In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole.
The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.
Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.
There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long.
As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.
One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.
All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.
> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to.
Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.
My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.
>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to.
Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.
How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.
The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/
I think the core issue is that we expect institutions like schools to do multiple, often conflicting tasks. In the US, schools are expected to:
* Provide instruction to the median student.
* Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities.
* Empower gifted students to learn to their potential.
* Serve as an amateur sports league.
* Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program
* Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings)
* Screen children for abuse and neglect
* Be a place children can be left while parents are at work
Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.
Yes, agree, and this dovetails with a sibling comment by a long-time teacher. I have a child in the US and have family close in age and demographics in non-US countries. The pressure of school-as-childcare is unique to me in the US because of the amount of paid time off I get, which is substantially less than my peers in Europe. In addition, the financial pressures of childcare and education in the US are quite different than Europe. I certainly earn more money in the US than I would in Europe in the same job, but the logistics of arranging childcare and the pressure of teaching my child both math and English outside of school, despite 7+ hours of school a day, are not insubstantial. As has come up elsewhere in these discussions (on HN and in the article), 15 minutes a day of worksheets has done wonders. While I appreciate what Kid has learned in school, and very much appreciate that Kid's classmates get a nutritional baseline no matter what, it is striking that I must provide this additional instruction and practice. It's this very out-of-school intervention that leads to the inequality of outcomes I so clearly see at the school my child is departing -- one in which the kids with college prof parents score top in the state and kids whose parents are English-language learners or work several (non-adjunct-instructor) jobs score in the 30th percentile. (The kids of all the PhDs, whether well-compensated or not, do fine academically.)
Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct.
For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).
I tend to agree and I think public schools, at least in the US, have the same basic challenge as most government services. The consumer/parent/voter has direct control over the inputs to the system (funding, policy, etc) as well as expectations on the output (the goals you mentioned), but doesn't actually behave as if they're at least partially responsible for those outputs. I actually think taxpayers are generally supportive of education as a goal, but they think that's achieved by shouting at the school district instead of voting as if education was their priority.
Government bureaucracy absolutely produces less than optimal incentives and priorities, but the responsibility voters have in creating those incentives seems underappreciated, especially when it comes to public schools.
I grew up in China and came to the same conclusion as yours! I never expect such a similarity. I've always thought that education in the US must be much better.
After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system.
Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform.
Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society.
These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?
I had the experience of going to US schools among competitive immigrants from Taiwan and HK(in the late 90's, i.e. they left while it was still under the British), and a little bit of mainland China as well.
Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city.
And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either.
I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy.
The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially.
In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.
> It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth.
Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them.
The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else.
So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.
This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones.
There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.
Multiple problems with this. The most obvious one is cost: schools don't have large classes because they want to but because of budgets. The second one is that "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case and might very well be: experience in other countries shows you that parents tend to optimize for grades , test scores and "connections"; so you get grade inflation, "teaching to the test", bribery and networks and over all worse quality (just think of prejudices you have heard about some private schools).
Pournelle was just another Republican and this is just another political slogan, not an "iron law".
He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.
I think a lot of the organizational dysfunction in education and more broadly comes down to a poor understanding of rule utilitarianism.
In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice.
The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection.
This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.
Quality comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN.
I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.
The only incentive that works is letting such institutions crash and burn and be replaced. Even giant monopolies can end up losing money and going under.
These institutions cannot be reformed in a reasonable amount of time. The alternative has to come from elsewhere. People need a viable alternative so they can 'exit' similar to how Uber changed the taxi industry.
Pitched competition between well-matched opponents is the only sure-fire antidote. It either keeps the players perpetually lean, or picks off the ones that ossify. You are simply left no choice other than to play seriously or lose.
Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.
The actions that the California state education system towards Blacks and Brown kids are exactly what the most insidious racist person would do. If I hated Black and Brown kids, I would lower the education standards so low that these kids would graduate high school being unable to compete at the city, state or country level. And this is EXACTLY what is happening. Half of the Black kids in SF are graduating high school and can barely read.
Now with the gutting with math, Black and Brown kids will be even further behind on math than the rest of the demographics. It's horrifying.
