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kleiba2 9 hours ago [-]
I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time.
For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!
I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.
jazzpush2 8 hours ago [-]
I had the opposite experience, as it were, teaching in the UC system. The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those post-COVID, were the problem.
Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.
And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students.
Give teachers authority again. It shouldn't be their problem if a student wants to fail the class.
borski 6 hours ago [-]
The problem is that just like students, teachers are not all created equal.
My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years.
I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me.
Activist teachers are also a thing.
thot_experiment 6 hours ago [-]
Crazy that such a load bearing job isn't better funded and more respected. Arguably the most important job in society and the level of respect, pay and to some extent training (at least a lot of places require a masters for what that's worth) is absolutely not commensurate with it's importance.
I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here.
Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.
ethbr1 5 hours ago [-]
Multiple things can be true, because the goal is to optimize in aggregate.
- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)
- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the bad ones impairs and burns out the others
Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle. Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with outcome-less proscriptive policies.
* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?
bsder 5 hours ago [-]
> it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees)
That completely ignores the social and political aspects.
You need to understand that the people who have the authority to do so do not want to document bad teachers, ever. Documenting bad teachers makes political waves and principals and superintendents never want to make waves because that impedes their ability to both do their job as well as get their next job.
Even if a teacher is very bad, they may be well-liked or be an important part of the community. If you attempt to remove that teacher, they may rally support from the community that can be extremely noisy and inconvenient.
porridgeraisin 5 hours ago [-]
Yep, and there is (rightfully) general distrust in giving teachers that much authority over students. Parents already have that authority, which is why a family environment conducive towards education is the most direct way to improve overall student outcomes. Trying to fix it in the school is bordering on pointless. In my country, boarding schools / boarding at another ...quieter... family member's house and attending a school near there was the most common solution among poorer people. Example: more-or-less sane mother sends off kid to uncles house during the school year to go to school and escape drunkard father. The kid visits on some weekends and most holidays.
Hard guidance is needed for kids. Hard guidance requires authority. So either you give teachers that authority which is very hard especially in diverse settings, or you make the family environment give better implicit and explicit guidance.
Now, the government will always attempt to solve it using the tools they have, which is the school, but it is destined to have vanishingly little success if at all.
borski 5 hours ago [-]
Which country? (Curious)
porridgeraisin 5 hours ago [-]
Urban poor of India
zahlman 6 hours ago [-]
> The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those post-COVID, were the problem.
I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
> And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
Case in point. It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.
> I had a student claim...
Again, this is the student expressing the politics in question.
DonutATX 8 hours ago [-]
I suggest you glance at the novel Ananthem by Neal Stephenson. The core plot device is about "universities" stripping all worldly items away from the students, so they are left with simple clothes and chalkboards. Fascinating topic, well executed by Neal. One of my favorite books.
__rito__ 8 hours ago [-]
This is nothing new. It is ancient.
Ancient Hindus divided life into four parts, the earliest was called "Brahmacharya" - core tenet of it was celibacy, but sons of kings and rich merchants lived ascetic lives in the teacher's house who was also an ascetic and a sage - no rich clothes, no luxury foods or comfort.
This was supposed to last till the age of 16, going as high as 21 for some.
The Buddhist monastery-universities of India also kept students under similar conditions - celibate, ascetic, and far from luxury.
__rito__ 5 hours ago [-]
The maths in the book where these students and scholars stayed in Anathem, were directly inspired by matths in India. I visited one last month.
jobs_throwaway 7 hours ago [-]
Anathem* for those like me who googled it
bix6 8 hours ago [-]
This reminded me of Kvothe from Name of the Wind.
mos_basik 8 hours ago [-]
God, what a great book, imo. My favorite Stephenson novel.
__rito__ 5 hours ago [-]
Mine, too. Cryptonomicon was the gateway drug. But I loved 'Anathem'.
xg15 8 hours ago [-]
That sounds like the other extreme.
bearjaws 8 hours ago [-]
I'm always torn on this, I learned a lot of algebra, stats and calc from actually writing TI-Basic programs in my calculator. I was deeply interested in programming since the age of 11, so it felt very natural to translate the formulas and concepts to code.
Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.
mlsu 9 hours ago [-]
It’s definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast majority of education. And, it’s a purely selfish thing by tech companies to insert themselves into education.
