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California’s math misadventure is about to go national

165 points by fortran77 3y ago

pinewurst 3y ago
https://archive.ph/OuKIa https://archive.ph/OuKIa
Dig1t 3y ago
>Sometimes, as I pored over the CMF, I could scarcely believe what I was reading. The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say. >The document tried hard to convince readers that it was based on a serious reading of neuroscience research. The first chapter, for example, cited two articles to claim that “the highest achieving people have more interconnected brains,” implying that this has something to do with learning math. But neither paper says anything about math education. Yikes.
xeonmc 3y ago
I am immediately reminded of the opening of Lockhart's essay "A Mathematician's Lament"[0]: > A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer. > Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school... [0] http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf
- supernova87a 3y ago
  I think the analogy here is that after graduation, the kids are going to be asked to play a song from sheet music, but the school doesn't want them to be forced to (or feel bad if they have trouble to) learn the terribly constraining rigors of musical notation. Or worse, the teachers don't really understand how to teach the notation themselves. Instead, we want them to invent how to write music "using the innate and self-discovered techniques for music notation that make sense to them as whole individuals".
  - bradrn 3y ago
    That’s not actually a great analogy, since many musicians get along perfectly well without being able to read music notation.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Fair few that make living as musicians and not entertainers.
      - defrost 3y ago
        You'd be surprised - for a number of musicians it's not about sight reading notation and playing fom there, it's about developing musical talent and variations and adding in formal notation reading | writing later. I've known a family of three siblings who all played in the state orchestra in their teens and only one was a fluent reader, the other two were extremely good musicians that practised hard and either very slow worked through written music note by note, or, once familiar with a piece looked at a page of music with a helicopter view, not reading" individual notes, but tracking off entire blocks .. like seeing a page of text w/out wearing glasses. From the same music roots, some years later, Tim Minchin- admittedly more an Entertainer than a pure Musician - but none the less someone that made their name and living from performing original and relatively complex music on stage playing piano and singing - also doesn't read music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c
lfmunoz4 3y ago
Hilarious that the people that are the problem think they can solve the problems. But that is impossible since they don't realize they are the problem. Education can easily be fixed by giving students vouchers and let them decide where they get the best education,i.e, probably Khan Academy. The market knows best. Isn't the California cost per student per year is like 20k or something ridiculous where each kid can get a private tutor?
- jmye 3y ago
  This is nuts. You don’t “easily” fix education by telling over-burdened parents that now they have to both evaluate every school they can find, hope that the voucher covers the education and that the act of providing it doesn’t shut down every neighborhood school, figure out how they’re going to get their child to it, and require them to do that every single year for 14-17 years. Especially given competing education standards, especially given the insanity of trying to find childcare at all. And advocating online-only education is a great way to ensure another generation grows up incapable of interacting with anyone. But this kind of thinking is what happens when we let people who know literally nothing whatsoever about education feel like their opinion matters as much as an expert’s.
  - TimTheTinker 3y ago
    Not all parents have to be unburdened enough to motivate public schools to improve. Even if there's only a tiny minority of parents who are able to research and move their kids to a better school, their experience will motivate others, word will spread and the public schools will feel the pressure to improve their environment and outcomes. Even the threat of competition can be motivating. I dare to believe that the majority of parents across the US do care about their kids and are willing to drive their kids to a different school if doing so means they'll achieve significantly better success in life.
    - PhasmaFelis 3y ago
      Quite a lot of parents have to choose between driving their kids to school every day and working to keep their kids fed and sheltered. There's a real problem there, but it's not that they don't care about their kids.
robot_no_421 3y ago
