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California needs real math education, not gimmicks
- iwsk 3y agoThis is incredibly sad. What does Dr. Boaler have to gain from crippling math education?
- tylerhou 3y agoMoney from consulting fees. https://twitter.com/minilek/status/1509678967472549889 https://twitter.com/minilek/status/1509678967472549889
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wiseleo 3y agoData Science is a form of statistics. Algebra II is a pre-requisite for statistics. How is replacing a pre-requisite with a more advanced class is a good idea?
- kevinpet 3y agoSimple, you teach a very low level spreadsheets course but label is "Data Science". Voila!
- jordigh 3y agoHow is data science not just statistics, rebranded? When I studied statistics in university we studied clustering, regression, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, visualisations, charting, general linear models... how is this different from data science? Is it just because we have more computing power, so we rebranded it? Instead of doing frequentist analyses because those are easy to do with smaller computers, now we do more Bayesian stats, on bigger computers, and therefore call it data science?
- topkai22 3y agoFrom the one data science course I took: compared to a traditional stats class, there is a bit more focus on data acquisition and pre processing, and more usage of our of the box tools, a bit less on some of theory (I don’t recall hearing about type I and type II errors). Of course, since it was a professional course there is probably the assumption that students already know these things…
- slt2021 3y agostatistics assumes you have data prepared and ready to work on. data science is more practical in a sense, you learn more to prepare real-life data for analysis. also statistics coursework doesn't cover ML part (at least the stats course that I took)
- tnecniv 3y agoI’ve periodically looked into it the differences and mostly it seems to come down to priorities. Statistics prioritizes mathematical rigor all the way through the process from collection to analysis. ML / Data science has more algorithmic concerns. Even the theoretical aspects of the two fields emphasize that distinction.
- fatherzine 3y ago"data science" -- science warping onto itself, forgetting that it's primary mission is to match data with reality.
- oefrha 3y agoIt’s “data science” only in name. (Btw I hate the term data science; most practitioners of this profession practice pseudoscientific bullshit or worse.) From TFA: > The core issue of the CMF’s “data science” section is that it claims to be discussing data science while it is actually discussing data literacy. > ... > The CMF is replete with statements like “high-school data-science class students can learn to clean data sets – removing any data that is incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, or incorrect in some other way [...] High school students can also learn to download and upload data, and develop the more sophisticated “data moves” that are important to learn if students are tackling real data sets.'' It’s more of an Excel class with some basic math sprinkled in.
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- avs733 3y agoAs someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.
- ecshafer 3y agoThe "advice" coming from these professors of education to state governments should be what is giving you a giant red flag. Reducing quality of education by lowering standards, and lying about the data, shows that it is not driven by science. My opinion on this: the "education" establishment in the US is driven by people looking for consulting fees, as shown by someone in this post linking to Dr Boaler's absurd consulting fees. Math standards are being dropped in the US, and the fight is coming from your colleagues. Reading is taught incorrectly and has been for decades as shown by dropping phonics based education and using "whole word association". Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead of American education, and the professors and educators are debating on if they should make American students unable to take Algebra in middle school, despite numerous countries learning algebra years before that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 3y agoAren't those absurd consulting fees determined by taking a small fee and dividing it by a very small number of nominal hours worked?
- ecshafer 3y ago$40,000 billed at $5,000 an hour for 8 hours worked is not what I would call a small fee no matter how you split it. That's a very large fee divided by a very small number of hours worked.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aeonik 3y agoThe Author may have good points, but there is still a lot of value in teaching basic statistics, and I don't understand why Algebra is required to understand basic stats. Even just learning the basic descriptive statistics and getting people fluent in reading charts can be very valuable. The fact that they may not understand the deeper nuances is fine in my opinion. Also... I work with a lot of data analysts and data scientists, and I really question if 90%+ of them have even a faintest understanding of their calculus course material. Most took the courses, promptly forgot everything, and just learned what they needed for their job, or use tools built by people who actually know the details.
- extr 3y ago> why Algebra is required to understand basic stats I don't understand how you can say this. Literally every statistical concept is defined via formula, and to manipulate formulas correctly (or even really understand the concept) you need basic algebra. Going even further than that, if you have the most basic "business scenario word problem", like cells in excel that describe how many widgets are made per hour, how many are defective, the price of each one...etc. The skill that lets you combine them in a sensical way to figure out your profit or loss is literally algebra. It's used by everyone everywhere all the time. Algebra is a core skill we can't be skipping. IMO if you don't teach stats, people are okay, they have an intuition about fractions and can reason from there. But not teaching basic algebra and putting them in the modern economy is like not teaching someone to read and putting them in a car on the road.
