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'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco

• jschveibinz 3y ago
  Argh this grinds my gears. It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!! For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake. The kids need 1-on-1 tutoring help. Cut off the head of the problem—the school administration that continues to support our archaic system-and spend the money you will save on tutoring the kids. Or switch to mastery education. Fix the PROBLEM.
  • Dalewyn 3y ago
    >Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!! As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time. What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today.
    • thethirdone 3y ago
      > As someone who fucking hated and still hates academical math: No, kids do not need math. Not in the sense as taught in schools, anyway. That is a straight waste of precious time. Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? It seems like a strange thing to hate except for trauma from school. Are you referring to K-12 level math only? Math at the college level is very useful. Most of the math I was taught in K-12 was just how to calculate (which is mostly useless in a world with computers) and basic algebra. Basic algebra is useful, but only really as a building block to more powerful math. > What kids need is broader context and guidance for what math is, how it applies to the world around us, how we can use it, and why it's important. Fuck quadratic equations and counting slices of pie, none of that literal bullshit is useful as taught to kids today. I completely agree that math curriculum in the US needs a significant overhaul to be more useful, more interesting and a better base for learning advanced mathmatics. Actually coming up with a detailed curriculum that students can follow is pretty difficult. As someone who found K-12 math really easy and boring, I was very peeved when I found out in college that there is a bunch of fun math that I could have been learning throughout school.
      • starik36 3y ago
        > Math at the college level is very useful Useful to whom? I've been coding for 30 years and the most complicated math ever I used was for calculating distance between two lat/lon points and even that I looked up. Is it useful to an average worker sitting in front of a PC? I do not believe so.
        • stcroixx 3y ago
          25 years doing dev work, also never used anything more than basic arithmetic. I barely passed my college math requirements - still don’t understand what calculus is for, never came up writing CRUD apps.
      • Dalewyn 3y ago
        >Would you mind explaining why you still hate math? I apologize if I didn't make myself clear: I hate academical math. I love math, especially once I realized how truly relevant it is to quite literally everything around me. It was computer programming, long after and outside my academical times, that taught me what math really was about. Suddenly, all those numbers and letters had actual meanings and values to them, I learned I could manipulate them to store and mean literally anything. It was a mindblowing paradigm shift in my way of understanding and thinking everything. All the teachers and textbooks in the world failed to teach me the true value and purpose of math, and I loathe them for wasting my time with their absolute failure.
        • n4r9 3y ago
          I hope that some day you manage to let go of your hatred.
    • samtho 3y ago
      I’m sorry you had a poor experience with math in an academic setting. I agree that this is what kids need, the problem with this particular failing of just nixing Algebra is that we’ve not actually innovated in the way we communicate the ideas and techniques used to solve problems. Perhaps the biggest failing with academic math is that it is geared towards a subset of students who can suspend curiosity in order to memorize equations and learn precisely the place to apply them. These are often the students who dislike word problems because it causes them to actually think about the work they are doing. That is to say, I don’t hold contempt for these students as they are just optimizing their academic experience - there is no room for actual rational thinking with how math is taught. My point here is that everyone loses: those who want to bring rationality and purpose into math are left behind because they cannot keep up due to pesky curiosity and those who can parrot equations and mechanically solve trivial problems are lured into the false sense of deep knowledge their grades would suggest. We need to do better for our students but nobody in a position to enact change actually cares enough to do the legwork in revamping how we teach and communicate mathematics or any other subjects for that matter.
    • akomtu 3y ago
      How otherwise are you going to develop abstract thinking? There's a huge boulder in front of you and you need to hire a truck to move it. But to do that you need to know the weight of the boulder. How do you measure it? Or there is a very tall tree you need to cut down, but if the tree is too tall, it might fall on your house. How do you measure its height?
      • eternityforest 3y ago
        Math is great, but examples like that are pretty unconvincing. The real value is in solving new problems that nobody has encountered before. I'm not good at math, so I have no idea what I'd use it for. I'd probably get a high end tech job working with advanced stuff, and whatever I was doing there would be stuff that made no sense to someone who doesn't already know math. It's exactly the kind of leap of faith that young people seem to be uninterested in. People have figured out by now that they will always have a calculator 99% of the time, and probably won't need math in the remaining 1%, Google can tell you how to do niche stuff that doesn't come up a lot, and lots of the stuff you use math for also requires specialist equipment, so you'll probably just hire someone. Perhaps if we had more of a DIY culture. But even then, I do a lot of DIY work and almost never encounter math, because I've got FreeCAD. And even though I'm vaguely aware of they Pythagorean theorem, I doubt I'd use it to find the height of a tree, I'd draw it as a sketch and use a constraint solver, actually seeing the triangle on the screen would make it a little clearer if there was a mistake, and it's one less calculation to mess up. Or, I'd just use the height feature on the laser measurement tool. I do have friends who use math in real life, but I rarely see them do anything they couldn't do with an understanding of what software can do, rather than an understanding of the actual physics. And yet everyone seems to say they are very happy to have learned it, and most of our big innovations are from people who know it. I think the important part is how do you convey the benefit of math without saying anything people will immediately recognize as kind of an exaggeration. Math isn't directly useful in an average person's life, it gives people the possibility of doing certain things average people don't do, and lets people understand things, that are not always obvious ahead of time why you would want to understand them.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • mindcandy 3y ago
      Totally agree. AFAICT, our math curriculum has been set for a hundred years by mathematicians. People who by some quirk of their upbringing were extremely strongly motivated to dig deep into mathematics. Naturally, the mathematicians laid out for everyone the short path to deep competence in advanced math as fast as possible. Only seems obvious to them. This path ignores the obvious fact that 99.5% of students are not intrinsically motivated to persevere through the decade-long marathon to reach PHD level math. No one in the kids’ lives ever made it clear why this is a goal worth investing in. Even their teachers don’t know. Not well enough to explain it. It’s not even assumed you grok the fun puzzle game that is math. Instead, math is presented as an unending series of seemingly arbitrary rules that all strictly build on each other, eventually leading to an end goal of… … … You are simply required to memorize these rules because if you fail you are a failure. And, maybe if you are unlucky you will utilize something more advanced than basic arithmetic twice a year for the rest of your life. The reality is that math is tremendously interesting and useful and fun. But, all the life was sucked out of it from the beginning of public education. Before the common kids had a chance to even be presented with the idea that math can be fun. We gotta turn this around. Present math as the game that is it. Not a “gamification” to artificially push you into doing things you don’t want to do. But, something that’s actually fun to do in itself.
      • opportune 3y ago
        I don’t agree with this at all. I studied math way past high school and what you learn up until the last 2 years of a standard undergrad curriculum does not even approach what mathematicians do or care about. It’s not even putting you on the PhD track at all, to the contrary, the weird detour into calculus/statistics/non-theoretical linear algebra from an applied perspective sets you back a solid 2 years if you’re following a standard curriculum. The current math curriculum is about giving people a strong base for using math outside mathematics itself, in case they want to study physics or some other science, or engineering. Mathematicians do not generally give a shit about the computational aspect (it’s not what math is about, generally speaking) which you spend most of your time doing in math curricula until you’re at the point where further studying math suggests you are interested in math itself. The vast majority of people who struggle in math IME have at least one of two problems: one is they struggle with it and put up some mental barrier of being “bad at math”, the other is they fell behind at some point and the curriculum kept chugging along with no chance for the student to catch up (which just makes the subsequent material fail to stick and confusing). This has nothing to do with some nefarious mathematicians’ agenda and everything to do with the school system not allowing students to progress at different rates based on proficiency.
