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An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter

292 points by feross 5y ago

bobthechef 5y ago
Given the underlying ideological current, I don't expect a letter like this to move very many people. You want to entice them with the future possibility of career opportunities? Not very rousing or compelling in this environment. And indeed this career-centric view of education and learning I claim is what produced the conditions for further decadence in the first place. Classical education places truth and understanding at the top of its list. Modern education shifts to "know how", manipulation, and production. Truth takes a back seat. Once that happens, myth and gnosis re-enter the picture, and that's what we've been witnessing for some time. What we're seeing now is just the latest development. So in a way, the letter is arguing for a regression to an earlier status quo which itself contributed to the very conditions we're seeing now. Societies don't really rewind like that.
bob1029 5y ago
It's almost as if this is all going according to some plan and we are crafting the next generation of "working class" Americans with intent. It's a lot easier to become oppressed when you don't possess these most fundamental tools for understanding the nature of that reality. Maybe that's what we need to keep this shit show moving along for another generation.
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
The more people you push into STEM, the less money we will get. Please stop! It‘s self harm, unless you are an employer. For my own sake, I want everyone to think computers and programming are incomprehensible magic. Why can‘t we behave more like highly limited occupations like medical doctors?
jelliclesfarm 5y ago
they are screaming Fire!!..no one is listening. The only solution is to split public schools into two streams STEM and liberal arts studies(I don’t know what it’s called).+ more vocational/trade schools. We can’t cater to the lowest common denominator in math.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  This makes no sense - stem and liberal arts aren’t mutually exclusive things you can just separate. In fact math itself is generally thought to be part of the “liberal arts”, along with logic, which could be said to be the precursor to computer science.
  - Anechoic 5y ago
    I read that as "stem & liberal arts" as one stream and "vocational/trade schools" as the second stream.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      We don't need more trade schools though. Over here on hacker news many of us have day jobs eliminating those jobs. While we won't succeed (and trades are still a better job than many artistic degrees) there are a lot of kids going into them. Most trades are also taught on the job. Want to be a carpenter - you can start tomorrow morning at 7am in any large city. From there you can branch out if you want.
      - jimbokun 5y ago
        The majority of programming jobs, DevOps jobs, etc. could be learned in a trade school. Only a minority of programming jobs really require a four year CS degree. Also, is that true that most trades can be learned on the job without prior training? I thought you needed a decent amount of training to be a plumber, electrician, etc.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    See "Modern usage" in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education "The modern use of the term liberal arts consists of four areas: the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities." So no, math is not "generally thought" to be part of the liberal arts.
stakkur 5y ago
Public education in the US sits at a difficult nexus of political will, cultural ideology, public opinion, and educational 'theory'. It rarely goes well, because everyone vehemently believes they know the 'purpose' of public education. And so, we get posts like this: public ed as a 'pipeline to STEM careers'. The reductionist view of public education-as-career-training is one of those contentious topics. I myself find it absurd. An ed system driven by vocations and political/ideological nation-state goals has been so genuinely harmful to people it's hard to know where to begin.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > Public education in the US sits at a difficult nexus of political will, cultural ideology, public opinion, and educational 'theory'. And that doesn't even list the people with remunerative interests, teachers unions, textbook publishers the testing/test-prep industry, the for-profit outrage machine., etc.
mherdeg 5y ago
I don't understand how you can remove algebra from middle-school curricula without exacerbating inequality. Supplementary math education in our area costs about $1500-$2500/year (looking at Russian School of Math list prices). The exemplary private schools in the area I grew up charge $30k-$35k annual tuition (with financial aid available for some families). And you can DIY home instruction -- I've been working through the Moebius Noodles play with our 4yo, and I guess you could try to see if there's a Math Circle to sign up for. But not every household can afford the time or money to coordinate extracurricular instruction. The kids whose parents are hyper-prepared and able to spend the time and money will end up with better math background, maybe a better shot at the AHSME/AIME/USAMO, and I guess maybe better career outcomes, versus their peers. Is that a fair outcome? Is it a good thing to do? I'm very willing to be wrong here … I just don't understand how this plan promotes equity. p.s. saw this in the news and tried introducing algebra to the 4yo. We're not quite ready yet. "Hey kid -- if I have four of something but I want to have six of them, how many do I need to add?" He holds up a fist, empty. "Four." Then he starts counting out fingers. One finger: "Five!". Two fingers: "Six!". He says, "Two!" "That's right, kid. Sometimes we say 4+x=6, so x=2." He gives a sly grin. "But I know my numbers so well that I don't need to use x!"
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  This should be the foundation for all teacher training: spend most of your time sitting with small groups of kids at various ages and try to teach them concepts that are obviously beyond their current knowledge. Take copious notes. Patterns will emerge, and you’ll develop an intuition about what sticks and what doesn’t.
  - earleybird 5y ago
    Piaget - stages of cognitive development?
  - xwdv 5y ago
    Meh, you’re asking too much. For many teaching is just a steady paycheck and generous time off. It’s not a calling.
humanistbot 5y ago
The manufactured outrage over the California math recommendations keep getting posted on HN. Read the actual text of the plans here [1]. The FAQ is at [2] and directly responds to these characterizations. They are not banning gifted & talented programs or advanced students taking accelerated courses. They are not taking algebra out of the curriculum, although they are cutting geometry a bit, which doesn't make as much sense today as it did 100 years ago when far more people grew up to be farmers or ranchers. They are adding more statistics and probability, which I think are crucial in today's society. What they are fundamentally doing is breaking up the classic U.S. staged path where you learn algebra for a year, then geometry for a year, then back to algebra / pre-calc for a year, then maybe take statistics or calculus as an elective, etc. Instead, all branches of math will be taught in an integrated approach focused around applied problems. This is how a lot of European math courses are taught. In fact, I think HN would appreciate the shift from focusing on pure numbers and classic formulas to more applied uses of math, including algorithms, probability, data collected and analyzed in charts, etc. Students also forget a lot of algebra when they do a year of geometry by itself, then have to go back to algebra / pre-calc. It also does mean that in the transition, it will be harder for students to "test out" of the classic algebra I/II, geometry, pre-calc sequence, because it will just be "year X integrated math." But the framework does not forbid gifted and talented programs or anything like that. There will just be a few awkward years while the curriculum shifts. Now, there are some on the left who advocated for the elimination of gifted and talented programs altogether, for equity reasons. They did not get what they wanted in the new California framework. That hasn't stopped a lot of people from looking at what California is doing and imagining it is actually some kind of Harrison Bergeron dystopia, when that is absolutely not the case. [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ [2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I’ve read most of the text. It’s pretty misleading to say the guidelines don’t ban accelerated courses, because they don’t really have a concept of “banning” things in general; they’re a vision of what the curriculum should look like, not a list of rules. The guidelines do make it pretty clear that accelerated classes are not part of the vision.
crackercrews 5y ago
I started reading the California Math Framework but stopped partway through the intro, when I got to the part that says: > we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents It must be nice to think about a world in which every child is an equally-capable blank slate. But we do not live in that world. We live in a world where some people are tall, and somewhat more likely to be successful basketball players. And some people find math easy, and are somewhat more likely to succeed in math. When you start out with flawed assumptions, it's not surprising when your prescriptions (no advanced math for anyone!) are foolish and counterproductive.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > is an equally-capable blank slate. It seems like tabula rasa idealism has made a serious resurgence in leftist and liberal circles and the scary thing is that nobody (other than extremists saying nonsense) is really talking about this explicitly. Somehow we went from a bunch of stuff being cultural constructs to literally everything is a cultural construct and then this somehow became extremely widespread in no time at all. We need to have this conversation out-loud.
  - ng12 5y ago
    Careful there, Harrison Bergeron.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    Every single one of us has things we support in-public but don't sincerely support in-private. Most of the time this isn't a problem because the endorsements we make don't end up affecting our own personal lives. I have not met a single parent who didn't want to try and give their own children an advantage over the others. It is one thing to support "equity in education", but when parents sense that these activists are trying to dumb-down the curriculum, I expect significant pushback. Especially because this is quite literally a "won't somebody please think of the children" issue.
    - csee 5y ago
gorwell 5y ago
Read Chapter 2: Teaching for Equity and Engagement https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.docx https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.doc... Why are they integrating and layering the religion of social justice and gender ideology onto math? I would be just as alarmed if Christianity or any other religion or dogma or ideology was embedded with math and how it's taught. This document is pushing evangelical-level indoctrination and is certainly less about teaching math than our current system. At the very least it's orthogonal to learning how to add and subtract. "Teach Toward Social Justice" "Teachers can take a justice-oriented perspective at any grade level, K–12" "teachers need to work consciously to counter racialized or gendered ideas" "Students are able to take what they noticed and named – in this case, how gender played out in the problem" "Learning is not just a matter of gaining new knowledge—it is also about a change in identity. As teachers introduce mathematics to students, they are helping them shape their identity as people"
- pas 5y ago