- aeonik 3y agoI struggled a lot with Algebra, I forged my teacher's signature to not retake it for the third year in a row. I didn't really "get" it until I started programming and learning stats. That's when it all hit me, then I went back and had to relearn what the hell they were talking about during my middle school years. Also, once I got to Highschool math, Algebra 2 and PreCalc, it was very easy to simply memorize formulas and plug and chug. You don't need to know Algebra to know what profit and loss is. If you want to calculate a break-even point, you look up the break-even point formula and plug in the numbers, or more commonly today, find the menu in your analysis program. None of my business classmates had any idea how to manipulate the formulas. You get a "quant" to do that for you. Yes, there are bad consequences because of this, but this is the reality of most modern businesses. People are already skipping Algebra, we just kinda let people move forward anyway. To test it, give a highschool Algebra test randomly sampled modern workers. Don't let them study for it, pop quiz. I believe almost everyone would fail horribly if you could control for cheating. Same story for trig, I didn't really appreciate or "get it" until I got really interested in ballistics and digital signal processing many years later. Kids like me find Algebra, by itself, too far removed and too abstract to even begin to find value in it. I really had no idea what we were talking about most of the time. Sure you can learn some patterns and "trust" that the teachers know best, but then I go home and ask my parents, one who has a Doctoral degree in medicine, and the other a Master's in finance, when the last time they calculated an integral, or used the quadratic formula, and they say freshman year of college 40 years ago... A lot of my teachers were also full of shit and power tripping a significant amount of the time, so that didn't help build any trust either. Thankfully, I figured out the deep beauty and power of math, but I have quite a lot of catching up to do, but my mental framework now is far more organized at mapping how all the concepts relate, and why they're valuable. I can learn more now in a few months than years of study when I was in Highschool. All because I can plug the concepts into a nice modular framework, and I can experiment with ideas in code. Almost nobody that I knew did the same though, most of my coworkers over my 15 year career don't have the patience or curiosity to dive into this stuff. It's actually really hard to find friends who geek out about math and functional programming (expect for a few corners of the Internet, including here). Hopefully that clarifies things, if not, I'd need to know more about your confusion.
- JohnMakin 3y agoalgebra until highschool? some students can take it as early as 5th/6th grade. ludicrous.
- jncfhnb 3y agoDepends on definitions mostly. You’ll likely start doing things like simple linear equations, including algebraic notation before formally doing “algebra 1”
- ip26 3y agoResounding agreement. I know kindergartners who can solve “z = x + y, solve for x” forms of problems, but some people call that “algebra”.
- jncfhnb 3y agoWhat I really mean is a lot of introduction to y = mx + b as a linear function
- zmgsabst 3y agoAlmost all of them can: “7 = [ ] + 3” where you write 4 in the box is a standard problem when learning to add, in nearly every workbook. We unteach that skill between early elementary school and middle school through poor pedagogy.
- bushbaba 3y agoCalifornia k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution. It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy. I can only hope that in 5-10 years a new set of voters shift focus to education being a top priority.
- mimikatz 3y agoMore and more I get the feeling California doesn't care about the homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare. There are just a ton of grifters who make a lot of noise on the topics, but don't push for policies that would actually improve things. Or push for them in a way that is just more red tape that hinders actual results. Education is in the same bucket. Lots of noise from lots of people with bad ideas or bad implementations of ok ideas.
- anonporridge 3y agoThe homelessness industrial complex is quite profitable.
- slt2021 3y agogovernment bureacracy learned from the Military industrial complex (and Pentagon) how to leech $$$ from the government and keep problems alive to keep $$$ flowing
- SoftTalker 3y agoExactly why none of these problems ever get fixed. There's too much money in the status quo; if they actually fixed the problems a lot of people would have to find some other way to earn an income.
- riku_iki 3y agothey likely dedicate good amount of money, but overall corrupted and inefficient system doesn't allow to put these money at work.
- fwungy 3y agoIt's all so tiresome.
- gloryjulio 3y agoIt really just looks like another form of the Reagan economics of 'starve the beast' in the end. Kill the public education. Enrich the privatized education. How ironic
- jeffbee 3y agoI feel like the facts are a little thin. It is not really true that "For decades, American math curriculum has followed a standard sequence: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus." That may have been the local condition in some places. The high school in my city does not have and has never had any named math course except calculus and statistics. Everything else is just "math". Common core math does not follow the given progression, either. 8th grade common core math has elements of algebra, geometry, and statistics and probability.
