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Sorry for being out of the loop and asking a (possibly) dumb question: What is the stated reason that the CMF suggested these changes? Is it about budgets? Is

Sorry for being out of the loop and asking a (possibly) dumb question: What is the stated reason that the CMF suggested these changes? Is it about budgets? Is it because some people might think these classes "aren't that important?". The open letter seems to suggest that it's about closing gaps between privileged and less privileged - is that it? Honest question - I'm not trying to stir the pot.

cortesoft 4y ago
I believe the gist of the argument is that when you split students into 'normal' and 'advanced' classes at a young age, the students who are not put into the advanced classes will believe they are just naturally not good at math and will give up on trying to get better because they will think they just "don't have a math brain". Here is a short blurb about the idea: > The framework would not forbid districts from accelerating students in middle school. It does, however, recommend that middle-school students all take the same sequence of “integrated” math classes that blend concepts from arithmetic, algebra and other subjects with the goal of cultivating a foundation and comfort level with numbers. > On top of that, the framework recommends that schools postpone offering students Algebra 1 until 9th grade or later, when it says more students are likely to be able to master the material. > “When kids struggle, they immediately say ‘I don’t have a math brain,’” Boaler said. “That changes how the brain operates.” https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2021/11/california-math/ https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2021/11/cali... I am sympathetic to the idea that we don't want to send the message that some kids are just bad at math, but it does seem to be a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by holding back the other kids who are doing well. Even if you keep the advanced kids in the same class, the kids are are struggling are going to be well aware that some of the kids are getting it really quickly.
- nafix 4y ago
  Sounds like more woke nonsense. Sounds nice and easy to a layman from a super high level but not practical or put through any kind of rigorous rational thought.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkou 4y ago
    > Sounds like more woke nonsense You are right that this is a lot of nonsense. Specifically, 'you aren't good at math/math is hard' is the nonsense meme that gets hammered into student heads so frequently during school that most of them actually start to believe it. It's not some kind of novel woke nonsense, though, it's how math instruction on this continent has been happening over the past X decades. The wokies are pushing back on this nonsense.
    - nafix 4y ago
      Like I said, sounds good to a layman in general terms (just how you explained it). But the actual implementation is half-baked, short-sighted, and favors a weak/easy solution rather than something more well thought out and complex.
      - cortesoft 4y ago
        Ok, so what would your approach be to address the issue of huge groups of kids underperforming what they are actually capable of? I feel too often the people who play the 'woke nonsense' card think that we should just allow the current failings to continue, and any work to help struggling groups is wrong.
        woojoo666 4y ago
        Wouldn't cutting out high level math courses make even more kids underperform below what they are capable of? The cited issue was that higher level math courses were making other students feel like they weren't cut out for math. So it seems more like the issue is a mindset one. They shouldn't be looking at better performing kids and think "I can never do that". We should be instilling a better growth mindset to these kids, so they understand that they can overcome their inabilities. The "woke" solution of removing high level courses actually achieves the opposite. It reinforces the idea that such a level is inachievable for some people so it should be cut out for all people.
- acomjean 4y ago
  I was in the "middle" tier math program in high school. But around sophomore year I wanted to get more into science/engineering but you can't switch tiers or catch up to those ahead of you, no matter if you're making extra effort and doing well. It was frustrating. In my case I got a letter about summer school at a local university. So I pre-calced over summer school to get moved into calculus in high school. It honestly changed my path. I get having tiers, but once placed into one its hard to move. If I wasn't self motivated, and had the opportunity to try I would be in a different place.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    Many public schools take local college credits. There is always a path.
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      Yes, but these alternatives are much harder to find for students who already aren’t the best at navigating the school system. Requiring students to figure all of this out is going to reduce the number of students who benefit by quite a bit.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      My understanding is that CA law requires public schools to accept any class that would receive credit by the UCs. They don't always, and I believe some bay area schools have been (successfully) sued over their non-compliance.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    My school allowed changing tiers, and I am very grateful that it did. I had a bad year in my early teens with some mental health stuff, and spent my first year in high school with kids who needed much more time and practice to get a handle on concepts than I did. If I had been forced to stay in those tracks, my life would have taken a drastically different course, as I didn't really need to work to learn. Getting bumped into a higher tier challenged me, and that challenge is what prepared me for college. Had I gone into college without that work ethic, I almost certainly would have failed out early.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Why wouldn't you just let everyone take the same class and the same exams, but let the kids who have interest do extra work? Want to do calculus a year early? Here's the book, here's the exercises, why would I stop you?