Anyone who has money will avoid all this by either sending their kids to private school, which is what we did, or getting enrichment classes after school. Both of those options are unavailable to lower income kids, so the gap between the haves and the have nots will only increase at an exponential rate.
There is nothing more racist than the of lowered expectations in the guise of ruinous empathy for "the poor victims of white supremacy". You help undereducated kids by raising expectations, and pumping money into the system so that the student teacher ratio plummets in the poorest areas that need the most help. Instead SFUSD was spending millions to change the names of school instead of trying to get those kids to learn how to read.
I have both of my kids enrolled in SFUSD and what you describe is exactly what's happening. Majority of “affluent” parents and immigrants are enrolling their children in Sylvan, Kumon, hiring Russian instructors, and so forth. Even school counselors will suggest this, as they also enroll their own children in such programs and subtly encourage you to do the same.
However, if a child belongs to a disadvantaged group, then they're out of luck. There's virtually no assistance available for them. While the district does offer free after-school and extra classes through SF State, these require a significant amount of paperwork which, as you probably know, necessitates full involvement from both parents. Essentially, the system is set up so that disadvantaged children don't receive the help they need.
It's a truly racist system. Yet, they can freely post on Twitter, touting how great and progressive they are.
I think a major problem is that most education "experts" (the type policy makers listen to, not practicing teachers) are upper-middle-class kids who had their parents teach them the basics of phonics and times tables. Who else would get a PhD in education?
They went to school, and found learning these things a massive waste of time, because their parents had already set them up to succeed, but they don't realise it was their parents doing all the work and it's not a waste of time or just "common sense" to the kids who didn't have the same home environment.
People with money homeschool, with much better results. There's even small homeschooling groups that pool resources to hire the best tutors money can buy.
Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back.
Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homeschooling literally produce better outcomes.
Not to mention the violence in public schools (which is escalating), and the abuse from teachers that the major US teaching unions ritually cover up (the teacher's unions vehemently defend predator teachers).
Teachers unions are in the business of protecting predators, financially and with predator-friendly policy like union-decided arbitration venues. [1]
I think we significantly overestimate how much school actually matters compared to family milieus. My wife and I highly value education, so regardless of when the school says children should learn algebra, I am already tutoring my 6 year old in basic algebra. If school did nothing other than be a daycare for my kids so we could work, they'd probably still be better educated than most kids going through public school because my wife and I will make sure of that because we teach our kids a lot on our own (and we're not hiring tutors or after school programs). If schools were more rigorous then it would save us time from having to do a lot of the educating ourselves, but it won't change family values.
This. I strongly suspect that the biggest problem in school for children from good families isn't the schooling but rather the presence of children from bad families.
My sister is a primary teacher and the things I've heard make it clear that the system tries to make up for bad parenting but it's and uphill struggle.
You are correct that in our world currently and maybe even in the past, the kids never truly learned math in school. I studied in the top university in my Indian province with 50 million people, and most of my undergrad colleagues truly didn’t understand what differentiation and integration actually meant.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. The kids are supposed to learn things in school, we just need to pull our heads out of our assess and acknowledge that almost all current learning systems suck and try to reset from the ground up.
This is a recipe for an ignorant underclass from which one can never escape. What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education? Functioning public school is supposed to solve that problem.
Yes.
However, public schools should provide opportunities for children to break free from this destructive cycle.
And it is not about “family” values. What the single grandma can do? Or single mom having drug issues can do? And these two examples are 100% real world examples.
But that’s sort of the point I’m making- schools can’t fix drug-addicted parents and that’s probably going to make much more of a difference in a child’s educational attainment than how good their teacher is at teaching math. Unless schools are going to do more than just teach academic subjects. They will basically have to function as reliable, disciplining parents.
I'll give her simple problems like "x + 5 = 0, what must `x` be to make this true?" (First had to teach her the number line and negative numbers) or "2*y = 6, what is y?" (Taught her multiplication as a copy-then-add operation, ie she knows that 2*3 means to make 3 copies of 2 and then add them all together. She hasn’t yet learned the times table)
California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution.
It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy.
I can only hope that in 5-10 years a new set of voters shift focus to education being a top priority.
