It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. I suspect part of it is driven by the fact that it's cheaper and easier to meet metrics and/or look "socially engaged" by blocking students (when appropriate) from advancing. US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping. (https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm)
On an anecdotal basis, I went to an elite university in the US (mostly based on luck I think because I was a mediocre student) and there was an implicit expectation was that students seriously pursuing STEM would be starting their curriculum with multivariable calc or linear algebra as a freshmen since the single variable calc requirement would have been knocked out AP/IB credits. I've seen many of my international cohorts going even beyond. I genuinely worry that school systems such as SFUSD is doing a great disservice to its students and the society.
**DISCLAIMER: The numbers don't add up, someone's numbers are wrong see Jesson's child comment
>US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping.
This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]:
- Asian (556)
- White (531)
- Hispanic (481)
- Black (448)
- Mixed Race (501)
Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten.
The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide.
Yes I’ve seen these statistics a number of times and it really goes against so much of the “lol Americans are bad at math” meme all over the internet.
America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too fine grained to reduce it to generalities (with a few exceptions such as heavily nationally influenced/consistent things like health care insurance, defence spending, Wall St/banking policies, etc).
Some people try to minimize it all to “class” like they found some Pandora’s box for all of life’s problems but that’s just as often flawed as any other generalization.
Those numbers doesn't add up, USA average was 478, how could whites that are a majority score all the way up at 531? There aren't enough black people to drag 531 down to 478, and only black people are below average here.
Edit: Yes, look at page 34 in that report, it says that white kids scored 25 higher than average, so 503. Where did you get those numbers from, those are wrong.
Does anyone else feel weird about comparisons that match a subgroup of people in the US against whole continents? Why is it normal to smash all the countries of a continent into one? What “asian” or “European” student is making it into these standards? The ones with money to come to the US and be surveyed?
>Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole.
Wait, what? That is exactly what it means. If the groups that are least likely to get external support (ie a tutor, prep, whatever) are under-performing that implies the _standalone_ system is broken. Sure, it is not so broken that it can't be patched with outside aid, but that is true of many things we consider "a failure."
This is akin to saying "Of course my car can get across the country. All I need is the occasional tow-truck, you know, for when it overheats."
Controlling for race is stupid and is the source of many of our problems. One should control for socioeconomic factors instead such as family income, whether both parents present, parents’ education.
"The system is only failing black and hispanic students. "
Black students of African heritage, unless the group is very specifically selected (Nigerian-Americans come to mind, with their extremely high average education levels), tend to come out on the bottom in all racially mixed societies in the world. Even the Finnish educational system, touted as one of the best in the world, struggles to educate Somali immigrants to Finnish levels.
The very opposite tends to be true about East Asians and Ashkenazi Jewish students. I am not aware of a single educational system worldwide where either of those groups would be considered under-achieving and needing government or private help.
The standard American answer is that the root cause is systemic racism. I don't believe that; the phenomenon is too widespread and there are other ethnicities that face vicious open racism in their countries, while being extremely successful. Some of the most successful groups in the world are actually direct survivors of genocidal campaigns or lost wars; all that murder didn't break them.
The upper segment of the US compares favorably to the average of EU. That doesn’t sound fair. Most EU countries have went through massive immigrant shifts in the last three decades. Like for like comparison would exclude the second and third generation immigrants as well for the EU. (I actually don’t think this is a worthwhile comparison. Just point out a flawed reasoning.)
We do a disservice to students in the US by treating Algebra/Calc as advanced math. Typically, American schools judge student math aptitude prior to algebra based on rote memorization of multiplication tables. Potentially with the added benefit of more rote memorization problems if one is in the honors curriculum. Aptitude for this type of problem does not directly translate into aptitude for higher math.
There is nothing particularly advanced about Algebra or Calculus. At most, it's a question of how much time one is willing and able to put into the subject. The fact that most American students do not exit high school with a functional knowledge of single variable calculus is purely an artifact of our curriculum priorities.
I was pretty annoyed when I got to university and figured out that math could be about proofs rather than calculation. If I had been raised with that idea of math, I would have loved it so much sooner and would probably be pretty good at it by now.
A college math professor who taught calculus told me that on the first day of class he gave students a quiz on basic arithmetic. The questions were easy enough that most students could score 100%. But he found that the speed with which students completed the quiz was a reliable predictor of their final course grade. Rote memorization of basic concepts does have some value in reducing the mental load and making it easier to focus on more complex concepts.
As a practical matter though, I think that most people working in STEM fields — including engineers — would benefit more from learning statistics instead of calculus.
Yes, this. I knew how to do derivatives in 8th grade, came to the US in 10th grade and took AP Calculus because I was more than ready for it. I took differential equations at a community college in 11th grade, multivariable calculus in 12th.