  Because now it's the idea of the times and it's making its way into various spheres of life. Do we have data that it helps/worsens?
  - deltarholamda 5y ago
    >Do we have data that it helps/worsens We've been playing games with education in the US for a while now. This identity stuff is the newest, but you can go back every decade or so for some 60 years and find some fad that was really big at the time. Now look at the test scores over time. Up? Down? Flat? Break it out into race, socioeconomic class, religion, however you want. Check again. Up? Down? Flat? We pretty well know how to teach things like math. It's a lot of drills. It's a lot of homework. It's word problems. It's all the things that both teachers and students hate, because it's annoying to do and annoying to check. But math is more or less like learning a language. You have to immerse yourself in it and do a lot of practice. And, in the end, you have to accept that some people are just not going to cut it. They will top out at about 8th grade basic Algebra. And that's okay! Cramming some kid who can't cut Calculus into a Calculus class just because you need to count a certain number of different colored noses is daft and unproductive. School should educate people to their maximum ability, and everybody's maximum ability is different. It doesn't matter if it makes you feel better to attribute somebody's poor performance to some vaporous societal ill. That's not helping. That's trying to shoehorn your preferred reality into actual reality. The hell of it is that it completely shafts those who really did earn their way into the top ranks. There is always the spectre that they're there because some administrator needed enough $IDENTITY to make their Powerpoint presentation look good.
bstockton 5y ago
I'm confused, what is the proposed framework supposed to fix, or how is it better? Is the goal really to reduce achievement gaps by limiting the advancement of top students? Surely, that can't be the goal...that's crazy. Furthermore, that has the possibility to exacerbate the problem by forcing advanced students to augment their math education in the private sector, something only available to wealthier families. Also, the shifted emphasis on data science stuff is a joke. The very courses they're talking about minimizing are the building blocks of data science and there's no shortcut.
- didibus 5y ago
  Not sure, from other comments I gather the goal is to de-emphasize the idea that you need to be gifted to be good at math, which studies apparently have shown that this idea tend to discourage other students, often girls or racially disadvantaged boys, which do have the ability to succeed at math, to pursue math or be interested in it. I don't think anything is changing for truly gifted students, they should still have the ability to be fast-tracked or options to take more advanced topics. It seems more that it's about focusing on students who don't see themselves as gifted or who aren't yet showing signs of it.
  - TraceWoodgrains 5y ago
    This is incorrect. Their explicit goal is to remove fast tracking and options to take more advanced topics for gifted students. The vision is for uniformly paced classes for all same-aged students.
    - didibus 5y ago
      Hum, I don't know, this is what their FAQ says: > Does the draft Mathematics Framework eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs? No. The draft Mathematics Framework does not eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs (including programs that offer Integrated Math 1 or Algebra 1 courses to grade eight students). The draft Mathematics Framework emphasizes the importance of following the sequenced progression of topics laid out in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) and considers the latest research on the impact of skipping grades or undermining the sequences progression. Additionally, the CA CCSSM are significantly more rigorous than those from previous grade eight content standards. They address the foundations of algebra and geometry by including content that was previously part of the Algebra I course, including but not limited to a more in-depth study of linear relationships and equations, a more formal treatment of functions, and the exploration of irrational numbers.
thepasswordis 5y ago
The wealthy are going to send their kids to private schools, and homeschool coops. People might talk a lot of woke on twitter, but nobody is going to willingly handicap their own children in the name of some nebulous greater good. It's exactly the same as liberal NIMBYs. Preach tolerance and acceptance until somebody who doesn't look, talk, and think exactly like you, wants to live in your neighborhood and alter your precious neighborhood aesthetic.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  The irony is that this same logic is twisted beyond recognition to justify these “alternative” curricula: just because these math classes don’t look like yours (algebra is “white” math, I guess) doesn’t mean they aren’t just as valuable.
- felistoria 5y ago
  Teaching Pod start up is seeming like a better idea everyday.
- tinyhouse 5y ago
  Exactly. Every time it's the same thing. They come up with stupid rules for the sake of equity, just to realize they made things worse cause everyone who could afford it moved to another town, or private school, etc. My town one day decided to cancel so many school traditions like the halloween parade for the sake of equity. Then they didn't allow in-person learning during the entire year. Then they did many other stupid things like that. Everyone I know who could afford it moved. They just have no clue what they are doing, they are just trying to look good, but in practice are doing more harm than good.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  You think private schools aren’t teaching woke ideologye? You are wrong. The future rules are are getting schooled in proper wokeness so they can run hr department and navigate proper corporate norms.
  - tannhauser23 5y ago
tinyhouse 5y ago
The US unfortunately has lost its direction. Everything is so political, including education. They don't try to improve equity, just to look good from the outside.
- felistoria 5y ago
  I'm as red blooded American as they come but I believe we are on a downward slide with little to no hope for recovery. Outside sources have so successfully utilized technology to drive a wedge between two sides the country that I don't see how it can ever be brought back together. The wedge pushes further every single day it seems like.
  - ihsw 5y ago
    There is hope for America yet: > Michael Bloomberg: Why I’m Backing Charter Schools > The public school system is failing. My philanthropy will give $750 million to a proven alternative. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backing-charter-schools-covid-19-learning-loss-teachers-union-11638371324 https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backin...
nopinsight 5y ago
From the post: “The report states that while 80% of all students have access to Algebra I in middle school, only 24% enroll.” A solution is to enroll all students in schools that offer the course by default, but let some opt out if they have a very good reason to do so (ie, nudging in behavioral economics term.) A potential problem is the pressure to water down the course for unwilling students but many countries have already solved that by having different streams/versions of the course. Another objection is that it could be too hard for some students. I’d say it should be possible for a majority of students to understand Algebra I if they are taught properly, as in the case of many countries with high PISA Math score. In these countries/regions, to my knowledge, much of Algebra I is taught in math courses compulsory for ALL middle school students. PISA 2018 results: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png I grew up in Asia, taught math there for several years, and have run a tutoring school specializing in math tutoring there for over a decade. I was quite surprised when I saw how easy the American math curriculum/textbook is for a given grade. (I’d say 1-3 grades easier than Asian counterparts) Others in Quora have expressed the same sentiment. Math is a skill that requires a great deal of time to master. Those who start properly sooner tend to have an advantage. US schools should offer more advanced math courses to all students at a younger age, rather than the reverse.
nitwit005 5y ago
I suppose this is a new trend, but there's constant pressure to lower the standards here in California. We genuinely graduate some students who can't multiply as-is. I went to Sonoma State, which at the time had at least 3 semesters of remedial math you could take, plus a tutoring program, trying to fill in the knowledge a high school graduate was supposed to have. The state got mad about all those classes because the high schools were supposed to cover the material.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  Not just California. I'm from the South and it's the same.
legerdemain 5y ago
Math at school started losing me some time around multiplying and dividing fractions, and I haven't seen anything uses of math in any of my jobs. I, for one, am glad that schools are finally removing the unnecessary pressure to Take More Math Than Necessary. Maybe they can now focus on more practical subjects like CS or shop, or even just reduce the number of hours students spend cooped up in those kid prisons with tyrannical teachers.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  I learned the conversion factors approach in chemistry but it's really just a basic math process of starting with something in one unit set, having a target unit and applying conversions until you get to your goal. It's probably the single most powerful technique I took from public school. If you think we can teach CS at any sort of non-trivial level without an understanding of math beyond grade 7/8 you don't really know what computer science is. Even if you mean "programming", kids want to primarily build games which involves tonnes of HS math. Even shop courses often involve questions like "find the center of an object".
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    I think units are brilliant, and use them extensively in math and programming. However I often get sloppy and conflate conversion factors (60 minutes per hour) and quantities (44100 samples per second). This usually isn't a problem, as long as I use different units for sampling rates (samples per second) and waveform frequencies (cycles per second) instead of calling them both hertz. But things get messy when you're converting between multiple different sampling rates, polyphase resamplers ("64 subsamples per sample" etc.), overlap-add convolution (which has like 3 different quantities all labeled "samples"), and such.
- it_does_follow 5y ago
  > I haven't seen anything uses of math in any of my jobs Math didn't "click" with me until well after college, when I eventually caught up on a lot of calculus, discrete math, probability and stats, to the point where I ended up doing math most of the day as a data scientist. Before I learned math I used to feel like you did, and would argue that math wasn't necessary to be a good programmer. Funny thing is that only once I learned a lot of math did I realize how insanely applicable it was to a wide, wide range of problems I was working on. Because I had to learn it late in life I learned math more enthusiastically than most of my data science peers and so find that even in that domain people don't realize how often they can use math to solve problems better and faster. I wish I had had better teachers in HS that were able to make me realize just how important math is to so many interesting and fun problems. It's sort of shocking to me, looking back at HS, how many math teachers didn't have a good answer to "when are we going to use stuff?". I wish I could take some of my friends making high six figure salaries with a penchant for late night partying to explain to HS students exactly how math is useful because it lets you get a job where nobody cares how much weed you smoke, how late you sleep, and pay your more than many doctors all because you can do some basic calculus tricks. Plus you get to work on really fun problems.