More and more I get the feeling California doesn't care about the homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare. There are just a ton of grifters who make a lot of noise on the topics, but don't push for policies that would actually improve things. Or push for them in a way that is just more red tape that hinders actual results. Education is in the same bucket. Lots of noise from lots of people with bad ideas or bad implementations of ok ideas.
What gives you the impression that California prioritizes homelessness, immigrants, and medicare over education? The state spent $136 billion on k-12 education last year, making it far and away the largest spending program. Anti-homelessness programs typically get 1% that much, although recent years have been slightly more as the housing crisis worsens.
The bar for US public school education is abysmally low to begin with. One would have expected Silicon Valley to be better than that, not one of the worst in the country.
Source: Someone from the Midwest who went to a public school
I'm not sure any part of america has working education; across the board it seems to be a huge money sink that produces poor results. Gesturing to homelessness, immigrants and healthcare is clouding the issue. Those are real, pressing issues too, and it's not a binary choice of tackling one or the other.
Social issues and education are not separate. That's the problem. Most of the low-performing kids are from - you might not guess it - households that are in need of social support.
Yes, there are some issues that can be demarcated as not intertwined with education.
But of course homeless people can have kids, and now they are in the foster system, and that's likely worse than fixing the homelessness. And similarly, when poor kids or their parents have medical issues, which they almost surely will have, because they don't have the resources to have a healthy lifestyle, where do you think they will go? If they have to go to work to afford medication they won't continue their studies, or simply won't even apply for higher ed.
The problem that voters should address is high costs, lack of efficiency, run of the mill corruption and so on. (But for this voters would need to accept actual cities with functioning transit system, not endless suburbs and highways around a few corporate skyscrapers. They'd need to face the actual problem of resource deficit that's needed to actually make some progress in closing the education and income gap of the disadvantaged, and so on.)
Tldr k-12 education budget is smaller than what taxpayers are paying for homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and expanded Medi-Cal. Cutting costs in these areas could significantly bolster our K-12 budget.
Homelessness programs take up significant budget. 636 million per year SF spends on homelessness, SFUSD’s budget is 1.28 billion. Cutting the homeless budget would allow for increased education spend.
Undocumented immigrants make up ~10% the state population and are in the lowest tax paying bucket. On average just 1304$/undocumented immigrant of yearly tax revenue. So they are taking more social services than what they bring in. If California was more active in deporting them or enforcing tax collection practices, we’d have greater educational dollars per legal resident.
Medi-Cal has 1/3rd the states population enrolled. This is significantly higher than many other states. This program takes up significant tax dollars. These tax dollars could instead be spent on public education.
Like a lot of education, California's is so tied up in so many ways that it takes books to understand.
The first issue that springs to mind is the funding. Most funds in California do not stay local, they go to Sacramento and are then distributed out. If you're thinking that is a system ripe for abuse, then you are correct. The formulas and methods for determining funding aren't easy to grok. But then you add in all the fraud from schools themselves and you get a real mess.
Further, Prop 13's starvation of property taxes has also contributed to the lack of public school funding in California. It's a bit of a winding tale there, but suffice to say, less taxes means less good schools. Then again, Prop 13 is, just, hoo boy. What a total long standing mess.
So, does California need better education. Oh heck yes. But fixing that requires dealing with things like Prop 13 and other huge political monsters barely hidden under the rug. Try finding any politician with the bravery, let alone stamina, to fix those titanic underlying issues (pun intended).
The median salary for a teacher in SF seems to be ~$70k +/- $9k [0], so about half you guess. Which, I mean, how the heck are they living anywhere near SF on that salary? Jeeze Louise...
A better breakdown of the '21-'22 budget for SFUSD seems to be here: [1]. Numbers in () are a per student number
Total $ per student seems to be ~$22k, the ratio is just under 20:1, and construction is just under 20%, so your guesses were pretty good!
The site has more info, but one thing to notice is that the expenditures add up to more than the revenues. As in, SFUSD is in debt at ~$6 per student.
Play with the numbers yourself (please also find another source of data). In the end, it seems SFUSD is not doing all that well if it's only paying teachers ~$70k, is still running a deficit, and has revenues of ~$1.1B per year. Something seems strange about all those numbers.