    • hardware2win 3y ago
      Practicing Math means practicing logic This is the most powerful tool for making your life easier
      • Dalewyn 3y ago
        I was only ever taught to rote memorize equations and ways to manipulate numbers, I was never taught the hows and whys. Therefore, there was nothing logical about academical math and it didn't help me think logically about anything.
        • hardware2win 3y ago
          You were never tasked with solving e.g equations? E.g x + 4 = 13 - 2x? Or using derivatives to find optimal material amount needed? Which would be tricky to memorize 100% Like how could you even manage thru a lot of years and exams purely on memory? You gotta understand somewhat this stuff. Just because you dont know how to reinvent derivatives and integrals then it doesnt mean that there is no logic involved
          • Dalewyn 3y ago
            >You were never tasked with solving e.g equations? E.g x + 4 = 13 - 2x? Sure I was, but what does "x + 4 = 13 - 2x" actually mean? That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. WTF is the point of it all? The answer is there is no point, other than scoring adequately on tests so teachers can collect their paychecks and schools their funding. >You gotta understand somewhat this stuff. I was never taught to understand, I was only ever taught to do. That is meaningless and, as far as I've experienced, still irrelevant in my life to this very day.
            • hardware2win 3y ago
              >WTF is the point of it all? Practice of math and logic. >That sheer lack of context is what I hate about academical math. Isnt this beautiful? Math doesnt need context, especially cultural context. We dont need examples with apples, cars or money to do the math. Sure, they are helpful for kids, but at some point they are so used to abstract concepts that theres no need for that. So not only logic is being practiced, but also abstract thinking. >still irrelevant in my life to this very day. We dont do math just to apply some random ass formulas. As ive said it improves logical and abstract thinking. Both of them can make significant impact on someones life. It can be seen everywhere in real life, especially during arguments.
  • macspoofing 3y ago
    What’s the fix? It’s not the system. If you have parents that are involved in education and engage in the kind of child-rearing, that is conducive to education - it doesn’t matter the kind of system you’re operating under (keep in mind, our bar for success is very low - we want kids that graduate high-school to be functionally literate with basic arithmetic and basic general knowledge). Put another way, if a child graduates and they are functionally illiterate, I don’t care how bad California’s public education is, the fault lays with the parents for letting their child be illiterate.
    • pigsty 3y ago
      My parents were straight D/F students and never helped me with classes at all. I would’ve appreciated help that would’ve let me go farther, but that’s at a point well past algebra. Parents are part of the problem, but it seems like we’re just desperately trying to pin the responsibility on one specific person in the child’s life and put it out of their personal responsibility. That’s not the case. Some kids get everything they need to succeed provided for them and have plenty of assistance and choose to fail. Some have nothing but barriers put all around them and they still bust their ass to succeed.
      • macspoofing 3y ago
        Today we are graduating an unacceptably large numbers of functional illiterate kids from high school. If a kid graduates high school and they are functionally illiterate, that illustrates neglect by parents over many years. It has nothing to do with the academic background of said parents or whether they themselves can read or write. It has nothing to do with the state of public education, or the quality of teachers - the public system is good enough to teach literacy over 15 years of schooling. The quality of the public system may be important for the last mile of education (where you’re trying to provide kids a richer educational experience), but our bar for success is much much lower. Put another way, you cannot convince me that the parents are not at fault when a kid can’t read or write after 15 years of education (after having sampled many many teachers and teaching styles, including summer school and remedial education, during that time).
  • jerojero 3y ago
    I mostly agree with you, except on one aspect. We cannot rely on support from parents, the system we design needs to be thought of with parents out of the equation because in the case of the most vulnerable of kids they will not have parents that can help them. Special tutoring needs to be a part of the system, outsourcing the work will make things cheaper but it will complicate things for those struggling. Kids in need should be our priority, because the ones that have supportive parents are really going to receive that support regardless. I agree on everything else though. Content shouldn't be watered down, school needs to be a safe haven for kids in need. We should be having our most capable people thinking on how to improve the educational system so that we can truly bring everyone forward as we progress.
    • ethbr0 3y ago
      Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year. In addition to being a continually renewing supply of teachers, it provides an income stream for those who might really need it and financially incentivizes academic excellence.
      • em-bee 3y ago
        Or use school funding to pay students who volunteer to tutor the previous year. why pay students to tutor? make tutoring younger kids part of the curriculum. teaching a skill is the best way to practice and internalize the skill for yourself. montessori is already doing this very effectively.
    • suchire 3y ago
      Honestly, it doesn’t really work without the parents. The issue is that the biggest problems with schooling discrepancies are poverty. Kids can’t eat, need to take care of siblings or their own kids or go work two jobs, have no homes, don’t get medical care, have no internet, etc. There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.
      • 3y ago
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" under ideal conditions and circumstances? What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances? What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances? What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"? Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be? The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years. And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.
    • staunton 3y ago
      You seem to be saying that schools are bad. Do you really think modern society can function without schools? Or that countries that don't have schools shouldn't build any?
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        You ask two questions that are at odds with each other. If schools were bad, but modern society can't function without them, which would you pick? If you say it can't function without them, then are they good regardless because you want it to continue to function? Like, no matter how bad they are? Or do you draw some line or another? "It's ok if they make kids dumb and compulsive consumers, but they can't go torturing them!" Asking questions like this seems to be more about dogma and status quo than anything else.
  • mdorazio 3y ago
    > They need the math!!! Serious question: for what? Basic algebra, yes. And basic geometry is handy in many jobs as well. But beyond that?
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      Failing to understand compound interest leads to a lifetime of poor financial management.
      • voidfunc 3y ago
        Compound interest can be taught in about 5 minutes.
        • HKH2 3y ago
          If only we had ideal conditions...
    • froh 3y ago
      where do we draw the line what's "basic"?
      • HideousKojima 3y ago
        Being able to take an arbitrary word problem and turn it into an algebraic equation (or series of equations) and be able to solve it. That a huge percentage of kids graduate high school being unable to do that means several people (mostly parents but likely the school system too) failed them.
        • froh 3y ago
          that hat is quite a bit higher than the basic algebra to just solve given equations. that's why I was asking. I think there are vastly different views on what's "basic". wrt who has failed on them iirc countries like Finland figured how to largely lift the dependency from home, family, parents.
