I live in Seattle, not San Francisco, but we have some similar issues with our schools. I'd really prefer to send my son to our local public schools, but if they aren't challenging him appropriately then my wife and I obviously aren't going to just give up on his education. We'll either pay for extracurricular enrichment like the person in this article, move to a wealthy suburb, or send him to a private school instead.
That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
Bingo, that is the issue, everybody is worried about equity.
You can't have it, we need meritocracy, equity is just cruel and unusual punishment to future. It is a recipe for driving society to the lowest common denominator.
You should demand proper education or your money back.
(Side note, this is what we will get 10x with free college, and the guaranteed loans have already driven it this way a bit more)
Growing up in Seattle in the 90s, the school district was obviously racist and classist. Advanced programs were in the richer (whiter) neighborhoods and poor kids got to go to schools with police wagons out front.
The district charter use to have a line in it saying they had to offer each kid the best education possible. My mother used that line to force the school district to send a taxi to every day to take me up to a richer part of the city with better schools. That line of the charter has since been removed as from what I can tell kids now are at the mercy of their circumstances.
There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.
So, kernel of truth behind some of these policies.
IMHO the problem is, this plan only works if the vast majority of students are high achievers. If you have 10% of the students who are high achievers and you mix everyone together, after a few years you end up with no high achievers.
America in general needs to seriously look at how we as a culture approach education, until we fix that, there isn't much the schools can do to actually improve outcomes for underprivileged students en masse.
> equity is just cruel and unusual punishment to future
Equality of outcome can be an undesired outcome, equality of opportunity is completely different.
The only trouble is getting the opportunities to be equal - there must be no advantage that can be unfairly given to one more deserving student than another, being able or willing to send your children to summer bootcamps must be an option for all children (who qualify), not whether you pay for it with time or money, e.g.
Free college is fantastic, but once again you confuse opportunity with outcome, and not even for the same individuals - parents are unburdened by cost, but in fact the opportunities are far from equal - money does not a quality education make, yet the majority or colleges are run as for profit institutions, not places that accept students based on their merits or potentials, nor do they actually try to actively shed students who are undeserving. Party culture does not need or require an expensive room and board situation, yet it pervades nearly every 'higher' education institution, only somewhat subsiding when graduate/doctorate programs become involved, and academics are once again taken seriously.
I.e. your meritocracy does not exist precisely because universities are busy making profits not teaching students.
That seems quite different. First, lots of countries have free higher education and seem to do just fine. Second, lowering price of entry is orthogonal to lowering expected performance. Your argument does not apply.
Without some level of equity, what exactly is the point of meritocracy?
A pure meritocracy wouldn't prioritize curing rare diseases or ending poverty, and might not reduce suffering as much as a more equitable society, even if that equitable society has less raw talent and education, so obviously there's an optimal point.
That optimal point may be a function of the current state of tech, as more and more of the stuff people need education for is done by AI.
It's not like they're ever going to have zero high achievers, even without school at all there's always going to be a few genuises.
On the other hand, the better AI gets, the less anyone outside the top 1% actually needs math, because AI may be able to do most of what an average person could learn without unrealistic amount of effort way beyond their motivation.
I think it's moreso effective co-optimization between equity and meritocracy.
I went to private schools, and even kids of parents with money can wind up very unintelligent—placing them in the same classes as overachievers is good for neither. Same concept as bright kids from underprivileged families, let's bend over backward to get them in the same classes as the overachievers too.
We have two friends whose kids are in two different Seattle middle schools, and the anecdotes we hear are not going well. One middle school was considering getting rid of advanced courses entirely.
We're in East Renton, which usually follows Seattle, but they have kept honor courses. In fact, honor courses are encouraged to take, open to everyone, and from what I understand, no one is rejected (possibly only for the first year). I like this approach better than 'algebra for no one'.
Yes, the better school districts are east of Seattle, and this is why all those homes are retaining their skyrocketing value.
>> Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
We're not wealthy at all, so if the Renton school system follows Seattle, we're not going to waste our child's future on crap education.
You're not going to improve the lives of impoverished children by lowering the bar. It's absurd.
The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars (STEM, clubs, sports, arts, etc.) A student wouldn't have to be gifted in math, just apply themselves to some interest that drives them.
Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month. Playing for the school sports team, being in the band, getting involved in photography. Something positive in academics, arts, leadership, cooperation.
Paying kids would teach valuable lessons about finance and build up a reward system that would serve them later in life as they begin to associate action and achievement with positive outcomes. It should still work even if they don't have a suitable environment at home to discover this on their own.
Right now school is basically daycare. It can teach those that are properly prepared at home to pay attention, but it fails so many others.
Luckily, everyone in the area gets access to Running Start[1]. Doesn't address the earlier years of schooling, though.
If your children are in HS, I'd really recommend sitting downing with a HS councilor to make sure that your kids take the classes that are required by the district for HS, but aren't required for a college degree (I'm thinking of speech here, but there may be others) in the first 2 years of HS. That way they get the most benefit out of their Junior and Senior years, if they decide to go that route.
I'm honestly not sure how the GPA thing works - I know AP classes can sometimes let kids increase their GPA above 4.0 for admissions purposes. But as someone who did both Running Start and AP classes, IMO, the actual college credit was way more valuable. But I also went to school in state, so those credits transferred nicely. May be a totally different story if you're shooting for Ivys.
I found the actual impact of AP credits disappointing. I ended up with no gen ed classes and started off in sophomore classes for math and physics. AP doesn’t count towards college GPA, and it turns out that others ended up with GPA padding that I missed out on. Still turned out fine overall, the GPA padding thing just didn’t occur to me in high school and no one pointed it out.
Running start is an incredible program - beyond offering far more advanced and faster paced classes, it also really helped me personally mature and see vastly different people and perspectives than where in my age group at high school.
I did this in HS decades ago and had to fight guidance counselors to get it done. Fortunately, it's much easier now. I cannot recommend this program highly enough.
Running start applies to the entire state of Washington, and since 2013, all Washington state schools are pretty well funded (even if that means taking money away from richer Seattle area property tax districts).
They don’t generally transfer for Ivys. Running start is something you do if you have no intention of going to prestigious private universities as it’s completely pointless (credits don’t usually transfer) and they don’t have a great process for evaluating such students into their programs. You’d only do it if you plan to go to a school in your state since transferring credits out of state isn’t always easy going.
Wealthy suburbs are cutting advanced classes too. Palo Alto Unified School District is dropping dual-enrolled Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra (classes taken after AP Calculus BC).