Some school admins went nuts about letting a student take calculus in 10th grade because they didn't think it was doable. But I tested out of everything else. I was the first person in the history of the school to do this, only because I came from internationally having completed a trig course in 9th grade. In the US they wouldn't have allowed that in the first place, but here I was, having already done it, because I was given the opportunity outside the US.
I never saw myself having any special learning abilities, I was just moving onto the next thing to learn. I'm not any sort of prodigy, I just hated team sports and liked science and math, and spent lots of my extracurricular time learning about it.* I only moved faster in math because I put so many hours into studying it outside of school, not because I had any innate talent for it. It also made it more fun, because by learning ahead of class, I was learning for myself with much less pressure than learning for some stupid exam.
This "no child left behind" stuff is pure nonsense in the way they are implementing it.
*You see, I was previously growing up in Asia, where STEM is what the "cool kids" do.
I disagree that Calculus is not hard. Integration and differentiation on certain elementary functions, sure. Once you go beyond you can't mechanistically manipulate symbols anymore. The foundation of limits, too, properly treated requires quite a bit of foundational and proof machinery as well. So now you need to talk about how first-order logic is related to mathematics.
I agree with you on this point, especially the part about rote memorization. I feel like when you get exposed to calculus for the first time, you're almost expected to accept the definitions for what they are (central limit theorem, etc) without really understanding where it's coming from. 3Blue1Brown's videos, fwiw, seem to do better at explaining the core concepts.
On a tangent, I also feel like college math curriculum kinda don't make sense sometimes because you're hit with more computational heavy classes like calc and stats courses and then they break everything down and rebuild you with proof-based and analysis course at the beginning of your junior year.
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up.
It's not that surprising, though, given that they've admitted their goal is equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. That's the only way to achieve the former.
What is "absolutely mind-boggling" is that there are parents who voluntarily send their kids to a school that openly admits it wants to dumb kids down to the lowest common denominator yet claim they care about their kids.
If you know that the school's focus isn't on providing the best education possible to your kids, pull them out of that school immediately. If it is a public school (as it is in this case), complain to the school board, vote them out of office if they don't listen and support local efforts to expand school choice to rescue as many kids as possible from that failing public school system that has proven itself incapable of performing its primary function. Even if you get the school board to reverse insane decisions like banning algebra from middle schools, I still wouldn't trust any school system that would even consider doing such things to properly educate kids. I think it beyond a reasonable doubt that the dysfunction in the SF school district is much deeper than just this algebra ban.
For a long time, schools have been trying to eliminate testing. The reason is simple - with no tests, how can anyone argue that the schools aren't doing a great job teaching?
Schooling is compulsory and parents don't have a whole lot of options. This kind of political idiocy is one of the strongest Arguments for school vouchers
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them
It’s not “mind boggling” if you do a deep dive into the “ethnic studies” curricula that so many teachers and administrators are graduating from these days. It’s a completely parallel value system complete with revisionist history. It’s like the Wahhabist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
> administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up
It's truly disheartening to see the San Francisco school district's actions resemble something straight out of Orwell's 1984. As someone who has lived in this city for years, it's painful to witness the gradual decline and the rise of corruption overshadowing the progressive spirit that once defined it. Instead of addressing the root cause of poor math education, the district has opted for obfuscation and dishonesty.
It's a classic case of doublethink, where they attempt to hold two contradictory beliefs: that they're doing what's best for the students while simultaneously suppressing their educational growth. Much like the Party in 1984, they seem to prioritize maintaining a facade over genuinely improving education. I wish we could challenge this dystopian approach and hope to meaningfully improve the situation, but at this point, I am not even sure how one would go about doing that.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. ...
Not surprising. This kind of moronism has been happening in India for nearly 100 years.
And look at that society: it's a sub-saharan "shit-hole" that has ruined its own future because of its borrowed obsession with "social justice" (and the political vermin that exploit them); which thinks squeezing out its best talent who then achieve wonderful things outside is something to be "proud" of.
There is enough reason to hate British colonialism, but it is under them that Indians bagged the first Nobel Prizes in Asia. Now, even those universities that produced them are being destroyed due to idiotic tribal dogfighting. Worse, unlike the US case, all this caste-propaganda doesn't even have much historical evidence to begin with!
The problem is that there is absolutely no policy that could be implemented that would bring black students to the performance levels of Asian students. So they have to stop letting the Asian students perform.
Oh, there definitely is. Pay the teachers bonuses based on how many of their students achieve at grade level.
I propose this often, and it inspires massive pushback every time.
Just give the teachers a $1,000 bonus for every such kid. Give the teachers a free hand in how to go about it. It'll be the cheapest and most effective boost to education you've ever seen.
Of course there is, just as there was a way for poor rural kids in China to go to the top universities: have public schools offer excellent educations. Pay teachers to offer after-school programs. Pay teachers to give challenging course work. Pay teacher to give timely and frequent feedbacks. It's not about leaving no kids behind, as some kids are simply not good at academics. It's about giving the brights kids, no matter where they come from, a chance to succeed.