  • bigbacaloa 3y ago
    Kids don't need "support at home from parents". Very few parents are competent to teach kids math properly (even those who think they are). Kids do better learning from someone else, better still if the someone else is a professional. Tutoring rarely helps anyone learn as it almost always consists in heavily guided spoon-feeding. Also there are very few good tutors as those who are adequately trained in math to tutor it have much better employment alternatives (including teaching). In 25 years teaching math in universities I've never seen a student who used a tutor and learned math at the same time. I don't teach my kids math and I don't help them with their homework. What kids need is teachers who know math.
    • WillAdams 3y ago
      >What kids need is teachers who know math. I would add, "and how to teach it." to that. My final "Advanced Math" course in high school was a young teacher just out of college who apparently knew math, but failed completely at teaching anything meaningful to anyone in the class --- this may have been the fault of the textbook being used, but the fact that the school board chose to replace Calculus with this class because they couldn't find a teacher competent to teach it, speaks volumes to my mind.
    • horns4lyfe 3y ago
      If the problem was kids showing up, trying hard, and not getting it then sure. But the problem is kids not showing up and putting no effort in when they do, and that’s on parents.
  • winwhiz 3y ago
    I bet farmers use waaay more algebra than I do as a fullstack web programmer. I love it I just don't use it. On the other hand farmers are thinking about slopes all day, every day: irrigation rates; fuel, fertilizer, seed rates; growth rates. They don't get paid once or twice a month like I do so their finance maths are much more sophisticated than mine. I know, I know what about video game programmers? Okay, you got me there.
• BigCryo 3y ago
  PAging Harrison bergeron, paging Harrison bergeron
  • xwdv 3y ago
    Used to think that story was a fiction, that clearly anyone would realize didn’t make sense and could draw the right conclusions. Unfortunately in our modern era it seems some people took its lessons as a playbook. It’s hard to push for equality across the board when some people are clearly just better at certain things. Let people achieve what they can without limit.
    • userbinator 3y ago
      I used to think the same about 1984.
  • spaceprison 3y ago
    I had the exact same thought by the end of the article.
  • wrp 3y ago
    The movie did an excellent job of fleshing out the story while remaining true to the tone and content of the original. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113264/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113264/) It should be part of the core curriculum. I wonder how the contemporary education establishment would react to it.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Has any child ever gotten better at something they don't have to do? It seems the practical effect will be to simply place these children farther behind and never catching up. SFUSD does not appear to be run by intelligent people, however. I don't say that as some Internet slur. I mean that as a descriptive term. Should you disagree, it is worth watching this 2 min video of a meeting from one of their committees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdekUXyAAzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdekUXyAAzI
  • bavila 3y ago
    "... violations of the heebeas [sic] corpus -- whatever..." Yikes.
  • Dalewyn 3y ago
    >Has any child ever gotten better at something they don't have to do? Nope, and it's compounded by the fact the vast majority of academical math is irrelevant to life unless and until you make your way into a path of life that requires some of it. Math education is fundamentally flawed because it attempts to teach irrelevant factoids in a manner that explicitly avoids teaching the hows and whys. No wonder most people end up hating the subject.
    • thaumasiotes 3y ago
      >> Has any child ever gotten better at something they don't have to do? > Nope It happens all the time. You think people are born being great at Mario Kart?
      • Dalewyn 3y ago
        Are you implying playing Mario Kart isn't a must-do for a child? I would argue that as far as they are concerned, it is: It's fun. Must-dos fall under those dictated by our surroundings (eg: life, work, etc.) and those dictated by ourselves (eg: it's fun, it's for a greater purpose, etc.). Math education falls under neither.
        • 3y ago
• powera 3y ago
  I commented on this 18 months ago: https://www.newslettr.com/p/when-do-they-learn-algebra https://www.newslettr.com/p/when-do-they-learn-algebra As time passes, it looks more and more like policy in SFUSD is being set by various individuals whom, for their own reasons, think that "math education" is bad and that it must be avoided for "reasons", probably that they say involving "promoting equity".
  • kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    But they're still all in on STEM which cannot be pursued at all without some facility in math. Then when those who are lacking the necessary education to do the work drop out of their STEM freshman college program it's social inequity to blame for these failures rather than the "math class is tough" Barbie mentality.
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  When it comes to politics, San Francisco is the world capital of learned helplessness. London Breed et al. are the problem solving equivalent of giving up.
  • luuuzeta 3y ago
    And racism of low expectations.
    • 29athrowaway 3y ago
      They are like the annoying lady in Stand and Deliver that suggested that math should not be taught to not hurt the self esteem of students.
  • doryWalnut 3y ago
    [dead]
• suckmydang 3y ago
  [dead]
• richwater 3y ago
  Anyone with resources will avoid the public school system. Progressive nuts embracing equality over everything else have taken over.
  • Duwensatzaj 3y ago
    It’s not equality anymore, it’s equity.
• tiedieconderoga 3y ago
  It sounds like they tried to set up a large one-size-fits-all program. This might be a good time to bring up Lockhart's Lament, which imagines what artistic education would look like if we treated it like math. https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament Nobody with decision-making power in a school district likes the answer which this paper proposes: very small class sizes.
  • boringuser2 3y ago
    That answer has also been tried and doesn't work. Let me ask this: what problem are you trying to solve?
    • PuppyTailWags 3y ago
      Inquiry: small class sizes doesn't work? Could you show me sources/papers/studies/etc? It's is unintuitive, so I'd like to be educated on the factors at play here.
      • jbellis 3y ago
        I could easily believe the constraint being the tiny number of k-12 teachers who themselves understand math well enough to teach it like this, no matter how small you'd like to make classes.
        • alex_sf 3y ago
          That seems likely. Small groups allow for lots of questions and deeper explanations, which plenty of teachers can't provide.
      • zone411 3y ago
        https://hechingerreport.org/despite-popularity-with-parents-and-teachers-review-of-research-finds-small-benefits-to-small-classes/ https://hechingerreport.org/despite-popularity-with-parents-...
    • 3y ago
• foolfoolz 3y ago
  math is just the beginning of these backwards policies. public schools in california have been removing advanced classes in the name of “equity” for years. the racial enrollment in those classes did not reflect the racial enrollment of the school. the result? parents moving kids to private school. at the school nearest me they kindergarten enrollment is dropping. they are likely going to only have a a single class in a couple years california is making it very clear the public school system is not going to help your children succeed beyond a base level. it seems to have the completely opposite goals of when i was in public school in california
  • theGnuMe 3y ago
    My contrarian take is that algebra and calculus are pre requisites for for ap calc which is primarily used for elite college admission decisions.
    • social_quotient 3y ago
      Is the word Elite needed?
      • airtonix 3y ago
        [dead]
      • theGnuMe 3y ago
        It's really about SAT test prep which is primarily used for Elite admissions decisions when all else is equal.
    • imgabe 3y ago
      Algebra is basic math that every adult should know in and of itself, not something that is only needed to take AP calculus.