Gunax 5y ago
Sounds good to me--less competition! (I kid, this sounds disasterous).
indymike 5y ago
Father of five, and husband of teacher here. Math is a problem for middle school teachers because they often don't understand algebra, trigonometry, calculus or geometry well enough to teach it. When you add to that common core style arithmetic where parents and family can't help (because they do not understand how to do common core-style math), teachers are struggling to even teach math at all. Additionally, many professions pay better than being a teacher, and unfortunately, that includes package handling for FedEx and UPS (just drove by a sign promising $24/hour starting) in some areas.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I'm never heard of a middle school offering trigonometry or calculus. The rare kid who is ready for those topics by age 13 can be accommodated by allowing him to attend that class at the local high school. A middle school algebra teacher should of course understand middle school algebra. This is not an unreasonable expectation for a job that requires a college education. If a teacher lacks the ability to master middle-school algebra, how on earth did he get into college?
  - maniflames 5y ago
    Honest question from someone from the Netherlands: when are kids in the states old enough for these topics? Me and all of my friends were thaught the fundamentals of algebra & trigonomatry (admittedly not calculus) at 13 years old. I had no idea the wasn't the case in the US and it honestly kind of blows my mind.
    - indymike 5y ago
      The norm for exposure to basic algebra is 5th (10-11 years old) grade in most US states. Not sure what the standards are exactly, but each grade after that does progressively more, with 14 year olds expected to complete a full year course.
    - Izkata 5y ago
      Very roughly, subtract 6 from age to get grade. For example, barring being held back, jumping a grade, or unusual things around birthday timing, you'd usually finish 12th grade at age 18.
tannhauser23 5y ago
If I were a billionaire I would fund Asia-style 'cram' academies in disadvantaged neighborhoods and make them free. Provide a safe place where students can get extra-school training in music, writing, math, etc. Create communities of students who, yes, compete against each other and become motivated to succeed. Bloomberg giving $750 million to charter schools is a great start: https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backing-charter-schools-covid-19-learning-loss-teachers-union-11638371324 https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backin...
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  From my experience, the students who are truly gifted only needs a good environment they can study in (without worrying about money/work/bullying/parental abuse) but they definitely do not need 'cram schools'. The talented ones often have enough motivation to study what they like, and they can do self-study well with just light attention/mentoring from teachers. People who are blindly praising Asian-style cram education really haven't actually experienced one in their youth at all; it is a fucking disaster at raising actual talent, and it robs you so much of your adolescence.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    "The talented ones often have enough motivation to study what they like, and they can do self-study well with just light attention/mentoring from teachers." There are many people who do not fit this category, but could still benefit immensely from good teaching. I know, because I was one of them.
    - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
      Yeah, I agree. But not something that involves cramming for test scores, which is my main point.
- yardie 5y ago
  Billionaires could do this and yet chose not to. Do you ever wonder why American schools finish at 2-3pm rather than run the entire day as Western Europe? So that teachers could get that extra 3-4+ hours of doing the administration side of classroom work (grading, report writing, planning, etc). Even when parents request it there never appears to be enough money for afterschool programs, school districts create and withdraw them all the time depending on budget that you can't actually make plans for them.
ec109685 5y ago
I don't understand why there is so much effort put onto cramming math into high school. I took calculus in high school and then repeated it in college. There is plenty of time in college (especially if some of the less useful elective requirements were taken away) to catch up on your math requirements, so whether you are ready for Algebra in 8th grade or not should have no barring on whether you are able to pursue a STEM major in college, let alone be successful in your career. I think we lane people out of STEM way too early, which is what I believe some of these curriculum changes are trying to redress.
- ucm_edge 5y ago
  Math is one of the pure foundations for liberal arts so getting it done early is better. We should be focusing on getting high schools teaching it so well that colleges don't feel the need to rerun it not saying you can do it later. High school grads should be able to pass the AP Calc and AP Stats exams to the level colleges feel they can totally ditch the 100 level courses for those subjects. If you don't have students repeating basic math (and chemistry) in college, they can do deeper on an elective track involving a STEM because because their STEM credit hours aren't spent getting a rerun of Calc I.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  So you were perfectly willing to pay for an extra semester of college to learn something you could have learned in high school for free.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Yes, because mastering Calc wasn’t what I was capable of in high school. It would have been a huge shame if I was slightly worse at math, didn’t even take Calc and thus wasn’t accepted into a CS program upon graduation. So much stress and consternation is spent on saving one calculus corse in college (and it’s used as gate keeping to get into an elite college stem program).
tannhauser23 5y ago
We all know what initiatives like California's leads to. Parents from middle to upper class families will send their kids to private schools or invest in extracurricular math programs. This will be especially true in immigrant and tech-worker parents who know the value of a strong STEM education. Only people who suffer will be kids from families without the means or the desire to go beyond public education - most likely the same people that these initiatives purport to help.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  "We all know what initiatives like California's leads to. Parents from middle to upper class families will send their kids to private schools or invest in extracurricular math programs." Are you saying it's not happening now?
  - julienb_sea 5y ago
    Whether or not it's happening now, doesn't preclude opposition to policy choices that actively accelerate the process. People with money and wherewithal are always going to have alternative options available to them, such as private education or moving to expensive neighborhoods with strong schools. The problem is when public school policy results in actual degradation of education for everyone else.
  - twblalock 5y ago
    A lot of high-earning parents in California send their children to public schools, and they are willing to pay extra money to buy homes in the best school districts in order to do so. School district quality has a significant impact on home values in California, and that wouldn't be the case if the majority of high earners sent their kids to private schools.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > This will be especially true in immigrant and tech-worker parents who know the value of a strong STEM education. Only people who suffer will be kids from families without the means or the desire to go beyond public education - most likely the same people that these initiatives purport to help. Short term schools like Lowell are switching from using test score to a lottery based admission. And so are UC schools! So the smart kid interested in learning but who doesn't have parents in tech to send him to private tutoring better be lucky at the lottery or have the correct "holistic" attributes his target school will admit on!
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
Eh, watching all this makes me only more willing to properly research homeschooling ( it is not yet apparent whether we will be able to afford private school.. so I am assuming we won't be ). Still, the pattern is hard to miss. I think my current favorite is biology and its treatment of race ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/us/race-biology-genetics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/us/race-biology-genetics.... ). Quote directly from the article: “We basically decided, no, race is still a social construction, it’s not a biological thing,” Ken Miller, an author of the widely used Prentice Hall biology textbook, told the science magazine Undark of the decision to omit mention of race. I guess what I am saying is not new to anyone. Public schools will continue to degrade. There is no benefit to any of the groups other than the parents to ensure kids learn things ( administrators, their lawyers, your congressman, my congressman, teachers, teacher's unions, book publishers ). Sure, they pay lip service and some individual teachers care, but each of those groups have goals beyond kid's education. edit: I was gonna add Apple and Microsoft in that list, but I removed them, because, as flawed as their reasoning is, at least they pretend they want to teach kids basic coding, which is not horrible.
- freemint 5y ago
  Race as biological concept exists but there are no human races in the biological sense. Humans are able to interbreed and were not selected by their environments for long enough to develop significantly different cognitive abilities. If we use the word race for human being it can only mean cultural or other such societal concepts meaning it is a social construction. I hope that helped.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    It didn’t really help. Why do you mention interbreeding? Are you confusing race with species?
    - freemint 5y ago
      Because partial but not complete genetic isolation is a criteria in the IMHO applicable (or rather not applicable) definition of race here. I am not confusing race and species.
teeray 5y ago
Everybody hates it to different degrees, but grinding Algebra I & II problem sets hard for a few years was a dramatic advantage in college calc & physics. Some classmates were still struggling with special right triangles where it was completely intuitive to me at that point. The applications of math that everyone clamors for in high school eduction became far more apparent once I got to college.
6f4f06c00484d34 5y ago
people who push for "equitable" education do not send their children to public schools. equity for thee, not for me.
tzs 5y ago
Some interesting stats from ed.gov [1]. Only 59% of schools offer algebra in 8th grade. There's a map showing percent of schools with 8th grade algebra by district. There's another map farther down shown percent of 8th graders who took it by school district. (The maps can be slow to load). Overall 80% of students have access to algebra I in 8th grade. Breaking that down by type of school it is 88% in magnet schools, 81% in traditional schools, 60% in charter schools. It is 86% in suburban schools, 75% in urban schools, 75% in rural schools, and 76% in town schools. That is access. Enrollment is another matter. 24% of 8th graders actually take it. By gender that is 25% of the females and 22% of the males. By race 34% of the Asians, 24% of the Whites, 23% of the two-or-more race students, 14% of Pacific Islanders, 13% of the Hispanics, 13% of the Natives, and 12% of the Blacks. [1] https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/stem/algebra/index.html https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/stem/algebra/index.html