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    What you suggest is already the case. The book and exercises are "here" for you to do, nobody to stop you. It's called the internet. The calculus police doesn't come get you if you're reading a calc book in 10th grade. It's just that you don't have any way of getting instruction or school credit - so you are very unlikely to be successful, and not very likely to have your university credit you as having mastered the material without taking a college class.
    - throwawayboise 4y ago
      Any high schooler can take the AP calculus test and earn credit, no?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    Because that's inefficient. A class geared towards the bottom 50% of kids is going to waste a lot of time for the top 50% of kids. Simply giving the gifted kids more homework just wastes more time, and hardly encourages them to reach their potential.
  - leaflets2 4y ago
    I think the teacher sometimes says and explains things to the whole class, and if what the teacher says, or homework s/he has prepared, applies only to 5 out of 25 kids, the others can get bored and unmotivated, sometimes even start disturbing the others. And sometimes the kids talk with each other about the maths problems. But that won't work so well if they're in different books. Simpler for both the teacher and students, if those in a class are at roughly the same level. But I do think that what you say, would work in a group where everyone is pretty good at maths, enjoy it so much so "yes I got a new book" they think (when they get the next book). And dive into it, no matter if there's a teacher there or not. That's not generally the case though is it
- rajin444 4y ago
  > That changes how the brain operates. I didn’t think our understanding of the brain was that advanced yet. AFAIK we run some experiments and observe results, but we can’t explain why those results were observed. Which is useful and awesome from a learning perspective, but extremely worrying we use it to craft public policy.
- npunt 4y ago
  Yep, tracking students into systems like high/low early on makes it very hard to ever escape that track, as they're a sort of self-perpetuating system. That has downstream effects for one's entire life. It's a crude method of personalizing education within the context of factory education. Downsides are that kids develop at different times, have different educational needs, have home life issues that can temporarily derail progress, etc and if those happen around the time kids are getting tracked, they may not reach their full potential. A good education system would offer students a way to rise up whenever they're ready to rise up, let them learn at their pace, focus on mastery, build upon knowledge gained rather than schedule followed, etc. There's a lot of edtech out there that incorporate these concepts but school models struggle to integrate it into the (literally) old school way they operate. It's quite difficult to reorient school around these new concepts at scale, it has to be done school-by-school, leader-by-leader, school board by school board. Agree its complex, as it may be the 'best of the worst' option for certain contexts. Anything involving balancing equity/access/etc is like that.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    From what I've seen there are three major problems with edtech that gives a personalized education: 1) A lot of K-8 education is babysitting. If you let kids do their own thing they'll just watch YouTube and play Roblox instead. Most kids are not _that_ self motivated at this point in life. It's hard for teachers to manage a classroom if everyone is working on different things. 2) Staring at a computer screen is not a great learning experience. A classroom is an interactive, social experience with active feedback. It's hard to socialize when the kid next to you is not working on the same activity or problems you are. 3) Personalizing education diminishes the importance of teachers in the classroom, which teachers unions obviously oppose. Teachers can't teach if every kid is learning something different, and online education strongly promotes winner-take-all dynamics where the best teacher and content can scale up infinitely and dominate. Out of all these I think 2) and 3) are the hardest problems to solve and whoever solves them is going to meaningfully advance education. But I'm not very convinced by the startups I'm seeing in this space that anyone has solved it yet.
    - 4y ago
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > we don't want to send the message that some kids are just bad at math But some kids are just bad at math. Some kids are bad at sports, music, dance, etc. Some kids are good at some things and kids are good at different things.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    Yes, some kids are bad at math... but they could be better than they are. Let's use your example of sports, for example. Yes, no matter how much I train and practice running, I will never be as fast as Usain Bolt... but I sure will be faster than if I didn't practice at all.
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      Yes, that's correct. So you (and I) should be taking remedial running and Usain should be taking AP running.