The CMF was designed by people who don't like math and prioritize the "human experience" over physical reality. When you read through the CMF, you begin to see all sorts of hints that their ideology is inspired by Continental philosophies such as Marxism, Existentialism, and all of the other ways of thinking that find "facts" and "reality" offensive. For example, I lost count of how many times they mentioned the word "authenticity" in the CMF. To sum up the whole CMF in my words, it's Critical Theory applied without critical thinking used. Proponents saw that minorities were struggling in math class, so they proposed a solution to handicap math classes. That's literally what CMF is. Proponents would rather see everyone fail than some people succeed. Especially if those some successful people are not minorities. Why we should learn math from people who clearly have no respect for facts and reality in the first place is beyond me. Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of set theory, would have outright rejected most of the philosophy that inspired the CMF.
- mrdatawolf 3y ago
  You "lost count" of 0? Because I just downloaded every chapter and searched for "authenticity" it occurred 0 times. Edited to add where I got the chapters from: I gather the chapters from another posters link https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
  - Zanni 3y ago
    Try again with "authentic." Several matches in the summary alone. Granted, OP should not have put "authenticity" in quotes.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  No need to slander the continental philosophers by associating this with them.
- RedCondor 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Yodel0914 3y ago
ng12 3y ago
[flagged]
- yetanotherloser 3y ago
  That's not very fair on clowns!
  - thghtihadanacct 3y ago
    They have smaller cars!
  - huytersd 3y ago
    [flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > circus run by the clowns The main proponent of California's framework is (a) not a mathematician and (b) likely committing fraud [1]. (When the author of a standard is billing low-income school districts $50k to explain to them her new framework over eight hours, it looks more like corruption than clownishness.) [1] https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is-worse-than-we-thought/ https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...
kazinator 3y ago
Algebra is incredibly important, because it teaches students to manipulate truths using symbols. It is a tool which improves thought.
- robot_no_421 3y ago
  It's way, way more than just a tool that improves thought. It's a necessary tool to organize your life. How can you even budget or use a credit card responsibly if you don't know algebra? You need algebra to know how long a paycheck can last you. My dad didn't graduate high school and even he knew enough algebra to work out how much money he needed a month for cigarettes (until he eventually quit once he really thought about the numbers).
  - kazinator 3y ago
    That's a good question. Historic human societies without algebra somehow had working bean counting. Using a credit card isn't very abstract. You only have to use the concrete specific values in your situation, and not solve some generality. Moreover, I don't think I had to ever square anything, let alone, cube, when reckoning over credit card transactions. Or find the roots of a polynomial, or do anything with polynomials. I'm not saying that the intuitions gained from algebra are not relevant, mind you.
    - robot_no_421 3y ago
      > Using a credit card isn't very abstract. To use a credit card responsibly you need to understand the concept of exponential growth, or you might accidentally turn a manageable $500 debt into a burdensome $5000 debt. Same goes for understanding good debt (mortgages) vs bad debt. It might not be solving a polynomial per se, but I don't see how you get to understanding exponential equations without at least understanding algebra.
      - taeric 3y ago
        There is understanding the concept of exponential growth, and there is being able to manage it. They are two skills. Where management is helped more by having resources than it is by understanding it.
hnburnsy 3y ago
I cant be the only one who thinks it sad that in the US that it takes six school years (K-5) to teach basic atrithmetic, fractions, decimals, and simple 2D geometry. Parents run, dont walk, to Kumon or AOPS or something similar. Our children got 5 on AP Calc in 9th grade. Note dont share with the school you are supplementing, most, not all, teachers resent it and your child will become the teachers assistant.
- anonuser123456 3y ago
  > and your child will become the teachers assistant. Not a bad thing if that means teaching peers math; you learn a whole lot by teaching material that you otherwise believe you have mastered.
- cardiffspaceman 3y ago
  Becoming the teacher’s assistant was the best-case outcome for me in high school in the late 1900’s (as we refer to the 70’s now)
Jtsummers 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20231002153731/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/california-math-framework-algebra/675509/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231002153731/https://www.theat...
Kon-Peki 3y ago
The article offers two examples from "Not California" and neither of them are too scary sounding to me. Is there any real danger that this "is about to go national"? I'm out here in middle America with an 8th grader taking geometry and a 6th grader taking pre-algebra. And I certainly haven't heard anything about reducing math opportunities. Quite the opposite, really - they're talking about expanding a program where the school system will pay half the tuition for advanced math classes at the local community college if you end up beyond what they teach at the high school.