      • theGnuMe 3y ago
        Nobody said otherwise. It's still there in high school fwiw: https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/curriculum/high-school/mathematics/algebra-1 https://www.sfusd.edu/learning/curriculum/high-school/mathem... This is about dropping algebra I in 8th grade which is where you need to take it in order to prep for AP exams and the SAT basically. Algebra I (8th), trig/Geometry 9th, Algebra II 10th, pre-calc/ calculus 11th, AP calc 12th. Anyway, these are all basically memorization and it is more important to teach mathematical reasoning and understanding skills vs pattern matching. I mean ChatGPT LLMs score a 5 on AP calc now for god sakes. However, it scores a 2 on ap English language comprehension and literature. Oh the irony. https://www.thestar.com/business/technology/2023/03/14/chatgpts-getting-an-upgrade-but-it-still-cant-pass-ap-english-class.html https://www.thestar.com/business/technology/2023/03/14/chatg...
• NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  Turns out math isn’t actually white supremacy. To the surprise of absolutely no one.
  • boringuser2 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • Mike_12345 3y ago
    Math is Arabic and Islamic supremacy. "The word algebra comes from the Arabic: الجبر, romanized: al-jabr, lit. 'reunion of broken parts,[1] bonesetting[2]' from the title of the early 9th century book ʿIlm al-jabr wa l-muqābala "The Science of Restoring and Balancing" by the Persian mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi."
    • bobsmooth 3y ago
      Pretty sure they're talking about articles like this https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematics-confronts-its-white-patriarchal-past/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...
      • Mike_12345 3y ago
        I am quite aware of that. That's what I'm making fun of.
    • tick_tock_tick 3y ago
      I mean the word we use for it just happens to be Arabic. If anything it's more Indian and Hindu we, the west that is, just happen to get most of our exposure to it via the people who lived between us and them.
• boringuser2 3y ago
  > That didn't happen, concludes a study by a team of Stanford professors. "Large ethnoracial gaps in advanced math course-taking . . . did not change." Is there anything that will get these people to realize that maybe they are working with a hypothesis that is fundamentally flawed? It doesn't take a large amount of thinking to imagine what might have more predictive power in explaining what's going on here.
  • g9yuayon 3y ago
    They answer to voters? If so, nothing will unless the voters think otherwise.
    • mlrtime 3y ago
      The voters got exactly what they asked for. Why do you think this is only happening in NYC, SF and Seattle?
  • SuzanSarong 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • intalentive 3y ago
    It’s like getting Soviet biologists to reconsider Lysenkoism. A good way to end your career.
• Gabriel54 3y ago
  This is a logical and natural conclusion of what happens when we give up on the idea of meritocracy.
• g9yuayon 3y ago
  > "Families with resources turn to fee-required online algebra 1 courses in eighth grade, outside the public school system, or enroll their kids in private schools," Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many private schools. If I have the means, why would I not send my kids to such schools and therefore fuck up the funding of the public schools? Not that I want to, but it furiates me that the school administrators really hurt the kids who need public education the most in the name of equity. It also saddens me that the constituents are okay with such administrators.
  • TimTheTinker 3y ago
    > in the name of equity That's the problem. We're dealing with the critical theory definition of equity, which they define as the intentional redistribution of opportunity and resources along identity group lines to correct for present and historical injustices, as well as opportunities those groups have already had. Critical theory and social justice adopts a distorted view of reality. Leave it to a school in San Francisco to show everyone what happens in real life when administrators adopt a policy based on that distorted view of reality -- inequality is only increased. In fact, I'd classify critical theory alongside Marxism for adopting a false belief that some top-down forced redistribution of resources/wealth/opportunity/means of production/etc. is the way to true justice. That kind of belief backfires spectacularly when policy makers adopt it IRL.
    • vnchr 3y ago
      Inequality is increased because those without resources aren’t receiving any new benefits and those with resources use those resources to compensate for the failure of the system to provide an education optimal path. It’s worse outcomes for both, except some people can shield themselves from the fallout. What new kind of self-inflicted damage will be required to realize the detrimental failure of this world view?
      • 3y ago
• dilippkumar 3y ago
  Meanwhile, I experienced one of the most unique job interviews at an autonomous driving company just this last week. It was 45 mins of math. Questions ranging from simple algebra to probability theory to physics. And I was applying for an embedded systems position. Boy was I glad that I was good at that kind of math.
  • Invictus0 3y ago
    What is that supposed to prove? Any type of engineer or mathematician could pass that interview and still not know anything about coding.
    • sp332 3y ago
      Yes, but it’s still pretty common. When I was interviewing for my first job, they were much more impressed with a couple of math puzzles I solved than my actual programming ability.
    • function_seven 3y ago
      I imagine the idea is that coding is easy to teach on the job, but the fundamental logic and analytical skills aren’t.
      • chii 3y ago
        Although correlated, high math skills aren't a great proxy to the desired analytical skills you'd want. It is easily gamed with rote memorization if this test was discovered by an applicant pre-interview, as they would just prep for it (in which case, it ceases to be a good metric). Doing a 45min test on maths seems overkill to me.
      • Invictus0 3y ago
        No, coding is not easy to teach on the job, especially if you have no knowledge of algorithms/data structures.
• praxulus 3y ago
  I live in Seattle, not San Francisco, but we have some similar issues with our schools. I'd really prefer to send my son to our local public schools, but if they aren't challenging him appropriately then my wife and I obviously aren't going to just give up on his education. We'll either pay for extracurricular enrichment like the person in this article, move to a wealthy suburb, or send him to a private school instead. That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
  • nordsieck 3y ago
    > I live in Seattle Luckily, everyone in the area gets access to Running Start[1]. Doesn't address the earlier years of schooling, though. If your children are in HS, I'd really recommend sitting downing with a HS councilor to make sure that your kids take the classes that are required by the district for HS, but aren't required for a college degree (I'm thinking of speech here, but there may be others) in the first 2 years of HS. That way they get the most benefit out of their Junior and Senior years, if they decide to go that route. I'm honestly not sure how the GPA thing works - I know AP classes can sometimes let kids increase their GPA above 4.0 for admissions purposes. But as someone who did both Running Start and AP classes, IMO, the actual college credit was way more valuable. But I also went to school in state, so those credits transferred nicely. May be a totally different story if you're shooting for Ivys. --- 1. https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/support-programs/dual-credit-programs/course-based-dual-credit https://www.k12.wa.us/student-success/support-programs/dual-...
    • icelancer 3y ago
      I did this in HS decades ago and had to fight guidance counselors to get it done. Fortunately, it's much easier now. I cannot recommend this program highly enough.
    • bradlys 3y ago
      They don’t generally transfer for Ivys. Running start is something you do if you have no intention of going to prestigious private universities as it’s completely pointless (credits don’t usually transfer) and they don’t have a great process for evaluating such students into their programs. You’d only do it if you plan to go to a school in your state since transferring credits out of state isn’t always easy going.
• Avicebron 3y ago
  I'll be the first to admit that I'm chronically stupid, but can someone help parse the linked SFUSD's decision for me: https://www.sfusdmath.org/richard-carranzas-remarks-to-board.html https://www.sfusdmath.org/richard-carranzas-remarks-to-board... (it's linked in the article as the decision to push math back a year). But I'm having trouble understanding why not exposing students to a subject earlier would be better for their development with that subject. Are they supposed to absorb the knowledge for that between 8th-9th grade somehow without knowing what it is?
