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It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. I suspect part of it is driven

It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. I suspect part of it is driven by the fact that it's cheaper and easier to meet metrics and/or look "socially engaged" by blocking students (when appropriate) from advancing. US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping. (https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm) On an anecdotal basis, I went to an elite university in the US (mostly based on luck I think because I was a mediocre student) and there was an implicit expectation was that students seriously pursuing STEM would be starting their curriculum with multivariable calc or linear algebra as a freshmen since the single variable calc requirement would have been knocked out AP/IB credits. I've seen many of my international cohorts going even beyond. I genuinely worry that school systems such as SFUSD is doing a great disservice to its students and the society.

josephcsible 4y ago
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. It's not that surprising, though, given that they've admitted their goal is equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. That's the only way to achieve the former.
- decremental 4y ago
  [flagged]
- bdw5204 4y ago
  What is "absolutely mind-boggling" is that there are parents who voluntarily send their kids to a school that openly admits it wants to dumb kids down to the lowest common denominator yet claim they care about their kids. If you know that the school's focus isn't on providing the best education possible to your kids, pull them out of that school immediately. If it is a public school (as it is in this case), complain to the school board, vote them out of office if they don't listen and support local efforts to expand school choice to rescue as many kids as possible from that failing public school system that has proven itself incapable of performing its primary function. Even if you get the school board to reverse insane decisions like banning algebra from middle schools, I still wouldn't trust any school system that would even consider doing such things to properly educate kids. I think it beyond a reasonable doubt that the dysfunction in the SF school district is much deeper than just this algebra ban.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    “ If you know that the school's focus isn't on providing the best education possible to your kids, pull them out of that school immediately” Hard to do when you are poor, as many in SF are. SF seems like a rich city on the outside because it has an insane number of rich people but it also has dirt poor people who can’t do anything else.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    This is one of the quickest way to get your kids into youth services even if you provide better education yourself. And IN youth services, something like half of kids don't even go to school, and aren't homeschooled, so let's just forget asking about the quality of education. The purpose of the state here is to sabotage your kids to their own benefit (in this case: make the education system easier to administrate, to underpay teachers, and above all else protect the power and jobs the system has). They will actively fight, to the point of using violence against you and your kids, if you reject the school system. Be very careful with doing this. And if you do, you're probably better off pretending you're a fundamentalist christian, or better yet, muslim or hindu or ... objecting to sex ed classes. Seriously. This is with parents and kids rejecting the school system being big exceptions. If ever 10% of kids become homeschooled, it will get a lot worse. You'd think this wouldn't happen. Statistics are very clear, for example, that a LOT more kids are abused at school than at home. This is 100% the fault of the school system (failure to prevent personnel from plus failure to supervise kids, and please do not: school do traumatize kids, as everyone kind of knows and research confirms. It's just not something talked about), and has an obvious result: actions by youth services to make kids go to school increases child abuse, rather than decrease it. Likewise, it reduces schooling. You would think this strange if you assume their purpose is to protect kids, rather than their real purpose: to protect schools and the state from kids. If they actually intended to protect kids, obviously, they'd refuse to interfere in these cases. And for the love of God, DO NOT ask help from youth services under any circumstances, but above all, don't ask them to help with your kid being traumatized or bullied at school. They will 100% blame the kid, refuse do take any action whatsoever in school, and most definitely will not make teachers pay attention and prevent bullying in the playground or anything like that.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Schooling is compulsory and parents don't have a whole lot of options. This kind of political idiocy is one of the strongest Arguments for school vouchers
- WalterBright 4y ago
  For a long time, schools have been trying to eliminate testing. The reason is simple - with no tests, how can anyone argue that the schools aren't doing a great job teaching?
lumost 4y ago
My two cents. We do a disservice to students in the US by treating Algebra/Calc as advanced math. Typically, American schools judge student math aptitude prior to algebra based on rote memorization of multiplication tables. Potentially with the added benefit of more rote memorization problems if one is in the honors curriculum. Aptitude for this type of problem does not directly translate into aptitude for higher math. There is nothing particularly advanced about Algebra or Calculus. At most, it's a question of how much time one is willing and able to put into the subject. The fact that most American students do not exit high school with a functional knowledge of single variable calculus is purely an artifact of our curriculum priorities.
- ocbyc 4y ago
  YouTube is probably the best source of education delivered by passionate teachers at this point.
  - daniel_rh 4y ago
    I've been looking for a really engaging solid intro to number theory course on youtube, including rings, Abelian groups, etc for early teens. Does anyone have a recommendation here?
- polio 4y ago
  I was pretty annoyed when I got to university and figured out that math could be about proofs rather than calculation. If I had been raised with that idea of math, I would have loved it so much sooner and would probably be pretty good at it by now.
  - clnq 4y ago
    I was also annoyed for the opposite reason. I had assumed until then that math was more about application of what’s been proven rather than revisiting the proofs. I think the majority of students feel what I felt; that math got a lot less applied and a lot more esoteric in the academia.
spoonjim 4y ago