- matheweis 3y ago
  Lengthy discussion from a few months ago: “'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595026
  - nitwit005 3y ago
    That's also an article about SF, rather than this "going national".
    - matheweis 3y ago
      I linked to the discussion, the top comment of which is about Seattle. I can vouch from experience that the top comment is accurate.
      - taeric 3y ago
        The top comment there is somewhat vacuous? Rephrased, "if we want the absolute best education, we will either pay for after school efforts, move to a wealthier place, or send to an expensive private school." That... is the same as it has been for a long long time. Would we like better? I mean... yeah. Hard to say no to that one. What is "better," though? So much of education discussion is dominated by talk of things that "used to work," only, they probably didn't actually work that well.
ericmcer 3y ago
Kids who have wealthy/involved parents that push them will always outperform kids who don't. The government can do whatever they want to try to equalize that (except encouraging parents to do better), I just hope they waste as little money as possible and don't interfere with gifted kids. FWIW my 14 year old is doing pre-algebra now, she struggles with math and the way they are teaching it seems insane. Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing. That probably results in relatively equal outcomes but she has no clue how to do things that fall outside of the frameworks they established.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Someday a “reality check” situation happens. Might be writing a cover letter for their first job. Or trying to pass college-level calculus. But eventually, if someone doesn’t actually know how to read, write, or think logically it comes to a breaking point. It doesn’t matter if a high school gave someone all As and a college gave out a degree in Community Building. The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people. After all, if you had to hire someone, are you going to offer a job to someone who writes in broken emoji-gibberish and can’t multiply? One time I got a resume from someone at a fairly well-regarded college for an internship, and the cover letter was a single run-on sentence without any capitalization. How could this person possibly succeed? How much money did they spend getting to this point of obvious failure? Very sad
  - Rumudiez 3y ago
    > barring nepotism this is a pretty big issue, though. even here on hn, many folks claim the best or only way to get a good job is by networking
    - monero-xmr 3y ago
      Getting a first job is very helpful with nepotism. But to sustain being a negative employee - one that brings no value if not hurts the organization - I have only seen with the children / relatives of executives, and in the government.
jrflowers 3y ago
I’ve only seen articles about the idiot bougie hippy math-hating socialistas and their conspiracy to stop children from learning how to do long division. Does anybody have any links to descriptions of the policies and their aims from the people that proposed/implemented them that doesn’t read like a post-apocalyptic retrospective written by the few remaining survivors of San Francisco Politics?
- akprasad 3y ago
  See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745319 > For those interested, a link to the CA proposal: > https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    Thanks! That’s a lot of docx files, are there any regular people in the blogosphere that have took it upon themselves to explain or justify their support of this policy? If on balance the only stuff to read on the internet is “the official proposal on ca.gov” and “a library of folks describing The Grapes of Wrath But It’s Math In California” that would be fascinating.
akprasad 3y ago
For those interested, a link to the CA proposal: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  And here [1] is a mathematician commenting on the framework, which careens from misrepresenting citations to math errors in the examples. [1] https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/#h.ns5n6hdqa4x8 https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/#h.ns5n...
  - rahimnathwani 3y ago
    Brian is also the author of the Atlantic article (OP).
- User23 3y ago
  The obfuscation to information ratio in this document blows past 100:1 and probably 1000:1 and maybe more. I don’t imagine calculating Shannon entropy is part of the curriculum.
glyphy177 3y ago
[dead]
kepler1 3y ago
I'm really glad our kids will have high esteem about their inability to do algebra when it comes time to try to re-onshore our semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities.
Kapura 3y ago
Obviously anecdotal, but I feel that my success in fields of programming and computer science are precisely because I had _more_ access to advanced math courses, not _less_. I started doing symbolic algebra in 4th grade, and by the end of high school I was doing multivariable calculus, which continues to be applicable in my field.
sbuttgereit 3y ago