BTW, there's nothing secret about Asian students' performance. It's just that even the poor families would know to pool the limited resources to educate their kids.
Administrators are just doing what people in SF vote for - this idea and implementation of equity has been rolled into the set of positions one adopts as a progressive in CA, which is the only position to take unless you want to be socially ostracized. The ones who don't move away absolutely know they're sacrificing their kids. It's more popular though among this set to just skip having kids in the first place. Or to pay for private school, skip the consequences of this terrible idea, and let the people who can't afford that deal with them. I had my first of 4 kids at St. Lukes in the mission, but we moved out of the city before he was even a year old because of the schools.
I have been calling this behavior out for almost a decade, and all I got for it was being labeled a conservative. People are extremely close minded, and completely blind to what is happening.
I really wish we could all move on from the conservative/liberal false dichotomy. I'm neither (or both), and so is nearly everyone else I know.
I think we need something better than winner-takes-all for all elected positions, because it forces you to pick 'the lesser of two evils', knowing that a vote for the person you like the most is really just a 'protest vote'
Equity is literally about pushing everybody down to the lowest level. Are there any examples where that has not been the outcome? Some advocate it out of ignorance, some out of malice. The result is the same, everybody is worse off.
Easily? It's not like you're born with math predisposition. It has everything to do with culture. Asian parents push their kids to greatness. Some other groups do not.
All of this behavior makes perfect sense once you accept they are malicious. Halons razer is not paramount, sometimes it really is malice.
Science is about creating theory that has predictive power, and the malice hypothesis in my experience has predicted future outcomes far better than stupidity.
That isn't even an elite school thing. That's an any school in the top 100 engineering/math/physics/CompSci thing. Mine was ~50ish and the vast majority of people in the program had at least one semesters worth of AP Calculus credits. Linear algebra was a first or second semester course if you followed the default recommended degree plan. That was only about 10 years ago, and other schools I considered all had similar looking degree plans.
I'm inclined to think the concern (that we will run out of supply of people that can do math or something) is overblown. There are plenty of underemployed engineering and science students that took more advanced mathematics classes than the CS kids.
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down
That is simply socialism 101 as portrayed in Rush' "The Trees":
There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas
The trouble with the maples
And they're quite convinced they're right
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade?
There is trouble in the forest
And the creatures all have fled
As the maples scream, "oppression"
And the oaks just shake their heads
So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
"The oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light"
Now there's no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet
Axe
And saw
AP calc is basically useless. I took all the math classes in high school and memorized all the formulas but nobody taught me how to use the math to solve problems. You know word problems.
Well now with deep learning I can apply the chain rule. None of those classes prepared me to be a math major or how to do proofs. It’d be better if we taught kids how to model problems and apply the tools.
I think statistics is a better subject to learn early and often. Way more useful across disciplines.
Anyway I think we know that high performing math countries teach math totally different than we do and they produce way better engineers, so why don’t we do what they do?
I mean seriously I work in tech and all the engineers are foreign educated.
Equal outcomes is a fine goal, and this is a terrible example of a good way to achieve it. It may be the quickest/easiest way (maybe even the only way given the levers they have control over), but that doesn't make it good.
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up.
Do you actually mean "pushing them up", or is this code for "filter out underperformers"?
This goes to the root of the issue. What is the whole point of a school? Is it to help students learn and improve? Or is it to serve as a series of challenges to eliminate and filter out people based on arbitrary people?
If the goal is to lift up people, you need to pick them up from down where they are at.
Isn't it the poor but talent kids who got hurt? Family with means will simply send their kids to private tutors or good after schools. What's really mind boggling is that the constituents in the SF school district were okay with these garbage administrators.
This is absolutely ludicrous, unethical, and borderline criminal.
I took algebra I in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. That allowed me to take geometry in 7th grade, algebra II trig in 8th grade, pre-calc in 9th grade, AP calculus in 10th grade and then IB high math in 11th and 12th grade.
I credit my public, magnet school with giving me a huge leg up in life. All of my peers were middle class, yet a focus on lifting us up, accelerating our education, and challenging us helped me become the successful person I am today.
In contrast, my life almost took a severely different and worse path in elementary school when I was sent to the principal's office often in kindergarten and second grade for distracting the class and causing disturbances.
Thankfully my first grade teacher realized the root cause -- I had already learned the material quickly and was bored and thus distracting others. So she gave me more advanced novels and books to keep me stimulated and learning. If instead I would have had a teacher force me to slow down to the rest of the class, I likely would have ended up suspended and a delinquent.
This holding everyone to the slowest standard in the name of equity is actually very inequitable. It forces children with ADHD like myself to end up as failures instead of recognizing neurodiversity and helping each child succeed in the manner best for him or her.
> This holding everyone to the slowest standard in the name of equity is actually very inequitable.