My kid is on this track exactly and I think it is a joke that some kids take multivariable calculus or linear algebra in high school. Enrichment and AP has become an arms race for the upper middle class to get their kids into good schools. Realistically, if you are STEM major you probably are going to have to retake these classes anyway. And if you aren't you probably won't need them.
I know some kids are really exceptional and maybe ought to take this much math that young. But I think a lot do it now to get into a college.
I have a hard time believing above average students (with parents with parents without engineering/science degrees) could take linear algebra and multi variable calculus at university rigor along any other courses they are required to take. Sure, maybe at Paly and Gunn there’s enough to fill a 20 person class, but those are still pretty steep courses which require math majors and not math education majors.
If the students are prepared enough for those classes, what’s the point in keeping them in High School anyway?
I had a strange experience where I had a bunch of AP courses lined up my senior year and then moved to a place which did not have nearly any of them. In hindsight, I should have really pressed for direct enrollment to college instead of faffing around my senior year in “communication skills”, AP english, and “Economics” - all three required by the school district but mostly useless.
The real problem is the insane policy of the U.S. to fund schools locally. That way, you will always have better schools in the richer areas and worse schools in the poorer areas.
In Ontario (Canada), schools are funded by the province. Schools doing worse can access addition funding and other resources. In 2020 teachers earned an average of $103,000/year including benefits. In Toronto, which has a high cost of living, the average was $108,000.
That's not to say that school quality doesn't vary, often by household income. Poorer people often have language issues (immigrants) and can't afford to pay for extra help for their kids, or don't have free time to work with them. The system is still stacked against them, but not nearly as badly.
The American "I got mine" method of school funding seems like the worst possible choice.
I grew up in Russia, and education system at the time was mostly the same as it was in Soviet times.
Still, there was a whole system of special schools, both for high and low achievers. I have went to a “math/physics” grade school from the start, and subsequently changed schools two times, each time through hard entrance exams, to finally end up in the most challenging/prestigious school in the country.
It's completely mind boggling to me that a communist country has such a system, but a capitalist country is trying to bring everyone to common denominator.
Same boat. He is in SPS now, but as a kindergartener. We will kick the can down the road and do something if he gets bogged down in a watered down curriculum. I get the equalization goal, but when kids in China are starting calculus, not algebra, in 9th grade, we can't just ignore that.
in what universe sacrificing child’s education (even if the child is from wealthy family) leads to some greater good. It is a lose-lose proposition for everyone.
No, it’s the school board of San Francisco who is making the poor kids pay. They can’t afford to get private schooling, and their school is actively preventing them from succeeding.
i'm curious in what sense you mean that they "pay"... public schools could easily just offer these classes, ex idealism, but they choose not to in the name of Equity. and it's not because the rich kids go and attend private school instead-- their rich parents still pay property taxes like everyone else, so i don't really know how that flight would shift an extra burden on to the kids that don't move schools. i guess school funding is tied in some formulaic sense to the number of kids that attend that specific school? but even that roundabout justification has the causality backward: the un-offering of the course is what leads to the rich kid flight in the first place-- seems to me that the only "idealism" that is being "paid" for here is that which is being promulgated by the Church of "Equity". but it is true that the non-rich kids are the ones stuck paying for it. (but where do the kids of these high priests of Equity go to school? i have a hunch...)
and beyond that, isn't the whole point of GP's comment that the idealistic rich people are trying to / would like to leave their children in public schools? what's idealistic about sending your kids to private school instead? seems like the exact opposite to me.
so other than "pay" not making any sense, "idealism" not making sense, and randomly swapping whose (not "who's") idealism is being paid for, your reply makes perfect sense.
like, when people make comments like this, do they think that they are saying anything in particular, or is it just about the words sounding good in a certain order, like music lyrics? it's like some sort of pathos DDoS. but, hey: at least "your heart's in the right place", right?
> "Families with resources turn to fee-required online algebra 1 courses in eighth grade, outside the public school system, or enroll their kids in private schools,"
Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many private schools. If I have the means, why would I not send my kids to such schools and therefore fuck up the funding of the public schools? Not that I want to, but it furiates me that the school administrators really hurt the kids who need public education the most in the name of equity. It also saddens me that the constituents are okay with such administrators.
That's the problem. We're dealing with the critical theory definition of equity, which they define as the intentional redistribution of opportunity and resources along identity group lines to correct for present and historical injustices, as well as opportunities those groups have already had.
Critical theory and social justice adopts a distorted view of reality. Leave it to a school in San Francisco to show everyone what happens in real life when administrators adopt a policy based on that distorted view of reality -- inequality is only increased.
In fact, I'd classify critical theory alongside Marxism for adopting a false belief that some top-down forced redistribution of resources/wealth/opportunity/means of production/etc. is the way to true justice. That kind of belief backfires spectacularly when policy makers adopt it IRL.
Inequality is increased because those without resources aren’t receiving any new benefits and those with resources use those resources to compensate for the failure of the system to provide an education optimal path. It’s worse outcomes for both, except some people can shield themselves from the fallout. What new kind of self-inflicted damage will be required to realize the detrimental failure of this world view?
It must suck to be poor but not belong to any one the correct identity groups nowadays. I am lucky I was born way before that, or I would never have be able to leave poverty.
People will willingly claim that critical theory is not connected to Marxism. We call these people wrong.
Marx is literally the godfather of critical theory, the Frankfurt school, post strcturalism and the rest of the fashionable nonsense cannon that parts of the left seem obsessed with.
Man, forget about Soviet Russia. I give you a more striking example: I was born in Brazil and started having algebra around this age, in a public school, where most of the kids, like me were either poor or at the best lower middle class. I don't even remember having a colleague that had at least one parent with a superior education.
I think the idea is that if it’s important to rich parents, they will grudgingly fund education for everyone. But as long as they have these outlets where they can just educate their own kids and leave everyone else behind, they will.
The rich will always have those outlets, and nobody is going to take them away from them, because they have the power.
Now, with the disappearing middle class, "just call them the rich, and make them pay for it" has been the default for a long time.
I'm not sure that's a fair generalization. I suspect many parents have the resources to improve their own kids' educations, but not the time/energy to try changing the school system politics / bureaucracy / laws / budgets in time for their kids.
> I think the idea is that if it’s important to rich parents, they will grudgingly fund education for everyone.
it doesn't cost more for a teacher to open up an algebra book and teach from that instead of from the pre-algebra book. unless there are scheduling difficulties which somehow prevent one classroom's worth of students from being crammed into the same room in the same slot, the imagined lack of money isn't going to impact the contents of the curriculum.
this isn't like when we thought we needed to cram schools full of computers and they were going to cost money. one math class is an expensive as another to teach. we don't even need new textbooks. hell, we probably don't even need textbooks, just have them do exercises online or something.