    - dahfizz 4y ago
      You're making a straw man that non-advanced math class == no math class. The lower level math class is exactly where you belong to train up your math ability. You wouldn't expect to practice running with the same routine that marathon runners use.
- fn-mote 4y ago
  > “When kids struggle, they immediately say ‘I don’t have a math brain,’” Boaler said. “That changes how the brain operates.” This really jumped out at me. I didn't read any context, but students CAN and SHOULD learn to struggle. Productively. Without thinking they are failing. Imagine you thought everything should come easily? That's not my experience in the world. The fact that students (are reported to) shut down when faced with difficulty is a failing of the educational system and something that should be worked against.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > I didn't read any context, but students CAN and SHOULD learn to struggle. Productively. Without thinking they are failing. Unproductive struggling with math is the natural consequence of substandard math education, such as is encouraged by the unscientific and arguably insane notion (which is however common throughout the Education field) that all students can simply be expected to "learn their math by themselves", and therefore have no need for actual, focused and direct teaching of that subject.
- honkdaddy 4y ago
  I know it's considered good form on HN to beat around the bush a bit when it comes to sensitive culture war topics, but I think it's worth pointing for the non-Americans here that the only reason this discussion is even happening is because of the demographics which are observed after the "split" occurs. Black and Latino students are overrepresented in underperforming math classes, while White and Asian students are overrepresented in the high-performing math class. That's literally the only reason there's any controversy, and if said disparity didn't exist, or if the races were reversed, then we wouldn't be having this discussion whatsoever. If you approached athletics with the same strategy, you'd end up with a similarly wonky outcome. Consider that Asian students have always been highly underrepresented in high school football. > “When kids struggle, they immediately say ‘I don’t have a football body,’” Boaler said. “That changes how the body operates.” Is the equitable conclusion to change the rules of football so Asian students perform better? Surely not, right?
Miner49er 4y ago
From my understanding, they revisit this framework every 8 years. California is doing poorly in 8th grade math scores, so I think they want to make changes to improve that.
- adamomada 4y ago
  Goodhart's law In action?
- prepend 4y ago
  It seems like such a bonehead solution to the problem. Of course if you’re doing poorly in math scores, you can make math easier in the hope to increase scores. It’s sad that the state is proposing these changes. I remember in school there were kids who argued “algebra is stupid, who needs it, why waste time” and there were one or two sympathetic teachers who would respond “well, I rarely have to use algebra to balance my checkbook” or something silly. It seems like those kids have grown up, gained power, and are literally pushing the argument that this math isn’t important.
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    The person quoted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Boaler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Boaler) is a "Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Mathematics Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education" who "won the award for best PhD in education from the British Educational Research Association" I'm not saying I agree with the proposed California Framework. As a formerly gifted maths student, I hate it. But let's not dismiss the rigorous work of an academic who is attempting to improve education for a public education body for a state with 40 million people as "bonehead" (or "woke nonsense" as another commenter did). 90% of the reasons why kids say "<subject> is stupid, who needs it" it's because they are not enjoying it or struggling with it and using this as a defense mechanism. Noone who is doing WELL at a school subject dismisses it as useless. So maybe, just maybe, it's worth evaluating the education process to make it easier to teach kids to give them the foundations that then the more gifted ones can invest and build on top of, and everyone comes out with baseline math competency.
legalcorrection 4y ago
- burner556 4y ago
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  This is actual argument that I saw presented as well, just in different words eg reduce racial disparity in outcome.
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  My (anecdotal but common) presumption is that the disparity often comes from a cultural / behavioral divide, which is increasingly blurry along racial lines but still distinct enough to recognize usually. By behavioral I mean things that are disruptive to standard teaching, like, during a lecture or presentation, students are spending time on phones or chatting with each other or listening to music or drawing or walking around. General "I don't care, I'm going to do my own thing" behavior. Sometimes the behavior is based in a cultural or subcultural expectation or standard. What methods or authorities do teachers have to enact behavioral change in such cases? In most cases, none at all. If any attempt isn't derided as racist (or other -ist/-phobic accusations) it's viewed as authoritarian/inhumane. Decades of legal precedent and risk aversion have caught up to education, perhaps rightly so. I don't think there's any chance in hell of going back to paddling and such, so we need to come up with newer ways to enact behavioral change. In order to do this, I think we have to stop being afraid of slights against culture. Unity of purpose, of many one. Diversity is not a strength if there is no unifying principle among the diversity.