Math in particular is a subject where there can be such a wide divergence in age where each kid is ready to absorb topics. Having a rigid schedule where topic X is taught in grade N is always going to hurt those who are capable of moving forward faster and hurt those who need more time/maturity to get there (but may well be excellent at algebra/calculus/etc if allowed to take it when ready, not sooner).
I like the schools where kids are allowed to progress through math at their pace, faster or slower, instead of being grouped by class level. Unfortunately that basically means private schools with such an approach, I haven't found any public school in the area (California) that support this.
Mountain View Los Altos High School District takes the opposite approach of Palo Alto Unified School District. There is no test to get into a particular math class. You can sign up for whatever class you want in whatever grade you want. Similarly, the elementary schools provide differentiated learning. Which private schools do this in California? I know Khan Lab School does, but watching presentations from its students didn't give me much confidence in its approach.
As far as I know, there is no proven way to improve equality in a school system. Even in Norway, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world, the students from poor/less educated families still underperform [1]:
>Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. Achievement gaps by parental income, but not by parental education, increased over the time period, underscoring the different ways these two socioeconomic status components relate to achievement and the potential for policy to alter gaps.
Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like. Plomin for example claims that from twin studies a large part of educational attainment is heritable. I suspect the current school system will burn itself down before admitting that, however.
And also being poor dumbs you down real hard. When you have to worry about your food and don’t have steady sources of mood uplift, when your existence is just daily peppered by stress, your brain goes into power saving survival mode, not allowing you the luxury of deep perception, introspection or longer attention span, and most importantly, curiosity. By stress I mean such mundane things like your parents (or much more often your now single parent) being seemingly unhappy, or wearing the same old clothes and not being able to buy new ones. Why trying to learn anything if it’s just another chore in a life that sucks?
> Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like.
In studies like the Norway study you cite this could be controlled for by adoptions. Though adoptees, of course, come with their own non-genetic baggage.
I would hope that, at the very least, IQ testing would be performed to try to match based on that.
>As far as I know, there is no proven way to improve equality in a school system.
What the remainder of your post argues is that there is no way to achieve complete equality in a school system.
But we need to be clear about what that means. Most people believe that success should be rewarded somehow. It's relatively uncommon even among socialists to argue that there should be no inequality of overall consumption opportunity. Most parents want to help their children succeed. It should naturally follow that the parents who have more resources will have more successful children. It would require a massive and likely endless society-scale project to counteract the combined parenting efforts of the whole professional class in order to achieve the questionable goal of literally equal opportunity, genetics notwithstanding. Even the Soviet Union had the nomenklatura.
The real goal should be to understand the process of education and remove all actual structural barriers while providing support to the disadvantaged in ways that are reasonably understood to be effective. Obsessing over romantic ideals that seem attractive from 10000 feet is not the way.
> We show that class attainment is strongly influenced by genetics. Shared environmental factors play a modest role. Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics.
did you read that paper? it is absolutely terrible, the method section is a mess, the statistics are probably wrong, and there is very little actual natural science behind this.
Another "social studies" pre-determined study, hopefully wont make it past review
"American IQ Test Scores Show Recent Declines, According To New Study" [1]
>American IQ test scores have dropped during a recent 13-year period, a remarkable finding that runs counter to the well-established trend of increasing IQ scores throughout much of the 20th century.
>The study found evidence of a reverse “Flynn effect” in a large U.S. sample of almost 400,000 individuals tested between 2006 and 2018 in several ability areas. The Flynn effect refers to the well-replicated finding that IQ scores increased consistently through much of the 20th century, with increases ranging from three to five IQ points per decade.
Public school is no longer enough, and I don’t see it improving in the short term.
I think the only practical solution is widely-known resources and alternative curricula for low-income families so that they too can get a decent education. Hopefully people are working on these, because otherwise these smart low-income kids are wasting their potential. And when kids apply to college they need a usable metric to be compared, which their “official” high-school transcripts are not, so otherwise admission is just upper-income or lottery.
An upside to over-lenient grading, at least students can half-ass “school” while they take these alternative classes that are actually teaching them.
As tantalizing as it may be to be the one eyed king in the world of the blind I assure you that you'd rather live in a world where everyone has two eyes.
I support public education for many reasons, but one of the more selfish reasons is so that I have interesting people to talk to in life. Talking with miseducated, or uneducated dumbasses is one of the most soul crushing things I experience on a semi-frequent basis.
Being able to give your children a world where everyone is intelligent, articulate, and emotionally stable is a priceless gift, and quality public education is a key part of that.
Sadly many people think of society as more of a competition than a collaboration. Of course it's both, but I certainly find myself happier when focusing on the gains we get from rising all boats instead of the gains I get from kicking the people climbing the ladder up after me.
> I think the only practical solution is widely-known resources and alternative curricula for low-income families so that they too can get a decent education.
And the middle class end up fucked. Too rich to get extra help. Too poor to afford private. Like walking in the middle of the road... splat.
