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From the original letter: While well-intentioned, we believe that many of the changes proposed by the CMF are deeply misguided and will disproportionately ha

• cloutchaser 5y ago
  My guess is the intention is to be able to say that the framework benefits disadvantaged people. But like almost any policy like this all it does at best is pull down people at the top, at worst pulls down everyone making the situation worse for everyone. You can have separation of education by ability, and progress, or you can have equality, and everyone being pulled down to the same low level. And suffering for everyone. You can’t have both. Take it from someone who has direct experience with communism, which is the same mentality that drives this.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    > You can have separation of education by ability, and progress, or you can have equality, and everyone being pulled down to the same low level. This seems a little off. What we're talking about (and what it seems like you're defending) is directing more resources towards the most gifted. It's fine to believe that, but it's an argument to give the most to those who have the most. Nobody is pulling anyone down, and communists are as happy to grant power and resources to those with aptitude and connections as capitalists are. edit: with the constant attacks on teachers, it might be more realistic to stop aiming for calculus in high school. Any kid who manages it within a gutted public system would have gotten there anyway, no matter what situation they found themselves in. They can download calculus books and calculus lectures now; with the internet a feral education is within everyone's reach.
    • hellisothers 5y ago
      As the parent of a child who is gifted at math this is wrong on so many levels, I’ll just state one. My kid only has so much time he can genuinely focus on “school work” in a day, why should he be forced to spend “school” time on things wildly beneath his level and then come home and spend his own time on additional “school” type work?
    • ralph84 5y ago
      How is it directing more resources to allow students to take courses at their level? It's not like you have to pay high school math teachers a higher salary to teach calculus. Your typical public high school in California has 1,000+ students. With that many students it's not going to be hard to find 20-30 students to register for a calculus class. It's not like you're running a special private class just for a few gifted students.
    • nullc 5y ago
      Every student needs and should be entitled to an education that pushes their abilities. Without it, they won't learn to put in the effort required to be successful even at a level that doesn't make use of their enhanced abilities. This might mean that there are additional costs for 'gifted' students. But that's no different than there being additional costs for mentally less advanced students: no matter what the students are, providing an education fit to their needs has costs... and a failure to provide it creates inequality when the most privileged families move their children (or relocate entirely) to places that will provide a more suitable education.
  • jdkee 5y ago
    Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut describes this quite well. See http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
• mc32 5y ago
  It's almost a case of inmates running the asylum --but in this case, it's not even the inmates but their caregivers who in their maternalistic view seem to think they know what's best for the "inmates" and are guiding them to the path to "hell" --hell being a reduced education in an increasingly competitive labor market.
• cwkoss 5y ago
  Is calculus an important highschool goal? I feel like I may have benefited more if that time was spent on statistical literacy than calculus. I encounter stats very often in my adult life, calculus style problems are rare and I don't remember the formulas offhand, so end up just looking up what I need.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Stats requires calculus; you can't even define a probability distribution without some pretty advanced notions of real analysis. Discrete math, linear algebra etc. are viable alternatives.
    • l33t2328 5y ago
      But statistical literacy doesn’t. Sure, they may not be able to tell you what is a measurable function, but they can explain the way you should feel about a p-value.
      • teawrecks 5y ago
        As someone who took both a stats and newtonian physics course before taking a calc course, I wish I hadn't. It was a waste of time. They can't explain why you use the formulas they do, they have to just say "trust us, and be able to regurgitate it on the exam". For me, learning means developing an intuition, which means resolving/building new facts from other facts I have already accepted. Being handed seemingly random formulas to memorize goes directly against this. Yeah, I can use my car without knowing how every piece inside works, but the moment something goes wrong, I don't know what to do. I would never say I am car-literate, and someone who hasn't taken calc cannot be stats-literate.
        • l33t2328 5y ago
          You can develop an intuition divorced from meaningless formulas. It goes without saying this proposed class wouldn’t be based around memorizing unmotivated formulas.