  • nverno 3y ago
    They were saying they split the old 1-year course across the two new 8/9th grade courses, but added in a bunch of extra stuff to the each of the replacement courses- useful modern stuff like data analysis and statistical modeling. They were making the point of focusing on deeper understanding through real world applications instead of rote memorization, which sounds good in theory, but takes up the time that was previously spent on the second half their Algebra class. The part that boggles my mind is that these kids wont even see polynomials until high school! I'm pretty sure we were learning that stuff in 5th grade.
    • Avicebron 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure I was too...and I did not go to an elite middle/high school by any stretch of the imagination. Also, maybe I was just lucky in my math teachers as a kid, but I can't for the life of me remember rote memorization in math for almost anything outside of maybe being forced to memorize times tables at some point. I honestly thought memorization had been disproven to be effective eons ago.
      • nverno 3y ago
        Memorization was the wrong word - I think they are referring repetitive processes like solving algebra equations over and over again until it's second nature. Probably an essential component of mastering basic math as a useful tool, at least it was for me - but focused on procedure not broader understanding I guess.
• jeffbee 3y ago
  It's interesting how path-dependency makes these things seem like controversial reforms, while nearby districts have always done it this way. In Berkeley, for example, there isn't any course called "Algebra I" or II. Through 8th grade there is just math, with no differentiation. Then for 9th grade you can test into an advanced track, and people take either Math 1/2/3 or Advanced Math 1/2/3. In senior year any of these people can take AP Statistics or Calculus AB, but only the advanced track can take AP Calculus BC. So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. It gives one the impression that San Francisco's issues are other than with the reform.
  • thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade, it's not getting even halfway decent results. If they're better than the results in San Francisco, all you can learn from that is that Berkeley has extreme problems with student quality, and quality is even lower in San Francisco (or rather, the part of San Francisco that's being measured).
    • gumby 3y ago
      > If Berkeley's system prevents everyone from taking calculus before 12th grade High school in the US ends at 12th grade -- how do they teach physics without calculus?
      • lolinder 3y ago
        There are three different AP Physics tests—1, 2, and C—and only AP Physics C requires calculus. The others presumably give you the formulas and expect you to memorize them and use algebra rather than being able to derive them.
      • m-ee 3y ago
        You memorize the equations for position and velocity without learning how you can derive one from the other. In my school we took no calc physics sophomore year then senior had the option to take AP physics which finally introduced calc. My high school offered more than most, I was able to take multi variable calculus which served me well in college.
• IndoorPatio 3y ago
  Wow, that site allows really racist comments. That can't help their messaging.
  • Avicebron 3y ago
    What was racist about the article exactly?
    • function_seven 3y ago
      Parent is referring to the comments on that site, all from “Guest”
    • jasonhansel 3y ago
      It wasn't the article per se, it was the comments section below it.
      • Avicebron 3y ago
        oh yikes, yea didn't even think to read, why wouldn't they be a dumpster fire? They're anonymous comments on an article on the internet, seems about right.
• ransom1538 3y ago
  Remove the ability to compete in math because you are poor and cannot enroll in private school. Don't allow the poor to do algebra? I left SF (and took my poor kids with me). However, the SF policy that was truly evil to the poor was randomized school selection. Tell a poor kid in western addition they need to go to school in pacific heights. Tell the pacific heights kids they need to go to school in western addition. So what happens? The poor kids miss school (a lot) since their parents are working crappy jobs for rich people and can't do bus commutes each day. The pacific heights parents just enroll in private school. So tons of schools in SF just close. Awesome work SF. I am confident if you do the exact opposite in all SF policies you would have a great city.
  • aksss 3y ago
    Voting with one’s feet is about all one can do when a city or state’s policies are locked up.
• sn41 3y ago
  A related question: can anyone provide a link to what the K-12 syllabus of the former Eastern bloc actually was? Certainly USSR and Hungary must have had impressive curricula. I had a Croatian friend who said that his basic skills in algorithms (which were very advanced from my viewpoint) was based on his math schooling in the former Yugoslavia, which he said treated very advanced concepts early on. Is there any link to an English version of these syllabi?
  • theGnuMe 3y ago
    Basically the new new tutoring thing is Russian Math which teaches reasoning and abstraction. https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-math-tutors-education-trend-b08b0eb5 https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-math-tutors-education-t...
• remote_phone 3y ago
  If you were a hardcore racist and systematically wanted to keep Black and Brown kids uneducated, you would throw out all expectations and requirements and let them pass every year until they graduated high school with almost no education. The white kids and the rich kids will find a way to educate themselves, either through tutors or private school but the poor kids with no options would be stuck in this worthless system and graduate high school completely uneducated. This is exactly what’s going on right now in SFUSD, and it’s so blatantly bad I honestly believe they are white supremacists in charge of the curriculum. What we are seeing is true systematic racism. How do they expect these kids to compete intellectually when they have lived an entire lifetime with lowered expectations?
  • PKop 3y ago
    It's absurd that you blame this on "white supremacists". This entire ethos is the egalitarian morality whereby they cannot have differentiated learning or high standards that expose differences in outcomes by racial group. This elimination of curriculum, and testing requirements, particularly as application criteria at elite colleges, is allowing for more under-performing students to gain entry to elite school while doing away with merit based, race blind enrollment. We are seeing systematic anti-racism. You have anti-racists in charge of the curriculum. This is what it looks like. Don't get it twisted.
    • remote_phone 3y ago
      It’s creating a generation of black and brown students that are uneducated and won’t be able to compete against anyone else. It’s the ultimate in racism. Overt racist policies couldn’t be more effective and de-educating these students more than these ”progressive” policies have. Half of Black SF high school students can barely read. https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-can-hardly https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-c... Decades of EXCLUSIVELY PROGRESSIVE policies have lead to this end result. There aren’t any Republican boogeymen you can blame for this damage these policies have created.
      • 3y ago
• sometimeshuman 3y ago
  In 1st grade it was an unspoken understanding that Latin kids are put in the slow class. It's understandable since most of us didn't speak English at home. But my teacher realized that I was advanced for my age so she put me in the back of the class with another classmate who didn't know any English. An hour or two a day we would sit in the back and I would read to her, translate words, and practice spelling. She seemed happy that someone was helping her and I felt great helping a classmate. One day I mentioned this to my parents. They didn't understand/believe it at first. But the next time I mentioned it they understood and instead of feeling proud they were clearly upset. Then a few months later I wrote a poem that impressed the school teachers and at that point they moved me to the "fast" class and I never tutored again until college. Why couldn't I have done both? Would I have learned more if I had been forever in the slow class but tutoring half of that time ? That seems better than where it we are headed -- where everyone is in the metaphorical slow class and the advanced kids likely become numb and disinterested.
• giantg2 3y ago
  Yeah, we can just delay classes because the students weren't properly prepared in prior classes... no reason to fix the preasons the prior classes didn't prepare them.