I should've said "free resources". Limited programs and stipends wouldn't even benefit all low-income anyways: some parents are really hard-to-reach, and some parents don't apply for things and the kid has to take the initiative themselves.
This creates its own issues, like public schools not sending misbehaving kids to specially-designed schools, and public schools losing money because students are sent to charter and private schools instead. And the private schools still require more money than the tax dollars provide. Furthermore, issues arise when the public schools suck and charter/private schools are the only decent options: these schools can be openly religious, skip over parts of the standard curriculum, and get to pick and choose who gets admitted.
Though, I don't even think giving all the tax money to public schools will help them at this point...
About 20 years ago, my public middle school tried to teach this new-fangled thing called “connected math“ that was conceptual and without notation or symbols, so I didn’t start learning real algebra until 9th grade when I went to private school. I was a year or more behind the rest of my peers (and in fact, my school had to open up a special section for me and one other person (!) to teach us algebra) and I constantly felt embarrassed. In college I went on to do well at linear alg and learned enough to hand wave my way through abstract alg so I ended up enjoying myself, but I’ve always felt resentful about being so far behind my peers and feeling like I needed to work harder than them. To this day I feel like I’m still playing catch up.
Hearing about kids being set back in math makes me very personally angry because I always felt that my college CS studies would have been so much easier had I been equipped with the proper math fundamentals. This shit takes a long time to train and you really can do powerful things with it.
Playing the contrarian, I'm ambivalent about 8th grade algebra. I tend to consider "school math" to be a distinct branch of math unto itself. Nobody knows why we teach it, except that it's a sorting hat for certain college majors. The purpose of each class is to prepare you for the next class.
Most of the people I know who have STEM degrees don't use their college math. The math that they need is programmed into their CAD terminals. The ones who still use math in their jobs, somehow got interested in math, in spite of school math.
Turning math into a competition sucked the soul out of it. Both of my kids got 8th grade math, and top ACT/SAT scores. My daughter skipped pre-calculus with no ill effect. Both are interested in math, but have no interest in taking more math classes.
I breezed through school math, through college and grad school. Whoop-de-doo. Two things made math come alive for me: Proofs, and computers. But proofs are nearly gone from the school math curriculum, and the schools still haven't embraced computers.
I'd actually like to see a refactoring of school math, loosely into 4 disciplines, that are introduced in a cycle, perhaps even starting in 1st grade:
1. Arithmetic -- manual symbol manipulation, up to and including calculus.
2. Computation -- use of computers to explore and solve math problems.
3. Working with data -- self explanatory.
4. Theory -- things like sets, proofs, etc.
I believe this would actually be more representative of how people actually use math in their lives. Many people will use computation and data, even if they struggle through arithmetic and develop no interest in theory. On the other hand, full exposure to all of the disciplines would adequately prepare someone for academic math study.
I don't believe in banning anything. Some kids need to be allowed to get "ahead" so they don't get bored and lose interest, or simply because solving those school math problems can be a fun escape -- as it was for me -- from an otherwise stressful adolescence.
I like the approach, but I wouldn't say it's "more representative of how people actually use math in their lives".
I work in STEM and don't think I've every needed the "Theory" category.
Any kind of computation beyond a calculator is beyond what most people use, and involves half a Computer Science degree.
Working with data is nice and probably somewhat useful to white collar people, but most of them are going to use a half dozen Excel commands to get there. Most people don't really have a use for learning R or anything like that.
Arithmetic is basically the only thing most people are going to use, and even calculus is beyond what most people actually use. Single variable algebra is about the extent of what's useful to the vast majority of people.
I'm doubtful any extension of math classes is going to go well. People forget the things they don't use, and the swaths of adults that only remember simple arithmetic and basic algebra are telling a story that the rest isn't useful.
San Francisco is a parody of itself but this is not specific to it. There is a concerted effort in California to dumb down math standards under spurious claims of advancing “equity”. Needless to say, the only people who benefit are the kids of parents rich enough to send them to private school, who will now face less competition from bright but poor Asian kids who were served by institutions like Lowell High School.
Readit News
On an anecdotal basis, I went to an elite university in the US (mostly based on luck I think because I was a mediocre student) and there was an implicit expectation was that students seriously pursuing STEM would be starting their curriculum with multivariable calc or linear algebra as a freshmen since the single variable calc requirement would have been knocked out AP/IB credits. I've seen many of my international cohorts going even beyond. I genuinely worry that school systems such as SFUSD is doing a great disservice to its students and the society.
>US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping.
This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]:
- Asian (556)
- White (531)
- Hispanic (481)
- Black (448)
- Mixed Race (501)
Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten.
The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi...
America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too fine grained to reduce it to generalities (with a few exceptions such as heavily nationally influenced/consistent things like health care insurance, defence spending, Wall St/banking policies, etc).