> But as long as they have these outlets where they can just educate their own kids and leave everyone else behind, they will.
Education is a collective action problem. Parents care more about their own child's education than the education of other children. This should not be surprising, and it cannot be changed.
That's the first thing that my daughter was taught at RSM when she went in for 5th grade math - Algebra. They also start you with geometry in the 6th grade. I think they start Algebra a lot younger actually - maybe 2nd or 3rd grade. When I spoke to the principal of the my local RSM she said the earlier you start the better it is.
Edit:- They get homework they need to turn in. Early on I had to spend sometime with my daughter to help her cope. But once she had her concepts down its been pretty smooth sailing.
russian school of math is very popular at the schools my kids are at. i ask the parents why and they tell me they think math is important and the public school isn’t challenging them
A private, after-school extra curricular program. It’s a national company with many local branches (possibly franchised). Like Kumon, it’s a way for ambitious parents to buy extra academic classes and extra homework for their kids.
Is a wonderful program teaching math. I cannot recommend it enough. I recommend it to all my friends. It starts from basics - in kindergarten they do problems like "there are 4 birds on a branch. 2 fly away. How many are left on the branch?". And then it builds and keeps building.
My son is taking it. My son was solving linear equations when he was 11 years old. I think this is the best education he is getting - and the one that will stay with him the most.
There are people who don't understand sociology and are only vaguely aware of pathological cultural factors (or possibly, though they are aware of them, wish to deny their existence) and demand that these problems be solved with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is only able to crudely affect these, and only in the most totalitarian of regimes. Mao or Stalin might have been able to rid their countries of pathological cultural factors (of course, instead of doing such they were more concerned with ridding themselves of potential rivals). California cannot at this point in time do any such thing.
> Mao or Stalin might have been able to rid their countries of pathological cultural factors
Mao did rid of the meritocracy-based education system, replacing it with an identity-based system. That is, if you were born with the right identity (blue-collar worker, peasant (not farmer, mind you), and soldier), then you get to go to a university without even any test. If you were born with the wrong identity (the right, the anti-revolutionary, the farmer or any family who has property, the "rich", the "bad"), then you can't go to any college. The results? Just look at China in the 70s. What a fucking hell hole.
As a for Stalin or Soviet, they never gave up their elite education. In fact, elite officers had to be elite students as well. Those who are good at STEM could even get a little leniency when they made the so-called political mistakes.
nearly every other developed country managed to fund their schools system adequately, to provide a uniform system of education without heavy reliance on private schools. While you can't really guarantee equal opportunities for every kid due extracurricular support, at least the possible schools and classes are open to everyone independent of income.
So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
> Families face a "nightmare of workarounds" to get their high-achieving children on track for advanced math, write Rex Ridgeway and David Margulies in a San Francisco Examiner commentary.
Families in Palo Alto recently won a lawsuit against PAUSD, [1] which was denying students credit for courses taken at other institutions (mainly community colleges, IIRC). In Menlo Park, we deal with similar issues; I recently wondered to myself how much I could have taught my kids in all the hours that I have spent talking to the school/district about allowing students to receive advanced learning. Other parents with less time and more money opt for private schools. Those with less time and no more money simply resign themselves to the situation. It is shocking how hostile schools are to what used to be common sense: letting (or, gasp, even encouraging) all students to learn.
It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!!
For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake. The kids need 1-on-1 tutoring help.
Cut off the head of the problem—the school administration that continues to support our archaic system-and spend the money you will save on tutoring the kids. Or switch to mastery education. Fix the PROBLEM.
We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling.
Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless.
I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.
Honestly, it doesn’t really work without the parents. The issue is that the biggest problems with schooling discrepancies are poverty. Kids can’t eat, need to take care of siblings or their own kids or go work two jobs, have no homes, don’t get medical care, have no internet, etc.
There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.
Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year.
In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.
Doesn't university math have tutorials and colloquiums? If you go to MIT opencourseware and look at the math and applied math courses tutorials are a big part. They're done in class to guarantee some minimal understanding. I think its the case with most math departments (not just elite ones like MIT). Not sure if something like that is possible. If you scale out of tutors with maybe a 1:3 or a 1:4 tutor to student ratio it might raise the bar for everyone. It might require a whole bunch of money though.
You can try to work the parents out of the equation as much as you want, but it won’t work. This isn’t a new problem, and we don’t and won’t live in small communal villages.
I bet farmers use waaay more algebra than I do as a fullstack web programmer. I love it I just don't use it. On the other hand farmers are thinking about slopes all day, every day: irrigation rates; fuel, fertilizer, seed rates; growth rates. They don't get paid once or twice a month like I do so their finance maths are much more sophisticated than mine.
I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.
It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge).
Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.
My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra.
Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
What's the fix? More support from the state of course.
It really is a task for the society compared to the individual, otherwise you will never ever ever have a fair system. Success in schools should not be so dependent on the parents. What about single parents? Do you just accept that it will be miserable for them to get their kids trough school? Parents without a lot of education will also have a problem of helping their kids. And what about those kids? Will you just leave them behind? It's not their fault they are born in the wrong family. This is just a take I would just really not agree with.
Kids don't need "support at home from parents". Very few parents are competent to teach kids math properly (even those who think they are). Kids do better learning from someone else, better still if the someone else is a professional.
Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching).
In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.
My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.
If the problem was kids showing up, trying hard, and not getting it then sure. But the problem is kids not showing up and putting no effort in when they do, and that’s on parents.
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" under ideal conditions and circumstances?
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"?
Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be?
The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years.
And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.
You seem to be saying that schools are bad. Do you really think modern society can function without schools? Or that countries that don't have schools shouldn't build any?
Everybody needs a certain base of math to a certain age so that we can find the students that want to go on with math and so that they are able to. Society needs that.
Along the way, everybody has a chance to get a feel for math in the world, which I would say is on par with a certain base in the humanities; we should strive for every citizen to have it, even if it’s not strictly needed for survival in the job market.
I currently think finance and statistics, so people don't get fooled so easily. Both require algebra as a foundation.
Trigonometry, calculus, vectors, complex numbers, group theory, matrices? Fun, but not something I expect to be used often enough to justify making it mandatory part of everyone's education.
>Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!!
As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time.
What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
> As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time.
Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school.
Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math.
> What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult.
As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.
I’m sorry you had a poor experience with math in an academic setting. I agree that this is what kids need, the problem with this particular failing of just nixing Algebra is that we’ve not actually innovated in the way we communicate the ideas and techniques used to solve problems.
Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught.
My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.
Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics.
Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them.
This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it.
It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … …
You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life.
The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun.
We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.