cortesoft 4y ago

I believe the gist of the argument is that when you split students into 'normal' and 'advanced' classes at a young age, the students who are not put into the advanced classes will believe they are just naturally not good at math and will give up on trying to get better because they will think they just "don't have a math brain". Here is a short blurb about the idea: > The framework would not forbid districts from accelerating students in middle school. It does, however, recommend that middle-school students all take the same sequence of “integrated” math classes that blend concepts from arithmetic, algebra and other subjects with the goal of cultivating a foundation and comfort level with numbers. > On top of that, the framework recommends that schools postpone offering students Algebra 1 until 9th grade or later, when it says more students are likely to be able to master the material. > “When kids struggle, they immediately say ‘I don’t have a math brain,’” Boaler said. “That changes how the brain operates.” https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2021/11/california-math/ https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2021/11/cali... I am sympathetic to the idea that we don't want to send the message that some kids are just bad at math, but it does seem to be a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by holding back the other kids who are doing well. Even if you keep the advanced kids in the same class, the kids are are struggling are going to be well aware that some of the kids are getting it really quickly.

nafix 4y ago
Sounds like more woke nonsense. Sounds nice and easy to a layman from a super high level but not practical or put through any kind of rigorous rational thought.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 4y ago
  > Sounds like more woke nonsense You are right that this is a lot of nonsense. Specifically, 'you aren't good at math/math is hard' is the nonsense meme that gets hammered into student heads so frequently during school that most of them actually start to believe it. It's not some kind of novel woke nonsense, though, it's how math instruction on this continent has been happening over the past X decades. The wokies are pushing back on this nonsense.
  - nafix 4y ago
    Like I said, sounds good to a layman in general terms (just how you explained it). But the actual implementation is half-baked, short-sighted, and favors a weak/easy solution rather than something more well thought out and complex.
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      Ok, so what would your approach be to address the issue of huge groups of kids underperforming what they are actually capable of? I feel too often the people who play the 'woke nonsense' card think that we should just allow the current failings to continue, and any work to help struggling groups is wrong.
      - woojoo666 4y ago
        Wouldn't cutting out high level math courses make even more kids underperform below what they are capable of? The cited issue was that higher level math courses were making other students feel like they weren't cut out for math. So it seems more like the issue is a mindset one. They shouldn't be looking at better performing kids and think "I can never do that". We should be instilling a better growth mindset to these kids, so they understand that they can overcome their inabilities. The "woke" solution of removing high level courses actually achieves the opposite. It reinforces the idea that such a level is inachievable for some people so it should be cut out for all people.
acomjean 4y ago
I was in the "middle" tier math program in high school. But around sophomore year I wanted to get more into science/engineering but you can't switch tiers or catch up to those ahead of you, no matter if you're making extra effort and doing well. It was frustrating. In my case I got a letter about summer school at a local university. So I pre-calced over summer school to get moved into calculus in high school. It honestly changed my path. I get having tiers, but once placed into one its hard to move. If I wasn't self motivated, and had the opportunity to try I would be in a different place.
- pishpash 4y ago
  Many public schools take local college credits. There is always a path.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    Yes, but these alternatives are much harder to find for students who already aren’t the best at navigating the school system. Requiring students to figure all of this out is going to reduce the number of students who benefit by quite a bit.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    My understanding is that CA law requires public schools to accept any class that would receive credit by the UCs. They don't always, and I believe some bay area schools have been (successfully) sued over their non-compliance.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  My school allowed changing tiers, and I am very grateful that it did. I had a bad year in my early teens with some mental health stuff, and spent my first year in high school with kids who needed much more time and practice to get a handle on concepts than I did. If I had been forced to stay in those tracks, my life would have taken a drastically different course, as I didn't really need to work to learn. Getting bumped into a higher tier challenged me, and that challenge is what prepared me for college. Had I gone into college without that work ethic, I almost certainly would have failed out early.
lordnacho 4y ago
Why wouldn't you just let everyone take the same class and the same exams, but let the kids who have interest do extra work? Want to do calculus a year early? Here's the book, here's the exercises, why would I stop you?