A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
account42 8 hours ago [-]
Now that's just needlessly extreme in the other direction. Students will be seeing devices much earlier than that just because their peers will use them so it makes sense to educate them on their proper use and dangers much earlier than college. It just doesn't make sense to cram them into every subject because not using one is outdated.
skydhash 8 hours ago [-]
Students also see power drills and cars, and schools don’t use them as part of the curriculum. I have a lot of computing device and still believes in real books and pen or paper for learning anything. The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials. Even those TI calculators can be overkill. I’ve only used one in college, and it was for a few exams about polar coordinates and transmission lines, IIRC. For everything else, the simpler scientific calculators were enough. Multiplying matrices and graphing functions doesn’t take that much time at high school and undergraduate level.
VortexLain 8 hours ago [-]
> The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps in retention of the materials.
Although this is the case for many people, I personally struggle to process information and write it on paper at the same time. Thus, I strongly prefer digital note-taking and use Obsidian or just vim instead of paper.
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not trying to be offensive, but I don't see how typing it into a computer is significantly different than writing it on paper.
Is there something stopping you, or anyone from writing it down and taking notes in class and then reviewing it later as needed? Not just process it in lecture time, but regurgitate it to physical form for later review.
Also, I would definitely constrain this into educational groups, where K-6 are much different from college (post mandatory) education.
dmbche 6 hours ago [-]
If I may, people write (with pens) slower than than can speak, and thus to take good notes you need to synthesize the material you are being explained. You need to understand what you're writing.
Many people can type as fast/faster than they talk, and when typing it is possible to try and type verbatim what is being said. In this case, there is no understanding. (If you've ever taken a class not all that is said is pertinent and not all that is pertinent is said)
I personally don't revisit my written notes their purpose is uniquely for me to remember/understand what I've written.
mos_basik 6 hours ago [-]
>I don't see how typing it into a computer is significantly different...
I haven't read up on it much myself, but any discussion along the lines of this subthread re: "handwriting > typing" is probably discussing research that's starting to be talked about more and more in the past 5 years or so (maybe the pandemic and online learning accelerated interest?)
here's a 5m clip of a neuroscientist presenting to the US Senate this year on correlation between dropping academic performance and use of tech in classrooms in many countries over many years, and asking for more research into mechanisms and causation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
and here's a paper from a couple years ago describing differences in observed brain activity between handwriting and typewriting and some discussion of how this could be a mechanism of the kind the video was talking about https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
>Is there something stopping you from...
No, but I feel like it's not hard to argue that default are important.
smcg 8 hours ago [-]
shop class and drivers ed used to be offered by schools...
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
But you didn't include them in your English or Math classes. They were optional courses, and for older students, not K-6.
7 hours ago [-]
bix6 8 hours ago [-]
I learned typing in 3rd grade iirc. That seems reasonable for a fundamental skill.
doubled112 8 hours ago [-]
My kids are in grade 3 and 6 and nobody ever taught them to type. They just handed them a Chromebook and assumed they know what they're doing.
It is a skill, but everybody seems to think it will just happen on its own.
toast0 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is everyone knows you learn to type when you get on IRC, but you can't put elementary school kids on IRC.
doubled112 7 hours ago [-]
Why not? I was in elementary school on IRC. ASL ;-) ?
toast0 6 hours ago [-]
I'm sure you turned out fine. But the school district can't put a bunch of kids on IRC, it'll look bad.
breppp 6 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't put any kids through some of the stuff I've seen on IRC
6 hours ago [-]
mftrhu 8 hours ago [-]
You don't necessarily need a computer for that. They built more than a billion typewriters, IIRC.
bix6 6 hours ago [-]
Sure let’s buy a bunch of typewriters instead of multi purpose computers
ethbr1 5 hours ago [-]
When's the last time you played DOOM on a typewriter?
swiftcoder 8 hours ago [-]
> A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand? Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free essay writing...
ekidd 8 hours ago [-]
As someone who hates handwriting in bluebooks, and who types constantly, yes: I think we should bring back in-class writing by hand, we should lock up cellphones for the school day, and we should proctor exams. If you're not doing this, your students will be stuck to a screen all day, pay no attention to class, and use ChatGPT under the desk to cheat.
ethbr1 5 hours ago [-]
This is literally what most grade level school systems are doing, with good results.
The teenage brain is not prepared for addiction of digital magnitude.
delta_p_delta_x 8 hours ago [-]
> making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand
You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).