How otherwise are you going to develop abstract thinking? There's a huge boulder in front of you and you need to hire a truck to move it. But to do that you need to know the weight of the boulder. How do you measure it? Or there is a very tall tree you need to cut down, but if the tree is too tall, it might fall on your house. How do you measure its height?
It's interesting how path-dependency makes these things seem like controversial reforms, while nearby districts have always done it this way. In Berkeley, for example, there isn't any course called "Algebra I" or II. Through 8th grade there is just math, with no differentiation. Then for 9th grade you can test into an advanced track, and people take either Math 1/2/3 or Advanced Math 1/2/3. In senior year any of these people can take AP Statistics or Calculus AB, but only the advanced track can take AP Calculus BC.
So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. It gives one the impression that San Francisco's issues are other than with the reform.
If you look at the breakdown of that 7/10 rating, test scores are 9 and “college readiness” an 8, while “equity”, whatever that means, is 4, which is what pulls the overall rating to a 7. This rating is not really a measure of the quality of the school.
* College Readiness, 8/10: This school is above the state average in key measures of college and career readiness.
* Test Scores, 9/10: Test scores at this school are far above the state average, suggesting that most students at this school are performing at or above grade level.
* Equity, 4/10: Underserved students at this school may be falling behind other students in the state, and this school may have significant achievement gaps.
> So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect.
If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade, it's not getting even halfway decent results. If they're better than the results in San Francisco, all you can learn from that is that Berkeley has extreme problems with student quality, and quality is even lower in San Francisco (or rather, the part of San Francisco that's being measured).
My mom helped write the Texas math curriculum and had high hopes for San Diego Unified when my kids just happened to hit the roll-out years for "common core" (the math 1/2/3 you refer to). She was compelled to admit it was a catastrophe for my daughter and useless for my son.
My daughter's story is tragic. I think it basically came down to teachers just not giving a shit about the outcomes and presenting rote lessons. So when my daughter came home for help (my undergrad is in physics) I would try to explain how to solve a blazingly obvious problem (e.g. solve for x where 2x + 3 = 2y, and y is 4) she would lose her marbles, telling me that's not what her teacher said, and best I could figure, she had been taught some weird path through something geometric, and there was no way I was going to figure that out. So, my knowledge of math was completely invalidated, despite my having a more advanced math education than her teacher. This went on for a couple years and she finally failed a course.
She fixed the grade over the next quarter and we incidentally moved to another school district for my job. She excelled and got an A in pre-calc as a junior. But the new school district enrolled her in calculus and then decided they didn't have enough students to justify the section, so they cancelled it and rolled everyone into other courses. They decided my daughter had only taken 3 years of math so they had her take Algebra 2. After getting an A in pre-calc, they had her take Algebra 2. The next year she enrolled in college and they decided that she had to take a math class, but she would be best served by taking pre-calc again! What. The. Literal. Fuck!
My mom, the math teacher who wrote the Texas curriculum, and adores the whole Berkeley math education scene, leaned in to help her (mostly just to recover from the crushed self esteem) and near the end of the semester my mom called to tell me my daughter should not be pressed to do any more math. She hates it, feels terrible about herself whenever she thinks about it, and it would be best to never think about it again.
She's now a philosophy major, finishing junior year at a top college with a 3.9, straight As last quarter, and as long as we don't equatr logic to math, she can rock logic all day long
Fuck every math department. Every fucking math teacher, professor, and administrator who buys into this math reform shit can fuck right off.
Ok. So, my son. What of him? He was ahead a year when we went to that other school district. And they wouldn't have been able to keep him up with his peer group. So 18 months before the pandemic we pulled him out for home school, my mom taught him, and got him through 3 years of math in 1 year. He started high school in pre-calc.
Same parents, same grandparents. He just happened to avoid common core entirely by virtue of circumstances and is now going to UCSC as a math major, having finished every math class at Foothill Community College a semester before graduating high school.
"Fuck every math department. Every fucking math teacher, professor, and administrator who buys into this math reform shit can fuck right off."
Essentially no mathematician buys into this stuff. In general professional mathematicians and mathematics educators are little involved in the processes that design curricula in public schools. They are simply not included. No one feels more threatened by expertise than education school professors.
i've reviewed multiple resumes from people in cali for east coast jobs and noticed fresh grads who went to great schools wrote down 'advanced math' on their resume and i thought it was so strange for it to be that vague that i definitely overlooked quite a few of them because other people named courses more clearly
> noticed fresh grads who went to great schools wrote down 'advanced math' on their resume
I assume you are reviewing the resumes of college grads. Writing "advanced math" still seems weird to me.
In this case, the comment you were replying to referred to the high school curriculum in the town of Berkeley, not the eponymous university located in the same town.
I don't specifically know about Berkeley, but my experience has been there's always an accelerated track for some students whose parents push the school system to let them into the right classes. At some point in middle school I was bussed to a local high school along with some of my peers to take advanced math not offered in middle school, and in high school all of my math classes were with people 1-2 years older than me.
What's your source for "math outcomes are way better in every aspect"? Figuring this out is trickier than it seems. Not only do students vary in demographics, socio-economic factors, and English-learners, but there are also relatively way more children of professors at Berkeley schools than in SF.
The state test scores are broken down by all those factors (except for "child of professor" which I am not sure is really a difference, since there is a UC and a CSU and several other universities in SF) so you can make apples-to-apple comparisons for yourself.
The world's foremost university is 500 meters from Berkeley High. I assure you that no person who ever wanted to study math was denied the opportunity. Anyone with 2 years of high school can enroll in multivariate calculus or linear algebra at UC Berkeley. In fact, anyone on Earth can study them virtually, for credit!
> Students’ academic success in mathematics must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs.
That’s amazing! While it may be laudable to hope that a math education program could be so strong that socioeconomic status and race make no difference, the rest of this is absurd. There are people with special needs who are at a disadvantage in math. The only way that their special needs would not predict the distribution of their academic success would be to have an implausibly amazing special needs education program, to redefine success, or to hold everyone else back.
Its like people are willfully ignoring the obvious: Black and Hispanic kids do the worst in math. Understanding why and correcting for the problems is a complex task. Making big proclamations about equity isn't going to do it.
Family life matters to the growth and development of children. 64% of Black children live in single parent homes vs. 16% of Asian kids. How does this effect math results? Black children are more likely to live near highways with higher rates of air pollution and asthma. Do Black children sleep poorly and have poorer memory formation?
Black and hispanic children who are more like to be poor may have chronic background stress from poverty: food and shelter insecurity. They may have inadequate access to health care. They miss routine screenings for vision, hearing and dyslexia. Chronic absenteeism and tardiness abounds. Are these the problems?