Reminds me when, as I recall, Kansas was going to start teaching creationism/intelligent design as being on par with evolution in terms of credibility. Sure the driving ideologies are very different, but being ideologically driven is the same. At this point I've resigned myself to having to teach my kid (SFUSD) if he going to get any sort of decent education.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
“ The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say.” Yikes. The great state of CA spreading hope.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
An ex-girlfriend passed her Occupational Therapy degree with flying colours, despite her extreme dyslexia. She had scribes and all sorts of help to get her through it. Day One of her cool new job in the UK NHS she was handed a stack of paperwork that she had to fill in. Needless to say she did badly; it took her forever and everything was misspelled. She lasted a month before they let her go, and she was glad to go. Her degree was very vocational - there aren't many opportunities for qualified OTs outside the health industry - and every single OT needs to deal with stacks of paperwork every day. [0] There's no point getting people qualified in an area they can't actually deal with. Making people who don't get on with maths work in an area that requires a decent understanding of maths is just going to make everyone unhappy. I understand the need to even out results and provide opportunity for people who are less STEM-oriented. But (as with the ex-gf) it doesn't work like this. If she had had less help in her degree, she would have wasted less time trying to get into an industry she was fundamentally unsuited for and everyone would have been better off, including her. Providing her with all the help was well-intentioned but ultimately hurt everyone. Except the university, of course. By providing assistance to an extremely dyslexic student they got another win on the board. Another "disadvantaged" student passed. Social goals met, etc. Everyone else suffered, but the uni got a win. Which was the point of the policy. I suspect the same is true here - the change in maths teaching is about making it easier for the schools to claim their wins, not about making it easier for students, or providing a better education. It's all about education metrics, not actual education. [0] Just to close out the story: she ended up getting another degree in Fashion and Textiles which was her real passion and what she was really good at. The OT thing was about making her mum happy; she came from a long line of nurses.
- lapama 3y ago
  A curiosity-driven question: What was the role of the scribes?
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    Basically taking dictation and/or editing her written work for clarity. She couldn't write legible English, all her spelling was a complete mess, but she could speak it fine. Dyslexia is strange.
sharts 3y ago
Math has always been taught badly. Kids ought to have been exposed to Calculus concepts by middle school. Anything short of that is a coin-toss anyway.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
My daughter is 13 and has completed algebra one and is now taking geometry. She will have as much as a year of high school credits completed before she gets there. Covid was actually a tremendous academic breakthrough for her, as it gave her the chance to finally work at an independent pace. Before the teachers thought her disruptive, afterwards they realized it was because she needed more independence and challenge (which I'd been telling them since Kindergarten, but...). I bring this up because that's what I want for every student. Why shouldn't each student receive a kind of individual plan where they can have lessons and classes tailored to their needs? That's the outcome our kids deserve, rather than some reduction to the mean where no one's needs are met.
- gsinclair 3y ago
  > Why shouldn't each student receive a kind of individual plan where they can have lessons and classes tailored to their needs? A nice idea that runs aground in reality, due to typical teenager personality characteristics and the teacher to student ratio that is required to educate a whole generation.
  - poulsbohemian 3y ago
    I certainly understand the reality on the ground, but I also think in many districts, especially with the number of electronic lessons (read: limited actual teacher planning or participation) that we are getting closer to this as a possibility.
oldbbsnickname 3y ago
I'm uncertain about the matters pertaining to this article. As a reference, since the late 70's, California has a history of adopting unproven and untried pedagogical fads for the entire state. California's abandonment of phonics (reading) was the impetus for the creation of the private schools by the name of Challenger. A commercial productization of this superior method had an annoying TV ad that morphed into a meme.
hatsune 3y ago
How communism supposed to work: if we take away the wealth from rich people and spread it evenly, then everyone is equally rich. How it worked in history: if we take away the wealth from rich people and spread it within the ruling classes, then every peasants are equally rich, or poor. If we take the opportunity of education away from every students, then they are equally dumb, which means they are equally smart now!