In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.
curt15 5 hours ago [-]
In the age of chatbots for outsourcing thinking at one's fingertips, absolutely!
The invasion of tech into the classroom has not produced more capable graduates. There's a lot of empirical evidence to the contrary.
The mind is a muscle, and developing that muscle is the education system's main purpose.
mlsu 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, I really am. For the purpose of learning, internalizing and organizing information, hand writing is superior to typing in every case. It's physiological.
solumunus 59 minutes ago [-]
Genuinely, why not? Seems obvious to me that this would produce better outcomes.
gizmo686 7 hours ago [-]
Back when I was in middle school, we had "digital typewriters" that worked fine, and was brought out far more often than the laptop cart or computer lab.
8 hours ago [-]
justsomehnguy 2 hours ago [-]
This is how you get people who can't comperhend why they can't open Thesis.LNK from a thumbdrive.
nradov 8 hours ago [-]
You've got to be kidding. Writing longhand was always a miserable experience for me no matter what technique or pen I used. Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.
buellerbueller 8 hours ago [-]
>Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.
I am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with infinite
pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am sure
with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you
want? What am I missing?
ncr100 8 hours ago [-]
Human biology likely makes it harder to write on a glass screen with a perceptible Gap in time, latency between where the pen is and where the pixels appear as well as the physical colocation Of the pencil tip and the written line differs more so on a tablet screen than on direct application of matter to paper.
This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not helpful!
Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system nearly entirely for part of the
handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on.
Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend to flicker. This is more of a strain.
Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.
stonogo 8 hours ago [-]
That isn't a matter of human biology. You learned to expect a specific experience when you took pencil to paper at a young age. Other people can learn to expect different experiences. Your acquired habits are not a genetic imperative. All of this post seems like ex post facto justifications for an implicit claim that the tech you grew up with is natural and good and the tech that came later is somehow inimical to life.
snazz 8 hours ago [-]
No matter how you restrict it with MDM profiles, it’s distracting compared to pencil/paper.
layer8 8 hours ago [-]
Can’t it run restricted to a single application in kiosk mode? Unless the application itself provides distraction, what would be distracting?
sparqlittlestar 8 hours ago [-]
The very light it emits, the liquid glass lensing animations, etc
econ 8 hours ago [-]
I recall some research in the TV age. They observed, if the subject is looking into a light source, (be it a camp fire, a screen or a bulb) they go into a kind of sleepwalking mode. They also mentioned the phenomenon was already well documented by hypnotists.
In the early internet days I couldn't help but notice people who read zero books now spend the whole day reading.
I think it means the tool is used the wrong way? Interactive should be e-paper or real paper. Dull cramming or basic reading skills would be a good fit for glowing displays.
Perhaps we even need a device that can do both.
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
You also don't get the physicality as part of recall with eInk over real books. When reading technical books, as an example, I often would look back when going to review something based on where it was physically in the book... I completely lose that with ebooks.. I still mostly use ebooks and online docs these days all the same because moving hundreds of pounds of books when you move sucks.
layer8 8 hours ago [-]
At least with OLED, the light output can be auto-adjusted to match the reflecting light of the environment. This can be quite convincing, looking like a purely reflective surface. And a dedicated app doesn’t need to use any distracting animations or highlights.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
Why do we even want to pay $500 per device for something that is easily replicated by a $1 paper notebook? The only people that benefit from forcing classrooms to adopt these devices is big tech relying on corporate welfare to juice their books.
shakna 8 hours ago [-]
Blue light changes the way you think. Makes it easier to focus on the thing emitting the light, than the rest of the room. Just having a screen, with perfectly locked down control, can distract.
nsxwolf 8 hours ago [-]
It's just not as good as a notebook. I've tried to make it as good. It sleeps, there's too much fumbling around with it to get to what you want. You lose the muscle memory of where something is in the book, you can't quickly flip to anything. You notice you used to do certain things, like flip to two different pages at once. Everything is just immediate and tactile.
nathan_compton 8 hours ago [-]
I friend of mine once made an observation that really stuck with me: a kindle is not a book: it is simultaneously all books at once. If you lock it to a single book, its still all books at once, but with a lock on all the others. Also, why not use paper?
layer8 8 hours ago [-]
I’m not an advocate of using tablets in class, I was just curious where the parent is seeing unavoidable distractions, compared to traditional tools like for example textbooks and calculators.