I feel like the facts are a little thin. It is not really true that "For decades, American math curriculum has followed a standard sequence: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus." That may have been the local condition in some places. The high school in my city does not have and has never had any named math course except calculus and statistics. Everything else is just "math". Common core math does not follow the given progression, either. 8th grade common core math has elements of algebra, geometry, and statistics and probability.
That sequence was exactly what I had in northern Virginia in the early 2000s. If you think back, did your "math" teach approximately that same sequence?
I can confirm. We had all of that at the small, rural Texas school I attended. My class of 17 produced two successful computer scientists, a college professor, and a Navy nuclear engineer, each of whom all went through that very curriculum.
My school system had a similar progression, though trig was on its own and you either took basic calc (essentially just limits and differentials) or AP calc, or a statistics-lite course that was basically "business math" for kids who weren't on a college track but might try for an associates degree or maybe community college. Though, arithmetic and algebra 1 were just called "math" (all pre-common-core, of course).
This was at a somewhat rural school in the Midwest, for what it is worth.
The CA and NY Common Core does follow that sequence even if the names don't match up exactly, and even if there's a sprinkling of geometry, statistics, or algebra mixed together in early math.
Data Science is a form of statistics. Algebra II is a pre-requisite for statistics. How is replacing a pre-requisite with a more advanced class is a good idea?
How is data science not just statistics, rebranded?
When I studied statistics in university we studied clustering, regression, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, visualisations, charting, general linear models... how is this different from data science?
Is it just because we have more computing power, so we rebranded it? Instead of doing frequentist analyses because those are easy to do with smaller computers, now we do more Bayesian stats, on bigger computers, and therefore call it data science?
From the one data science course I took: compared to a traditional stats class, there is a bit more focus on data acquisition and pre processing, and more usage of our of the box tools, a bit less on some of theory (I don’t recall hearing about type I and type II errors).
Of course, since it was a professional course there is probably the assumption that students already know these things…
I’ve periodically looked into it the differences and mostly it seems to come down to priorities. Statistics prioritizes mathematical rigor all the way through the process from collection to analysis. ML / Data science has more algorithmic concerns. Even the theoretical aspects of the two fields emphasize that distinction.
It’s “data science” only in name. (Btw I hate the term data science; most practitioners of this profession practice pseudoscientific bullshit or worse.) From TFA:
> The core issue of the CMF’s “data science” section is that it claims to be discussing data science while it is actually discussing data literacy.
> ...
> The CMF is replete with statements like “high-school data-science class students can learn to clean data sets – removing any data that is incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, or incorrect in some other way [...] High school students can also learn to download and upload data, and develop the more sophisticated “data moves” that are important to learn if students are tackling real data sets.''
It’s more of an Excel class with some basic math sprinkled in.
I went to high school in China, and the Math problems in the US from the same level are literal jokes to us. At the end of the semester, my teacher doesn't have anything else planned for the last class, so just for fun he would find these problems and share with the class :"Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with". I remember all of the problems are so dumb that the whole class would had a good laugh reading through them.
At that time I thought the whole Math education in the US is a joke, until I came here for graduate school and realized how brutally challenging the Math is in higher educations.
My 2 cents is that the majority demographics in the US don't give a damn about Math, or any kind of formal education. Most people, even the uneducated, are living a comfortable enough life, so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. As a result, these type of education are only reserved by the elite. While in a lot of developing countries, education is the only way for a normal people to not end up being extremely poor for the rest of his/her lives.
> "Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with"
That's some top grade propaganda to indoctrinate children there, just like with the authorities suppressing news about the knife attacks on Chinese kindergartens and instead reporting extensively on school shootings in the US to show how safe China is compared to the US. Gotta love the CCP
> so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education.
Is there really a point in grinding to learn calc 4 if you aren’t going to use it? Is the typical Chinese citizen in the workforce going to even use calc to begin with?
Readit News
The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.
Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.
As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.
One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.
All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.
Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.
Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.
How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.
* Provide instruction to the median student. * Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities. * Empower gifted students to learn to their potential. * Serve as an amateur sports league. * Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program * Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings) * Screen children for abuse and neglect * Be a place children can be left while parents are at work
Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.
Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct.
For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).