- zdragnar 3y agoMy school system had a similar progression, though trig was on its own and you either took basic calc (essentially just limits and differentials) or AP calc, or a statistics-lite course that was basically "business math" for kids who weren't on a college track but might try for an associates degree or maybe community college. Though, arithmetic and algebra 1 were just called "math" (all pre-common-core, of course). This was at a somewhat rural school in the Midwest, for what it is worth.
- jncfhnb 3y agoFor me, New England, early 10s the algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, precalc, calc was the exact pattern. Edit: despite the name, pre calc was basically entirely trigonometry.
- lambdasquirrel 3y agoSame in NY.
- goolulusaurs 3y agoIn my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole. The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations. Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.
- passers 3y ago[dead]
- MikeTheRocker 3y agoQuality comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN. I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.
- c_crank 3y agoThe only incentive that works is letting such institutions crash and burn and be replaced. Even giant monopolies can end up losing money and going under.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoIn the context of Education or you have an entranched monopoly, this means voting for private school vouchers.
- hnthrowaway0315 3y agoWell, "Yes Prime Minister" already figured it out. The whole education system is more for the welfare of bureaucracies and teachers/unions instead of students'. And that was some 40 years ago.
- superchroma 3y agoTeachers make very little money. Society has deemed them worth almost nothing despite the fact that they're pivotal in shaping minds; the future of america, and that they do very hard, frustrating work taking care of our spawn in a country where parents treat school like daycare instead of a place to learn. They wouldn't need a union to collectively bargain if they were taken care of properly. On the flipside, I acknowledge that it is unfortunate that teaching seems to be a drip pan to collect people who do not succeed in primary careers, and that should probably stop also.
- ochoseis 3y agoTeachers appear to earn an average of $79k in California[0], and are eligible for a pension[1] that probably boosts their earnings to the equivalent of a six-figure job. Also, they get summers and holidays off. Not silicon valley engineer money, but not bad. [0]: https://www.niche.com/blog/teacher-salaries-in-america/ https://www.niche.com/blog/teacher-salaries-in-america/ [1]: https://www.calstrs.com/retirement-benefits https://www.calstrs.com/retirement-benefits
- TulliusCicero 3y agoTrue, but it's also true that average cost of living in California is quite high, brought up by insane CoL along the coast.
- Jap2-0 3y ago> Also, they get summers and holidays off. Please don't perpetuate this. Any half decent teacher is going to spend summer looking at curriculum, block/lesson planning, in meetings, organizing their classroom, doing continuing education and training, etc. Sure, it's not as much work and it's more flexible during the summer, but it's by no means time off. Also, they work a lot more than 40 hrs/week during the school year. Also, they have a lot less flexibility about when they get time off. Also (in secondary/postsecondary), they have exams immediately prior to Christmas. (And yes, I bet you get Christmas off too.) And so on.
- keithnz 3y agoTo people where math (to some higher level) is kind of okish, this seems bad. But in my experience, most people coming out of school ( and I'm 50+ so going back decades now) don't really have a useful working knowledge of mathematical ideas. For many they just end up hating it, instantly forgetting everything they learned through pain when they leave school, and never want anything to do with math again. I'm all for people trying new ideas to teach math, also changing the way we assess it. As long as there is a path that preserves "academic math"
- outlace 3y agoI think we significantly overestimate how much school actually matters compared to family milieus. My wife and I highly value education, so regardless of when the school says children should learn algebra, I am already tutoring my 6 year old in basic algebra. If school did nothing other than be a daycare for my kids so we could work, they'd probably still be better educated than most kids going through public school because my wife and I will make sure of that because we teach our kids a lot on our own (and we're not hiring tutors or after school programs). If schools were more rigorous then it would save us time from having to do a lot of the educating ourselves, but it won't change family values.
- injb 3y agoThis. I strongly suspect that the biggest problem in school for children from good families isn't the schooling but rather the presence of children from bad families. My sister is a primary teacher and the things I've heard make it clear that the system tries to make up for bad parenting but it's and uphill struggle.
- ramraj07 3y agoYou are correct that in our world currently and maybe even in the past, the kids never truly learned math in school. I studied in the top university in my Indian province with 50 million people, and most of my undergrad colleagues truly didn’t understand what differentiation and integration actually meant. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The kids are supposed to learn things in school, we just need to pull our heads out of our assess and acknowledge that almost all current learning systems suck and try to reset from the ground up.