165 points by fortran77 3y ago

https://archive.ph/OuKIa https://archive.ph/OuKIa

>Sometimes, as I pored over the CMF, I could scarcely believe what I was reading. The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say. >The document tried hard to convince readers that it was based on a serious reading of neuroscience research. The first chapter, for example, cited two articles to claim that “the highest achieving people have more interconnected brains,” implying that this has something to do with learning math. But neither paper says anything about math education. Yikes.

xeonmc 3y ago

I am immediately reminded of the opening of Lockhart's essay "A Mathematician's Lament"[0]: > A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer. > Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school... [0] http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf

supernova87a 3y ago
I think the analogy here is that after graduation, the kids are going to be asked to play a song from sheet music, but the school doesn't want them to be forced to (or feel bad if they have trouble to) learn the terribly constraining rigors of musical notation. Or worse, the teachers don't really understand how to teach the notation themselves. Instead, we want them to invent how to write music "using the innate and self-discovered techniques for music notation that make sense to them as whole individuals".
- bradrn 3y ago
  That’s not actually a great analogy, since many musicians get along perfectly well without being able to read music notation.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Fair few that make living as musicians and not entertainers.
    - defrost 3y ago
      You'd be surprised - for a number of musicians it's not about sight reading notation and playing fom there, it's about developing musical talent and variations and adding in formal notation reading | writing later. I've known a family of three siblings who all played in the state orchestra in their teens and only one was a fluent reader, the other two were extremely good musicians that practised hard and either very slow worked through written music note by note, or, once familiar with a piece looked at a page of music with a helicopter view, not reading" individual notes, but tracking off entire blocks .. like seeing a page of text w/out wearing glasses. From the same music roots, some years later, Tim Minchin- admittedly more an Entertainer than a pure Musician - but none the less someone that made their name and living from performing original and relatively complex music on stage playing piano and singing - also doesn't read music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c

lfmunoz4 3y ago

Hilarious that the people that are the problem think they can solve the problems. But that is impossible since they don't realize they are the problem. Education can easily be fixed by giving students vouchers and let them decide where they get the best education,i.e, probably Khan Academy. The market knows best. Isn't the California cost per student per year is like 20k or something ridiculous where each kid can get a private tutor?

jmye 3y ago
This is nuts. You don’t “easily” fix education by telling over-burdened parents that now they have to both evaluate every school they can find, hope that the voucher covers the education and that the act of providing it doesn’t shut down every neighborhood school, figure out how they’re going to get their child to it, and require them to do that every single year for 14-17 years. Especially given competing education standards, especially given the insanity of trying to find childcare at all. And advocating online-only education is a great way to ensure another generation grows up incapable of interacting with anyone. But this kind of thinking is what happens when we let people who know literally nothing whatsoever about education feel like their opinion matters as much as an expert’s.
- TimTheTinker 3y ago
  Not all parents have to be unburdened enough to motivate public schools to improve. Even if there's only a tiny minority of parents who are able to research and move their kids to a better school, their experience will motivate others, word will spread and the public schools will feel the pressure to improve their environment and outcomes. Even the threat of competition can be motivating. I dare to believe that the majority of parents across the US do care about their kids and are willing to drive their kids to a different school if doing so means they'll achieve significantly better success in life.
  - PhasmaFelis 3y ago
    Quite a lot of parents have to choose between driving their kids to school every day and working to keep their kids fed and sheltered. There's a real problem there, but it's not that they don't care about their kids.

robot_no_421 3y ago

The CMF was designed by people who don't like math and prioritize the "human experience" over physical reality. When you read through the CMF, you begin to see all sorts of hints that their ideology is inspired by Continental philosophies such as Marxism, Existentialism, and all of the other ways of thinking that find "facts" and "reality" offensive. For example, I lost count of how many times they mentioned the word "authenticity" in the CMF. To sum up the whole CMF in my words, it's Critical Theory applied without critical thinking used. Proponents saw that minorities were struggling in math class, so they proposed a solution to handicap math classes. That's literally what CMF is. Proponents would rather see everyone fail than some people succeed. Especially if those some successful people are not minorities. Why we should learn math from people who clearly have no respect for facts and reality in the first place is beyond me. Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of set theory, would have outright rejected most of the philosophy that inspired the CMF.