Government bureaucracy absolutely produces less than optimal incentives and priorities, but the responsibility voters have in creating those incentives seems underappreciated, especially when it comes to public schools.
After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system.
Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform.
Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society.
These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?
Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city.
And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either.
I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy.
The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially.
In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.
Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them.
The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else.
So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.
This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones.
There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.
He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.
In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice.
The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection.
This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.
I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.
Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.
Large organizations just further exacerbate this
-- attributed to Oscar Wilde
Charter schools. Competition. Of course education sucks when there's no competition.
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Now with the gutting with math, Black and Brown kids will be even further behind on math than the rest of the demographics. It's horrifying.
Anyone who has money will avoid all this by either sending their kids to private school, which is what we did, or getting enrichment classes after school. Both of those options are unavailable to lower income kids, so the gap between the haves and the have nots will only increase at an exponential rate.
There is nothing more racist than the of lowered expectations in the guise of ruinous empathy for "the poor victims of white supremacy". You help undereducated kids by raising expectations, and pumping money into the system so that the student teacher ratio plummets in the poorest areas that need the most help. Instead SFUSD was spending millions to change the names of school instead of trying to get those kids to learn how to read.
However, if a child belongs to a disadvantaged group, then they're out of luck. There's virtually no assistance available for them. While the district does offer free after-school and extra classes through SF State, these require a significant amount of paperwork which, as you probably know, necessitates full involvement from both parents. Essentially, the system is set up so that disadvantaged children don't receive the help they need.
It's a truly racist system. Yet, they can freely post on Twitter, touting how great and progressive they are.
They went to school, and found learning these things a massive waste of time, because their parents had already set them up to succeed, but they don't realise it was their parents doing all the work and it's not a waste of time or just "common sense" to the kids who didn't have the same home environment.
I'm hoping the reversal of affirmative action will light a fire under this issue.
Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back.
Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homeschooling literally produce better outcomes.
Not to mention the violence in public schools (which is escalating), and the abuse from teachers that the major US teaching unions ritually cover up (the teacher's unions vehemently defend predator teachers).
Teachers unions are in the business of protecting predators, financially and with predator-friendly policy like union-decided arbitration venues. [1]
[1] https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/campbell-brown-teachers-un...
Two data points can't show something is exponential!
Also, it can't possibly be exponential because the US population is not growing exponentially.
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My sister is a primary teacher and the things I've heard make it clear that the system tries to make up for bad parenting but it's and uphill struggle.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. The kids are supposed to learn things in school, we just need to pull our heads out of our assess and acknowledge that almost all current learning systems suck and try to reset from the ground up.
What do they do in the current system? Get stuck in a class that can’t move faster than the average student?
And it is not about “family” values. What the single grandma can do? Or single mom having drug issues can do? And these two examples are 100% real world examples.
It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy.
I can only hope that in 5-10 years a new set of voters shift focus to education being a top priority.
https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
is it state or local taxes?..
Source: Someone from the Midwest who went to a public school
Yes, there are some issues that can be demarcated as not intertwined with education.
But of course homeless people can have kids, and now they are in the foster system, and that's likely worse than fixing the homelessness. And similarly, when poor kids or their parents have medical issues, which they almost surely will have, because they don't have the resources to have a healthy lifestyle, where do you think they will go? If they have to go to work to afford medication they won't continue their studies, or simply won't even apply for higher ed.
The problem that voters should address is high costs, lack of efficiency, run of the mill corruption and so on. (But for this voters would need to accept actual cities with functioning transit system, not endless suburbs and highways around a few corporate skyscrapers. They'd need to face the actual problem of resource deficit that's needed to actually make some progress in closing the education and income gap of the disadvantaged, and so on.)
Can you explain what those subjects have to do with education and how one affects the other?
Homelessness programs take up significant budget. 636 million per year SF spends on homelessness, SFUSD’s budget is 1.28 billion. Cutting the homeless budget would allow for increased education spend.
Undocumented immigrants make up ~10% the state population and are in the lowest tax paying bucket. On average just 1304$/undocumented immigrant of yearly tax revenue. So they are taking more social services than what they bring in. If California was more active in deporting them or enforcing tax collection practices, we’d have greater educational dollars per legal resident.