Some people try to minimize it all to “class” like they found some Pandora’s box for all of life’s problems but that’s just as often flawed as any other generalization.
Edit: Yes, look at page 34 in that report, it says that white kids scored 25 higher than average, so 503. Where did you get those numbers from, those are wrong.
Wait, what? That is exactly what it means. If the groups that are least likely to get external support (ie a tutor, prep, whatever) are under-performing that implies the _standalone_ system is broken. Sure, it is not so broken that it can't be patched with outside aid, but that is true of many things we consider "a failure."
This is akin to saying "Of course my car can get across the country. All I need is the occasional tow-truck, you know, for when it overheats."
What is “the system”? you mean to say the school is racist or unfair to black kids..hispanic kids? who is responsible in your opinion?
Black students of African heritage, unless the group is very specifically selected (Nigerian-Americans come to mind, with their extremely high average education levels), tend to come out on the bottom in all racially mixed societies in the world. Even the Finnish educational system, touted as one of the best in the world, struggles to educate Somali immigrants to Finnish levels.
The very opposite tends to be true about East Asians and Ashkenazi Jewish students. I am not aware of a single educational system worldwide where either of those groups would be considered under-achieving and needing government or private help.
The standard American answer is that the root cause is systemic racism. I don't believe that; the phenomenon is too widespread and there are other ethnicities that face vicious open racism in their countries, while being extremely successful. Some of the most successful groups in the world are actually direct survivors of genocidal campaigns or lost wars; all that murder didn't break them.
We do a disservice to students in the US by treating Algebra/Calc as advanced math. Typically, American schools judge student math aptitude prior to algebra based on rote memorization of multiplication tables. Potentially with the added benefit of more rote memorization problems if one is in the honors curriculum. Aptitude for this type of problem does not directly translate into aptitude for higher math.
There is nothing particularly advanced about Algebra or Calculus. At most, it's a question of how much time one is willing and able to put into the subject. The fact that most American students do not exit high school with a functional knowledge of single variable calculus is purely an artifact of our curriculum priorities.
My eastern European Calc II professor once complained when the class wasn't immediately grasping Riemann Sums, "This is grade school calculus!"
As a practical matter though, I think that most people working in STEM fields — including engineers — would benefit more from learning statistics instead of calculus.
Some school admins went nuts about letting a student take calculus in 10th grade because they didn't think it was doable. But I tested out of everything else. I was the first person in the history of the school to do this, only because I came from internationally having completed a trig course in 9th grade. In the US they wouldn't have allowed that in the first place, but here I was, having already done it, because I was given the opportunity outside the US.
I never saw myself having any special learning abilities, I was just moving onto the next thing to learn. I'm not any sort of prodigy, I just hated team sports and liked science and math, and spent lots of my extracurricular time learning about it.* I only moved faster in math because I put so many hours into studying it outside of school, not because I had any innate talent for it. It also made it more fun, because by learning ahead of class, I was learning for myself with much less pressure than learning for some stupid exam.
This "no child left behind" stuff is pure nonsense in the way they are implementing it.
*You see, I was previously growing up in Asia, where STEM is what the "cool kids" do.
On a tangent, I also feel like college math curriculum kinda don't make sense sometimes because you're hit with more computational heavy classes like calc and stats courses and then they break everything down and rebuild you with proof-based and analysis course at the beginning of your junior year.
Plane Geometry track, on the other hand, was incredibly difficult for me to grasp in university.
It's not that surprising, though, given that they've admitted their goal is equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. That's the only way to achieve the former.
If you know that the school's focus isn't on providing the best education possible to your kids, pull them out of that school immediately. If it is a public school (as it is in this case), complain to the school board, vote them out of office if they don't listen and support local efforts to expand school choice to rescue as many kids as possible from that failing public school system that has proven itself incapable of performing its primary function. Even if you get the school board to reverse insane decisions like banning algebra from middle schools, I still wouldn't trust any school system that would even consider doing such things to properly educate kids. I think it beyond a reasonable doubt that the dysfunction in the SF school district is much deeper than just this algebra ban.
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It’s not “mind boggling” if you do a deep dive into the “ethnic studies” curricula that so many teachers and administrators are graduating from these days. It’s a completely parallel value system complete with revisionist history. It’s like the Wahhabist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Dead Comment
It's truly disheartening to see the San Francisco school district's actions resemble something straight out of Orwell's 1984. As someone who has lived in this city for years, it's painful to witness the gradual decline and the rise of corruption overshadowing the progressive spirit that once defined it. Instead of addressing the root cause of poor math education, the district has opted for obfuscation and dishonesty.
It's a classic case of doublethink, where they attempt to hold two contradictory beliefs: that they're doing what's best for the students while simultaneously suppressing their educational growth. Much like the Party in 1984, they seem to prioritize maintaining a facade over genuinely improving education. I wish we could challenge this dystopian approach and hope to meaningfully improve the situation, but at this point, I am not even sure how one would go about doing that.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. ...