sh1mmer 5y ago
I find it interesting with many of these criticisms that subject matter experts on maths, sciences, etc think that they are also subject matter experts on the pedagogy of maths, science, etc especially at a high school level. Many advanced practitioners don’t even have a good grasp of college level/post-grad pedagogy which they’d use more in their day to day work. Using a skill isn’t the same as teaching it, and just like anything else there are plenty of fallacies to be had. I’d be more persuaded by angry hot takes from High School teachers worried that their students aren’t going to hit the grades they deserve / learn the things they need than anything else. Even then, single high school teachers experiences are closer to anecdotes than actual pedagogical research, with which the original proposal is backed.
- throwaway19937 5y ago
  > I find it interesting with many of these criticisms that subject matter experts on maths, sciences, etc think that they are also subject matter experts on the pedagogy of maths, science, etc especially at a high school level. Public education in the US has a long history of fads, manias, and ill-conceived attempts at reform. There's little evidence of improvement over time or competitive performance. The following is an excerpt from (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...). The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science. Given these results I'll trust subject matter experts over educators any day.
- dfdz 5y ago
  You are missing the key point: these experts on maths, sciences, etc are not arguing HOW to teach maths, sciences, etc. They are only arguing WHAT is important to teach. High school math teachers do not have the perspective to understand what kind of math is needed for jobs in engineering, data science, etc (The fact is that a background in algebra and calculus is necessary for almost all of these jobs).
  - 5y ago
yakkityyak 5y ago
My armchair take of the situation is that the administrators of K-12 education are too focused on the potential value of kids actually using these math frameworks instead of how they sort of rewire how to logically reason about things. I'm having trouble finding the right words to describe myself, but I vividly remember how many moments of epiphany I had when I took Calculus and Linear Algebra. I don't directly use either of them at all in my day job, but I feel like they were foundational in developing reasoning skills.
- leephillips 5y ago
  This is, I believe, the fundamental problem. Administrators, and, to some degree, math teachers themselves, don’t like or understand math. They constantly talk about what it’s “for”, as if math class serves a purpose similar to car repair shop class. They seem to understand that you can have an English class treating poetry, or a history class, without needing to justify them with practical applications. I think most of this bunch have no concept of studying math for its own sake, and the idea that you might do so for enjoyment would probably seem incomprehensibly bizarre. During my brief stints teaching math in high schools, my attitude was that I was guiding students along the path to becoming people—members of their civilization.
Hermitian909 5y ago
I think many of the commenters posting that this step will necessarily lower mathematical achievement are unlikely to have taught math to small children (or at least to a large number of them). The change has tradeoffs, but I think we'll likely end up a more numerate state for the change. It's important to remember that children are not tiny adults. At an early enough developmental stage, a child may be physically unable to learn algebra. The number of such children is much higher in middle school than freshman year of high school. Note that developing later doesn't mean you're not very smart nor that you have aptitude. A student I had many years with this issue now has his PhD in mathematics. By delaying algebra, you give a large chunk of students time to move forward developmentally so they can engage in the material. The current system ill suits them for a few reasons. One is that curriculum (somewhat necessarily) assumes high mastery of pre-requisite concepts, when it turns out this isn't the case students tend to not understand the material and get very frustrated. That frustration and anger often causes lasting damage that may never be undone. My mother was a math educator during the years when Algebra first moved into middle school fought heavily against it. According to her the push came mainly from professors of Mathematics (with no educational training) who wanted better trained students. I think this has worked out for some of the top schools. If you're smart and a little precocious algebra in 8th grade is good, but I think net we lose out on a lot of talent.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  Under the Common Core as specifically implemented in California, children who are ready for Algebra in middle school may take it, and children who benefit from a delay may opt for delay. A central pillar of Equitable Math is that this disparity sustains White Supremacy in math, and thus all children should always be in the same class, up until the last year of high school.¹ This is the central point of contention, and not whether some children benefit from a delay of Algebra past middle school, and nor whether all children ought to learn Calculus. [1]: https://equitablemath.org https://equitablemath.org
  - Hermitian909 5y ago
    > A central pillar of Equitable Math is that this disparity sustains White Supremacy in math, and thus all children should always be in the same class, up until the last year of high school. Could you cite a more direct source for this? It's in direct contradiction with the materials the site you linked provided me [0]. If you go to page 17 "September Who are my students?" they do not discourage different classes or tracks existing, they discourage placing students in different tracks without input from the student or their parents. As a former educator that seems sensible to me. Sometimes a student isn't quite ready to enter the more advanced mathematical track but could be made so with if provided some guidance on how to self study. I've seen many high school freshman apply themselves more readily when I laid out the long term consequences of different math tracks. [0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
tomohawk 5y ago
I took an informal poll of foreign students at the US university I went to. Regardless of major, they all took Algebra in 6th grade. This was quite some time ago. I was interested as I was ready for Algebra in 6th grade, but was unable to take it until 8th grade. If you don't get into Algebra before high school, there is no chance of taking a reasonable calculus class before college, which puts you way behind the curve if you get into an engineering program. I went to a state university that had a strong engineering program. The students that I knew who were having difficulty and eventually dropped all had first seen calculus at the university. These were smart, talented people, but they were not given the chance to succeed.
a9h74j 5y ago
To my reading the posted article makes only passing reference to the California recommendations, and gives positive emphasis to a number of focussed initiatives or programs.
- spiralx 5y ago
  I assume because it's easier to extrapolate an "alarming trend" from a curated subset of small initiatives and programs than it is from a bunch of recommendations for improving maths education. Seems to have worked, there's more comments here about a single program than the recommendations themselves.
nateburke 5y ago
While very much different in terms of the number and financial size of directly-applicable job prospects, American pre-collegiate math and musical training share a very important thing in common -- there is a step-function proficiency gain to be had from trained parents living in the same house as the child. Yes, primary and secondary curriculum matters, but in the same way a church musician parent will politely nod approval at the elementary school musical show knowing full well that real musical development for children usually happens in the home with parental involvement -- a mechanical engineer or e.g. actuary parent living in a small or under-schooled town will also politely acknowledge the child's remedial math homework assignments, yet know enough to be able to seek out quality instruction for the child, even if it means utilizing community college or other nearby resources. Given the same family and upbringing, something tells me that Scott would still excel in math as a HS student in today's California, were he there and that age now.
VLM 5y ago
The biggest problem I see with this article is not the obvious intended political sizzle but an assumption early in the article along the lines of the only purpose of public education is the eventual production of STEM college graduates and everyone else can and should go directly to hell and absolutely no resources or encouragement should be provided for any other educational outcome. It makes you wonder how the public school system is not in a continuous state of civil rights lawsuits over the equal protection clause. “every child must master algebra, preferably by eighth grade, for algebra is the gateway to the college-prep curriculum, which in turn is the path to higher education.” But that's not the life path for perhaps 90%+ of the population. I don't think we can justify burning tax dollars to exclusively and solely support a tiny minority of kids at the expense of nearly all the other kids. I would not be bothered by mindless STEM boosterism if it were not for pages like this: https://datausa.io/profile/cip/electrical-engineering#tmap_occ_num_emp_degree https://datausa.io/profile/cip/electrical-engineering#tmap_o... It offends me as a EE type person that the top job title for graduating engineers is software dev, where they'd have been better off with a CS degree, or no degree. Meanwhile I'm told by the other side that we have a terrifying massive shortage of engineering grads, despite that clearly not being the case and it being VERY difficult for new kids to get a job in the field. I'm led to believe by "shortage" they actually mean a "shortage of people willing to work 80 hrs/wk for minimum wage and no bennies" or "shortage of experts with decades years of masterful experience willing to accept apprentice level pay scales" We simply seem to have too many STEM grads for our economy to support. I don't see any realistic reason for future improvement in that situation. Meanwhile public education policy, meant to serve EVERYONE, is telling most of the kids to go to hell. And those are the kids running the rest of the economy and we're relying on them to grow the economy enough to support the 5% of STEM workers whom are the only important people to educate according to "public" education, which is now really only college prep STEM education and F every other kid. This path cannot possibly end well. The best way to handle algebra education as applied to the entire student body, is to acknowledge that for 95% of the population, learning how to change the oil in a car or how to identify when someone is using statistics as propaganda, would be a more valuable life skill. Yes I acknowledge STEM is and will remain important for a tiny subset of both kids and future jobs, but...
- naasking 5y ago
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
At some point they'll cut out all the foundational mathematics needed for hard science and engineering. Then only foreign students will be qualified for bachelor's programs. Complex numbers will be first at the chopping block.
itronitron 5y ago
Why do educators always fail to effectively communicate with a non-captive audience? The author needs to re-work this so that the first paragraph tells me everything that I need to know, and the rest of the essay/letter/memo can elaborate on things that I should or might want to know. If they aren't willing to do that then they are going to continue to remain out of touch to most people.