The problem is that there is absolutely no policy that could be implemented that would bring black students to the performance levels of Asian students. So they have to stop letting the Asian students perform.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Oh, there definitely is. Pay the teachers bonuses based on how many of their students achieve at grade level. I propose this often, and it inspires massive pushback every time. Just give the teachers a $1,000 bonus for every such kid. Give the teachers a free hand in how to go about it. It'll be the cheapest and most effective boost to education you've ever seen.
  - cwalv 4y ago
    You'd have to give a very free hand, and it'd likely end up with many students being kicked out of class. So they'd have fewer students, and close to all of the ones that stayed would be achieving at grade level. Not sure if that's better or worse in the end ...
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      If they get more achieving grade level, isn't that what we want?
      - edmundsauto 4y ago
        Not necessarily if it means there will be a barbell curve, and we get equal or more students doing even worse. Teachers will quickly bucket kids into 3-4 groups: 1. Doing fine, no need to even pay attention to these kids. Now your top performers don't grow as much. 2. On the edge - where most attention will go 3. Meh - maybe a small percentage jump into category 2, where they will be cared about 4. Let them rot - most of the kids at the bottom will just be let to rot
        4y ago
slackerchews 4y ago
**DISCLAIMER: The numbers don't add up, someone's numbers are wrong see Jesson's child comment >US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping. This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]: - Asian (556) - White (531) - Hispanic (481) - Black (448) - Mixed Race (501) Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten. The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide. [0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compiled.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi...
- Tehdasi 4y ago
  I'm sure in every educational system you can use some form of metric to exclude low SES students and conclude that the system isn't behind or failing.
  - dmix 4y ago
    …or maybe always attempting to look at systems as a whole and fix it as a homogenous unit might be exactly why it’s failing in the first place.
  - slackerchews 4y ago
    totally agree with you. was just pointing out a statistical quirk I thought added value to the discussion. I'll even retract my point that the US maths education system isn't failing as a whole. When two demographics (30% of the country and growing) are being left behind by the system, then the system is failing as a whole. I really hope to see this change in the future.
- 4y ago
golemotron 4y ago
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. It's unfair that some people develop skills easily when others don't. When equity is the goal this is what happens.
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  Easily? It's not like you're born with math predisposition. It has everything to do with culture. Asian parents push their kids to greatness. Some other groups do not.
  - golemotron 4y ago
    I didn't know there were any pure nurturists left. The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker is worth reading.
  - ndriscoll 4y ago
    Math always came easy to me up to grad school level. My parents didn't really push me. If I did my homework, it was timeboxed to what I could do on the bus ride, which meant I mostly just didn't do it once I started driving. I spent my afternoons playing video games. I remember my calc 2 teacher scolding me for never doing my homework and telling me I was going to get a C regardless of my AP exam score (most of the AP teachers at my school gave you an A if you got a 5). I didn't really care, got a 5. My habits and attitude improved somewhat during undergrad (I figured out in junior year that you can actually read those books you buy!), but as a kid I was a horrible student. I took all honors/AP classes because the normal ones were so boring and slow, not because I had tiger parents. From all of this, I'm forced to conclude that either everyone just likes to complain and actually math is easy, or some people find it easy and some do not, and I was very fortunate to be one of the former.
hoiu4oi23443434 4y ago
Not surprising. This kind of moronism has been happening in India for nearly 100 years. And look at that society: it's a sub-saharan "shit-hole" that has ruined its own future because of its borrowed obsession with "social justice" (and the political vermin that exploit them); which thinks squeezing out its best talent who then achieve wonderful things outside is something to be "proud" of. There is enough reason to hate British colonialism, but it is under them that Indians bagged the first Nobel Prizes in Asia. Now, even those universities that produced them are being destroyed due to idiotic tribal dogfighting. Worse, unlike the US case, all this caste-propaganda doesn't even have much historical evidence to begin with! Such potential wasted.
newZWhoDis 4y ago
All of this behavior makes perfect sense once you accept they are malicious. Halons razer is not paramount, sometimes it really is malice. Science is about creating theory that has predictive power, and the malice hypothesis in my experience has predicted future outcomes far better than stupidity.
rayiner 4y ago
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them It’s not “mind boggling” if you do a deep dive into the “ethnic studies” curricula that so many teachers and administrators are graduating from these days. It’s a completely parallel value system complete with revisionist history. It’s like the Wahhabist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
- margalabargala 4y ago
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  - lmm 4y ago
    Given the story we're discussing here, evidently it (or at the very least some equally screwed-up mentality) does?
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Some documents you may find interesting and relevant https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1124962.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1124962.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Conferences_and_Professional_Development/Webinars_and_Webcasts/Webcasts/4-19-22_WebinarSlides.pdf https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Conferences_and_Professio...
    - amluto 4y ago
      That first link is amazing. As far as I can tell, it has essentially nothing to do with math. One could search-and-replace to change math to any other field and get an equally valid paper.
    - margalabargala 4y ago
      Granted that stuff like that exists. What I question is whether teachers are actually being taught and accepting this in any sort of meaningful numbers, rather than simply existing as a handful of isolated publications that are largely ignored; do you know how widespread that is?
screamingninja 4y ago
> administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up It's truly disheartening to see the San Francisco school district's actions resemble something straight out of Orwell's 1984. As someone who has lived in this city for years, it's painful to witness the gradual decline and the rise of corruption overshadowing the progressive spirit that once defined it. Instead of addressing the root cause of poor math education, the district has opted for obfuscation and dishonesty. It's a classic case of doublethink, where they attempt to hold two contradictory beliefs: that they're doing what's best for the students while simultaneously suppressing their educational growth. Much like the Party in 1984, they seem to prioritize maintaining a facade over genuinely improving education. I wish we could challenge this dystopian approach and hope to meaningfully improve the situation, but at this point, I am not even sure how one would go about doing that.
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  I’m getting a more “Harrison Bergeron” feeling than I am 1984: https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. ...
  - screamingninja 4y ago
    Yeah agreed, I can totally see that!
anon291 4y ago
I have been calling this behavior out for almost a decade, and all I got for it was being labeled a conservative. People are extremely close minded, and completely blind to what is happening.
- cwalv 4y ago
  I really wish we could all move on from the conservative/liberal false dichotomy. I'm neither (or both), and so is nearly everyone else I know. I think we need something better than winner-takes-all for all elected positions, because it forces you to pick 'the lesser of two evils', knowing that a vote for the person you like the most is really just a 'protest vote'
nonethewiser 4y ago
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. It's the best way to ensure equal outcomes. Perhaps equal outcomes is just a nasty goal.
- cwalv 4y ago
  Equal outcomes is a fine goal, and this is a terrible example of a good way to achieve it. It may be the quickest/easiest way (maybe even the only way given the levers they have control over), but that doesn't make it good.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Merit, effort, intelligence, empathy, effort etc. aren’t equally distributed. Why should a cruel person with tons of advantages and no motivation experience the same as a smart, kind, hard working person? If you’re not for that you can see equal outcomes are a bad goal.
BigCryo 4y ago
Paging Harrison bergeron paging Harrison bergeron
readthenotes1 4y ago
"It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up" there is no other way, though. if you desire equal outcomes, you have to shackle the best. i believe Kurt Vonnegot wrote about this...
theGnuMe 4y ago
AP calc is basically useless. I took all the math classes in high school and memorized all the formulas but nobody taught me how to use the math to solve problems. You know word problems. Well now with deep learning I can apply the chain rule. None of those classes prepared me to be a math major or how to do proofs. It’d be better if we taught kids how to model problems and apply the tools. I think statistics is a better subject to learn early and often. Way more useful across disciplines. Anyway I think we know that high performing math countries teach math totally different than we do and they produce way better engineers, so why don’t we do what they do? I mean seriously I work in tech and all the engineers are foreign educated.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I mean it is pretty obvious what we need to do: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/math-scores-high-school-lessons-freakonomics-pisa-algebra-geometry/4835742002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/mat...
simplotek 4y ago
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. Do you actually mean "pushing them up", or is this code for "filter out underperformers"? This goes to the root of the issue. What is the whole point of a school? Is it to help students learn and improve? Or is it to serve as a series of challenges to eliminate and filter out people based on arbitrary people? If the goal is to lift up people, you need to pick them up from down where they are at.
hintymad 4y ago
Isn't it the poor but talent kids who got hurt? Family with means will simply send their kids to private tutors or good after schools. What's really mind boggling is that the constituents in the SF school district were okay with these garbage administrators.
the_third_wave 4y ago
> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down That is simply socialism 101 as portrayed in Rush' "The Trees": There is unrest in the forest There is trouble with the trees For the maples want more sunlight And the oaks ignore their pleas The trouble with the maples And they're quite convinced they're right They say the oaks are just too lofty And they grab up all the light But the oaks can't help their feelings If they like the way they're made And they wonder why the maples Can't be happy in their shade? There is trouble in the forest And the creatures all have fled As the maples scream, "oppression" And the oaks just shake their heads So the maples formed a union And demanded equal rights "The oaks are just too greedy We will make them give us light" Now there's no more oak oppression For they passed a noble law And the trees are all kept equal By hatchet Axe And saw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC88xBPkkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC88xBPkkc
version_five 4y ago
Equity is literally about pushing everybody down to the lowest level. Are there any examples where that has not been the outcome? Some advocate it out of ignorance, some out of malice. The result is the same, everybody is worse off.
stcroixx 4y ago
Administrators are just doing what people in SF vote for - this idea and implementation of equity has been rolled into the set of positions one adopts as a progressive in CA, which is the only position to take unless you want to be socially ostracized. The ones who don't move away absolutely know they're sacrificing their kids. It's more popular though among this set to just skip having kids in the first place. Or to pay for private school, skip the consequences of this terrible idea, and let the people who can't afford that deal with them. I had my first of 4 kids at St. Lukes in the mission, but we moved out of the city before he was even a year old because of the schools.
zsssss65784 4y ago
That isn't even an elite school thing. That's an any school in the top 100 engineering/math/physics/CompSci thing. Mine was ~50ish and the vast majority of people in the program had at least one semesters worth of AP Calculus credits. Linear algebra was a first or second semester course if you followed the default recommended degree plan. That was only about 10 years ago, and other schools I considered all had similar looking degree plans. I'm inclined to think the concern (that we will run out of supply of people that can do math or something) is overblown. There are plenty of underemployed engineering and science students that took more advanced mathematics classes than the CS kids.