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  What you suggest is already the case. The book and exercises are "here" for you to do, nobody to stop you. It's called the internet. The calculus police doesn't come get you if you're reading a calc book in 10th grade. It's just that you don't have any way of getting instruction or school credit - so you are very unlikely to be successful, and not very likely to have your university credit you as having mastered the material without taking a college class.
  - throwawayboise 4y ago
    Any high schooler can take the AP calculus test and earn credit, no?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Because that's inefficient. A class geared towards the bottom 50% of kids is going to waste a lot of time for the top 50% of kids. Simply giving the gifted kids more homework just wastes more time, and hardly encourages them to reach their potential.
- leaflets2 4y ago
  I think the teacher sometimes says and explains things to the whole class, and if what the teacher says, or homework s/he has prepared, applies only to 5 out of 25 kids, the others can get bored and unmotivated, sometimes even start disturbing the others. And sometimes the kids talk with each other about the maths problems. But that won't work so well if they're in different books. Simpler for both the teacher and students, if those in a class are at roughly the same level. But I do think that what you say, would work in a group where everyone is pretty good at maths, enjoy it so much so "yes I got a new book" they think (when they get the next book). And dive into it, no matter if there's a teacher there or not. That's not generally the case though is it
rajin444 4y ago
> That changes how the brain operates. I didn’t think our understanding of the brain was that advanced yet. AFAIK we run some experiments and observe results, but we can’t explain why those results were observed. Which is useful and awesome from a learning perspective, but extremely worrying we use it to craft public policy.
npunt 4y ago
Yep, tracking students into systems like high/low early on makes it very hard to ever escape that track, as they're a sort of self-perpetuating system. That has downstream effects for one's entire life. It's a crude method of personalizing education within the context of factory education. Downsides are that kids develop at different times, have different educational needs, have home life issues that can temporarily derail progress, etc and if those happen around the time kids are getting tracked, they may not reach their full potential. A good education system would offer students a way to rise up whenever they're ready to rise up, let them learn at their pace, focus on mastery, build upon knowledge gained rather than schedule followed, etc. There's a lot of edtech out there that incorporate these concepts but school models struggle to integrate it into the (literally) old school way they operate. It's quite difficult to reorient school around these new concepts at scale, it has to be done school-by-school, leader-by-leader, school board by school board. Agree its complex, as it may be the 'best of the worst' option for certain contexts. Anything involving balancing equity/access/etc is like that.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  From what I've seen there are three major problems with edtech that gives a personalized education: 1) A lot of K-8 education is babysitting. If you let kids do their own thing they'll just watch YouTube and play Roblox instead. Most kids are not _that_ self motivated at this point in life. It's hard for teachers to manage a classroom if everyone is working on different things. 2) Staring at a computer screen is not a great learning experience. A classroom is an interactive, social experience with active feedback. It's hard to socialize when the kid next to you is not working on the same activity or problems you are. 3) Personalizing education diminishes the importance of teachers in the classroom, which teachers unions obviously oppose. Teachers can't teach if every kid is learning something different, and online education strongly promotes winner-take-all dynamics where the best teacher and content can scale up infinitely and dominate. Out of all these I think 2) and 3) are the hardest problems to solve and whoever solves them is going to meaningfully advance education. But I'm not very convinced by the startups I'm seeing in this space that anyone has solved it yet.
  - 4y ago
commandlinefan 4y ago
> we don't want to send the message that some kids are just bad at math But some kids are just bad at math. Some kids are bad at sports, music, dance, etc. Some kids are good at some things and kids are good at different things.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  Yes, some kids are bad at math... but they could be better than they are. Let's use your example of sports, for example. Yes, no matter how much I train and practice running, I will never be as fast as Usain Bolt... but I sure will be faster than if I didn't practice at all.
