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TLDR : American public schools suck but there is an increasing number of extracurricular math programs that help talented kids learn advanced problem solving sk

by dzdt 11y ago

TLDR : American public schools suck but there is an increasing number of extracurricular math programs that help talented kids learn advanced problem solving skills. Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks, and there are marginal efforts to reach out to poorer students. But the real story right now is, if you have kids in public school, their math education sucks and you might want to look into extracurricular options -- there are lots out there.

douche 11y ago
Now that I think about it, public education is great training for a future of working in open-offices. You learn to accept that you have to wake up at an arbitrary time, spend eight hours getting very little productive done, whilst being bombarded with noise, interruptions, and politics, then if you want to make any real progress, you have to do it afterwards on your own time, outside the school/work day.
- HillaryBriss 11y ago
  One can make the case that, in California, the higher education system was purposefully, consciously stratified along career and status tiers, as you described. Community college system = workers in the practical trades Cal State system = office workers UC system = technologists, scientists, managers Big name, elite, private universities = executives and high level politicians, the people who actually run society and its institutions And, if you look at the architecture on the various campuses, it more or less reflects that. Also, all of the community colleges, and an awful lot of the Cal State schools are commuter campuses. You come and you go. It's not your home. You're a renter. The place shuts down around 10 pm. (Get out of here, kids.) By contrast, the elite private schools have sufficient dorm/house space to allow most of the students to live on-site: the students have a lot more access to buildings and more or less "own" the place while they're there.
  - recondite 11y ago
    Having attended school in California at a community college, UC, and finally an elite, private university I couldn't more agree with your characterization. I don't know how much I would agree with the claim that the stratification was purposefully constructed (I'd argue it's more of a reflection of American society writ large - i.e. successful parents have more resources to ensure their kids are successful), but otherwise this rings very true.
rayiner 11y ago
The difference between "good schools" and "bad schools" is much more about the kids that go there than anything about the school itself. You're seeing this starkly in D.C. where gentrification in certain neighborhoods is shifting the student demographics from 90% low-income to 20% low-income over just 4-5 years. Test scores are shooting up, but it's not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice the salary. American schools are fine. Our problems are social. For example, the U.S. has the second-highest rate of single-parent families along with one of the highest gaps in PISA scores between single-parent and two-parent households: http://educationnext.org/international-look-single-parent-family http://educationnext.org/international-look-single-parent-fa.... The U.S. also has a larger fraction of children in the lowest income distribution than comparable countries: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin.... Accounting for that eliminates a lot of the supposed gap in U.S. student performance: > If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.
- exhilaration 11y ago
  > Test scores are shooting up, but it's not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice the salary. Why are you assuming that the schools are responsible for the higher test scores? In my immigrant, upper-middle class community, there's nearly universal use of after-school test prep and tutoring from companies like Kumon. I'd argue that's the reason you're seeing test scores "shoot up" once only few low-income families are left in a neighborhood.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    You are violently agreeing with him.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
jerf 11y ago
"Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks," It's really important not to let 201x social concerns get in the way of this stuff. The good stuff always starts out with the rich. Always. It is virtually structurally impossible for it to happen any other way. (Not quite, but very much the exception rather than the rule.) Rather than complaining that only the rich have the thing it is far more important to work out how to get it improved and shared more widely; complaining about the rich having the thing doesn't help that and in the modern political environment runs the risk of strangling the improvement in the crib. It is always easier to bring "equality" by cutting off the top than bring up the bottom, and you have to be very wary of that, because people will propose that in various subtle ways if you fall for the "class inequality" memeset too hard.
- cschneid 11y ago
  It's easy to want to simply to steal from the rich, as you point out. But that's not our current style of failure, it's "hey poor district, you're not up to snuff compared to the rich district. We're going to fire all the teachers, gut your union, and generally make your life hell. That's sure to make you do better".
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Poor management by the government is hardly a surprise. Systems have to be constructed to deal with that as a reality. Or we need to stop hiring managers based on how popular they are.
  - jerf 11y ago
    I wasn't talking about "styles of failure". I'm talking about this very thread, where people are popping up, looking at a program demonstrating success in mathematical education, a thing proved to be difficult by well-funded repeated and repeated and repeated failure, and all they've got to say about it is complaints about how it's not fair that it's just going to rich people. This is not the time to be worried about fairness. This is the time to figure out what works. When you have that, then worry about fairness. Demanding that all the experiments be done equally to everybody at scale produces total paralysis, and is in no small part responsible for the total paralysis we witness in school reformation right now. You simply can't do anything that way.
hackercomplex 11y ago
At what point do you have to consider yourself an irresponsible parent if you leave your kid in public school while being able to afford homeschooling ? Are we rapidly approaching the point as a society where our public education feels more like daycare ? If that's not the case how do we measure it and where do we draw the line.

by dzdt 11y ago

douche 11y ago

Now that I think about it, public education is great training for a future of working in open-offices. You learn to accept that you have to wake up at an arbitrary time, spend eight hours getting very little productive done, whilst being bombarded with noise, interruptions, and politics, then if you want to make any real progress, you have to do it afterwards on your own time, outside the school/work day.