josephcsible 4y ago

> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. It's not that surprising, though, given that they've admitted their goal is equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. That's the only way to achieve the former.

decremental 4y ago
[flagged]
bdw5204 4y ago
What is "absolutely mind-boggling" is that there are parents who voluntarily send their kids to a school that openly admits it wants to dumb kids down to the lowest common denominator yet claim they care about their kids. If you know that the school's focus isn't on providing the best education possible to your kids, pull them out of that school immediately. If it is a public school (as it is in this case), complain to the school board, vote them out of office if they don't listen and support local efforts to expand school choice to rescue as many kids as possible from that failing public school system that has proven itself incapable of performing its primary function. Even if you get the school board to reverse insane decisions like banning algebra from middle schools, I still wouldn't trust any school system that would even consider doing such things to properly educate kids. I think it beyond a reasonable doubt that the dysfunction in the SF school district is much deeper than just this algebra ban.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  “ If you know that the school's focus isn't on providing the best education possible to your kids, pull them out of that school immediately” Hard to do when you are poor, as many in SF are. SF seems like a rich city on the outside because it has an insane number of rich people but it also has dirt poor people who can’t do anything else.
- candiodari 4y ago
  This is one of the quickest way to get your kids into youth services even if you provide better education yourself. And IN youth services, something like half of kids don't even go to school, and aren't homeschooled, so let's just forget asking about the quality of education. The purpose of the state here is to sabotage your kids to their own benefit (in this case: make the education system easier to administrate, to underpay teachers, and above all else protect the power and jobs the system has). They will actively fight, to the point of using violence against you and your kids, if you reject the school system. Be very careful with doing this. And if you do, you're probably better off pretending you're a fundamentalist christian, or better yet, muslim or hindu or ... objecting to sex ed classes. Seriously. This is with parents and kids rejecting the school system being big exceptions. If ever 10% of kids become homeschooled, it will get a lot worse. You'd think this wouldn't happen. Statistics are very clear, for example, that a LOT more kids are abused at school than at home. This is 100% the fault of the school system (failure to prevent personnel from plus failure to supervise kids, and please do not: school do traumatize kids, as everyone kind of knows and research confirms. It's just not something talked about), and has an obvious result: actions by youth services to make kids go to school increases child abuse, rather than decrease it. Likewise, it reduces schooling. You would think this strange if you assume their purpose is to protect kids, rather than their real purpose: to protect schools and the state from kids. If they actually intended to protect kids, obviously, they'd refuse to interfere in these cases. And for the love of God, DO NOT ask help from youth services under any circumstances, but above all, don't ask them to help with your kid being traumatized or bullied at school. They will 100% blame the kid, refuse do take any action whatsoever in school, and most definitely will not make teachers pay attention and prevent bullying in the playground or anything like that.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
Schooling is compulsory and parents don't have a whole lot of options. This kind of political idiocy is one of the strongest Arguments for school vouchers
WalterBright 4y ago
For a long time, schools have been trying to eliminate testing. The reason is simple - with no tests, how can anyone argue that the schools aren't doing a great job teaching?