- oefrha 3y agoSchool doesn’t matter when school is made useless. Almost a tautology.
- fn-mote 3y agoThis is a recipe for an ignorant underclass from which one can never escape. What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education? Functioning public school is supposed to solve that problem.
- huitzitziltzin 3y agoThe strangest thing to me is that American education professors wield power in setting educational standards, when their own field is completely allergic to any serious empirical work on what works. I guess to a state legislator a “professor of mathematics education” sounds like the kind of person who should know about these things? California math standards resemble New York reading standards in their lack of engagement with studies of what works. There are too many examples like this. We would all be better off if education professors stayed completely out of the business of setting state standards.
- blindriver 3y agoThe actions that the California state education system towards Blacks and Brown kids are exactly what the most insidious racist person would do. If I hated Black and Brown kids, I would lower the education standards so low that these kids would graduate high school being unable to compete at the city, state or country level. And this is EXACTLY what is happening. Half of the Black kids in SF are graduating high school and can barely read. Now with the gutting with math, Black and Brown kids will be even further behind on math than the rest of the demographics. It's horrifying. Anyone who has money will avoid all this by either sending their kids to private school, which is what we did, or getting enrichment classes after school. Both of those options are unavailable to lower income kids, so the gap between the haves and the have nots will only increase at an exponential rate. There is nothing more racist than the of lowered expectations in the guise of ruinous empathy for "the poor victims of white supremacy". You help undereducated kids by raising expectations, and pumping money into the system so that the student teacher ratio plummets in the poorest areas that need the most help. Instead SFUSD was spending millions to change the names of school instead of trying to get those kids to learn how to read.
- no_butterscotch 3y agoNothing like the subtle bigotry of lower expectations - the best way to keep "those people" in the underclass is to lower the standards. I'm hoping the reversal of affirmative action will light a fire under this issue.
- 0xy 3y agoPeople with money homeschool, with much better results. There's even small homeschooling groups that pool resources to hire the best tutors money can buy. Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back. Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homeschooling literally produce better outcomes. Not to mention the violence in public schools (which is escalating), and the abuse from teachers that the major US teaching unions ritually cover up (the teacher's unions vehemently defend predator teachers). Teachers unions are in the business of protecting predators, financially and with predator-friendly policy like union-decided arbitration venues. [1] [1] https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/campbell-brown-teachers-unions-going-msna36251 https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/campbell-brown-teachers-un...
- romusha 3y agoIf they underpay the teachers, then they don't need it. And people will be better off avoiding teaching as a career
- jncfhnb 3y agoFor my school, kids taking algebra 1 in 9th grade were the remedial students. To force everyone into this track and pace… ugh.
- meroes 3y agoI can confidently say only 6 out of 16 years of math education (elementary through undergrad math degree) were "good". Contrarily for example, most science classes were good in my experience. Math is down there with the worst average teachers. I learned more from YouTube than the textbook+teacher for some classes (Hello Professor Leonard anyone?). Without some YouTube professors I probably would have failed several classes. My gripes: Most teachers suck, no one teaches you how to actually study math along the way, the word problems/applications need to stop being almost always about physics ffs, too many classes have inadequate or poor technology, the big picture concepts/threads are lost by most math teachers, and some textbooks are AWFUL, the eTextbook push has made some even worse (too many examples of why to list), and finally there needs to be sometime in those 16 years where foundations and philosophical issues are broached at least passingly. The good math classes are amazing, and that's what kept me interested. But I just had to vent about the wasted potential. I'm not giving a nuanced opinion, I'm pointing out some glaring issues. Also if you get a teacher who says they regularly attend some national conference for math educators to structure their class, transfer out.
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- teddyh 3y agoSee also: A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart (2002): <https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....>
- andelink 3y agoThank you for sharing this. I had not read it before and it beautifully put to words the feelings I developed while getting my math degree.
- MichaelNolan 3y agoSomehow I stumble upon that paper once every few years, and I enjoy reading it every time.
- electriclove 3y agoGreat article! Though the author despises phrases like Woke Math, his description of the failings of the California Math Framework is exactly what critics are referring to when using phrases like Woke Math.
- oceanghost 3y agoI am just confronting this now. My daughter is 6, and I'm trying to teach her math and reading. She's excelling at reading. The thing about math is, I have to teach her math the way the standards specify. The problem is… The common core math is just strange. I find it confusing, and I did a full tour at an engineering college. Math is a “procedure”. That's why programs like MatLab/MathCad can solve equations-- they just have a set of rules that solve problems. Learning math is the process of internalizing these rules. The common core stuff seems to be the opposite of this. I want to build with my daughter a set of skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, exponents etc, eventually moving on to trig, linear algebra and calc) she can build on. But common core hopelessly confuses even simple things like adition.