HillaryBriss 11y ago
One can make the case that, in California, the higher education system was purposefully, consciously stratified along career and status tiers, as you described. Community college system = workers in the practical trades Cal State system = office workers UC system = technologists, scientists, managers Big name, elite, private universities = executives and high level politicians, the people who actually run society and its institutions And, if you look at the architecture on the various campuses, it more or less reflects that. Also, all of the community colleges, and an awful lot of the Cal State schools are commuter campuses. You come and you go. It's not your home. You're a renter. The place shuts down around 10 pm. (Get out of here, kids.) By contrast, the elite private schools have sufficient dorm/house space to allow most of the students to live on-site: the students have a lot more access to buildings and more or less "own" the place while they're there.
- recondite 11y ago
  Having attended school in California at a community college, UC, and finally an elite, private university I couldn't more agree with your characterization. I don't know how much I would agree with the claim that the stratification was purposefully constructed (I'd argue it's more of a reflection of American society writ large - i.e. successful parents have more resources to ensure their kids are successful), but otherwise this rings very true.

rayiner 11y ago

The difference between "good schools" and "bad schools" is much more about the kids that go there than anything about the school itself. You're seeing this starkly in D.C. where gentrification in certain neighborhoods is shifting the student demographics from 90% low-income to 20% low-income over just 4-5 years. Test scores are shooting up, but it's not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice the salary. American schools are fine. Our problems are social. For example, the U.S. has the second-highest rate of single-parent families along with one of the highest gaps in PISA scores between single-parent and two-parent households: http://educationnext.org/international-look-single-parent-family http://educationnext.org/international-look-single-parent-fa.... The U.S. also has a larger fraction of children in the lowest income distribution than comparable countries: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin.... Accounting for that eliminates a lot of the supposed gap in U.S. student performance: > If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.

exhilaration 11y ago
> Test scores are shooting up, but it's not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice the salary. Why are you assuming that the schools are responsible for the higher test scores? In my immigrant, upper-middle class community, there's nearly universal use of after-school test prep and tutoring from companies like Kumon. I'd argue that's the reason you're seeing test scores "shoot up" once only few low-income families are left in a neighborhood.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  You are violently agreeing with him.
snowwrestler 11y ago

jerf 11y ago

"Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks," It's really important not to let 201x social concerns get in the way of this stuff. The good stuff always starts out with the rich. Always. It is virtually structurally impossible for it to happen any other way. (Not quite, but very much the exception rather than the rule.) Rather than complaining that only the rich have the thing it is far more important to work out how to get it improved and shared more widely; complaining about the rich having the thing doesn't help that and in the modern political environment runs the risk of strangling the improvement in the crib. It is always easier to bring "equality" by cutting off the top than bring up the bottom, and you have to be very wary of that, because people will propose that in various subtle ways if you fall for the "class inequality" memeset too hard.

cschneid 11y ago
It's easy to want to simply to steal from the rich, as you point out. But that's not our current style of failure, it's "hey poor district, you're not up to snuff compared to the rich district. We're going to fire all the teachers, gut your union, and generally make your life hell. That's sure to make you do better".
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Poor management by the government is hardly a surprise. Systems have to be constructed to deal with that as a reality. Or we need to stop hiring managers based on how popular they are.
- jerf 11y ago
  I wasn't talking about "styles of failure". I'm talking about this very thread, where people are popping up, looking at a program demonstrating success in mathematical education, a thing proved to be difficult by well-funded repeated and repeated and repeated failure, and all they've got to say about it is complaints about how it's not fair that it's just going to rich people. This is not the time to be worried about fairness. This is the time to figure out what works. When you have that, then worry about fairness. Demanding that all the experiments be done equally to everybody at scale produces total paralysis, and is in no small part responsible for the total paralysis we witness in school reformation right now. You simply can't do anything that way.

hackercomplex 11y ago

At what point do you have to consider yourself an irresponsible parent if you leave your kid in public school while being able to afford homeschooling ? Are we rapidly approaching the point as a society where our public education feels more like daycare ? If that's not the case how do we measure it and where do we draw the line.