lumost 4y ago

My two cents. We do a disservice to students in the US by treating Algebra/Calc as advanced math. Typically, American schools judge student math aptitude prior to algebra based on rote memorization of multiplication tables. Potentially with the added benefit of more rote memorization problems if one is in the honors curriculum. Aptitude for this type of problem does not directly translate into aptitude for higher math. There is nothing particularly advanced about Algebra or Calculus. At most, it's a question of how much time one is willing and able to put into the subject. The fact that most American students do not exit high school with a functional knowledge of single variable calculus is purely an artifact of our curriculum priorities.

ocbyc 4y ago
YouTube is probably the best source of education delivered by passionate teachers at this point.
- daniel_rh 4y ago
  I've been looking for a really engaging solid intro to number theory course on youtube, including rings, Abelian groups, etc for early teens. Does anyone have a recommendation here?
polio 4y ago
I was pretty annoyed when I got to university and figured out that math could be about proofs rather than calculation. If I had been raised with that idea of math, I would have loved it so much sooner and would probably be pretty good at it by now.
- clnq 4y ago
  I was also annoyed for the opposite reason. I had assumed until then that math was more about application of what’s been proven rather than revisiting the proofs. I think the majority of students feel what I felt; that math got a lot less applied and a lot more esoteric in the academia.

spoonjim 4y ago

The problem is that there is absolutely no policy that could be implemented that would bring black students to the performance levels of Asian students. So they have to stop letting the Asian students perform.

WalterBright 4y ago
Oh, there definitely is. Pay the teachers bonuses based on how many of their students achieve at grade level. I propose this often, and it inspires massive pushback every time. Just give the teachers a $1,000 bonus for every such kid. Give the teachers a free hand in how to go about it. It'll be the cheapest and most effective boost to education you've ever seen.
- cwalv 4y ago
  You'd have to give a very free hand, and it'd likely end up with many students being kicked out of class. So they'd have fewer students, and close to all of the ones that stayed would be achieving at grade level. Not sure if that's better or worse in the end ...
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    If they get more achieving grade level, isn't that what we want?
    - edmundsauto 4y ago
      Not necessarily if it means there will be a barbell curve, and we get equal or more students doing even worse. Teachers will quickly bucket kids into 3-4 groups: 1. Doing fine, no need to even pay attention to these kids. Now your top performers don't grow as much. 2. On the edge - where most attention will go 3. Meh - maybe a small percentage jump into category 2, where they will be cared about 4. Let them rot - most of the kids at the bottom will just be let to rot
      - 4y ago

slackerchews 4y ago

**DISCLAIMER: The numbers don't add up, someone's numbers are wrong see Jesson's child comment >US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping. This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]: - Asian (556) - White (531) - Hispanic (481) - Black (448) - Mixed Race (501) Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten. The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide. [0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compiled.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi...

