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Have you experienced this personally? I ask because this hasn't been my experience as a parent of a K-12 student. They are expected to show and be able to expl

Have you experienced this personally? I ask because this hasn't been my experience as a parent of a K-12 student. They are expected to show and be able to explain their work, and the teachers use that work to gauge the student's understanding of the material.

Jtsummers 5y ago
It seems to be an issue in some school districts and because it's such a weird thing (to most of us) it ends up getting a lot of "air time", so to speak. Outliers doing bizarre things become representative when they get the majority of coverage.
jerf 5y ago
The school district my children were in fiddled with it. One of my kids got actively in trouble for the fact he could do the "real" math problem in his head and wasn't "estimating", despite also being able to estimate correctly on larger problems. It is the direction math education is going in the public school system, and it is the direction it has had for a while so it's not like this is really some sort of surprise. Standards will be lowered until all students pass. There are political currents in that direction, plus there's the ever-present fact that the easiest way to make a given school's performance go up is to lower the standards, and there are many entities with incentive to do that. If your local school still has standards, they may currently be the mountains still standing above the rising seas, but the seas are still rising. In some ways I wish they'd just get on with it and leap straight to the logical conclusion of just officially eliminated the standards and passing all students guaranteed, so we can all get on with the task of dealing with the fact that such a credential would be worthless, instead of this long, drawn-out process of lowering standards while trying to pretend the standards aren't being lowered. (I think the second derivative of this process has turned away from dumbing down. Pushback is really coming up in earnest. But it'll be a while before it so much as turns the first derivative back in the correct direction, let alone get to the point where the problem is largely fixed.)

Jtsummers 5y ago

It seems to be an issue in some school districts and because it's such a weird thing (to most of us) it ends up getting a lot of "air time", so to speak. Outliers doing bizarre things become representative when they get the majority of coverage.

jerf 5y ago

The school district my children were in fiddled with it. One of my kids got actively in trouble for the fact he could do the "real" math problem in his head and wasn't "estimating", despite also being able to estimate correctly on larger problems. It is the direction math education is going in the public school system, and it is the direction it has had for a while so it's not like this is really some sort of surprise. Standards will be lowered until all students pass. There are political currents in that direction, plus there's the ever-present fact that the easiest way to make a given school's performance go up is to lower the standards, and there are many entities with incentive to do that. If your local school still has standards, they may currently be the mountains still standing above the rising seas, but the seas are still rising. In some ways I wish they'd just get on with it and leap straight to the logical conclusion of just officially eliminated the standards and passing all students guaranteed, so we can all get on with the task of dealing with the fact that such a credential would be worthless, instead of this long, drawn-out process of lowering standards while trying to pretend the standards aren't being lowered. (I think the second derivative of this process has turned away from dumbing down. Pushback is really coming up in earnest. But it'll be a while before it so much as turns the first derivative back in the correct direction, let alone get to the point where the problem is largely fixed.)