Identifying and correcting the root cause of divergent math outcomes is likely to be a multi-faceted and complex endeavor involving families, finances and health. It is worth doing. Everyone deserves the best possible education outcome.
Unfortunately, with scant evidence, math educators have somehow convinced themselves the root cause of the problem is entirely the math curriculum and the equitable solution is to deprive advanced kids of opportunity. Madness.
>The idea that you can achieve cosmic justice should be abolished. There's no such thing.
I think abandoning cosmic justice is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is educational outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status and that problem cannot be solved by the school district (unless you could institute a kind of boarding school). That said, these administrators have arrived at a solution ("equitable" education) and are now gaming the metrics to achieve it at the cost of everything else. Worse still they race to pat themselves on the back on having "solved racism".
I think it has been shown over and over again that good educational outcomes start with parents (or more broadly community outside of school) and one group has had that community dismantled over and over again over several generations. In short, while I think it's a noble goal, it cannot be achieved by the school system and SF should have a more pragmatic approach even if the performance by race makes you uncomfortable.
math is just the beginning of these backwards policies. public schools in california have been removing advanced classes in the name of “equity” for years. the racial enrollment in those classes did not reflect the racial enrollment of the school.
the result? parents moving kids to private school. at the school nearest me they kindergarten enrollment is dropping. they are likely going to only have a a single class in a couple years
california is making it very clear the public school system is not going to help your children succeed beyond a base level. it seems to have the completely opposite goals of when i was in public school in california
>the result? parents moving kids to private school.
as someone who went through the public school system in California during a time where classroom sizes hovered between 35-50 students under a single teacher, I have a hard time thinking that won't bring at least some benefits to those that aren't being put into private schools.
Don't get me wrong, as a delinquent/mischievous/criminal youth I loved it; the dating pool was huge, parties everywhere, drugs abound -- but I never received any kind of decent scholastic education until college.
Probably not as much benefit as you'd think. The state funding that student would have been bringing goes with the student to the private school so the student/teacher ratio stays about the same
Honors English has been removed from many schools in the name of equity. Kids barely read novels for school anymore. Writing assignments are often limited to two page essays. Anything more significant requiring research, drafts and multiple revisions is not done.
Schools - and this is a problem in the UK as well - are incentivised to optimise for evenly distributed mediocrity, instead of allowing people to reach their potential.
Now, I'm not talking about race here - this is from my perspective in the UK.
Ultimately we need to split the education system up. Putting the next Einstein and a violent, disinterested drug dealer in the same school, let alone the same class, is a recipe for disaster. And no amount of giving the idiots targets will fix them, but it will make life hell for people who actually want to learn.
This one-size-fits-all, optimising for mediocrity attitude is evident in the move towards mixed sets. The idea is that by putting the intelligent kids and the violent, intentional failures in one class the intelligent kids encourage the others to improve. But in practice they're vastly outnumbered, so they just get relentlessly bullied and don't learn anything. I know, because it's happened to me.
And it's evident in the way schools handle behaviour. I was kicked in the head at school, twice, by a load of thugs. I'm still very slowly recovering from the post concussion syndrome. At this rate, I am likely to fail my exams and not get into what used to be my backup uni. It was an entirely preventable incident if only:
- The school had entry requirements (it's meant to be a specialist technical school, but thanks to our enlightened government new grammar schools are banned.)
- The school was able to expell them before it happened, what with them spending the whole time messing about and attacking my friend
- The school had temporarily suspended more than the single person who punched my friend in the face when the whole group was there
- The police, with it's restorative justice, letting under-18s get away with anything, policies, had actually done something the first time
But they didn't, and now my life is ruined, and they got away with it. Because of a series of brain dead policies that are disconnected from reality and pushed by people similarly disconnected from reality.
The school system should have separate schools for high achievers to allow them to succeed without violence and with the fast pace and high expectations they deserve. If people want to go to those schools they can put the work in, behave, and pay attention. It's time to stop feel-good policies about second chances and equity and optimise for success and meritocracy.
>Schools - and this is a problem in the UK as well - are incentivised to optimise for evenly distributed mediocrity, instead of allowing people to reach their potential.
and that is the crux of the problem --- the best school would be one which would help students explore what they are interested, find what best suits them, and then best prepare them to be successful at that.
I disagree w/ separation though --- this really should be achievable in a single building/system.
One of the best programs ever for fostering educational success was the one California had where land-grant colleges were required to accept the student with the highest GPA from each high school who applied and provide a full scholarship (so if the top 3 students got a better deal, then the student w/ the 4th highest GPA was guaranteed to be able to apply to a land-grant college and be accepted, and get full tuition and room and board). This was dismantled after college students began protesting the Vietnam War and draft.
How would you recommend a soon-to-be-parent keep track of what's actually being taught in schools, before their kid is in a given year? I see a lot of headlines but have no idea how this is different or if I should be concerned.
talk to principals. i’ve talked to a few and heard pretty consistent responses. the early grades k-5 don’t really matter. middle school 6-8 you need to get into algebra so you are doing geometry in 9th grade. other honors programs for english need good grades but rarely require this kind of years in advance track / planning. but you have to make sure the high school you are targeting (when you get there) has the classes
Make friends with parents of kids who are a couple years older. We've gotten the runaround from the school and district. They are familiar with stalling tactics and they know how to deploy them effectively. They start out saying things that sound promising, then string you along for a year or two, blaming special circumstances. By the time you realize it was all a game, your kid is about to graduate from that school. If you had talked with other parents, you would know their playbook and how to politely but effectively push back.
Memorizing things like SOHCAHTOA and FOIL may not be a vital life skill for everyone, but everyone can benefit from the base logical thinking required to identify a variable, break a problem down into steps, plan and execute a solution.
At a bare minimum, the basics of algebra (and to a lesser extent precalc, such as understanding limits and differentials) foster a type of abstract thinking and skills that pretty much anyone can benefit from.
The best school I ever attended was one which strongly divided classes between social and academic. Social classes (homeroom, gym, social studies, home ec., shop class) were attended at one's grade level, Academic classes (English, Reading, Math, science) were attended at one's academic level, though there was a 4 year cap on advancement until 8th grade, at which point students could test to determine what classes they were eligible for, and begin taking college classes (the school was affiliated with a local college and many teachers were accredited as faculty members there --- for classes where there wasn't a teacher, arrangements were made to either bring one in from the college, or to arrange for the student to attend classes.
Apparently the Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled.
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That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
Bingo, that is the issue, everybody is worried about equity.
You can't have it, we need meritocracy, equity is just cruel and unusual punishment to future. It is a recipe for driving society to the lowest common denominator.