292 points by feross 5y ago

Given the underlying ideological current, I don't expect a letter like this to move very many people. You want to entice them with the future possibility of career opportunities? Not very rousing or compelling in this environment. And indeed this career-centric view of education and learning I claim is what produced the conditions for further decadence in the first place. Classical education places truth and understanding at the top of its list. Modern education shifts to "know how", manipulation, and production. Truth takes a back seat. Once that happens, myth and gnosis re-enter the picture, and that's what we've been witnessing for some time. What we're seeing now is just the latest development. So in a way, the letter is arguing for a regression to an earlier status quo which itself contributed to the very conditions we're seeing now. Societies don't really rewind like that.

bob1029 5y ago

It's almost as if this is all going according to some plan and we are crafting the next generation of "working class" Americans with intent. It's a lot easier to become oppressed when you don't possess these most fundamental tools for understanding the nature of that reality. Maybe that's what we need to keep this shit show moving along for another generation.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

The more people you push into STEM, the less money we will get. Please stop! It‘s self harm, unless you are an employer. For my own sake, I want everyone to think computers and programming are incomprehensible magic. Why can‘t we behave more like highly limited occupations like medical doctors?

jelliclesfarm 5y ago

they are screaming Fire!!..no one is listening. The only solution is to split public schools into two streams STEM and liberal arts studies(I don’t know what it’s called).+ more vocational/trade schools. We can’t cater to the lowest common denominator in math.

endisneigh 5y ago
This makes no sense - stem and liberal arts aren’t mutually exclusive things you can just separate. In fact math itself is generally thought to be part of the “liberal arts”, along with logic, which could be said to be the precursor to computer science.
- Anechoic 5y ago
  I read that as "stem & liberal arts" as one stream and "vocational/trade schools" as the second stream.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    We don't need more trade schools though. Over here on hacker news many of us have day jobs eliminating those jobs. While we won't succeed (and trades are still a better job than many artistic degrees) there are a lot of kids going into them. Most trades are also taught on the job. Want to be a carpenter - you can start tomorrow morning at 7am in any large city. From there you can branch out if you want.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      The majority of programming jobs, DevOps jobs, etc. could be learned in a trade school. Only a minority of programming jobs really require a four year CS degree. Also, is that true that most trades can be learned on the job without prior training? I thought you needed a decent amount of training to be a plumber, electrician, etc.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  See "Modern usage" in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education "The modern use of the term liberal arts consists of four areas: the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities." So no, math is not "generally thought" to be part of the liberal arts.

stakkur 5y ago

Public education in the US sits at a difficult nexus of political will, cultural ideology, public opinion, and educational 'theory'. It rarely goes well, because everyone vehemently believes they know the 'purpose' of public education. And so, we get posts like this: public ed as a 'pipeline to STEM careers'. The reductionist view of public education-as-career-training is one of those contentious topics. I myself find it absurd. An ed system driven by vocations and political/ideological nation-state goals has been so genuinely harmful to people it's hard to know where to begin.

JackFr 5y ago
> Public education in the US sits at a difficult nexus of political will, cultural ideology, public opinion, and educational 'theory'. And that doesn't even list the people with remunerative interests, teachers unions, textbook publishers the testing/test-prep industry, the for-profit outrage machine., etc.

mherdeg 5y ago

I don't understand how you can remove algebra from middle-school curricula without exacerbating inequality. Supplementary math education in our area costs about $1500-$2500/year (looking at Russian School of Math list prices). The exemplary private schools in the area I grew up charge $30k-$35k annual tuition (with financial aid available for some families). And you can DIY home instruction -- I've been working through the Moebius Noodles play with our 4yo, and I guess you could try to see if there's a Math Circle to sign up for. But not every household can afford the time or money to coordinate extracurricular instruction. The kids whose parents are hyper-prepared and able to spend the time and money will end up with better math background, maybe a better shot at the AHSME/AIME/USAMO, and I guess maybe better career outcomes, versus their peers. Is that a fair outcome? Is it a good thing to do? I'm very willing to be wrong here … I just don't understand how this plan promotes equity. p.s. saw this in the news and tried introducing algebra to the 4yo. We're not quite ready yet. "Hey kid -- if I have four of something but I want to have six of them, how many do I need to add?" He holds up a fist, empty. "Four." Then he starts counting out fingers. One finger: "Five!". Two fingers: "Six!". He says, "Two!" "That's right, kid. Sometimes we say 4+x=6, so x=2." He gives a sly grin. "But I know my numbers so well that I don't need to use x!"

jkhdigital 5y ago
This should be the foundation for all teacher training: spend most of your time sitting with small groups of kids at various ages and try to teach them concepts that are obviously beyond their current knowledge. Take copious notes. Patterns will emerge, and you’ll develop an intuition about what sticks and what doesn’t.
- earleybird 5y ago
  Piaget - stages of cognitive development?
- xwdv 5y ago
  Meh, you’re asking too much. For many teaching is just a steady paycheck and generous time off. It’s not a calling.

humanistbot 5y ago

The manufactured outrage over the California math recommendations keep getting posted on HN. Read the actual text of the plans here [1]. The FAQ is at [2] and directly responds to these characterizations. They are not banning gifted & talented programs or advanced students taking accelerated courses. They are not taking algebra out of the curriculum, although they are cutting geometry a bit, which doesn't make as much sense today as it did 100 years ago when far more people grew up to be farmers or ranchers. They are adding more statistics and probability, which I think are crucial in today's society. What they are fundamentally doing is breaking up the classic U.S. staged path where you learn algebra for a year, then geometry for a year, then back to algebra / pre-calc for a year, then maybe take statistics or calculus as an elective, etc. Instead, all branches of math will be taught in an integrated approach focused around applied problems. This is how a lot of European math courses are taught. In fact, I think HN would appreciate the shift from focusing on pure numbers and classic formulas to more applied uses of math, including algorithms, probability, data collected and analyzed in charts, etc. Students also forget a lot of algebra when they do a year of geometry by itself, then have to go back to algebra / pre-calc. It also does mean that in the transition, it will be harder for students to "test out" of the classic algebra I/II, geometry, pre-calc sequence, because it will just be "year X integrated math." But the framework does not forbid gifted and talented programs or anything like that. There will just be a few awkward years while the curriculum shifts. Now, there are some on the left who advocated for the elimination of gifted and talented programs altogether, for equity reasons. They did not get what they wanted in the new California framework. That hasn't stopped a lot of people from looking at what California is doing and imagining it is actually some kind of Harrison Bergeron dystopia, when that is absolutely not the case. [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ [2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I’ve read most of the text. It’s pretty misleading to say the guidelines don’t ban accelerated courses, because they don’t really have a concept of “banning” things in general; they’re a vision of what the curriculum should look like, not a list of rules. The guidelines do make it pretty clear that accelerated classes are not part of the vision.

crackercrews 5y ago

I started reading the California Math Framework but stopped partway through the intro, when I got to the part that says: > we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents It must be nice to think about a world in which every child is an equally-capable blank slate. But we do not live in that world. We live in a world where some people are tall, and somewhat more likely to be successful basketball players. And some people find math easy, and are somewhat more likely to succeed in math. When you start out with flawed assumptions, it's not surprising when your prescriptions (no advanced math for anyone!) are foolish and counterproductive.

guerrilla 5y ago
> is an equally-capable blank slate. It seems like tabula rasa idealism has made a serious resurgence in leftist and liberal circles and the scary thing is that nobody (other than extremists saying nonsense) is really talking about this explicitly. Somehow we went from a bunch of stuff being cultural constructs to literally everything is a cultural construct and then this somehow became extremely widespread in no time at all. We need to have this conversation out-loud.
- ng12 5y ago
  Careful there, Harrison Bergeron.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Every single one of us has things we support in-public but don't sincerely support in-private. Most of the time this isn't a problem because the endorsements we make don't end up affecting our own personal lives. I have not met a single parent who didn't want to try and give their own children an advantage over the others. It is one thing to support "equity in education", but when parents sense that these activists are trying to dumb-down the curriculum, I expect significant pushback. Especially because this is quite literally a "won't somebody please think of the children" issue.
  - csee 5y ago

gorwell 5y ago

Read Chapter 2: Teaching for Equity and Engagement https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.docx https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter2.doc... Why are they integrating and layering the religion of social justice and gender ideology onto math? I would be just as alarmed if Christianity or any other religion or dogma or ideology was embedded with math and how it's taught. This document is pushing evangelical-level indoctrination and is certainly less about teaching math than our current system. At the very least it's orthogonal to learning how to add and subtract. "Teach Toward Social Justice" "Teachers can take a justice-oriented perspective at any grade level, K–12" "teachers need to work consciously to counter racialized or gendered ideas" "Students are able to take what they noticed and named – in this case, how gender played out in the problem" "Learning is not just a matter of gaining new knowledge—it is also about a change in identity. As teachers introduce mathematics to students, they are helping them shape their identity as people"

pas 5y ago
Because now it's the idea of the times and it's making its way into various spheres of life. Do we have data that it helps/worsens?
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  >Do we have data that it helps/worsens We've been playing games with education in the US for a while now. This identity stuff is the newest, but you can go back every decade or so for some 60 years and find some fad that was really big at the time. Now look at the test scores over time. Up? Down? Flat? Break it out into race, socioeconomic class, religion, however you want. Check again. Up? Down? Flat? We pretty well know how to teach things like math. It's a lot of drills. It's a lot of homework. It's word problems. It's all the things that both teachers and students hate, because it's annoying to do and annoying to check. But math is more or less like learning a language. You have to immerse yourself in it and do a lot of practice. And, in the end, you have to accept that some people are just not going to cut it. They will top out at about 8th grade basic Algebra. And that's okay! Cramming some kid who can't cut Calculus into a Calculus class just because you need to count a certain number of different colored noses is daft and unproductive. School should educate people to their maximum ability, and everybody's maximum ability is different. It doesn't matter if it makes you feel better to attribute somebody's poor performance to some vaporous societal ill. That's not helping. That's trying to shoehorn your preferred reality into actual reality. The hell of it is that it completely shafts those who really did earn their way into the top ranks. There is always the spectre that they're there because some administrator needed enough $IDENTITY to make their Powerpoint presentation look good.