8 hours ago [-]
bigstrat2003 8 hours ago [-]
The point is that it's foolish to require inserting an iPad into the classroom purely for the sake of using an iPad. The goal (or proposed benefit) should be identified first, and then decide what the best tools to achieve that are.
kleiba2 9 hours ago [-]
That's being done, but it would not be sufficient to satisfy the powers that be.
irishcoffee 9 hours ago [-]
You can just use a pencil and paper, and it's a lot cheaper?
ptek 9 hours ago [-]
Yes it is cheaper and who will steal or rob a student of pencil and paper compared to a iPad also pencil and paper doesn’t require age verification.
throwway120385 8 hours ago [-]
It's also probably good to make sure students know how to figure using a pencil and paper because pulling a calculator out on a job site is pretty impractical.
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
Not sure I agree with that last point... you probably have one in your pocket already (phone app). Though I'm strongly against electronic devices as core education materials in K-6 especially.
nathan_compton 8 hours ago [-]
For awhile I tried all sorts of digital notetaking devices. Eventually I realized that pen + paper notebook was vastly superior to all of them for retention, ease of use, and cost. I am sure that, for some people, the calculation is different (for example, I have a pretty good memory and thus writing something down once is sufficient for me to recall it later) but for me, the idea of a digital letter pad eventually seemed utterly wasteful and absurd to me.
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
Not just for math, but the shift to electronics based learning in language skills is way behind classic approaches from a century or more ago. A lot of common core reasoning is based at a level most younger children cannot yet grasp, and it's no surprise they fail to adopt at sufficient levels in reality. Then schools systems circle the wagons to cover up their own failures.
mtrifonov 7 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't even say it's the devices, exactly. The way I see it, this is all downstream of kids spending more time online than in real life (because all THEIR friends are online, rather than in real life). Device time-out doesn't exactly remediate that structural issue. And the whole testing debate kind of sails right past it.
My take is that the test won't make kids better at math. At best, it'll drift towards investment in reward-hacking the exam (like it always was).
I think it was idiotic to make it optional to begin with. The stats they're talking about, though, can't be a primarily admissions-signal problem. Whatever they're using these days in lieu of exams are imperfect proxies for math skill, sure, but it's not like they're admitting kids off their CoD K:D. Kids taking APs and stacking extracurriculars are generally motivated. So, if even the motivated ones show up unable to do middle school math, the cause is more systemic than "we stopped testing."
My vote: TikTok brain rot. I build LLM products and I see how the parasocial pull shows up even when the products have nothing to do with companionship. I watched one user obsessively spin up 44 separate chats around a K-Pop vampire character over a week. The product is NOT designed for that. The pull toward frictionless digital reward is just that strong, and that's what kids' attention is up against now. Math is the most effortful, least immediately rewarding thing they do. Doesn't stand a chance against an infinite feed, and I guess infinite vampires either.
Which is why the ask from the faculty is kind of arrogant. The article, at least, doesn't even float a hypothesis for WHY math skills collapsed, simply assuming standardized testing fixes it. I wholly believe in standardized testing — but it measures the problem, it doesn't fix it.
koolba 8 hours ago [-]
They got rid of paper because teachers are lazy and do not want to spend time grading things by hand.
I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.
The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”.
It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.
sonofhans 7 hours ago [-]
> teachers are lazy
Teachers don’t make those decisions, school boards do. School boards are elected or appointed political entities.
Teachers are humans just like you, and like or dislike work for the same reasons you do, including your unoriginal display of classic American anti-intellectualism.
koolba 6 hours ago [-]
School boards to do not set curriculum or methods of instruction. At best they hire and fire the administration team. But even those positions usually have tenure.
So even a willing school board is unable to do more than rubber stamp the status quo.
watwut 7 hours ago [-]
> I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.
All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw and calculate on paper and submit the result.
koolba 6 hours ago [-]
Yes you’re allowed paper. But it’s strictly worse than pure paper as the student is forced to copy the entire problem, possibly with errors.
It’s much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter (replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a geometry problem.
nathan_compton 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone with a lazy disposition would get into teaching. There are so many other jobs that pay better and involve less work.
make3 8 hours ago [-]
blackboards in uni where you can't do anything but just rewrite everything the prof is writing is a nightmarish waste of time, especially for anyone with any kind of attention difficulties
please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
SoftTalker 8 hours ago [-]
If you have attention difficulties perhaps uni isn't the place for you.
mos_basik 6 hours ago [-]
As someone with attention difficulties who eventually decided to leave uni and pursue another path:
I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly) figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your betters."