You should demand proper education or your money back.
(Side note, this is what we will get 10x with free college, and the guaranteed loans have already driven it this way a bit more)
The district charter use to have a line in it saying they had to offer each kid the best education possible. My mother used that line to force the school district to send a taxi to every day to take me up to a richer part of the city with better schools. That line of the charter has since been removed as from what I can tell kids now are at the mercy of their circumstances.
There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.
So, kernel of truth behind some of these policies.
IMHO the problem is, this plan only works if the vast majority of students are high achievers. If you have 10% of the students who are high achievers and you mix everyone together, after a few years you end up with no high achievers.
America in general needs to seriously look at how we as a culture approach education, until we fix that, there isn't much the schools can do to actually improve outcomes for underprivileged students en masse.
Equality of outcome can be an undesired outcome, equality of opportunity is completely different.
The only trouble is getting the opportunities to be equal - there must be no advantage that can be unfairly given to one more deserving student than another, being able or willing to send your children to summer bootcamps must be an option for all children (who qualify), not whether you pay for it with time or money, e.g.
Free college is fantastic, but once again you confuse opportunity with outcome, and not even for the same individuals - parents are unburdened by cost, but in fact the opportunities are far from equal - money does not a quality education make, yet the majority or colleges are run as for profit institutions, not places that accept students based on their merits or potentials, nor do they actually try to actively shed students who are undeserving. Party culture does not need or require an expensive room and board situation, yet it pervades nearly every 'higher' education institution, only somewhat subsiding when graduate/doctorate programs become involved, and academics are once again taken seriously.
I.e. your meritocracy does not exist precisely because universities are busy making profits not teaching students.
That seems quite different. First, lots of countries have free higher education and seem to do just fine. Second, lowering price of entry is orthogonal to lowering expected performance. Your argument does not apply.
A pure meritocracy wouldn't prioritize curing rare diseases or ending poverty, and might not reduce suffering as much as a more equitable society, even if that equitable society has less raw talent and education, so obviously there's an optimal point.
That optimal point may be a function of the current state of tech, as more and more of the stuff people need education for is done by AI.
It's not like they're ever going to have zero high achievers, even without school at all there's always going to be a few genuises.
On the other hand, the better AI gets, the less anyone outside the top 1% actually needs math, because AI may be able to do most of what an average person could learn without unrealistic amount of effort way beyond their motivation.
I went to private schools, and even kids of parents with money can wind up very unintelligent—placing them in the same classes as overachievers is good for neither. Same concept as bright kids from underprivileged families, let's bend over backward to get them in the same classes as the overachievers too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
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We're in East Renton, which usually follows Seattle, but they have kept honor courses. In fact, honor courses are encouraged to take, open to everyone, and from what I understand, no one is rejected (possibly only for the first year). I like this approach better than 'algebra for no one'.
Yes, the better school districts are east of Seattle, and this is why all those homes are retaining their skyrocketing value.
>> Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
We're not wealthy at all, so if the Renton school system follows Seattle, we're not going to waste our child's future on crap education.
The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars (STEM, clubs, sports, arts, etc.) A student wouldn't have to be gifted in math, just apply themselves to some interest that drives them.
Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month. Playing for the school sports team, being in the band, getting involved in photography. Something positive in academics, arts, leadership, cooperation.
Paying kids would teach valuable lessons about finance and build up a reward system that would serve them later in life as they begin to associate action and achievement with positive outcomes. It should still work even if they don't have a suitable environment at home to discover this on their own.
Right now school is basically daycare. It can teach those that are properly prepared at home to pay attention, but it fails so many others.
Luckily, everyone in the area gets access to Running Start[1]. Doesn't address the earlier years of schooling, though.
If your children are in HS, I'd really recommend sitting downing with a HS councilor to make sure that your kids take the classes that are required by the district for HS, but aren't required for a college degree (I'm thinking of speech here, but there may be others) in the first 2 years of HS. That way they get the most benefit out of their Junior and Senior years, if they decide to go that route.
I'm honestly not sure how the GPA thing works - I know AP classes can sometimes let kids increase their GPA above 4.0 for admissions purposes. But as someone who did both Running Start and AP classes, IMO, the actual college credit was way more valuable. But I also went to school in state, so those credits transferred nicely. May be a totally different story if you're shooting for Ivys.
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1. https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/support-programs/dual-...
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/square/2023/03/29/cancellatio...
I know some kids are really exceptional and maybe ought to take this much math that young. But I think a lot do it now to get into a college.
If the students are prepared enough for those classes, what’s the point in keeping them in High School anyway?
I had a strange experience where I had a bunch of AP courses lined up my senior year and then moved to a place which did not have nearly any of them. In hindsight, I should have really pressed for direct enrollment to college instead of faffing around my senior year in “communication skills”, AP english, and “Economics” - all three required by the school district but mostly useless.
In Ontario (Canada), schools are funded by the province. Schools doing worse can access addition funding and other resources. In 2020 teachers earned an average of $103,000/year including benefits. In Toronto, which has a high cost of living, the average was $108,000.
That's not to say that school quality doesn't vary, often by household income. Poorer people often have language issues (immigrants) and can't afford to pay for extra help for their kids, or don't have free time to work with them. The system is still stacked against them, but not nearly as badly.
The American "I got mine" method of school funding seems like the worst possible choice.
LA Unified is currently ~16,000/student/year.
It looks to me like SF actually gets significantly more money per student than people in the suburbs.
California too, yet California has one of the most corrupted education systems. Case in point, the Bay Area schools couldn’t even afford school buses
Still, there was a whole system of special schools, both for high and low achievers. I have went to a “math/physics” grade school from the start, and subsequently changed schools two times, each time through hard entrance exams, to finally end up in the most challenging/prestigious school in the country.
It's completely mind boggling to me that a communist country has such a system, but a capitalist country is trying to bring everyone to common denominator.
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and beyond that, isn't the whole point of GP's comment that the idealistic rich people are trying to / would like to leave their children in public schools? what's idealistic about sending your kids to private school instead? seems like the exact opposite to me.
so other than "pay" not making any sense, "idealism" not making sense, and randomly swapping whose (not "who's") idealism is being paid for, your reply makes perfect sense.
like, when people make comments like this, do they think that they are saying anything in particular, or is it just about the words sounding good in a certain order, like music lyrics? it's like some sort of pathos DDoS. but, hey: at least "your heart's in the right place", right?
Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many private schools. If I have the means, why would I not send my kids to such schools and therefore fuck up the funding of the public schools? Not that I want to, but it furiates me that the school administrators really hurt the kids who need public education the most in the name of equity. It also saddens me that the constituents are okay with such administrators.