• suchire 3y ago
  From second-hand knowledge, the Stanford GSE is really bad at understanding equity and minorities, and routinely, minorities in STEP (the teacher training program) get less support and empathy
• rdtsc 3y ago
  > The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam That’s the worst part. It just shows either complete ignorance and incompetence or deception. “Look how failure rates have decreased. We all deserve a bonus!” They knew exactly what they were doing if they went about bragging about it.
  • euroderf 3y ago
    "When failure is outlawed, only outlaws will be failures."
• OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  Fascinating article. Unclear if this stops the Boaler initiative, though. Considering the tussle between her and Jelani Nelson of Berkeley [1], I wonder what actions she'll take against her own colleagues. [1]https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/12/uc-berkeley-stanford-professors-face-controversy-debate-state-math-curriculum https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/12/uc-berkeley-stanford-pro...
  • testfoobar 3y ago
    This is an exceptional article on the effect that Jo Boaler has had on California's math education: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-divider https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-divider It mentions Prof. Nelson's criticism among others.
    • OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
      I've seen this link elsewhere but I get a pay wall.
      • testfoobar 3y ago
        Found this archive link of the article on Reddit: https://archive.md/a2S4q https://archive.md/a2S4q
        • OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
          Thank you. This certainly adds considerable nuance to what I naively took to be a cut-and-dried situation.
• deleted 3y ago
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• AnnikaL 3y ago
  In my view, the only way forward is providing more educational opportunities that are accessible to underserved groups, not reducing the total number of educational opportunities.
• bendbro 3y ago
  In the interest of dogpiling, I'll also never give up my support for standardized testing. My childhood school had 99% pass rates on standardized state tests and we literally never prepped for it. Time wasn't wasted studying directly for the state tests because there was no further score on which to grow. If a school of students is unable to meet the trivial ability required to pass the state tests then they have significantly worse problems than wasting time studying specifically for state tests.
• michael_vo 3y ago
  Why don't policies go through double blind trials or more A/B tests? And attach automatic rollbacks to policies based on metrics. I'm all for trying new solutions but they should be iterated on quickly.
  • jkingsbery 3y ago
    The facetious answer, of course, is that because the people designing these policies learned math in the California public school system. Less facetiously: A/B tests are great at lots of things. But these results really shouldn't surprise anyone. The idea that you will improve things for one group of students by making things worse for another group is really not only silly, it cost real kids a year of potential progress. An A/B test would cost some percentage of kids that year, which is better than hurting the whole group, but A/B testing on something that obviously would hurt their future does not seem fair to those hurt by the proposed changes.
  • alex_sf 3y ago
    Education is not a javascript app. Even ignoring the consent and ethical issues, doing something double-blind in a government ran system impacting statistically significant number of children simply can't be done. You can't maintain the blinding. 'Automatic rollbacks' are, frankly, absurd. How do you 'roll back' a child in 8th grade that failed algebra? Your quick iteration turns into dozens of cohorts to be tracked and managed.
    • michael_vo 3y ago
      I meant rollback of a policy that performed poorly. It is an interesting point you bring up about rolling back a child that I haven't considered. That might be a good policy to have. A question to ask is it better for a kid to score 90% in algebra and it takes 2 more years or is it better that they score 50% and then move on to calculus. That would be a good A/B test to compare their lifetime earnings. My hypothesis is that calculus is a pretty useless skill and basic maths is more important in life. There could be ways of doing A/B tests if the standardized tests are the same between states that have different curriculums.
• ChancyChance 3y ago
  Kids take algebra in 8th grade? When the heck did this start? I didn't take it until first year highschool (using US terms).
  • kolinko 3y ago
    Fun fact - in central/eastern Europe algebra starts in 6th grade (kids aged 11-12yo), and we don't have much problem with that.
  • reducesuffering 3y ago
    At least as of 15 years ago in a middling California public school. 7th grade (age 12/13): Pre-Algebra 8th grade: Algebra 9th grade: Geometry 10th grade: Algebra 2 / Trigonometry 11th grade: Pre-Calculus 12th grade: Calculus 1
  • bushbaba 3y ago
    Did algebra in middle school. Southeast US education system. Pre algebra was taught in my elementary school as an introduction.
  • jkingsbery 3y ago
    In the public school I went to up through 7th grade (in the late 90s), the top 10% to 20% took algebra in 8th grade. In the private high school I went to, most of the 9th grade class had algebra the previous year (whether they went to public school or private for middle school). While by no means universal, it's been pretty common for a while.
• tlear 3y ago
  Because "Racial achievement gap" sounds a lot better and gets more $$ for panels, committees, researchers, administrators, unions and co. Then "Yes we still suck at teaching math please give us more $$"
• thr0waway001 3y ago
  > San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. Ugh, I couldn't imagine being a high achieving student and having to be lumped in with people who don't give a shit about their education.
  • readthenotes1 3y ago
    I can, fortunately not until first semester in a state university. I remember asking one of my teachers for a reference when I was transferring and she replied that if I hadn't been in her class she would have thought herself an utter failure because of how little attention the other students paid. Without doing much work I regularly set the curve. I'm not brilliant, but I did study some.
  • CydeWeys 3y ago
    Hell, I took honors history instead of AP history my junior year (it was the only class I took that was "merely" honors; everything else was STEM magnet/AP level). And that class sucked, and was way too dumbed down, and was full of people who (comparatively) didn't care about their education. God forbid I would've had to take a normal level class at any point; the boredom might've killed me.
  • ams92 3y ago
    It’s all just a race to the bottom in the name of “equality”. Everyone with the means to do so is moving out of SF because of the terrible schools, and the kids suffering the most as a result are from poorer families.
• amluto 3y ago
  The district’s curriculum is partially available to the public: https://www.sfusd.edu/departments/mathematics-department-page/sfusd-math-core-curriculum/accessing-our-core-curriculum/accessing-6-12-core-curriculum-units-through-sfusd-math-portals https://www.sfusd.edu/departments/mathematics-department-pag... https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd-math-core-course-sequence-grades-6-12 https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd-math-core-course-sequence-... And the district position statement: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uije_05H3BtVyp55oQZ7NCa2k58SejeD/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uije_05H3BtVyp55oQZ7NCa2k58... It has a “guiding principle”: > Students’ academic success in mathematics must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs. That’s amazing! While it may be laudable to hope that a math education program could be so strong that socioeconomic status and race make no difference, the rest of this is absurd. There are people with special needs who are at a disadvantage in math. The only way that their special needs would not predict the distribution of their academic success would be to have an implausibly amazing special needs education program, to redefine success, or to hold everyone else back.
  • chii 3y ago
    > It has a “guiding principle” and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The idea that you can achieve cosmic justice should be abolished. There's no such thing.
    • nemothekid 3y ago
      >The idea that you can achieve cosmic justice should be abolished. There's no such thing. I think abandoning cosmic justice is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is educational outcomes are tied to race and socioeconomic status and that problem cannot be solved by the school district (unless you could institute a kind of boarding school). That said, these administrators have arrived at a solution ("equitable" education) and are now gaming the metrics to achieve it at the cost of everything else. Worse still they race to pat themselves on the back on having "solved racism". I think it has been shown over and over again that good educational outcomes start with parents (or more broadly community outside of school) and one group has had that community dismantled over and over again over several generations. In short, while I think it's a noble goal, it cannot be achieved by the school system and SF should have a more pragmatic approach even if the performance by race makes you uncomfortable.