- electriclove 3y agoPlease look into Beast Academy (online without books) and work through it with your daughter. Read the comics to her and go through the exercises together as needed.
- sfink 3y agoI'll second this. Beast is the only thing I've come across that feels to me like it's actually teaching math.
- oceanghost 3y agoThank you, I will look into this.
- gnicholas 3y agoKhan Academy worked well for our kid, who started at that age. She worked through 1-2 grades per year and is now in their Algebra series. The main complaint I have is that there is no concept of 'practice' or 'drilling'. You just learn something and go straight to the quiz. There are two problems with this. The first is that it doesn't get kids used to doing practice, which is critical for learning more advanced skills. The second is that the quizzes use a lot of multiple choice (particularly in the younger grades, where kids are not assumed to be literate). Getting a handful of multiple choice questions correct is not a good indicator of having mastered a topic. Once I realized this, I told my kid she had to get all of the questions correct on the quiz 3 times in a row in order to move on.
- Balgair 3y agoLike a lot of education, California's is so tied up in so many ways that it takes books to understand. The first issue that springs to mind is the funding. Most funds in California do not stay local, they go to Sacramento and are then distributed out. If you're thinking that is a system ripe for abuse, then you are correct. The formulas and methods for determining funding aren't easy to grok. But then you add in all the fraud from schools themselves and you get a real mess. Further, Prop 13's starvation of property taxes has also contributed to the lack of public school funding in California. It's a bit of a winding tale there, but suffice to say, less taxes means less good schools. Then again, Prop 13 is, just, hoo boy. What a total long standing mess. So, does California need better education. Oh heck yes. But fixing that requires dealing with things like Prop 13 and other huge political monsters barely hidden under the rug. Try finding any politician with the bravery, let alone stamina, to fix those titanic underlying issues (pun intended).
- rahimnathwani 3y agoFunding is not the problem, at least not everywhere. My local school district (San Francisco) has: - an annual operating budget of $1.2bn/year. - ~50k K-12 students. That's $24k per student per year. Let's assume a teacher costs $150k/year and you want a low student:teacher ratio of 20:1. Of the $24k, $7.5k is needed to pay 1/20th of the cost of the teacher. You still have two thirds of the money left. Is that not enough to pay for management and facilities?
- Balgair 3y agoThe median salary for a teacher in SF seems to be ~$70k +/- $9k [0], so about half you guess. Which, I mean, how the heck are they living anywhere near SF on that salary? Jeeze Louise... A better breakdown of the '21-'22 budget for SFUSD seems to be here: [1]. Numbers in () are a per student number Federal Revenue: $48,915,000 ($926) Local Revenue: $667,062,000 ($12,631) State Revenue: $455,213,000 ($8,620) Instructional Expenditures: $503,371,000 ($9,532) Student and Staff Support: $193,984,000 ($3,673) Administration: $104,612,000 ($1,981) Operations, Food Service, other: $103,178,000 ($1,954) Construction: $190,399,000 ($3,605) Student/Teacher Ratio: 19.32 Total $ per student seems to be ~$22k, the ratio is just under 20:1, and construction is just under 20%, so your guesses were pretty good! The site has more info, but one thing to notice is that the expenditures add up to more than the revenues. As in, SFUSD is in debt at ~$6 per student. Play with the numbers yourself (please also find another source of data). In the end, it seems SFUSD is not doing all that well if it's only paying teachers ~$70k, is still running a deficit, and has revenues of ~$1.1B per year. Something seems strange about all those numbers. [0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-school-teacher-salary/san-francisco-ca https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?ID2=0634410 https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I...
- yes_really 3y agoCalifornia: one of the richest regions on Earth, with the highest taxes in the US, and math education worse than third-world countries.
- thejackgoode 3y agoSince we are talking about education, there is no such thing as "third world", for 32 years at least.
- ern 3y agoU.S. high school math scores lag significantly behind other countries, even though scores in reading and science are above average How much of this math gap is because other countries focus heavily on test prep and exam performance?
- t8sr 3y agoOptimizing for test scores is an American phenomenon. AFAIK schools in most of the rest of the developed world are not worrying about these metrics. (They do worry about how many pupils go on to graduate college, for example.) (Although of course nobody on here likely knows anything about more than a handful of countries’ systems at most.)