Tehdasi 4y ago
I'm sure in every educational system you can use some form of metric to exclude low SES students and conclude that the system isn't behind or failing.
- dmix 4y ago
  …or maybe always attempting to look at systems as a whole and fix it as a homogenous unit might be exactly why it’s failing in the first place.
- slackerchews 4y ago
  totally agree with you. was just pointing out a statistical quirk I thought added value to the discussion. I'll even retract my point that the US maths education system isn't failing as a whole. When two demographics (30% of the country and growing) are being left behind by the system, then the system is failing as a whole. I really hope to see this change in the future.
4y ago

golemotron 4y ago

> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. It's unfair that some people develop skills easily when others don't. When equity is the goal this is what happens.

bufferoverflow 4y ago
Easily? It's not like you're born with math predisposition. It has everything to do with culture. Asian parents push their kids to greatness. Some other groups do not.
- golemotron 4y ago
  I didn't know there were any pure nurturists left. The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker is worth reading.
- ndriscoll 4y ago
  Math always came easy to me up to grad school level. My parents didn't really push me. If I did my homework, it was timeboxed to what I could do on the bus ride, which meant I mostly just didn't do it once I started driving. I spent my afternoons playing video games. I remember my calc 2 teacher scolding me for never doing my homework and telling me I was going to get a C regardless of my AP exam score (most of the AP teachers at my school gave you an A if you got a 5). I didn't really care, got a 5. My habits and attitude improved somewhat during undergrad (I figured out in junior year that you can actually read those books you buy!), but as a kid I was a horrible student. I took all honors/AP classes because the normal ones were so boring and slow, not because I had tiger parents. From all of this, I'm forced to conclude that either everyone just likes to complain and actually math is easy, or some people find it easy and some do not, and I was very fortunate to be one of the former.

hoiu4oi23443434 4y ago

Not surprising. This kind of moronism has been happening in India for nearly 100 years. And look at that society: it's a sub-saharan "shit-hole" that has ruined its own future because of its borrowed obsession with "social justice" (and the political vermin that exploit them); which thinks squeezing out its best talent who then achieve wonderful things outside is something to be "proud" of. There is enough reason to hate British colonialism, but it is under them that Indians bagged the first Nobel Prizes in Asia. Now, even those universities that produced them are being destroyed due to idiotic tribal dogfighting. Worse, unlike the US case, all this caste-propaganda doesn't even have much historical evidence to begin with! Such potential wasted.

newZWhoDis 4y ago

All of this behavior makes perfect sense once you accept they are malicious. Halons razer is not paramount, sometimes it really is malice. Science is about creating theory that has predictive power, and the malice hypothesis in my experience has predicted future outcomes far better than stupidity.

rayiner 4y ago

> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them It’s not “mind boggling” if you do a deep dive into the “ethnic studies” curricula that so many teachers and administrators are graduating from these days. It’s a completely parallel value system complete with revisionist history. It’s like the Wahhabist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

margalabargala 4y ago
[flagged]
- lmm 4y ago
  Given the story we're discussing here, evidently it (or at the very least some equally screwed-up mentality) does?
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Some documents you may find interesting and relevant https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1124962.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1124962.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Conferences_and_Professional_Development/Webinars_and_Webcasts/Webcasts/4-19-22_WebinarSlides.pdf https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Conferences_and_Professio...
  - amluto 4y ago
    That first link is amazing. As far as I can tell, it has essentially nothing to do with math. One could search-and-replace to change math to any other field and get an equally valid paper.
  - margalabargala 4y ago
    Granted that stuff like that exists. What I question is whether teachers are actually being taught and accepting this in any sort of meaningful numbers, rather than simply existing as a handful of isolated publications that are largely ignored; do you know how widespread that is?

screamingninja 4y ago

> administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up It's truly disheartening to see the San Francisco school district's actions resemble something straight out of Orwell's 1984. As someone who has lived in this city for years, it's painful to witness the gradual decline and the rise of corruption overshadowing the progressive spirit that once defined it. Instead of addressing the root cause of poor math education, the district has opted for obfuscation and dishonesty. It's a classic case of doublethink, where they attempt to hold two contradictory beliefs: that they're doing what's best for the students while simultaneously suppressing their educational growth. Much like the Party in 1984, they seem to prioritize maintaining a facade over genuinely improving education. I wish we could challenge this dystopian approach and hope to meaningfully improve the situation, but at this point, I am not even sure how one would go about doing that.