That's the problem. We're dealing with the critical theory definition of equity, which they define as the intentional redistribution of opportunity and resources along identity group lines to correct for present and historical injustices, as well as opportunities those groups have already had.
Critical theory and social justice adopts a distorted view of reality. Leave it to a school in San Francisco to show everyone what happens in real life when administrators adopt a policy based on that distorted view of reality -- inequality is only increased.
In fact, I'd classify critical theory alongside Marxism for adopting a false belief that some top-down forced redistribution of resources/wealth/opportunity/means of production/etc. is the way to true justice. That kind of belief backfires spectacularly when policy makers adopt it IRL.
Marx is literally the godfather of critical theory, the Frankfurt school, post strcturalism and the rest of the fashionable nonsense cannon that parts of the left seem obsessed with.
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it doesn't cost more for a teacher to open up an algebra book and teach from that instead of from the pre-algebra book. unless there are scheduling difficulties which somehow prevent one classroom's worth of students from being crammed into the same room in the same slot, the imagined lack of money isn't going to impact the contents of the curriculum.
this isn't like when we thought we needed to cram schools full of computers and they were going to cost money. one math class is an expensive as another to teach. we don't even need new textbooks. hell, we probably don't even need textbooks, just have them do exercises online or something.
Education is a collective action problem. Parents care more about their own child's education than the education of other children. This should not be surprising, and it cannot be changed.
Edit:- They get homework they need to turn in. Early on I had to spend sometime with my daughter to help her cope. But once she had her concepts down its been pretty smooth sailing.
There are people who don't understand sociology and are only vaguely aware of pathological cultural factors (or possibly, though they are aware of them, wish to deny their existence) and demand that these problems be solved with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is only able to crudely affect these, and only in the most totalitarian of regimes. Mao or Stalin might have been able to rid their countries of pathological cultural factors (of course, instead of doing such they were more concerned with ridding themselves of potential rivals). California cannot at this point in time do any such thing.
Mao did rid of the meritocracy-based education system, replacing it with an identity-based system. That is, if you were born with the right identity (blue-collar worker, peasant (not farmer, mind you), and soldier), then you get to go to a university without even any test. If you were born with the wrong identity (the right, the anti-revolutionary, the farmer or any family who has property, the "rich", the "bad"), then you can't go to any college. The results? Just look at China in the 70s. What a fucking hell hole.
As a for Stalin or Soviet, they never gave up their elite education. In fact, elite officers had to be elite students as well. Those who are good at STEM could even get a little leniency when they made the so-called political mistakes.
So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
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Families in Palo Alto recently won a lawsuit against PAUSD, [1] which was denying students credit for courses taken at other institutions (mainly community colleges, IIRC). In Menlo Park, we deal with similar issues; I recently wondered to myself how much I could have taught my kids in all the hours that I have spent talking to the school/district about allowing students to receive advanced learning. Other parents with less time and more money opt for private schools. Those with less time and no more money simply resign themselves to the situation. It is shocking how hostile schools are to what used to be common sense: letting (or, gasp, even encouraging) all students to learn.
1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/03/judge-rules-h...
It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!!
For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake. The kids need 1-on-1 tutoring help.
Cut off the head of the problem—the school administration that continues to support our archaic system-and spend the money you will save on tutoring the kids. Or switch to mastery education. Fix the PROBLEM.
We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling.
Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless.
I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.
There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.
In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.
I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.
It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge).
Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.
Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
It really is a task for the society compared to the individual, otherwise you will never ever ever have a fair system. Success in schools should not be so dependent on the parents. What about single parents? Do you just accept that it will be miserable for them to get their kids trough school? Parents without a lot of education will also have a problem of helping their kids. And what about those kids? Will you just leave them behind? It's not their fault they are born in the wrong family. This is just a take I would just really not agree with.
Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching).
In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.
I would add, "and how to teach it." to that.
My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"?
Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be?
The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years.
And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.
Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?
"You won't, but one of the smart kids might." [1]
Dumb kids can turn into smart kids, so they need math too.
[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...
Along the way, everybody has a chance to get a feel for math in the world, which I would say is on par with a certain base in the humanities; we should strive for every citizen to have it, even if it’s not strictly needed for survival in the job market.
Trigonometry, calculus, vectors, complex numbers, group theory, matrices? Fun, but not something I expect to be used often enough to justify making it mandatory part of everyone's education.
As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time.
What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school.
Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math.
> What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult.
As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.
Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught.
My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.
Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them.
This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it.
It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … …
You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life.
The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun.
We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.
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This is the most powerful tool for making your life easier
So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. It gives one the impression that San Francisco's issues are other than with the reform.
https://www.greatschools.org/california/berkeley/25-Berkeley...
Slightly above average in California is a failing grade by US standards. (California schools are 43rd in the nation.)
* College Readiness, 8/10: This school is above the state average in key measures of college and career readiness.
* Test Scores, 9/10: Test scores at this school are far above the state average, suggesting that most students at this school are performing at or above grade level.
* Equity, 4/10: Underserved students at this school may be falling behind other students in the state, and this school may have significant achievement gaps.
If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade, it's not getting even halfway decent results. If they're better than the results in San Francisco, all you can learn from that is that Berkeley has extreme problems with student quality, and quality is even lower in San Francisco (or rather, the part of San Francisco that's being measured).
High school in the US ends at 12th grade -- how do they teach physics without calculus?
My daughter's story is tragic. I think it basically came down to teachers just not giving a shit about the outcomes and presenting rote lessons. So when my daughter came home for help (my undergrad is in physics) I would try to explain how to solve a blazingly obvious problem (e.g. solve for x where 2x + 3 = 2y, and y is 4) she would lose her marbles, telling me that's not what her teacher said, and best I could figure, she had been taught some weird path through something geometric, and there was no way I was going to figure that out. So, my knowledge of math was completely invalidated, despite my having a more advanced math education than her teacher. This went on for a couple years and she finally failed a course.
She fixed the grade over the next quarter and we incidentally moved to another school district for my job. She excelled and got an A in pre-calc as a junior. But the new school district enrolled her in calculus and then decided they didn't have enough students to justify the section, so they cancelled it and rolled everyone into other courses. They decided my daughter had only taken 3 years of math so they had her take Algebra 2. After getting an A in pre-calc, they had her take Algebra 2. The next year she enrolled in college and they decided that she had to take a math class, but she would be best served by taking pre-calc again! What. The. Literal. Fuck!
My mom, the math teacher who wrote the Texas curriculum, and adores the whole Berkeley math education scene, leaned in to help her (mostly just to recover from the crushed self esteem) and near the end of the semester my mom called to tell me my daughter should not be pressed to do any more math. She hates it, feels terrible about herself whenever she thinks about it, and it would be best to never think about it again.