mrdatawolf 3y ago
You "lost count" of 0? Because I just downloaded every chapter and searched for "authenticity" it occurred 0 times. Edited to add where I got the chapters from: I gather the chapters from another posters link https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
- Zanni 3y ago
  Try again with "authentic." Several matches in the summary alone. Granted, OP should not have put "authenticity" in quotes.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
No need to slander the continental philosophers by associating this with them.
RedCondor 3y ago
[flagged]
Yodel0914 3y ago

ng12 3y ago

[flagged]

yetanotherloser 3y ago
That's not very fair on clowns!
- thghtihadanacct 3y ago
  They have smaller cars!
- huytersd 3y ago
  [flagged]
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> circus run by the clowns The main proponent of California's framework is (a) not a mathematician and (b) likely committing fraud [1]. (When the author of a standard is billing low-income school districts $50k to explain to them her new framework over eight hours, it looks more like corruption than clownishness.) [1] https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is-worse-than-we-thought/ https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...

kazinator 3y ago

Algebra is incredibly important, because it teaches students to manipulate truths using symbols. It is a tool which improves thought.

robot_no_421 3y ago
It's way, way more than just a tool that improves thought. It's a necessary tool to organize your life. How can you even budget or use a credit card responsibly if you don't know algebra? You need algebra to know how long a paycheck can last you. My dad didn't graduate high school and even he knew enough algebra to work out how much money he needed a month for cigarettes (until he eventually quit once he really thought about the numbers).
- kazinator 3y ago
  That's a good question. Historic human societies without algebra somehow had working bean counting. Using a credit card isn't very abstract. You only have to use the concrete specific values in your situation, and not solve some generality. Moreover, I don't think I had to ever square anything, let alone, cube, when reckoning over credit card transactions. Or find the roots of a polynomial, or do anything with polynomials. I'm not saying that the intuitions gained from algebra are not relevant, mind you.
  - robot_no_421 3y ago
    > Using a credit card isn't very abstract. To use a credit card responsibly you need to understand the concept of exponential growth, or you might accidentally turn a manageable $500 debt into a burdensome $5000 debt. Same goes for understanding good debt (mortgages) vs bad debt. It might not be solving a polynomial per se, but I don't see how you get to understanding exponential equations without at least understanding algebra.
    - taeric 3y ago
      There is understanding the concept of exponential growth, and there is being able to manage it. They are two skills. Where management is helped more by having resources than it is by understanding it.

hnburnsy 3y ago

I cant be the only one who thinks it sad that in the US that it takes six school years (K-5) to teach basic atrithmetic, fractions, decimals, and simple 2D geometry. Parents run, dont walk, to Kumon or AOPS or something similar. Our children got 5 on AP Calc in 9th grade. Note dont share with the school you are supplementing, most, not all, teachers resent it and your child will become the teachers assistant.

anonuser123456 3y ago
> and your child will become the teachers assistant. Not a bad thing if that means teaching peers math; you learn a whole lot by teaching material that you otherwise believe you have mastered.
cardiffspaceman 3y ago
Becoming the teacher’s assistant was the best-case outcome for me in high school in the late 1900’s (as we refer to the 70’s now)

Jtsummers 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20231002153731/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/california-math-framework-algebra/675509/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231002153731/https://www.theat...