Medi-Cal has 1/3rd the states population enrolled. This is significantly higher than many other states. This program takes up significant tax dollars. These tax dollars could instead be spent on public education.
Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-a...
The first issue that springs to mind is the funding. Most funds in California do not stay local, they go to Sacramento and are then distributed out. If you're thinking that is a system ripe for abuse, then you are correct. The formulas and methods for determining funding aren't easy to grok. But then you add in all the fraud from schools themselves and you get a real mess.
Further, Prop 13's starvation of property taxes has also contributed to the lack of public school funding in California. It's a bit of a winding tale there, but suffice to say, less taxes means less good schools. Then again, Prop 13 is, just, hoo boy. What a total long standing mess.
So, does California need better education. Oh heck yes. But fixing that requires dealing with things like Prop 13 and other huge political monsters barely hidden under the rug. Try finding any politician with the bravery, let alone stamina, to fix those titanic underlying issues (pun intended).
- an annual operating budget of $1.2bn/year.
- ~50k K-12 students.
That's $24k per student per year.
Let's assume a teacher costs $150k/year and you want a low student:teacher ratio of 20:1.
Of the $24k, $7.5k is needed to pay 1/20th of the cost of the teacher.
You still have two thirds of the money left. Is that not enough to pay for management and facilities?
A better breakdown of the '21-'22 budget for SFUSD seems to be here: [1]. Numbers in () are a per student number
Federal Revenue: $48,915,000 ($926)
Local Revenue: $667,062,000 ($12,631)
State Revenue: $455,213,000 ($8,620)
Instructional Expenditures: $503,371,000 ($9,532)
Student and Staff Support: $193,984,000 ($3,673)
Administration: $104,612,000 ($1,981)
Operations, Food Service, other: $103,178,000 ($1,954)
Construction: $190,399,000 ($3,605)
Student/Teacher Ratio: 19.32
Total $ per student seems to be ~$22k, the ratio is just under 20:1, and construction is just under 20%, so your guesses were pretty good!
The site has more info, but one thing to notice is that the expenditures add up to more than the revenues. As in, SFUSD is in debt at ~$6 per student.
Play with the numbers yourself (please also find another source of data). In the end, it seems SFUSD is not doing all that well if it's only paying teachers ~$70k, is still running a deficit, and has revenues of ~$1.1B per year. Something seems strange about all those numbers.
[0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho...
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I...
Edit: despite the name, pre calc was basically entirely trigonometry.
This was at a somewhat rural school in the Midwest, for what it is worth.
When I studied statistics in university we studied clustering, regression, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, visualisations, charting, general linear models... how is this different from data science?
Is it just because we have more computing power, so we rebranded it? Instead of doing frequentist analyses because those are easy to do with smaller computers, now we do more Bayesian stats, on bigger computers, and therefore call it data science?
Of course, since it was a professional course there is probably the assumption that students already know these things…
data science is more practical in a sense, you learn more to prepare real-life data for analysis.
also statistics coursework doesn't cover ML part (at least the stats course that I took)
> The core issue of the CMF’s “data science” section is that it claims to be discussing data science while it is actually discussing data literacy.
> ...
> The CMF is replete with statements like “high-school data-science class students can learn to clean data sets – removing any data that is incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, or incorrect in some other way [...] High school students can also learn to download and upload data, and develop the more sophisticated “data moves” that are important to learn if students are tackling real data sets.''
It’s more of an Excel class with some basic math sprinkled in.
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At that time I thought the whole Math education in the US is a joke, until I came here for graduate school and realized how brutally challenging the Math is in higher educations.
My 2 cents is that the majority demographics in the US don't give a damn about Math, or any kind of formal education. Most people, even the uneducated, are living a comfortable enough life, so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. As a result, these type of education are only reserved by the elite. While in a lot of developing countries, education is the only way for a normal people to not end up being extremely poor for the rest of his/her lives.
That's some top grade propaganda to indoctrinate children there, just like with the authorities suppressing news about the knife attacks on Chinese kindergartens and instead reporting extensively on school shootings in the US to show how safe China is compared to the US. Gotta love the CCP
Is there really a point in grinding to learn calc 4 if you aren’t going to use it? Is the typical Chinese citizen in the workforce going to even use calc to begin with?