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    Yes, that's correct. So you (and I) should be taking remedial running and Usain should be taking AP running.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    You're making a straw man that non-advanced math class == no math class. The lower level math class is exactly where you belong to train up your math ability. You wouldn't expect to practice running with the same routine that marathon runners use.
fn-mote 4y ago
> “When kids struggle, they immediately say ‘I don’t have a math brain,’” Boaler said. “That changes how the brain operates.” This really jumped out at me. I didn't read any context, but students CAN and SHOULD learn to struggle. Productively. Without thinking they are failing. Imagine you thought everything should come easily? That's not my experience in the world. The fact that students (are reported to) shut down when faced with difficulty is a failing of the educational system and something that should be worked against.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > I didn't read any context, but students CAN and SHOULD learn to struggle. Productively. Without thinking they are failing. Unproductive struggling with math is the natural consequence of substandard math education, such as is encouraged by the unscientific and arguably insane notion (which is however common throughout the Education field) that all students can simply be expected to "learn their math by themselves", and therefore have no need for actual, focused and direct teaching of that subject.
honkdaddy 4y ago
I know it's considered good form on HN to beat around the bush a bit when it comes to sensitive culture war topics, but I think it's worth pointing for the non-Americans here that the only reason this discussion is even happening is because of the demographics which are observed after the "split" occurs. Black and Latino students are overrepresented in underperforming math classes, while White and Asian students are overrepresented in the high-performing math class. That's literally the only reason there's any controversy, and if said disparity didn't exist, or if the races were reversed, then we wouldn't be having this discussion whatsoever. If you approached athletics with the same strategy, you'd end up with a similarly wonky outcome. Consider that Asian students have always been highly underrepresented in high school football. > “When kids struggle, they immediately say ‘I don’t have a football body,’” Boaler said. “That changes how the body operates.” Is the equitable conclusion to change the rules of football so Asian students perform better? Surely not, right?

Miner49er 4y ago

From my understanding, they revisit this framework every 8 years. California is doing poorly in 8th grade math scores, so I think they want to make changes to improve that.

adamomada 4y ago
Goodhart's law In action?
prepend 4y ago
It seems like such a bonehead solution to the problem. Of course if you’re doing poorly in math scores, you can make math easier in the hope to increase scores. It’s sad that the state is proposing these changes. I remember in school there were kids who argued “algebra is stupid, who needs it, why waste time” and there were one or two sympathetic teachers who would respond “well, I rarely have to use algebra to balance my checkbook” or something silly. It seems like those kids have grown up, gained power, and are literally pushing the argument that this math isn’t important.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  The person quoted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Boaler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Boaler) is a "Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Mathematics Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education" who "won the award for best PhD in education from the British Educational Research Association" I'm not saying I agree with the proposed California Framework. As a formerly gifted maths student, I hate it. But let's not dismiss the rigorous work of an academic who is attempting to improve education for a public education body for a state with 40 million people as "bonehead" (or "woke nonsense" as another commenter did). 90% of the reasons why kids say "<subject> is stupid, who needs it" it's because they are not enjoying it or struggling with it and using this as a defense mechanism. Noone who is doing WELL at a school subject dismisses it as useless. So maybe, just maybe, it's worth evaluating the education process to make it easier to teach kids to give them the foundations that then the more gifted ones can invest and build on top of, and everyone comes out with baseline math competency.

legalcorrection 4y ago

burner556 4y ago
s1artibartfast 4y ago
This is actual argument that I saw presented as well, just in different words eg reduce racial disparity in outcome.
jimmygrapes 4y ago
My (anecdotal but common) presumption is that the disparity often comes from a cultural / behavioral divide, which is increasingly blurry along racial lines but still distinct enough to recognize usually. By behavioral I mean things that are disruptive to standard teaching, like, during a lecture or presentation, students are spending time on phones or chatting with each other or listening to music or drawing or walking around. General "I don't care, I'm going to do my own thing" behavior. Sometimes the behavior is based in a cultural or subcultural expectation or standard. What methods or authorities do teachers have to enact behavioral change in such cases? In most cases, none at all. If any attempt isn't derided as racist (or other -ist/-phobic accusations) it's viewed as authoritarian/inhumane. Decades of legal precedent and risk aversion have caught up to education, perhaps rightly so. I don't think there's any chance in hell of going back to paddling and such, so we need to come up with newer ways to enact behavioral change. In order to do this, I think we have to stop being afraid of slights against culture. Unity of purpose, of many one. Diversity is not a strength if there is no unifying principle among the diversity.