Kon-Peki 3y ago

The article offers two examples from "Not California" and neither of them are too scary sounding to me. Is there any real danger that this "is about to go national"? I'm out here in middle America with an 8th grader taking geometry and a 6th grader taking pre-algebra. And I certainly haven't heard anything about reducing math opportunities. Quite the opposite, really - they're talking about expanding a program where the school system will pay half the tuition for advanced math classes at the local community college if you end up beyond what they teach at the high school.

matheweis 3y ago
Lengthy discussion from a few months ago: “'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595026
- nitwit005 3y ago
  That's also an article about SF, rather than this "going national".
  - matheweis 3y ago
    I linked to the discussion, the top comment of which is about Seattle. I can vouch from experience that the top comment is accurate.
    - taeric 3y ago
      The top comment there is somewhat vacuous? Rephrased, "if we want the absolute best education, we will either pay for after school efforts, move to a wealthier place, or send to an expensive private school." That... is the same as it has been for a long long time. Would we like better? I mean... yeah. Hard to say no to that one. What is "better," though? So much of education discussion is dominated by talk of things that "used to work," only, they probably didn't actually work that well.

ericmcer 3y ago

Kids who have wealthy/involved parents that push them will always outperform kids who don't. The government can do whatever they want to try to equalize that (except encouraging parents to do better), I just hope they waste as little money as possible and don't interfere with gifted kids. FWIW my 14 year old is doing pre-algebra now, she struggles with math and the way they are teaching it seems insane. Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing. That probably results in relatively equal outcomes but she has no clue how to do things that fall outside of the frameworks they established.

monero-xmr 3y ago
Someday a “reality check” situation happens. Might be writing a cover letter for their first job. Or trying to pass college-level calculus. But eventually, if someone doesn’t actually know how to read, write, or think logically it comes to a breaking point. It doesn’t matter if a high school gave someone all As and a college gave out a degree in Community Building. The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people. After all, if you had to hire someone, are you going to offer a job to someone who writes in broken emoji-gibberish and can’t multiply? One time I got a resume from someone at a fairly well-regarded college for an internship, and the cover letter was a single run-on sentence without any capitalization. How could this person possibly succeed? How much money did they spend getting to this point of obvious failure? Very sad
- Rumudiez 3y ago
  > barring nepotism this is a pretty big issue, though. even here on hn, many folks claim the best or only way to get a good job is by networking
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Getting a first job is very helpful with nepotism. But to sustain being a negative employee - one that brings no value if not hurts the organization - I have only seen with the children / relatives of executives, and in the government.

jrflowers 3y ago

I’ve only seen articles about the idiot bougie hippy math-hating socialistas and their conspiracy to stop children from learning how to do long division. Does anybody have any links to descriptions of the policies and their aims from the people that proposed/implemented them that doesn’t read like a post-apocalyptic retrospective written by the few remaining survivors of San Francisco Politics?

akprasad 3y ago
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745319 > For those interested, a link to the CA proposal: > https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
- jrflowers 3y ago
  Thanks! That’s a lot of docx files, are there any regular people in the blogosphere that have took it upon themselves to explain or justify their support of this policy? If on balance the only stuff to read on the internet is “the official proposal on ca.gov” and “a library of folks describing The Grapes of Wrath But It’s Math In California” that would be fascinating.

akprasad 3y ago

For those interested, a link to the CA proposal: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
And here [1] is a mathematician commenting on the framework, which careens from misrepresenting citations to math errors in the examples. [1] https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/#h.ns5n6hdqa4x8 https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/#h.ns5n...
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  Brian is also the author of the Atlantic article (OP).
User23 3y ago
The obfuscation to information ratio in this document blows past 100:1 and probably 1000:1 and maybe more. I don’t imagine calculating Shannon entropy is part of the curriculum.

glyphy177 3y ago

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kepler1 3y ago

I'm really glad our kids will have high esteem about their inability to do algebra when it comes time to try to re-onshore our semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities.