bstockton 5y ago

I'm confused, what is the proposed framework supposed to fix, or how is it better? Is the goal really to reduce achievement gaps by limiting the advancement of top students? Surely, that can't be the goal...that's crazy. Furthermore, that has the possibility to exacerbate the problem by forcing advanced students to augment their math education in the private sector, something only available to wealthier families. Also, the shifted emphasis on data science stuff is a joke. The very courses they're talking about minimizing are the building blocks of data science and there's no shortcut.

didibus 5y ago
Not sure, from other comments I gather the goal is to de-emphasize the idea that you need to be gifted to be good at math, which studies apparently have shown that this idea tend to discourage other students, often girls or racially disadvantaged boys, which do have the ability to succeed at math, to pursue math or be interested in it. I don't think anything is changing for truly gifted students, they should still have the ability to be fast-tracked or options to take more advanced topics. It seems more that it's about focusing on students who don't see themselves as gifted or who aren't yet showing signs of it.
- TraceWoodgrains 5y ago
  This is incorrect. Their explicit goal is to remove fast tracking and options to take more advanced topics for gifted students. The vision is for uniformly paced classes for all same-aged students.
  - didibus 5y ago
    Hum, I don't know, this is what their FAQ says: > Does the draft Mathematics Framework eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs? No. The draft Mathematics Framework does not eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs (including programs that offer Integrated Math 1 or Algebra 1 courses to grade eight students). The draft Mathematics Framework emphasizes the importance of following the sequenced progression of topics laid out in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) and considers the latest research on the impact of skipping grades or undermining the sequences progression. Additionally, the CA CCSSM are significantly more rigorous than those from previous grade eight content standards. They address the foundations of algebra and geometry by including content that was previously part of the Algebra I course, including but not limited to a more in-depth study of linear relationships and equations, a more formal treatment of functions, and the exploration of irrational numbers.

thepasswordis 5y ago

The wealthy are going to send their kids to private schools, and homeschool coops. People might talk a lot of woke on twitter, but nobody is going to willingly handicap their own children in the name of some nebulous greater good. It's exactly the same as liberal NIMBYs. Preach tolerance and acceptance until somebody who doesn't look, talk, and think exactly like you, wants to live in your neighborhood and alter your precious neighborhood aesthetic.

jkhdigital 5y ago
The irony is that this same logic is twisted beyond recognition to justify these “alternative” curricula: just because these math classes don’t look like yours (algebra is “white” math, I guess) doesn’t mean they aren’t just as valuable.
felistoria 5y ago
Teaching Pod start up is seeming like a better idea everyday.
tinyhouse 5y ago
Exactly. Every time it's the same thing. They come up with stupid rules for the sake of equity, just to realize they made things worse cause everyone who could afford it moved to another town, or private school, etc. My town one day decided to cancel so many school traditions like the halloween parade for the sake of equity. Then they didn't allow in-person learning during the entire year. Then they did many other stupid things like that. Everyone I know who could afford it moved. They just have no clue what they are doing, they are just trying to look good, but in practice are doing more harm than good.
rdtwo 5y ago
You think private schools aren’t teaching woke ideologye? You are wrong. The future rules are are getting schooled in proper wokeness so they can run hr department and navigate proper corporate norms.
- tannhauser23 5y ago

tinyhouse 5y ago

The US unfortunately has lost its direction. Everything is so political, including education. They don't try to improve equity, just to look good from the outside.

felistoria 5y ago
I'm as red blooded American as they come but I believe we are on a downward slide with little to no hope for recovery. Outside sources have so successfully utilized technology to drive a wedge between two sides the country that I don't see how it can ever be brought back together. The wedge pushes further every single day it seems like.
- ihsw 5y ago
  There is hope for America yet: > Michael Bloomberg: Why I’m Backing Charter Schools > The public school system is failing. My philanthropy will give $750 million to a proven alternative. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backing-charter-schools-covid-19-learning-loss-teachers-union-11638371324 https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backin...

nopinsight 5y ago

From the post: “The report states that while 80% of all students have access to Algebra I in middle school, only 24% enroll.” A solution is to enroll all students in schools that offer the course by default, but let some opt out if they have a very good reason to do so (ie, nudging in behavioral economics term.) A potential problem is the pressure to water down the course for unwilling students but many countries have already solved that by having different streams/versions of the course. Another objection is that it could be too hard for some students. I’d say it should be possible for a majority of students to understand Algebra I if they are taught properly, as in the case of many countries with high PISA Math score. In these countries/regions, to my knowledge, much of Algebra I is taught in math courses compulsory for ALL middle school students. PISA 2018 results: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png I grew up in Asia, taught math there for several years, and have run a tutoring school specializing in math tutoring there for over a decade. I was quite surprised when I saw how easy the American math curriculum/textbook is for a given grade. (I’d say 1-3 grades easier than Asian counterparts) Others in Quora have expressed the same sentiment. Math is a skill that requires a great deal of time to master. Those who start properly sooner tend to have an advantage. US schools should offer more advanced math courses to all students at a younger age, rather than the reverse.

nitwit005 5y ago

I suppose this is a new trend, but there's constant pressure to lower the standards here in California. We genuinely graduate some students who can't multiply as-is. I went to Sonoma State, which at the time had at least 3 semesters of remedial math you could take, plus a tutoring program, trying to fill in the knowledge a high school graduate was supposed to have. The state got mad about all those classes because the high schools were supposed to cover the material.

dorchadas 5y ago
Not just California. I'm from the South and it's the same.

legerdemain 5y ago

Math at school started losing me some time around multiplying and dividing fractions, and I haven't seen anything uses of math in any of my jobs. I, for one, am glad that schools are finally removing the unnecessary pressure to Take More Math Than Necessary. Maybe they can now focus on more practical subjects like CS or shop, or even just reduce the number of hours students spend cooped up in those kid prisons with tyrannical teachers.

skeeter2020 5y ago
I learned the conversion factors approach in chemistry but it's really just a basic math process of starting with something in one unit set, having a target unit and applying conversions until you get to your goal. It's probably the single most powerful technique I took from public school. If you think we can teach CS at any sort of non-trivial level without an understanding of math beyond grade 7/8 you don't really know what computer science is. Even if you mean "programming", kids want to primarily build games which involves tonnes of HS math. Even shop courses often involve questions like "find the center of an object".
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I think units are brilliant, and use them extensively in math and programming. However I often get sloppy and conflate conversion factors (60 minutes per hour) and quantities (44100 samples per second). This usually isn't a problem, as long as I use different units for sampling rates (samples per second) and waveform frequencies (cycles per second) instead of calling them both hertz. But things get messy when you're converting between multiple different sampling rates, polyphase resamplers ("64 subsamples per sample" etc.), overlap-add convolution (which has like 3 different quantities all labeled "samples"), and such.
it_does_follow 5y ago
> I haven't seen anything uses of math in any of my jobs Math didn't "click" with me until well after college, when I eventually caught up on a lot of calculus, discrete math, probability and stats, to the point where I ended up doing math most of the day as a data scientist. Before I learned math I used to feel like you did, and would argue that math wasn't necessary to be a good programmer. Funny thing is that only once I learned a lot of math did I realize how insanely applicable it was to a wide, wide range of problems I was working on. Because I had to learn it late in life I learned math more enthusiastically than most of my data science peers and so find that even in that domain people don't realize how often they can use math to solve problems better and faster. I wish I had had better teachers in HS that were able to make me realize just how important math is to so many interesting and fun problems. It's sort of shocking to me, looking back at HS, how many math teachers didn't have a good answer to "when are we going to use stuff?". I wish I could take some of my friends making high six figure salaries with a penchant for late night partying to explain to HS students exactly how math is useful because it lets you get a job where nobody cares how much weed you smoke, how late you sleep, and pay your more than many doctors all because you can do some basic calculus tricks. Plus you get to work on really fun problems.