She's now a philosophy major, finishing junior year at a top college with a 3.9, straight As last quarter, and as long as we don't equatr logic to math, she can rock logic all day long
Fuck every math department. Every fucking math teacher, professor, and administrator who buys into this math reform shit can fuck right off.
Ok. So, my son. What of him? He was ahead a year when we went to that other school district. And they wouldn't have been able to keep him up with his peer group. So 18 months before the pandemic we pulled him out for home school, my mom taught him, and got him through 3 years of math in 1 year. He started high school in pre-calc.
Same parents, same grandparents. He just happened to avoid common core entirely by virtue of circumstances and is now going to UCSC as a math major, having finished every math class at Foothill Community College a semester before graduating high school.
Essentially no mathematician buys into this stuff. In general professional mathematicians and mathematics educators are little involved in the processes that design curricula in public schools. They are simply not included. No one feels more threatened by expertise than education school professors.
i've reviewed multiple resumes from people in cali for east coast jobs and noticed fresh grads who went to great schools wrote down 'advanced math' on their resume and i thought it was so strange for it to be that vague that i definitely overlooked quite a few of them because other people named courses more clearly
I assume you are reviewing the resumes of college grads. Writing "advanced math" still seems weird to me.
In this case, the comment you were replying to referred to the high school curriculum in the town of Berkeley, not the eponymous university located in the same town.
https://www.sfusd.edu/departments/mathematics-department-pag...
https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd-math-core-course-sequence-...
And the district position statement:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uije_05H3BtVyp55oQZ7NCa2k58...
It has a “guiding principle”:
> Students’ academic success in mathematics must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs.
That’s amazing! While it may be laudable to hope that a math education program could be so strong that socioeconomic status and race make no difference, the rest of this is absurd. There are people with special needs who are at a disadvantage in math. The only way that their special needs would not predict the distribution of their academic success would be to have an implausibly amazing special needs education program, to redefine success, or to hold everyone else back.
Family life matters to the growth and development of children. 64% of Black children live in single parent homes vs. 16% of Asian kids. How does this effect math results? Black children are more likely to live near highways with higher rates of air pollution and asthma. Do Black children sleep poorly and have poorer memory formation?
Black and hispanic children who are more like to be poor may have chronic background stress from poverty: food and shelter insecurity. They may have inadequate access to health care. They miss routine screenings for vision, hearing and dyslexia. Chronic absenteeism and tardiness abounds. Are these the problems?
Identifying and correcting the root cause of divergent math outcomes is likely to be a multi-faceted and complex endeavor involving families, finances and health. It is worth doing. Everyone deserves the best possible education outcome.
Unfortunately, with scant evidence, math educators have somehow convinced themselves the root cause of the problem is entirely the math curriculum and the equitable solution is to deprive advanced kids of opportunity. Madness.
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and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The idea that you can achieve cosmic justice should be abolished. There's no such thing.
I think abandoning cosmic justice is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is educational outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status and that problem cannot be solved by the school district (unless you could institute a kind of boarding school). That said, these administrators have arrived at a solution ("equitable" education) and are now gaming the metrics to achieve it at the cost of everything else. Worse still they race to pat themselves on the back on having "solved racism".
I think it has been shown over and over again that good educational outcomes start with parents (or more broadly community outside of school) and one group has had that community dismantled over and over again over several generations. In short, while I think it's a noble goal, it cannot be achieved by the school system and SF should have a more pragmatic approach even if the performance by race makes you uncomfortable.
the result? parents moving kids to private school. at the school nearest me they kindergarten enrollment is dropping. they are likely going to only have a a single class in a couple years
california is making it very clear the public school system is not going to help your children succeed beyond a base level. it seems to have the completely opposite goals of when i was in public school in california
as someone who went through the public school system in California during a time where classroom sizes hovered between 35-50 students under a single teacher, I have a hard time thinking that won't bring at least some benefits to those that aren't being put into private schools.
Don't get me wrong, as a delinquent/mischievous/criminal youth I loved it; the dating pool was huge, parties everywhere, drugs abound -- but I never received any kind of decent scholastic education until college.
Now, I'm not talking about race here - this is from my perspective in the UK.
Ultimately we need to split the education system up. Putting the next Einstein and a violent, disinterested drug dealer in the same school, let alone the same class, is a recipe for disaster. And no amount of giving the idiots targets will fix them, but it will make life hell for people who actually want to learn.
This one-size-fits-all, optimising for mediocrity attitude is evident in the move towards mixed sets. The idea is that by putting the intelligent kids and the violent, intentional failures in one class the intelligent kids encourage the others to improve. But in practice they're vastly outnumbered, so they just get relentlessly bullied and don't learn anything. I know, because it's happened to me.
And it's evident in the way schools handle behaviour. I was kicked in the head at school, twice, by a load of thugs. I'm still very slowly recovering from the post concussion syndrome. At this rate, I am likely to fail my exams and not get into what used to be my backup uni. It was an entirely preventable incident if only: - The school had entry requirements (it's meant to be a specialist technical school, but thanks to our enlightened government new grammar schools are banned.) - The school was able to expell them before it happened, what with them spending the whole time messing about and attacking my friend - The school had temporarily suspended more than the single person who punched my friend in the face when the whole group was there - The police, with it's restorative justice, letting under-18s get away with anything, policies, had actually done something the first time
But they didn't, and now my life is ruined, and they got away with it. Because of a series of brain dead policies that are disconnected from reality and pushed by people similarly disconnected from reality.
The school system should have separate schools for high achievers to allow them to succeed without violence and with the fast pace and high expectations they deserve. If people want to go to those schools they can put the work in, behave, and pay attention. It's time to stop feel-good policies about second chances and equity and optimise for success and meritocracy.
and that is the crux of the problem --- the best school would be one which would help students explore what they are interested, find what best suits them, and then best prepare them to be successful at that.
I disagree w/ separation though --- this really should be achievable in a single building/system.
One of the best programs ever for fostering educational success was the one California had where land-grant colleges were required to accept the student with the highest GPA from each high school who applied and provide a full scholarship (so if the top 3 students got a better deal, then the student w/ the 4th highest GPA was guaranteed to be able to apply to a land-grant college and be accepted, and get full tuition and room and board). This was dismantled after college students began protesting the Vietnam War and draft.
At a bare minimum, the basics of algebra (and to a lesser extent precalc, such as understanding limits and differentials) foster a type of abstract thinking and skills that pretty much anyone can benefit from.
Apparently the Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled.
What the actual fuck.