a hack to avoid accountability--if there's no data showing inequality then surely there is no inequality.