- strix_varius 3y agoThis is blatantly wrong. https://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132416889/chinese-top-in-tests-but-still-have-lots-to-learn https://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132416889/chinese-top-in-test...
- t8sr 3y agoI mean, I did say developed world, but the link you're giving me is about China. I guess it's up to debate whether you consider that a developed country, but the IMF for example doesn't. Being more concrete, test in Europe scores are generally not a factor in university admissions* or school funding. I love being told I'm blatantly wrong about the world by confident Americans on the internet but, like, I did go through three of the systems in Europe for a total of 18 years and not once did the topic of test scores even come up. *: How could they be? How do you use Swiss Matura grades to apply to an Italian university?
- strix_varius 3y agoI've gone to school in the US, Germany, and Australia. Tests were a major factor in all three places. But if you'd like to restrict candidates to the IMF's "developed" list, then other countries with well-documented testing cultures include Japan, South Korea, and the UK.
- _8j50 3y agoI think standardized tests are ideal. Make them very hard and don't be afraid to fail most of your students and have them repeat grades. Testing should not account for anything about a student other than physical disability needs. The effects of these measures are seen decades after enactment. From what I have observed, the politicization of education and having metrics other than academic tests has gotten so bad, it should be discussed as a matter of national security. Relying on immigrants to fill in the gap and hoping they'll choose to remain in the US(despite societal hostility growing) is not a sustainable strategy. This is the one area China, India and Russia can run circles around the US easily.
- viraptor 3y ago> other than physical disability needs. And mental, unless you wanted to likely fail many people with various kinds of dyslexia and many other issues. If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot.
- _8j50 3y agoYeah, mental too, so long as it impedes learning. > If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot. Depends. If a child has terrible parents for example, testing shouldn't accomodate for that. Same thing if family income and other issues are a factor. I think you are talking about learning accomodation and that's probably fine but tests should measure ability. I inclided physical disability only because I couldn't think of how mental disability could be accomodated for in a test. But dyslexia is a good one, carefully crafting questions and answers for dyslexic kids makes sense.
- xwdv 3y agoI know of no better way to promote inequity than to gatekeep knowledge so that only those with abundant resources can access it.
- casey2 3y agoI don't believe that "education resources" are lacking at all, if a student has access to the internet they have instant access to anything they would learn k-16. In terms of exercise, everybody has their own personal/public gym, with all the most advanced equipment (possibly interspersed with suboptimal equipment but an advanced personal gym nonetheless) that they do not use, because they either aren't athletes or don't care about exercise for health/spiritual fulfillment. Any work on making the gym better is wasted it isn't being used. How can we solve this problem? Advertisement. Perhaps instead of giving talks at conferences to people who couldn't care less about what you are saying and even if they did care they are "too busy" to engage with the ideas; you give talks to elementary schoolers instead. Elementary school, classrooms or auditoriums, or a monthly lecture series over the course of a year. There aren't many other effective ways to show students that real people actually care about STEM, this one has the bonus of making use of the education of people who went from say EE to IT support, teachers cannot reasonably be expected to explain to children how electricity works better than that guy who lives a block down from you who has a stack of breadboards up to the ceiling, and just showing a video lacks the spontaneity needed to keep children engaged as you change focus. What exactly is stopping you from repeating that talk you gave at strangeloop, rustconf, usenix, fosdem or gophercon to that school within walking distance? At the very least can you walk into the principal's office, look them dead in the eye; give them a firm handshake and tell them that you want to get involved with the kids' education. How many STEM degrees holders are in California? A hundred thousand? How many elementary schools? <6,000. Even including middle and highschools the total is <10,000. The more people who participate the more it will show children that STEM is a real part of their life right now. If you are a Californian, tell me how many STEM related talks, given by a community speaker, did you attend during your k-12 schooling? Now tell me how many times your teacher put on some random movie. For me the answers are 0 and 100+
- John23832 3y agoThe California educational public system is made to hamstring those that need it in order to prop up those that don’t.