Gunax 5y ago

Sounds good to me--less competition! (I kid, this sounds disasterous).

indymike 5y ago

Father of five, and husband of teacher here. Math is a problem for middle school teachers because they often don't understand algebra, trigonometry, calculus or geometry well enough to teach it. When you add to that common core style arithmetic where parents and family can't help (because they do not understand how to do common core-style math), teachers are struggling to even teach math at all. Additionally, many professions pay better than being a teacher, and unfortunately, that includes package handling for FedEx and UPS (just drove by a sign promising $24/hour starting) in some areas.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I'm never heard of a middle school offering trigonometry or calculus. The rare kid who is ready for those topics by age 13 can be accommodated by allowing him to attend that class at the local high school. A middle school algebra teacher should of course understand middle school algebra. This is not an unreasonable expectation for a job that requires a college education. If a teacher lacks the ability to master middle-school algebra, how on earth did he get into college?
- maniflames 5y ago
  Honest question from someone from the Netherlands: when are kids in the states old enough for these topics? Me and all of my friends were thaught the fundamentals of algebra & trigonomatry (admittedly not calculus) at 13 years old. I had no idea the wasn't the case in the US and it honestly kind of blows my mind.
  - indymike 5y ago
    The norm for exposure to basic algebra is 5th (10-11 years old) grade in most US states. Not sure what the standards are exactly, but each grade after that does progressively more, with 14 year olds expected to complete a full year course.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    Very roughly, subtract 6 from age to get grade. For example, barring being held back, jumping a grade, or unusual things around birthday timing, you'd usually finish 12th grade at age 18.

tannhauser23 5y ago

If I were a billionaire I would fund Asia-style 'cram' academies in disadvantaged neighborhoods and make them free. Provide a safe place where students can get extra-school training in music, writing, math, etc. Create communities of students who, yes, compete against each other and become motivated to succeed. Bloomberg giving $750 million to charter schools is a great start: https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backing-charter-schools-covid-19-learning-loss-teachers-union-11638371324 https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-bloomberg-why-im-backin...

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
From my experience, the students who are truly gifted only needs a good environment they can study in (without worrying about money/work/bullying/parental abuse) but they definitely do not need 'cram schools'. The talented ones often have enough motivation to study what they like, and they can do self-study well with just light attention/mentoring from teachers. People who are blindly praising Asian-style cram education really haven't actually experienced one in their youth at all; it is a fucking disaster at raising actual talent, and it robs you so much of your adolescence.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  "The talented ones often have enough motivation to study what they like, and they can do self-study well with just light attention/mentoring from teachers." There are many people who do not fit this category, but could still benefit immensely from good teaching. I know, because I was one of them.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    Yeah, I agree. But not something that involves cramming for test scores, which is my main point.
yardie 5y ago
Billionaires could do this and yet chose not to. Do you ever wonder why American schools finish at 2-3pm rather than run the entire day as Western Europe? So that teachers could get that extra 3-4+ hours of doing the administration side of classroom work (grading, report writing, planning, etc). Even when parents request it there never appears to be enough money for afterschool programs, school districts create and withdraw them all the time depending on budget that you can't actually make plans for them.

ec109685 5y ago

I don't understand why there is so much effort put onto cramming math into high school. I took calculus in high school and then repeated it in college. There is plenty of time in college (especially if some of the less useful elective requirements were taken away) to catch up on your math requirements, so whether you are ready for Algebra in 8th grade or not should have no barring on whether you are able to pursue a STEM major in college, let alone be successful in your career. I think we lane people out of STEM way too early, which is what I believe some of these curriculum changes are trying to redress.

ucm_edge 5y ago
Math is one of the pure foundations for liberal arts so getting it done early is better. We should be focusing on getting high schools teaching it so well that colleges don't feel the need to rerun it not saying you can do it later. High school grads should be able to pass the AP Calc and AP Stats exams to the level colleges feel they can totally ditch the 100 level courses for those subjects. If you don't have students repeating basic math (and chemistry) in college, they can do deeper on an elective track involving a STEM because because their STEM credit hours aren't spent getting a rerun of Calc I.
jimbokun 5y ago
So you were perfectly willing to pay for an extra semester of college to learn something you could have learned in high school for free.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Yes, because mastering Calc wasn’t what I was capable of in high school. It would have been a huge shame if I was slightly worse at math, didn’t even take Calc and thus wasn’t accepted into a CS program upon graduation. So much stress and consternation is spent on saving one calculus corse in college (and it’s used as gate keeping to get into an elite college stem program).

tannhauser23 5y ago

We all know what initiatives like California's leads to. Parents from middle to upper class families will send their kids to private schools or invest in extracurricular math programs. This will be especially true in immigrant and tech-worker parents who know the value of a strong STEM education. Only people who suffer will be kids from families without the means or the desire to go beyond public education - most likely the same people that these initiatives purport to help.

nouveaux 5y ago
"We all know what initiatives like California's leads to. Parents from middle to upper class families will send their kids to private schools or invest in extracurricular math programs." Are you saying it's not happening now?
- julienb_sea 5y ago
  Whether or not it's happening now, doesn't preclude opposition to policy choices that actively accelerate the process. People with money and wherewithal are always going to have alternative options available to them, such as private education or moving to expensive neighborhoods with strong schools. The problem is when public school policy results in actual degradation of education for everyone else.
- twblalock 5y ago
  A lot of high-earning parents in California send their children to public schools, and they are willing to pay extra money to buy homes in the best school districts in order to do so. School district quality has a significant impact on home values in California, and that wouldn't be the case if the majority of high earners sent their kids to private schools.
908B64B197 5y ago
> This will be especially true in immigrant and tech-worker parents who know the value of a strong STEM education. Only people who suffer will be kids from families without the means or the desire to go beyond public education - most likely the same people that these initiatives purport to help. Short term schools like Lowell are switching from using test score to a lottery based admission. And so are UC schools! So the smart kid interested in learning but who doesn't have parents in tech to send him to private tutoring better be lucky at the lottery or have the correct "holistic" attributes his target school will admit on!

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

Eh, watching all this makes me only more willing to properly research homeschooling ( it is not yet apparent whether we will be able to afford private school.. so I am assuming we won't be ). Still, the pattern is hard to miss. I think my current favorite is biology and its treatment of race ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/us/race-biology-genetics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/us/race-biology-genetics.... ). Quote directly from the article: “We basically decided, no, race is still a social construction, it’s not a biological thing,” Ken Miller, an author of the widely used Prentice Hall biology textbook, told the science magazine Undark of the decision to omit mention of race. I guess what I am saying is not new to anyone. Public schools will continue to degrade. There is no benefit to any of the groups other than the parents to ensure kids learn things ( administrators, their lawyers, your congressman, my congressman, teachers, teacher's unions, book publishers ). Sure, they pay lip service and some individual teachers care, but each of those groups have goals beyond kid's education. edit: I was gonna add Apple and Microsoft in that list, but I removed them, because, as flawed as their reasoning is, at least they pretend they want to teach kids basic coding, which is not horrible.

freemint 5y ago
Race as biological concept exists but there are no human races in the biological sense. Humans are able to interbreed and were not selected by their environments for long enough to develop significantly different cognitive abilities. If we use the word race for human being it can only mean cultural or other such societal concepts meaning it is a social construction. I hope that helped.
- leephillips 5y ago
  It didn’t really help. Why do you mention interbreeding? Are you confusing race with species?
  - freemint 5y ago
    Because partial but not complete genetic isolation is a criteria in the IMHO applicable (or rather not applicable) definition of race here. I am not confusing race and species.

teeray 5y ago

Everybody hates it to different degrees, but grinding Algebra I & II problem sets hard for a few years was a dramatic advantage in college calc & physics. Some classmates were still struggling with special right triangles where it was completely intuitive to me at that point. The applications of math that everyone clamors for in high school eduction became far more apparent once I got to college.