EvanAnderson 4y ago
I’m getting a more “Harrison Bergeron” feeling than I am 1984: https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. ...
- screamingninja 4y ago
  Yeah agreed, I can totally see that!

anon291 4y ago

I have been calling this behavior out for almost a decade, and all I got for it was being labeled a conservative. People are extremely close minded, and completely blind to what is happening.

cwalv 4y ago
I really wish we could all move on from the conservative/liberal false dichotomy. I'm neither (or both), and so is nearly everyone else I know. I think we need something better than winner-takes-all for all elected positions, because it forces you to pick 'the lesser of two evils', knowing that a vote for the person you like the most is really just a 'protest vote'

nonethewiser 4y ago

> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. It's the best way to ensure equal outcomes. Perhaps equal outcomes is just a nasty goal.

cwalv 4y ago
Equal outcomes is a fine goal, and this is a terrible example of a good way to achieve it. It may be the quickest/easiest way (maybe even the only way given the levers they have control over), but that doesn't make it good.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Merit, effort, intelligence, empathy, effort etc. aren’t equally distributed. Why should a cruel person with tons of advantages and no motivation experience the same as a smart, kind, hard working person? If you’re not for that you can see equal outcomes are a bad goal.

BigCryo 4y ago

Paging Harrison bergeron paging Harrison bergeron

readthenotes1 4y ago

"It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up" there is no other way, though. if you desire equal outcomes, you have to shackle the best. i believe Kurt Vonnegot wrote about this...

theGnuMe 4y ago

AP calc is basically useless. I took all the math classes in high school and memorized all the formulas but nobody taught me how to use the math to solve problems. You know word problems. Well now with deep learning I can apply the chain rule. None of those classes prepared me to be a math major or how to do proofs. It’d be better if we taught kids how to model problems and apply the tools. I think statistics is a better subject to learn early and often. Way more useful across disciplines. Anyway I think we know that high performing math countries teach math totally different than we do and they produce way better engineers, so why don’t we do what they do? I mean seriously I work in tech and all the engineers are foreign educated.

theGnuMe 4y ago
I mean it is pretty obvious what we need to do: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/math-scores-high-school-lessons-freakonomics-pisa-algebra-geometry/4835742002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/02/28/mat...

simplotek 4y ago

> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down, instead of them up. Do you actually mean "pushing them up", or is this code for "filter out underperformers"? This goes to the root of the issue. What is the whole point of a school? Is it to help students learn and improve? Or is it to serve as a series of challenges to eliminate and filter out people based on arbitrary people? If the goal is to lift up people, you need to pick them up from down where they are at.

hintymad 4y ago

Isn't it the poor but talent kids who got hurt? Family with means will simply send their kids to private tutors or good after schools. What's really mind boggling is that the constituents in the SF school district were okay with these garbage administrators.

the_third_wave 4y ago

> It's absolutely mind-boggling that the administrators try to establish "equity" by pushing all students down That is simply socialism 101 as portrayed in Rush' "The Trees": There is unrest in the forest There is trouble with the trees For the maples want more sunlight And the oaks ignore their pleas The trouble with the maples And they're quite convinced they're right They say the oaks are just too lofty And they grab up all the light But the oaks can't help their feelings If they like the way they're made And they wonder why the maples Can't be happy in their shade? There is trouble in the forest And the creatures all have fled As the maples scream, "oppression" And the oaks just shake their heads So the maples formed a union And demanded equal rights "The oaks are just too greedy We will make them give us light" Now there's no more oak oppression For they passed a noble law And the trees are all kept equal By hatchet Axe And saw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC88xBPkkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC88xBPkkc

version_five 4y ago

Equity is literally about pushing everybody down to the lowest level. Are there any examples where that has not been the outcome? Some advocate it out of ignorance, some out of malice. The result is the same, everybody is worse off.

stcroixx 4y ago

Administrators are just doing what people in SF vote for - this idea and implementation of equity has been rolled into the set of positions one adopts as a progressive in CA, which is the only position to take unless you want to be socially ostracized. The ones who don't move away absolutely know they're sacrificing their kids. It's more popular though among this set to just skip having kids in the first place. Or to pay for private school, skip the consequences of this terrible idea, and let the people who can't afford that deal with them. I had my first of 4 kids at St. Lukes in the mission, but we moved out of the city before he was even a year old because of the schools.

zsssss65784 4y ago

That isn't even an elite school thing. That's an any school in the top 100 engineering/math/physics/CompSci thing. Mine was ~50ish and the vast majority of people in the program had at least one semesters worth of AP Calculus credits. Linear algebra was a first or second semester course if you followed the default recommended degree plan. That was only about 10 years ago, and other schools I considered all had similar looking degree plans. I'm inclined to think the concern (that we will run out of supply of people that can do math or something) is overblown. There are plenty of underemployed engineering and science students that took more advanced mathematics classes than the CS kids.