- theGnuMe 3y agoThe standard path is optimized for college admissions discrimination. It is prep for the SAT and calculus. What is not taught is effective problem solving. Instead we are basically teaching rote pattern matching. The proof of this claim is that chat gpt aces the SAT in math but fails on any advanced test like the IIT exams. Chat gpt even fails advanced AP English and literature exams. A place a priori you’d expect an LLM to do well. Yes we should learn the chain rule and derivatives/slope but arguably developing statistical, mathematical and even computational reasoning/thinking is a better foundation.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago> Math should be more inclusive. Math should be more engaging. I think one of the biggest mistakes both Dr. Boaler’s supporters and detractors have made in this debate is to try to slot what should be a practical, fact based argument about optimal math education into an ideological struggle invoking silly phrases like Woke Math. Dr. Boaler and her fans did not make math education worse by being too left wing in their math—whatever that even means—but by sloppy with their science and lazy with their facts. You don’t make math education better by advocating for changes based on lies, and unfortunately, that is exactly what happened here. The assertion is that this was not leftist politics at work. Why else would Dr. Boaler advocate for what the author asserts are lies, then? The author also admits that the aim is equal outcomes and gives data showing the approach is actively worse, even on that measure. How is this not a problem of Progressivism over Liberalism? > In response to this, science and math professors across the state have been raising alarms. In response, Dr. Boaler turned to a tactic she often relies on—trying to wrap her ideas in the context of a broader culture war, painting critics as stodgy conservatives fighting her efforts to make math more equitable and diverse. She described her critics as those resisting change. The notion that teaching this version of data science rather than Algebra II is somehow more equitable permeates the CMF in often bizarre ways. > The CMF says data science is more equitable than other STEM fields because “data scientists work together to address uncertainty in data while avoiding bias.” So the aim is to train people to "clean data," leading to more equity! That is, train people to use the tools to eliminate data from datasets that meets someone else's definition of bias. Why "someone else's?" Because if the people wielding the tools don't have an understanding of the underlying math (something the article opines about) they can't know whether a dataset is biased or not without someone else telling them it is and how. When someone else tells them that any data indicating X < 0.9 is biased, they can then blindly eliminate all values of X less than 0.9. Yay! "Unbiased" data! Such a manipulation would have to be done on faith rather than on understanding. How is this not a problem of politics getting in the way of education? The only possible alternative is that it is the adjacent hustle of big business aligned with a particular political mindset. But that only makes it mildly removed from, not entirely divorced from, Progressive policy advocacy.
- perryizgr8 3y agoThe problem is thinking that 5 or 10 or 20 people can decide what is good for millions of kids. Let parents work with teachers and schools to figure out what works for their kids. The government should shut down all public funded schools. If some people need financial aid to ensure education, provide that aid directly in the form of money or school vouchers. Schools will spring up with varied teaching philosophies and approaches. Parents can evaluate the available options and enroll their kids wherever they like. Eventually the best approaches will win out, and even specialisations might emerge. Maybe everyone actually doesn't need to learn arithmetic. But others do. So they would choose the appropriate school and courses.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoWow, this Boaler character is a piece of work [1][2]. [1] https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is-worse-than-we-thought/amp/ https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is... [2] https://stanfordreview.org/boaler-professor/ https://stanfordreview.org/boaler-professor/
- boringuser2 3y agoEducation interventions are historically some of the least effective endeavors of any public works project. Countless attempts to spend beacoup bucks to bridge racial gaps in educational attainment and IQ have been made and none have ever worked. Given the bet available evidence, not much education is necessary to bring out the potential of a population in terms of attainment and IQ scoring.
- yqinyn 3y agoI went to high school in China, and the Math problems in the US from the same level are literal jokes to us. At the end of the semester, my teacher doesn't have anything else planned for the last class, so just for fun he would find these problems and share with the class :"Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with". I remember all of the problems are so dumb that the whole class would had a good laugh reading through them. At that time I thought the whole Math education in the US is a joke, until I came here for graduate school and realized how brutally challenging the Math is in higher educations. My 2 cents is that the majority demographics in the US don't give a damn about Math, or any kind of formal education. Most people, even the uneducated, are living a comfortable enough life, so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. As a result, these type of education are only reserved by the elite. While in a lot of developing countries, education is the only way for a normal people to not end up being extremely poor for the rest of his/her lives.
- somedude895 3y ago> "Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with" That's some top grade propaganda to indoctrinate children there, just like with the authorities suppressing news about the knife attacks on Chinese kindergartens and instead reporting extensively on school shootings in the US to show how safe China is compared to the US. Gotta love the CCP
- abracadabra0000 3y ago> so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. Is there really a point in grinding to learn calc 4 if you aren’t going to use it? Is the typical Chinese citizen in the workforce going to even use calc to begin with?