6f4f06c00484d34 5y ago

people who push for "equitable" education do not send their children to public schools. equity for thee, not for me.

tzs 5y ago

Some interesting stats from ed.gov [1]. Only 59% of schools offer algebra in 8th grade. There's a map showing percent of schools with 8th grade algebra by district. There's another map farther down shown percent of 8th graders who took it by school district. (The maps can be slow to load). Overall 80% of students have access to algebra I in 8th grade. Breaking that down by type of school it is 88% in magnet schools, 81% in traditional schools, 60% in charter schools. It is 86% in suburban schools, 75% in urban schools, 75% in rural schools, and 76% in town schools. That is access. Enrollment is another matter. 24% of 8th graders actually take it. By gender that is 25% of the females and 22% of the males. By race 34% of the Asians, 24% of the Whites, 23% of the two-or-more race students, 14% of Pacific Islanders, 13% of the Hispanics, 13% of the Natives, and 12% of the Blacks. [1] https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/stem/algebra/index.html https://www2.ed.gov/datastory/stem/algebra/index.html

sh1mmer 5y ago

I find it interesting with many of these criticisms that subject matter experts on maths, sciences, etc think that they are also subject matter experts on the pedagogy of maths, science, etc especially at a high school level. Many advanced practitioners don’t even have a good grasp of college level/post-grad pedagogy which they’d use more in their day to day work. Using a skill isn’t the same as teaching it, and just like anything else there are plenty of fallacies to be had. I’d be more persuaded by angry hot takes from High School teachers worried that their students aren’t going to hit the grades they deserve / learn the things they need than anything else. Even then, single high school teachers experiences are closer to anecdotes than actual pedagogical research, with which the original proposal is backed.

throwaway19937 5y ago
> I find it interesting with many of these criticisms that subject matter experts on maths, sciences, etc think that they are also subject matter experts on the pedagogy of maths, science, etc especially at a high school level. Public education in the US has a long history of fads, manias, and ill-conceived attempts at reform. There's little evidence of improvement over time or competitive performance. The following is an excerpt from (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...). The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science. Given these results I'll trust subject matter experts over educators any day.
dfdz 5y ago
You are missing the key point: these experts on maths, sciences, etc are not arguing HOW to teach maths, sciences, etc. They are only arguing WHAT is important to teach. High school math teachers do not have the perspective to understand what kind of math is needed for jobs in engineering, data science, etc (The fact is that a background in algebra and calculus is necessary for almost all of these jobs).
- 5y ago

yakkityyak 5y ago

My armchair take of the situation is that the administrators of K-12 education are too focused on the potential value of kids actually using these math frameworks instead of how they sort of rewire how to logically reason about things. I'm having trouble finding the right words to describe myself, but I vividly remember how many moments of epiphany I had when I took Calculus and Linear Algebra. I don't directly use either of them at all in my day job, but I feel like they were foundational in developing reasoning skills.

leephillips 5y ago
This is, I believe, the fundamental problem. Administrators, and, to some degree, math teachers themselves, don’t like or understand math. They constantly talk about what it’s “for”, as if math class serves a purpose similar to car repair shop class. They seem to understand that you can have an English class treating poetry, or a history class, without needing to justify them with practical applications. I think most of this bunch have no concept of studying math for its own sake, and the idea that you might do so for enjoyment would probably seem incomprehensibly bizarre. During my brief stints teaching math in high schools, my attitude was that I was guiding students along the path to becoming people—members of their civilization.

Hermitian909 5y ago

I think many of the commenters posting that this step will necessarily lower mathematical achievement are unlikely to have taught math to small children (or at least to a large number of them). The change has tradeoffs, but I think we'll likely end up a more numerate state for the change. It's important to remember that children are not tiny adults. At an early enough developmental stage, a child may be physically unable to learn algebra. The number of such children is much higher in middle school than freshman year of high school. Note that developing later doesn't mean you're not very smart nor that you have aptitude. A student I had many years with this issue now has his PhD in mathematics. By delaying algebra, you give a large chunk of students time to move forward developmentally so they can engage in the material. The current system ill suits them for a few reasons. One is that curriculum (somewhat necessarily) assumes high mastery of pre-requisite concepts, when it turns out this isn't the case students tend to not understand the material and get very frustrated. That frustration and anger often causes lasting damage that may never be undone. My mother was a math educator during the years when Algebra first moved into middle school fought heavily against it. According to her the push came mainly from professors of Mathematics (with no educational training) who wanted better trained students. I think this has worked out for some of the top schools. If you're smart and a little precocious algebra in 8th grade is good, but I think net we lose out on a lot of talent.

threatofrain 5y ago
Under the Common Core as specifically implemented in California, children who are ready for Algebra in middle school may take it, and children who benefit from a delay may opt for delay. A central pillar of Equitable Math is that this disparity sustains White Supremacy in math, and thus all children should always be in the same class, up until the last year of high school.¹ This is the central point of contention, and not whether some children benefit from a delay of Algebra past middle school, and nor whether all children ought to learn Calculus. [1]: https://equitablemath.org https://equitablemath.org
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  > A central pillar of Equitable Math is that this disparity sustains White Supremacy in math, and thus all children should always be in the same class, up until the last year of high school. Could you cite a more direct source for this? It's in direct contradiction with the materials the site you linked provided me [0]. If you go to page 17 "September Who are my students?" they do not discourage different classes or tracks existing, they discourage placing students in different tracks without input from the student or their parents. As a former educator that seems sensible to me. Sometimes a student isn't quite ready to enter the more advanced mathematical track but could be made so with if provided some guidance on how to self study. I've seen many high school freshman apply themselves more readily when I laid out the long term consequences of different math tracks. [0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

tomohawk 5y ago

I took an informal poll of foreign students at the US university I went to. Regardless of major, they all took Algebra in 6th grade. This was quite some time ago. I was interested as I was ready for Algebra in 6th grade, but was unable to take it until 8th grade. If you don't get into Algebra before high school, there is no chance of taking a reasonable calculus class before college, which puts you way behind the curve if you get into an engineering program. I went to a state university that had a strong engineering program. The students that I knew who were having difficulty and eventually dropped all had first seen calculus at the university. These were smart, talented people, but they were not given the chance to succeed.

a9h74j 5y ago

To my reading the posted article makes only passing reference to the California recommendations, and gives positive emphasis to a number of focussed initiatives or programs.

spiralx 5y ago
I assume because it's easier to extrapolate an "alarming trend" from a curated subset of small initiatives and programs than it is from a bunch of recommendations for improving maths education. Seems to have worked, there's more comments here about a single program than the recommendations themselves.

nateburke 5y ago

While very much different in terms of the number and financial size of directly-applicable job prospects, American pre-collegiate math and musical training share a very important thing in common -- there is a step-function proficiency gain to be had from trained parents living in the same house as the child. Yes, primary and secondary curriculum matters, but in the same way a church musician parent will politely nod approval at the elementary school musical show knowing full well that real musical development for children usually happens in the home with parental involvement -- a mechanical engineer or e.g. actuary parent living in a small or under-schooled town will also politely acknowledge the child's remedial math homework assignments, yet know enough to be able to seek out quality instruction for the child, even if it means utilizing community college or other nearby resources. Given the same family and upbringing, something tells me that Scott would still excel in math as a HS student in today's California, were he there and that age now.

VLM 5y ago

The biggest problem I see with this article is not the obvious intended political sizzle but an assumption early in the article along the lines of the only purpose of public education is the eventual production of STEM college graduates and everyone else can and should go directly to hell and absolutely no resources or encouragement should be provided for any other educational outcome. It makes you wonder how the public school system is not in a continuous state of civil rights lawsuits over the equal protection clause. “every child must master algebra, preferably by eighth grade, for algebra is the gateway to the college-prep curriculum, which in turn is the path to higher education.” But that's not the life path for perhaps 90%+ of the population. I don't think we can justify burning tax dollars to exclusively and solely support a tiny minority of kids at the expense of nearly all the other kids. I would not be bothered by mindless STEM boosterism if it were not for pages like this: https://datausa.io/profile/cip/electrical-engineering#tmap_occ_num_emp_degree https://datausa.io/profile/cip/electrical-engineering#tmap_o... It offends me as a EE type person that the top job title for graduating engineers is software dev, where they'd have been better off with a CS degree, or no degree. Meanwhile I'm told by the other side that we have a terrifying massive shortage of engineering grads, despite that clearly not being the case and it being VERY difficult for new kids to get a job in the field. I'm led to believe by "shortage" they actually mean a "shortage of people willing to work 80 hrs/wk for minimum wage and no bennies" or "shortage of experts with decades years of masterful experience willing to accept apprentice level pay scales" We simply seem to have too many STEM grads for our economy to support. I don't see any realistic reason for future improvement in that situation. Meanwhile public education policy, meant to serve EVERYONE, is telling most of the kids to go to hell. And those are the kids running the rest of the economy and we're relying on them to grow the economy enough to support the 5% of STEM workers whom are the only important people to educate according to "public" education, which is now really only college prep STEM education and F every other kid. This path cannot possibly end well. The best way to handle algebra education as applied to the entire student body, is to acknowledge that for 95% of the population, learning how to change the oil in a car or how to identify when someone is using statistics as propaganda, would be a more valuable life skill. Yes I acknowledge STEM is and will remain important for a tiny subset of both kids and future jobs, but...

naasking 5y ago

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

At some point they'll cut out all the foundational mathematics needed for hard science and engineering. Then only foreign students will be qualified for bachelor's programs. Complex numbers will be first at the chopping block.

itronitron 5y ago

Why do educators always fail to effectively communicate with a non-captive audience? The author needs to re-work this so that the first paragraph tells me everything that I need to know, and the rest of the essay/letter/memo can elaborate on things that I should or might want to know. If they aren't willing to do that then they are going to continue to remain out of touch to most people.