And look at that society: it's a sub-saharan "shit-hole" that has ruined its own future because of its borrowed obsession with "social justice" (and the political vermin that exploit them); which thinks squeezing out its best talent who then achieve wonderful things outside is something to be "proud" of.
There is enough reason to hate British colonialism, but it is under them that Indians bagged the first Nobel Prizes in Asia. Now, even those universities that produced them are being destroyed due to idiotic tribal dogfighting. Worse, unlike the US case, all this caste-propaganda doesn't even have much historical evidence to begin with!
Such potential wasted.
I propose this often, and it inspires massive pushback every time.
Just give the teachers a $1,000 bonus for every such kid. Give the teachers a free hand in how to go about it. It'll be the cheapest and most effective boost to education you've ever seen.
BTW, there's nothing secret about Asian students' performance. It's just that even the poor families would know to pool the limited resources to educate their kids.
I think we need something better than winner-takes-all for all elected positions, because it forces you to pick 'the lesser of two evils', knowing that a vote for the person you like the most is really just a 'protest vote'
It's unfair that some people develop skills easily when others don't. When equity is the goal this is what happens.
there is no other way, though. if you desire equal outcomes, you have to shackle the best.
i believe Kurt Vonnegot wrote about this...
Science is about creating theory that has predictive power, and the malice hypothesis in my experience has predicted future outcomes far better than stupidity.
I'm inclined to think the concern (that we will run out of supply of people that can do math or something) is overblown. There are plenty of underemployed engineering and science students that took more advanced mathematics classes than the CS kids.
That is simply socialism 101 as portrayed in Rush' "The Trees":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC88xBPkkcI think statistics is a better subject to learn early and often. Way more useful across disciplines.
Anyway I think we know that high performing math countries teach math totally different than we do and they produce way better engineers, so why don’t we do what they do?
I mean seriously I work in tech and all the engineers are foreign educated.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/mat...
It's the best way to ensure equal outcomes. Perhaps equal outcomes is just a nasty goal.
Do you actually mean "pushing them up", or is this code for "filter out underperformers"?
This goes to the root of the issue. What is the whole point of a school? Is it to help students learn and improve? Or is it to serve as a series of challenges to eliminate and filter out people based on arbitrary people?
If the goal is to lift up people, you need to pick them up from down where they are at.
I took algebra I in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. That allowed me to take geometry in 7th grade, algebra II trig in 8th grade, pre-calc in 9th grade, AP calculus in 10th grade and then IB high math in 11th and 12th grade.
I credit my public, magnet school with giving me a huge leg up in life. All of my peers were middle class, yet a focus on lifting us up, accelerating our education, and challenging us helped me become the successful person I am today.
In contrast, my life almost took a severely different and worse path in elementary school when I was sent to the principal's office often in kindergarten and second grade for distracting the class and causing disturbances.
Thankfully my first grade teacher realized the root cause -- I had already learned the material quickly and was bored and thus distracting others. So she gave me more advanced novels and books to keep me stimulated and learning. If instead I would have had a teacher force me to slow down to the rest of the class, I likely would have ended up suspended and a delinquent.
This holding everyone to the slowest standard in the name of equity is actually very inequitable. It forces children with ADHD like myself to end up as failures instead of recognizing neurodiversity and helping each child succeed in the manner best for him or her.
Math in particular is a subject where there can be such a wide divergence in age where each kid is ready to absorb topics. Having a rigid schedule where topic X is taught in grade N is always going to hurt those who are capable of moving forward faster and hurt those who need more time/maturity to get there (but may well be excellent at algebra/calculus/etc if allowed to take it when ready, not sooner).
I like the schools where kids are allowed to progress through math at their pace, faster or slower, instead of being grouped by class level. Unfortunately that basically means private schools with such an approach, I haven't found any public school in the area (California) that support this.
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>Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. Achievement gaps by parental income, but not by parental education, increased over the time period, underscoring the different ways these two socioeconomic status components relate to achievement and the potential for policy to alter gaps.
Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like. Plomin for example claims that from twin studies a large part of educational attainment is heritable. I suspect the current school system will burn itself down before admitting that, however.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X221142...
In studies like the Norway study you cite this could be controlled for by adoptions. Though adoptees, of course, come with their own non-genetic baggage.
I would hope that, at the very least, IQ testing would be performed to try to match based on that.
What the remainder of your post argues is that there is no way to achieve complete equality in a school system.
But we need to be clear about what that means. Most people believe that success should be rewarded somehow. It's relatively uncommon even among socialists to argue that there should be no inequality of overall consumption opportunity. Most parents want to help their children succeed. It should naturally follow that the parents who have more resources will have more successful children. It would require a massive and likely endless society-scale project to counteract the combined parenting efforts of the whole professional class in order to achieve the questionable goal of literally equal opportunity, genetics notwithstanding. Even the Soviet Union had the nomenklatura.