• taeric 5y ago
  I'll bite. Why is calculus a goal?
  • kurthr 5y ago
    Because, without it you will be at a great disadvantage in entering any STEM undergraduate program in the US.
    • taeric 5y ago
      I'll agree that any stem targeted students should get exposure. Not clear that it helps most students.
    • bawolff 5y ago
      Maybe for most of them, however i found calculus totally useless for my CS degree (the only time i recall it mentioned was defining big-oh notation). Otoh i liked calculus so still time well spent. Of course, that's not counting "mathamatical maturity" which is super important or if you're doing some specific thing that needs calculus (hello machine learning.)
      • pishpash 5y ago
        It's pretty simple: - calculus if you want to do engineering - discrete mathematics if you want to do CS You can teach these in university, it's not a problem. Calculus doesn't need to be taught in high school to everyone but it should be available and it should be the goal state in terms of curriculum pace for everyone so that you should have no problem taking it by the time you are 17 or 18 (which is what we're talking about). Anything else propagates back to a regressive dumbing down in an earlier year, from an already dumbed down curriculum by international standards.
        • ryandrake 5y ago
          > - calculus if you want to do engineering > - discrete mathematics if you want to do CS I'd guess the vast majority of software development jobs are like "gluing one API layer to another" and "writing simple-to-complex CRUD apps". Neither calculus or discrete mathematics really helps if your goal is to simply make a computer read data from database X and display it in webform Y. I found all of the math required by my undergrad degree to be totally useless in real life programming. Whether you need any math at all will highly depend on the application domain you get in to. The most complex math I needed as a code monkey was vector arithmetic (3D graphics) and trigonometry (ocean and aero mapping navigation).
• H8crilA 5y ago
  What does "calculus" here mean? I'm not American, no idea what's included in that word and what's outside, in this context. Does it mean limits, derivatives, integration (Newton), maybe even some high level talk about ODEs for the "very best" schools? Anything more, anything less? Also, in case anyone is also wondering, 8th grade means 13-14 years old.
  • pishpash 5y ago
    Calculus without analysis, so the mechanical rules and recipes of real analysis of well behaved scalar functions that an engineering course might use (and that were used by the developers of Newtonian mechanics in the pre-modern era), limits on intervals, Riemann integration, etc.
  • SOTGO 5y ago
    Limits, derivatives, and integrals mostly, plus many applications. There is also a heavy emphasis on computation and very little emphasis on proof.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    Yes, they talk about the normal things average high school students learn about derivatives and integrals all over the world.
  • zdragnar 5y ago
    At my US school around the year 2000, precalc was one option for seniors, which primarily focused on limits and derivatives. The more advanced pace AP calc course also went into integrals. Beyond that I don't really recall, but by that point you also had gone through courses focusing on basic geometry, basic algebra (using variables, factoring), and a course dedicated to trigonometry (mostly memorizing the rules around figuring out angles). There were some other courses that had math involvement, but were more business oriented (finance / accounting type stuff) and I don't recall if they counted towards core math credit requirements.
  • cowboysauce 5y ago
    It varies throughout the country. But for me it was: * Calculus I: limits, derivatives, integrals * Calculus II: More integration techniques (substitution, by parts, table), infinite series and convergence, basic numerical methods * Calculus III: multi-variable calculus (partial derivatives, multiple integrals), vector calculus (gradient, divergence, curl, surface and line integrals) ODEs were a class you could take after Calc II.
• FFRefresh 5y ago
  I don't doubt that the people crafting these proposals care. I think they truly believe they are doing the right thing. I personally think it's just increasingly popular, mistaken moral beliefs that inform these types of proposals. Some of the underlying beliefs: 1. Blank slate - All humans are of equal ability 2. Any observable differences between humans are merely the result of social factors 3. Any observable differences in outcomes between groups of humans are the result of oppression from the majority group 4. If you observe differences at your org/institution, it's your moral duty to create policies which disfavor groups of humans performing better and to favor groups of humans performing worse, as those performance differences are due to oppression. If these beliefs undergird your worldview, and your social groups/information environment reinforce and reward these beliefs, it is of no surprise that we'll see a lot of people soberly propose the types of policies we see here. I can empathize that they really do think they are fighting the good fight, and are doing the right thing for society.
