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Seemingly everything about education becomes a national scandal. The federal No Child Left Behind law, and the state-led Common Core initiative, were both majo

Seemingly everything about education becomes a national scandal. The federal No Child Left Behind law, and the state-led Common Core initiative, were both major efforts to improve education in the U.S. They both also created massive national backlashes. California tried to do something as simple as refactor a few math classes and somehow it got turned into fodder for some ideological battle. The College Board tried to offer a new optional AP class and the Florida governor nearly called the National Guard on them. Everyone says they want to fix education until actual change starts to happen. Then there is a huge freak out about how (insert group) is trying to ruin schools.

armatav 4y ago
That’s one of the most disingenuous comments I’ve seen. Common Core demolished the education system in this state, along with the other acts to “improve” education. The optional AP was just a single African American studies class. Education in public schools is just straight terrible here - teachers live like 2 hours away and hate their lives, topics are low difficulty and uninteresting, and the entire system predicates itself on the SAT, which you need a part-time tutor to cover your ass for, unless you want to spend every weekend doing a test; most can’t afford that.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  Common Core can be fairly summarized as conservatively pushing math standards forward by 0.5 years. The spec of any particular grade level can be read in a few minutes and details simple requirements like some operationalized understanding of polynomials, and the entire math spec can be read in an afternoon. The more recent push to abolish the spec in favor of a more lax standard, namely Equitable Math, was a backlash against this. There are public school districts in California which couldn't be more eager for specs to push standards forward by another 0.5+ years because the Common Core is still catching up from behind to their de facto standards, but there's a seriously powerful (perhaps majority) democratic and political will to hold standards back. What the Common Core and Equitable Math should not be understood as is as a new way of teaching or learning math. Neither of these are revolutionary. All parties involved understand that there's an existing supply of math teachers across the nation who are comfortable teaching some curriculum at some level, and that a true re-arrangement or re-imagination of subjects carries high institutional friction. In other words, we might rearrange Geometry to be taken before Algebra, but replacing Geometry with Linear Algebra (per Gilbert Strang's suggestion) would be revolutionary.

armatav 4y ago

That’s one of the most disingenuous comments I’ve seen. Common Core demolished the education system in this state, along with the other acts to “improve” education. The optional AP was just a single African American studies class. Education in public schools is just straight terrible here - teachers live like 2 hours away and hate their lives, topics are low difficulty and uninteresting, and the entire system predicates itself on the SAT, which you need a part-time tutor to cover your ass for, unless you want to spend every weekend doing a test; most can’t afford that.

threatofrain 4y ago
Common Core can be fairly summarized as conservatively pushing math standards forward by 0.5 years. The spec of any particular grade level can be read in a few minutes and details simple requirements like some operationalized understanding of polynomials, and the entire math spec can be read in an afternoon. The more recent push to abolish the spec in favor of a more lax standard, namely Equitable Math, was a backlash against this. There are public school districts in California which couldn't be more eager for specs to push standards forward by another 0.5+ years because the Common Core is still catching up from behind to their de facto standards, but there's a seriously powerful (perhaps majority) democratic and political will to hold standards back. What the Common Core and Equitable Math should not be understood as is as a new way of teaching or learning math. Neither of these are revolutionary. All parties involved understand that there's an existing supply of math teachers across the nation who are comfortable teaching some curriculum at some level, and that a true re-arrangement or re-imagination of subjects carries high institutional friction. In other words, we might rearrange Geometry to be taken before Algebra, but replacing Geometry with Linear Algebra (per Gilbert Strang's suggestion) would be revolutionary.