Kapura 3y ago

Obviously anecdotal, but I feel that my success in fields of programming and computer science are precisely because I had _more_ access to advanced math courses, not _less_. I started doing symbolic algebra in 4th grade, and by the end of high school I was doing multivariable calculus, which continues to be applicable in my field.

sbuttgereit 3y ago

Reminds me when, as I recall, Kansas was going to start teaching creationism/intelligent design as being on par with evolution in terms of credibility. Sure the driving ideologies are very different, but being ideologically driven is the same. At this point I've resigned myself to having to teach my kid (SFUSD) if he going to get any sort of decent education.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

“ The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say.” Yikes. The great state of CA spreading hope.

marcus_holmes 3y ago

An ex-girlfriend passed her Occupational Therapy degree with flying colours, despite her extreme dyslexia. She had scribes and all sorts of help to get her through it. Day One of her cool new job in the UK NHS she was handed a stack of paperwork that she had to fill in. Needless to say she did badly; it took her forever and everything was misspelled. She lasted a month before they let her go, and she was glad to go. Her degree was very vocational - there aren't many opportunities for qualified OTs outside the health industry - and every single OT needs to deal with stacks of paperwork every day. [0] There's no point getting people qualified in an area they can't actually deal with. Making people who don't get on with maths work in an area that requires a decent understanding of maths is just going to make everyone unhappy. I understand the need to even out results and provide opportunity for people who are less STEM-oriented. But (as with the ex-gf) it doesn't work like this. If she had had less help in her degree, she would have wasted less time trying to get into an industry she was fundamentally unsuited for and everyone would have been better off, including her. Providing her with all the help was well-intentioned but ultimately hurt everyone. Except the university, of course. By providing assistance to an extremely dyslexic student they got another win on the board. Another "disadvantaged" student passed. Social goals met, etc. Everyone else suffered, but the uni got a win. Which was the point of the policy. I suspect the same is true here - the change in maths teaching is about making it easier for the schools to claim their wins, not about making it easier for students, or providing a better education. It's all about education metrics, not actual education. [0] Just to close out the story: she ended up getting another degree in Fashion and Textiles which was her real passion and what she was really good at. The OT thing was about making her mum happy; she came from a long line of nurses.

lapama 3y ago
A curiosity-driven question: What was the role of the scribes?
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  Basically taking dictation and/or editing her written work for clarity. She couldn't write legible English, all her spelling was a complete mess, but she could speak it fine. Dyslexia is strange.

sharts 3y ago

Math has always been taught badly. Kids ought to have been exposed to Calculus concepts by middle school. Anything short of that is a coin-toss anyway.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

My daughter is 13 and has completed algebra one and is now taking geometry. She will have as much as a year of high school credits completed before she gets there. Covid was actually a tremendous academic breakthrough for her, as it gave her the chance to finally work at an independent pace. Before the teachers thought her disruptive, afterwards they realized it was because she needed more independence and challenge (which I'd been telling them since Kindergarten, but...). I bring this up because that's what I want for every student. Why shouldn't each student receive a kind of individual plan where they can have lessons and classes tailored to their needs? That's the outcome our kids deserve, rather than some reduction to the mean where no one's needs are met.

gsinclair 3y ago
> Why shouldn't each student receive a kind of individual plan where they can have lessons and classes tailored to their needs? A nice idea that runs aground in reality, due to typical teenager personality characteristics and the teacher to student ratio that is required to educate a whole generation.
- poulsbohemian 3y ago
  I certainly understand the reality on the ground, but I also think in many districts, especially with the number of electronic lessons (read: limited actual teacher planning or participation) that we are getting closer to this as a possibility.

oldbbsnickname 3y ago

I'm uncertain about the matters pertaining to this article. As a reference, since the late 70's, California has a history of adopting unproven and untried pedagogical fads for the entire state. California's abandonment of phonics (reading) was the impetus for the creation of the private schools by the name of Challenger. A commercial productization of this superior method had an annoying TV ad that morphed into a meme.

hatsune 3y ago

How communism supposed to work: if we take away the wealth from rich people and spread it evenly, then everyone is equally rich. How it worked in history: if we take away the wealth from rich people and spread it within the ruling classes, then every peasants are equally rich, or poor. If we take the opportunity of education away from every students, then they are equally dumb, which means they are equally smart now!