  • devindotcom 5y ago
    • cool_dude85 5y ago
      No, even Ayn has never claimed to be a psychic, able to penetrate the deepest thoughts of school board members to distill their entire world view down to a bulleted list.
  • innagadadavida 5y ago
    You are leaving out who is involved and what commercial interest will be benefitted from these policies. It is likely those commercial interests are the ones sponsoring and pushing these by finding sympathetic folks. The important thing to note here is- if you reduce the bar in high schools, a lot more students will end up in college - more money will spent, more loans will be written out etc.
    • leaflets2 5y ago
      > commercial interest Or political interest? I wrote sth about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176276 (Namely, foreign state psyops? -- I do not think so, just a thought)
• hintymad 5y ago
  I have two theories: 1. Math is a differentiating subject for getting into those competitive colleges, departments, and professions. In the meantime, the progressives simply refuse to believe that some people are just better at studying math. The logical choice, then, is to dumb down math to "level the play ground". It's the same unspoken reason why so many people pushed the magnet schools to use lottery to pick students (I actually think lottery with threshold can be a good solution, but that's another subject). 2. Progressive math educators have been advocating self discovery and that everyone can learn math in their own pace for years. What educators need to do, per the progressive argument, is to protect the fragile passion and creativity of the kids. Jo Boaler even argued that kids should discover all maths by their own. Naturally, we have to dumb down math courses, otherwise we would inevitably hurt the confidence and passion of some kids. As progressives always said: no kid should be left behind and some people got better at math only because they were socially privileged. I disagree with the progressive view of math education based on my personal experience, as so many classmates of mine simply were not interested in STEM, and maths in particular. I'm not sure why we don't accept that most people will hit a wall sooner or later when learning maths. To some it is arithmetic, to some it is calculus, to some it is abstract algebra, etc and etc. To me I definitely lost my drive when taking courses like model logic, and I certainly do not have interest or talent to get good at things like functional analysis or topology or algebraic geometry, but I make peace with it. I really don't understand why the progressives are hell bent on insisting that everyone can learn maths equally.
• rayiner 5y ago
  > If it is well-intentioned, what was the intention... to dumb down math in high school? Bingo. It's well intentioned, but the intentions aren't to ensure that America can keep up with a rising China. It's shocking to me that people in California aren't more worried about this. About 15 years ago, I was talking to an engineer at Juniper/Cisco. We were joking about how Huawei had copied one of their router designs down to the silk screened assembly instructions (in English!) on the PCBs. Fast forward to today, Huawei is making fully custom equipment down to state of the art switch and router chips, and Chinese companies are white boxing lower end products made by American brands. There's a big bet out there that the U.S. can survive on software and social media alone. I would think the success of Tik Tok would have blown even that rationalization out of the water. On the general point of U.S. math education: my cousin who lives in a nice California suburb was complaining that the math education her early high school student is receiving is several grade levels behind what she got--in Bangladesh. My mom, who also went to school in Bangladesh (in the 1960s!) was deeply unhappy about the math education in our affluent Virginia suburb, until I got into a top STEM magnet high school. My own kids go to an expensive private school, but are still getting math tutoring on the side. Math is just a shockingly low priority for Americans.