• readthenotes1 3y ago
  Not surprised that not teaching doesn't help. In contrast, a relative got into the special ed group for smart kids. During orientation, the moderator said that it is just as silly to put kids in the top 2% in a classroom with everyone else as it is to keep the kids who can't tie their shoes on their own in that same classroom.
• dehrmann 3y ago
  I have no insight into SF school politics beyond things like this and Lowell High School. Who's voting for the school board members that are driving this?
  • bushbaba 3y ago
    Mostly childless adults. Sf has more dogs than children.
    • uptownfunk 3y ago
      Bravo, I’m glad more people are making this observation
    • diebeforei485 3y ago
      It is a bit strange. Having kids enrolled in SFUSD schools should be a prerequisite for being able to vote (or run) for school board elections IMO.
    • areyousure 3y ago
      In case anyone is curious, the United States as a whole has more dogs than children.
• eastdakota 3y ago
  The solution, of course, is to ban private tutoring. Just like they did here: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008838 https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008838
  • noisy_boy 3y ago
    All that'll do is break-up the organized tuition system (which may be a good thing and probably has the biggest impact in organized tuition-crazy places like China) and encourage small-scale/individual setups (also may be a good thing but depends). How will you ban individuals across the globe offering lessons over Zoom? That is what has been the net result of the ban as per the article - people are resorting to "underground" means. Plus a ban only extends to within a country so people in other countries will go right ahead with their tuition. Competition is global and such bans, beyond dismantling the tuition "business" and putting up hurdles in front of parent's craze for the rat-race, don't do much. Nobody is talking about the root cause, which is the fear of unemployment due to scarcity of opportunities. All the while, the very well-off will continue to manage perfectly with plenty of workarounds available to them, as usual. All these bans would do to create another class of have's and have not's.
  • tpmx 3y ago
    The eastern city of Hangzhou, meanwhile, is offering a 50,000-yuan reward to anyone who provides tips about illegal tutoring activities.
• WillAdams 3y ago
  The best school I ever attended was one which strongly divided classes between social and academic. Social classes (homeroom, gym, social studies, home ec., shop class) were attended at one's grade level, Academic classes (English, Reading, Math, science) were attended at one's academic level, though there was a 4 year cap on advancement until 8th grade, at which point students could test to determine what classes they were eligible for, and begin taking college classes (the school was affiliated with a local college and many teachers were accredited as faculty members there --- for classes where there wasn't a teacher, arrangements were made to either bring one in from the college, or to arrange for the student to attend classes. Apparently the Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled.
  • giantg2 3y ago
    "decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled." What the actual fuck.
    • alex_sf 3y ago
      That's what achieving equity means.
      • giantg2 3y ago
        Which is stupid because you can't actually achieve equity here. Stick kids with an IQ 120+ in the same room as the others and they will teach themselves out of curiosity (in some subjects at least), or retain more than the other kids. If we're using the classic fence example where each person gets a box just tall enough to see over the fence, then what were trying to do here is dig a fuckng hole for the taller (smarter) kids to stand in.
• _8j50 3y ago
  It seems the government and schools keep trying to parent kids for some reason. Alright, you want kids to have racially equal-ish academic progress? Make it the parents' problem. I don't mean that parents should tutor their kids but rather pressure them and expect them to be #1. Unless your kid is mentally challenged then it is the parents' expectation and lack of discipline and parenting skills that is the problem. Even facing racist teachers and kids a child can come out on top and prove them wrong. It is not a school teachers's job to discipline a child, morivate them or teach them perseverance. It is also not their job to reward and celebrate a child's achievements. How then can you make parents do a good job at parenting when it comes to academics? Most people care about money so reward parents of academically performing kids with tax credits. This way you won't raise taxes or add fees but especially for poor parents having an extra grand or two on their tax refund is huge motivator. And if it really is the kids fault then they get the same amount of tax burden as usual. And what if they get abusive? Well they'll get abusive anyways if they are so terrible anyways.and you can say that abour teachers and standardized tests as well.
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  There are quite a lot of Indians with dedicated teaching setup teaching from their homes -- to American kids -- mostly Math and Science. The good ones are in hot demand and are difficult to get and/or are very costly (against the average Indian tuition fees). My wife set up a tutor from our hometown (a north-eastern corner of India) and I did a Zoom setup complete with a separate camera mount that streams my kid's table (where she writes) (we are in Bangalore). The teacher on the other end is earning much better than the local counterpart for an hour a day, five days a week. And we have a good teacher to work with. In fact, a few other teachers have approached us by now. The recent Pandemic has taught everyone that it is indeed possible to learn from anywhere in the world and stay anywhere (almost). A few families had had their kids enrolled in schools (USA, UK, Australia) which were (I think) meant and started for home-schooled kids, and those that do not want to be in physical classes, etc. but accelerated for everyone during the Pandemic. So, an Indian kid might just be sitting at her home learning from teachers across the globe speaking native languages - English, French, and what not.
• Hellokitty121 3y ago
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• Hellokitty121 3y ago
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• throwawaylinux 3y ago
  And "the experts" wonder why they have a trust problem. https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/equity-in-theory-vs-equity-in-reality-everyone-got-their-legs-cut-off.jpg https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/equity-in-th...
• foogazi 3y ago
  > Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. I don’t get this idea that everyone should finish at the same time ? why not let kids test into algebra in 8th grade and take pre-algebra when they are ready ?
  • hn92726819 3y ago
    As I understand, the argument goes like this: kids are required by law to go to school until 12th grade. If you let some kids test out of math classes and take higher level classes, then by the end of the required schooling (12th grade), those students will be smarter and look better to colleges. Smarter and college educated people tend to make more and therefore there's an advantage of kids who test out. Meanwhile, kids who don't test out look worse at the end of 12th grade. In theory, yes, we should let kids finish at the same time. But required school is over at the 12th grade mark, which is also around the time colleges are looking at you. Most kids won't do non-required schooling to get to the same level as the other kids.
• deleted 3y ago
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• uptownfunk 3y ago
  Growing up in San Diego the accelerated cohort did algebra in grade 7. Some of us who were passionate took math over the summer and got even further ahead. It’s a little surprising to see in this day and age when things should move faster that algebra is delayed to grade 9.
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    Same for me, growing up in Sacramento (and going to a public magnet school). I was shocked to learn that what is described on Silicon Valley school tours as "super-duper advanced math" is literally what we had 35 years ago in Sactown.
• MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  The article mentions a study which is showing that the 'Algebra for none' approach has failed - despite that official want to adopt this policy to all of California. Does that mean that they ignore the feedback of the study, because of ... ideology?