The real goal should be to understand the process of education and remove all actual structural barriers while providing support to the disadvantaged in ways that are reasonably understood to be effective. Obsessing over romantic ideals that seem attractive from 10000 feet is not the way.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mncet/
TLDR:
> We show that class attainment is strongly influenced by genetics. Shared environmental factors play a modest role. Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics.
Another "social studies" pre-determined study, hopefully wont make it past review
"American IQ Test Scores Show Recent Declines, According To New Study" [1]
>American IQ test scores have dropped during a recent 13-year period, a remarkable finding that runs counter to the well-established trend of increasing IQ scores throughout much of the 20th century.
>The study found evidence of a reverse “Flynn effect” in a large U.S. sample of almost 400,000 individuals tested between 2006 and 2018 in several ability areas. The Flynn effect refers to the well-replicated finding that IQ scores increased consistently through much of the 20th century, with increases ranging from three to five IQ points per decade.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/03/23/amer...
I think the only practical solution is widely-known resources and alternative curricula for low-income families so that they too can get a decent education. Hopefully people are working on these, because otherwise these smart low-income kids are wasting their potential. And when kids apply to college they need a usable metric to be compared, which their “official” high-school transcripts are not, so otherwise admission is just upper-income or lottery.
An upside to over-lenient grading, at least students can half-ass “school” while they take these alternative classes that are actually teaching them.
Me: You seem to not care at all about public schools dumbing down the curriculum. It could happen here too.
Wife: Why should I? This doesn’t affect us. We’ve already decided our kids are going to private school.
Me: Sure. Just sucks for smart but poor kids.
Wife: Good for us. Weaker competition for our kids.
I support public education for many reasons, but one of the more selfish reasons is so that I have interesting people to talk to in life. Talking with miseducated, or uneducated dumbasses is one of the most soul crushing things I experience on a semi-frequent basis.
Being able to give your children a world where everyone is intelligent, articulate, and emotionally stable is a priceless gift, and quality public education is a key part of that.
She doesn't believe that er kids would outperform regardless of that?
And the middle class end up fucked. Too rich to get extra help. Too poor to afford private. Like walking in the middle of the road... splat.
This creates its own issues, like public schools not sending misbehaving kids to specially-designed schools, and public schools losing money because students are sent to charter and private schools instead. And the private schools still require more money than the tax dollars provide. Furthermore, issues arise when the public schools suck and charter/private schools are the only decent options: these schools can be openly religious, skip over parts of the standard curriculum, and get to pick and choose who gets admitted.
Though, I don't even think giving all the tax money to public schools will help them at this point...
Hearing about kids being set back in math makes me very personally angry because I always felt that my college CS studies would have been so much easier had I been equipped with the proper math fundamentals. This shit takes a long time to train and you really can do powerful things with it.
Most of the people I know who have STEM degrees don't use their college math. The math that they need is programmed into their CAD terminals. The ones who still use math in their jobs, somehow got interested in math, in spite of school math.
Turning math into a competition sucked the soul out of it. Both of my kids got 8th grade math, and top ACT/SAT scores. My daughter skipped pre-calculus with no ill effect. Both are interested in math, but have no interest in taking more math classes.
I breezed through school math, through college and grad school. Whoop-de-doo. Two things made math come alive for me: Proofs, and computers. But proofs are nearly gone from the school math curriculum, and the schools still haven't embraced computers.
I'd actually like to see a refactoring of school math, loosely into 4 disciplines, that are introduced in a cycle, perhaps even starting in 1st grade:
1. Arithmetic -- manual symbol manipulation, up to and including calculus.
2. Computation -- use of computers to explore and solve math problems.
3. Working with data -- self explanatory.
4. Theory -- things like sets, proofs, etc.
I believe this would actually be more representative of how people actually use math in their lives. Many people will use computation and data, even if they struggle through arithmetic and develop no interest in theory. On the other hand, full exposure to all of the disciplines would adequately prepare someone for academic math study.
I don't believe in banning anything. Some kids need to be allowed to get "ahead" so they don't get bored and lose interest, or simply because solving those school math problems can be a fun escape -- as it was for me -- from an otherwise stressful adolescence.
I work in STEM and don't think I've every needed the "Theory" category.
Any kind of computation beyond a calculator is beyond what most people use, and involves half a Computer Science degree.
Working with data is nice and probably somewhat useful to white collar people, but most of them are going to use a half dozen Excel commands to get there. Most people don't really have a use for learning R or anything like that.
Arithmetic is basically the only thing most people are going to use, and even calculus is beyond what most people actually use. Single variable algebra is about the extent of what's useful to the vast majority of people.
I'm doubtful any extension of math classes is going to go well. People forget the things they don't use, and the swaths of adults that only remember simple arithmetic and basic algebra are telling a story that the rest isn't useful.
https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...