  • klodolph 5y ago
    In the 1960s, it was the USSR. In the 1980s it was Japan. Now it's China. I'm not trying to suggest that the US is fine and we shouldn't fix anything, but if you look at the world by comparing test scores and grade levels in mathematics, you're going to come to some very warped perceptions about what is important. I'm speaking as someone passionate about STEM education, who got a B.S. in mathematics. The whole situation is warped. The USA accounts for 4% of the world population, and 40% of the top 100 universities in the world. That's fucking weird. I don't have an explanation for it. I'm just saying that the different signals we use for evaluating how good our education system is functioning are giving us radically different pieces of feedback, and our understanding needs to be correspondingly sophisticated. There are all these narratives about how China is going to eat our lunch (like Japan in the 1980s, or the USSR in the 1960s) and while I don't feel comfortable betting on long-term US hegemony, and while I do think we should put more work into our mathematics education, I do think that looking at the world through high-school mathematics test scores is going to give you anxiety more than it's going to give you an accurate picture of what are problems really are. To take another statistic into account, there are actually many STEM graduates in the US. What do we do with this information? How do we change our policies? It's unclear.
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I don't think calculus should be a goal to be honest. Or at least not as taught. Calculus could be greatly condensed to a shorter theoretical view. The ideas of understanding differentiation and integration are great. Memorizing the rules of doing it is pretty painful and likely won't stick. But that's the bulk of classroom time, homework, and testing.
• duxup 5y ago
  >to dumb down math in high school? There's a lot of competing / strange interests in school systems that can have well intended but BIZARRE outcomes. My wife works in early childhood education. At one point it was recognized that the early childhood department should be more involved in helping students with learning disabilities as soon as possible. There was lots of outreach to parents to get them into free classes and education, and most importantly screening so they could get free services if they qualified / needed them. However, it was noticed at some point by some very vocal parents that some students with specific backgrounds were refereed to these services more than others. These services were provided in and out of school, the kids weren't moved to another school or anything like that, but despite all their efforts... The result was deemed to be some sort of bias, or outright racism. Therefore it was made very clear that they could not disproportionately "single out" students of some backgrounds for these services, that are free, to help them learn.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. The job that the administrator is hired for is “make Black and White test scores identical.” With only the leverage of the school, and no broader socioeconomic levers, the only way to make this happen is to reduce all assessment to 1+1=? (Multiple choice)
• overview 5y ago
  The perception of math by the public has led to a cognitive predisposition that math (especially calculus) is beyond the ordinary person. I wish pop culture would transform this.
• TimPC 5y ago
  The intention was to dumb down mathematics. If you lower the bar sufficiently you can get everyone over it. Then we'll all be equal, which is the goal of this curriculum.
• namelessoracle 5y ago
  Goodharts law is in effect. They have a target they are trying to hit and are aiming a different way towards it. They are optimizing towards "High School Graduates" and "College Graduates". And if they need to destroy the value of being any kind of graduate to get there. So be it.
• fnordpiglet 5y ago
  I’d rather linear algebra and discrete math be the goal. Calculus is greatly overrated. I mean, sure you should take it, but IMO linear algebra is considerably more useful in the real world and most people never take it. Knowing how to integrate and differentiate in continuous space isn’t nearly as useful as learning how to count in discrete space. Most people operate in a discrete world.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  The vision is equality. One way to achieve equality is to get better at doing something and improve the outcomes of what you are doing. Another way is to lower the standard to make the outcome easier to attain. It’s gross and racist.
• HWR_14 5y ago
  I could see replacing Calculus with Statistics as a goal for High School. It seems more broadly applicable, and both are offered at the AP level. But that doesn't seem to be this.
• ouid 5y ago
  Calculus is a terrible thing to be teaching in high school, and we should be teaching linear algebra instead.
• msla 5y ago
  Being able to integrate and differentiate is less important than understanding that P(B|A) does not, in general, equal P(A|B), and you can learn that latter fact without learning how a probability distribution is defined. Wikipedia has a proof of Bayes' Theorem without calculus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem Yes, it is ultimately founded on calculus. But we don't teach numbers to kindergarteners starting from Peano's axioms, and we don't need to gate the essentials of conditional probability behind calculus. In fact, doing so is positively harmful to society at large.