- cashsterling 3y agoOh wow... this article resonates with me and is bringing up some stuff for me as a parent. My son was in the 8th grade the first year or two that CA rolled out this replace Algebra 2 with Data Science. The Piedmont school district selected this ridiculous book for the course that contained only problems, no lessons. I could go into a deep diatribe about this book, and the course design, but it did things like 'use exponents and exponent notation without introducing what exponents are and how they work... un-flipping believable. I scheduled a parent-teacher meeting to discuss my concerns about the course design and book... and was assured by the assistant principal that the course was designed by experts and the book was carefully selected and was written by professors with expertise in math education. I. got. nowhere. Here are vents/beefs with our education system today, as it pertains to math & science: - What the heck happened to using a nice print book? It is understood that people learn better from reading and working with print books. Even in the 'every kid has a phone', screens everywhere, age... I have found this to be true for my kids and other parents have found the same. kids do better at math/science/history working out of a good physical book. Somehow, we can afford iPad's for every kid but we can't afford books? - the 8th grade math book above was 80 USD for a hard copy, which I bought so I could tutor my son at home... absolutely deplorable. Not only was the book's content garbage... but the paper and print quality was also garbage. Somehow, I can buy a beautiful hardback textbook on an esoteric math topic for as little 50 USD... meanwhile, a 8th grade textbook is reaming the state coffers. We have so much economic capture and profiteering in K-12 education and it is disgusting... all K-12 content should be creative commons licensed and book cost should cover printing costs and meager profit and that's it (think www.openintro.org). - We have some very special idiots in our public education system and they are "trying out education theories" on our kids, and we are letting them. There was nothing wrong with the math education 20 years ago, or even 40 years ago. Math is hard, that is okay... not everyone has to be a math genius. Learning math well takes time, being kind & compassionate to ourselves / our kids, and appreciating the grind a little bit. Even if there was something wrong with our classical math education, we could look at other countries who are kicking our ass in math education and see what they're doing... hints: teachers are treated/paid better, they use print textbooks with lots of carefully constructed lessons (graphics) and worked examples, gradual introduction of ideas in class with ample time for discussion, lots of spaced repetition, and lots of exercises starting with "very easy", to build confidence and enjoyment of progress/understanding, and moving gradually to more challenging. This 8th grade books I refer to above was doing absolutely crazy stuff like throwing a couple problems out on average and standard deviation (again, with no lessons in book... just problems) and then, two problems later, asking them interpret box plots (again, without a lesson on box plots)... insanity. Kids in the class were so lost and disheartened; they all felt stupid. I had to keep telling my son, "you're not stupid... this book is completely ridiculous. The people who wrote this book, and the people who selected this book for your class, are out of touch with reality."
- RecycledEle 3y agoI've taught high school and college for more than 2 decades. Please ignore me while I rant. Before we can fix public education, we need to admit that humans are inherently unequal. Not everyone is at the top of the class in math. It is a teacher's job to bring the kids at the bottom up as high as we can, but some of them will not get it on their first try. That is nature. Then we need to motivate them. Stop grouping kids into math classes based on what grade they are in. That does not match the workplaces we are preparing them for. Instead, we need to group them by interests. Let me teach a class of kids who truly love cars. I'll bring an old engine in and start teaching them arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. Let me teach a class of kids who want to be streamers and YouTubers. I'll use DSLRs and Premiere Pro to teach them arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. They will learn the same math as the future mechanics, but they will not use the same examples. Let me teach a class of kids who love money to do the accounting for the auto shop kids. The only problem with grouping them by ability is that most (85%) of public school students have the intellectual curiosity of tomatoes. They love only app games and music. They are vegetables. The fix to that is to kick them out and let them try to earn a living until they (the ones that survive) come home and beg for a chance to learn enough to earn a living. Then they will pay attention in class. We need to incentivize the learning of these public schools students while we kick their inflated egos out from under them. They think they are smart enough to be the CEO of Intel. We need to call them on that. Let's see them earn their lunch money replacing the shocks on cars, creating marketing videos for Fiverr clients, or keeping track of the accounting for the other classes. I'll teach them what they need to know. Above all, do not let anyone supervise a teacher who is not qualified to teach that subject. Public schools prepare principals to run high schools in 4 steps: First, have them teach kindergarten for a year. Second, be an elementary school principal for a year. Third, be a junior high principal for a year. Fourth, be a high school principal. Imagine if the head of OpenAI started doing tech support for Microsoft Word, then because a supervisor over Word Tech Support, then moved to be the head of developing Microsoft Office (without being able to code) then move to be the head of OpenAI (without being able to explain what a GAN is.) Seriously. I've had public school bosses who saw no reason to ask the kids to log into the PCs in a computer class. They wanted to see me "teach" meaning talk to the kids without them touching the PCs in a computer class. They were stuck in kindergarten.
- Nellyz 3y ago[dead]