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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 ad

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 5y 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 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
        dahfizz 5y ago
        It would be most equitable and inclusive for everyone to be equally destitute. Let's drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator...
        vkou 5y ago
        So, the solution is to instead decide at ~grade 6 or 7 that some people are going to get dragged down, instead?
acomjean 5y 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 5y ago
  Many public schools take local college credits. There is always a path.
  - cortesoft 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    Any high schooler can take the AP calculus test and earn credit, no?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dahfizz 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
  - 5y ago
commandlinefan 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    Yes, that's correct. So you (and I) should be taking remedial running and Usain should be taking AP running.
  - dahfizz 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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?

nafix 5y 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 5y ago
[deleted]
vkou 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
      - dahfizz 5y ago
        It would be most equitable and inclusive for everyone to be equally destitute. Let's drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator...
        vkou 5y ago
        So, the solution is to instead decide at ~grade 6 or 7 that some people are going to get dragged down, instead?

acomjean 5y 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 5y ago
Many public schools take local college credits. There is always a path.
- cortesoft 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Any high schooler can take the AP calculus test and earn credit, no?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dahfizz 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- 5y ago

commandlinefan 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Yes, that's correct. So you (and I) should be taking remedial running and Usain should be taking AP running.
- dahfizz 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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?