• steve76 3y ago
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• jdkee 3y ago
  Obligatory Harrison Bergeron short story. See https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
• joshthecynic 3y ago
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• gnicholas 3y ago
  > Families face a "nightmare of workarounds" to get their high-achieving children on track for advanced math, write Rex Ridgeway and David Margulies in a San Francisco Examiner commentary. Families in Palo Alto recently won a lawsuit against PAUSD, [1] which was denying students credit for courses taken at other institutions (mainly community colleges, IIRC). In Menlo Park, we deal with similar issues; I recently wondered to myself how much I could have taught my kids in all the hours that I have spent talking to the school/district about allowing students to receive advanced learning. Other parents with less time and more money opt for private schools. Those with less time and no more money simply resign themselves to the situation. It is shocking how hostile schools are to what used to be common sense: letting (or, gasp, even encouraging) all students to learn. 1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/03/judge-rules-high-school-math-policy-violates-state-law https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/03/judge-rules-h...
• __lbracket__ 3y ago
  Why must "college level" be uniform in all subjects for all students? Vast majority of math (algebra, calculus etc) are of little use in most careers (even quantitative ones). So why must the society strive for equal outcome in a subject that is of questionable use? Why not prepare kids instead for something thats actually useful for a job?
  • Glawen 3y ago
    Like a coding bootcamp?
    • __lbracket__ 3y ago
      I don't know enough to suggest what form it should take. But taking a broader view of 'job', I'd say expose them to possible career paths. Then, make clear the mapping between the broad job areas and the needed skills. This may at least provide motivation and context for the regular subjects. The down side is that folks don't know what they like until college and often much after that. So I also feel some reservation about this approach. All in all, my feeble understanding of this subject does not really allow me to take an informed position.
• userbinator 3y ago
  Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam. That'll just create students who think they're great... until they experience the real world.
• KingMachiavelli 3y ago
  I think these one size fits all policies almost never work as I think many here will agree. But I also think the public school system has many one size fits all policies that no one questions. Many people advocate for smaller class sizes so teachers can spend more time with each student, but this is very expensive so if tends to come with compromises. I did very well in HS including advanced math but class size had nothing to do with it. I did well because I ignored the instructor and just did homework and studied in every class; often to the annoyance of the instructor. In college this effect was even worse since class size is a key metric for US News college rankings work. Small class sizes mean college costs more. If college costs even $10 more per class-hour then you loose about an hour of time to study (per hour of class/instruction!) if you're working to afford college. But weed-out classes are often taught via large lectures while easier electives tend to be smaller class sizes so it'd be difficult to observe this in metrics. If you A/B tested large very small class sizes would you see an improvement? Probably, but you would never see the effects for an individual student. I keep wondering why offering different size classes isn't the solution? I think a lot of students would prefer the hands off approach of large classes while some really need smaller class sizes.
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• cleandreams 3y ago
  One problem in San Francisco is that the private schools are truly expensive. One good high school, Urban, has a tuition of 55K year. That means it is hard to leave the public system even when it has these awful flaws. San Francisco has never really gone whole hog in trying innovative programs with underachieving programs for minority youth. This trick of trying to drag down high performers to disguise the other failures is typical of the district.
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    Easy to leave sf tho (in fact, easier than ever). For some reason people there prefer to pay and suffer
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• winrid 3y ago
  Algebra in 9th grade??? I'm pretty sure we were doing basics of algebra in 6th, at most 7th grade in bumfuck nowhere western PA (graduated 2012).
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  What's the problem? I remember at the beginning of each school year they gave us math textbooks for the year. I took me a week to read it all and do all the exercises. Today there is internet, Wikipedia, youtube, everything is so much easier.
  • Skeime 3y ago
    Yeah, that’s right, down with teachers! /s
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    My kid is currently in elementary school in a desirable district in Menlo Park. On the first day of school, the teacher sent home a list of expectations for what the students should be able to accomplish by year-end for math. There were expectations for multiplication and division problems (x number correct in y minutes, up to 12s). I had my daughter attempt this a couple times that week, and messaged the teacher on Thursday to ask what the process was for demonstrating her proficiency. We were told that she could not test out of the standard path. She literally had to do 1s and 2s multiplication tables worksheets alongside students who are learning this material. She is allowed, during free time, to do Khan Academy, where she is several grade levels ahead. However, she is so loaded down with busywork that even though it's now April, she still hasn't yet finished all of the multiplication and division worksheets. As a result, there has been very little free time during which she could actually learn anything. The most frustrating thing is that we're not even looking for the teacher to provide advanced instruction — just to let her go off and do KA on her own.
  • euroderf 3y ago
    The problem is, you're bored the rest of the year and become disruptive in class. Been there, done that.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      Just admit that school's main function is free day care. Provide rooms for playing and quiet rooms for those who want to study.
• bigbacaloa 3y ago
  Dumbing education down in the name of democracy is the best way possible to promote authoritarianism. Guarantee a uniformly uneducated populace with a small exception for the children of the rich and elite.
  • euroderf 3y ago
    Aye, 'tis a Brave New World. Here, have some soma.
• ghusto 3y ago
  > Test data from 2015 to 2019 shows that racial "achievement gaps have widened," I'm finding the statistics in the second article linked to in this sentence difficult to read (because I'm not smart). Can someone tell me if this is because the top achievers are doing better, or that the bottom achievers are doing worse? If it's the former, then this could be considered a good thing. You could certainly look at it and say "well we haven't made things _worse_ for the people who weren't doing well, but we have made things better for those who were already doing well". I get that wasn't the goal, but it's another way to look at things that could be interesting, because then you could take that apart and see if there's anything to learn there.
• freshocean 3y ago
  Is Byjus not a thing in America ? IIRC Disney / Facebook invested many billions in that company. Didn't they deploy for US students?
• lakomen 3y ago
  What's with the comments on that site? Bunch of right wing paranoid reactionists. It's like a disease. Soros this Mao that Communism blah, wtf? Is this what ~50% of America is like in real life as well?
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• say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
  If it hurt achievers while not helping low achievers, the plan succeeded. The ends justify the means to these people. You voted them in.
• euroderf 3y ago
  I see here echoes of problems in the Finnish system (at least as far as I understand it). The system is designed to be inclusive and promote equality of opportunity. In practice this means classes with uninterested and preternaturally disruptive kids who spoil it for kids who actually want to learn.
• ChoGGi 3y ago
  The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam. It's easy to succeed when you can't fail.
• cptcobalt 3y ago
  Are we still teaching math well? I grew up with rote memorization of math concepts and applying that through memorized math tables. That doesn't work for my spectrumy dyscalculic brain. If I had more advanced math education that started with elements of computer programming & interaction (actually, even at the "basic" level too), I'd wager I'd actually be relatively good at math today, with a much better lower level understanding of concepts. Instead, I'm effectively helpless when it comes to math.
• ouid 3y ago
  By the time you can measure the difference, it's too late.
• KenArrari 3y ago
  I can't believe such an insanely stupid proposal was ever taken seriously. This really needs to be a career-killer for anyone who supported it.
• cauliflower99 3y ago
  If anyone wants to hear some excellent talks on mastering mathematics, listen to Sal Khan on youtube. It is a stark contrast to Boaler's utopian way of thinking.