And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate, politics, war, and future generations)
My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those of mine (USA).
kleiba2 7 hours ago [-]
Uni and high-school are not the same.
moi2388 6 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but I’m calling absolute bullshit. Blackboards are fine for teaching maths according to mathematicians. For students, just look at stuff like 3blue1brown and summer of math and how many people finally get it because of animations and playing with the maths instead of some old dude drawing a formula on a blackboard.
This is like the pi vs tau debate.
I seriously do not understand why maths teachers are so unable to relate to their non-mathematically inclined students
john_strinlai 9 hours ago [-]
>“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.
i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math.
i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into my class without a passing-grade grasp of the prerequisites, i will point them in the right direction to get caught up, but i am not spending any class time on it. its not fair to the other students.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.
AlanYx 9 hours ago [-]
That's presumably why so many professors are banding together for this letter. 600 professors is a fairly significant chunk of the faculty.
john_strinlai 9 hours ago [-]
professors who don't/can't cover their curriculum also get in trouble. if i had to dedicate half of my classes to reteaching things the students are required to know before taking my class, i would not cover what i am supposed to, which then has a knock-on effect to the classes that my class is a prereq for.
whenever i have had a larger-than-normal percent of my students failing, i am provided an opportunity to explain it.
btilly 9 hours ago [-]
When we are put into a catch-22 situation, we should not expect sympathy from the ones who created the catch-22 situation.
SpicyLemonZest 9 hours ago [-]
The full letter (https://ucstudentsuccess.org/) gestures towards "growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor". The strong implication seems to be that some administrators have told some faculty that the failure rates you'd get from holding the line are unacceptable. Presumably they don't want to frame this issue as a faculty vs. administration thing, which makes sense to me.
1970-01-01 9 hours ago [-]
That is the entire problem in a nutshell. You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you.
everdrive 9 hours ago [-]
In part this is a consequence of blank slate ideology, which presupposes that all students are equally capable of identical outcomes and that individual student failures are always / usually systemic failures in disguise.
This is a silly perspective, but the blank slate folks really got their tendrils in just about anywhere. In reality, some people are simply bad at math. More education will help, but they will always be disadvantaged compared to people who are more naturally predisposed. (note, I'm quite bad at math myself)
It may seem altruistic to err on the side of caution here and try to catch the kids that fall through the gaps, (again, assuming that they are falling through the gaps due to systemic failures) but as the article points out, there is a limit to this approach; eventually it brings the talented students down and degrades the program.
scarmig 9 hours ago [-]
That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.
The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
But universities need the tuition to support ever more bloated administrative hierarchies and salaries. Most are in a state of abject panic because international graduate enrollments (a cash cow) are way down in the past couple of years. Staff layoffs are starting to happen, which were previously almost unheard of.
throw9494krrj 9 hours ago [-]
No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects!
Universities are business as any other!
scarmig 8 hours ago [-]
That would be a reform I'd get behind.
At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.
account42 8 hours ago [-]
At that point you don't have a loan, you have a subsidy. That's OK though, many countries do have that.
john_strinlai 9 hours ago [-]
>You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year
this seems absurdly low, from my experience. but i have only taught in one school, so maybe we're the outlier? i would say one to two failing students per course is the baseline, not the cap.
can you share where you are getting this number from? is that the guideline where you teach?
It's a complete national mess. You don't know what will happen in your school until you do it. Half of the country hates hard teachers, the other half loves them.
john_strinlai 8 hours ago [-]
>Just use AI:
your article appears to be about high school?
1 to 2 failing students per course is expected (from lived experience, not ai)
1970-01-01 7 hours ago [-]
HS and undergrad students have overlapping math levels: Algebra, Pre-calc, and Calc.
john_strinlai 7 hours ago [-]
we're talking about this claim you made: "You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year"
which you appear to be basing on a high school article your ai supplied you, which is irrelevant to how many students a post-secondary institution can fail per semester.
it does not claim that professors are only allowed to fail 1 to 2 students in a year.
1970-01-01 7 hours ago [-]
Are you disputing that limit of 1-2 students is failing factcheck, or that there is no formal established quota limit? No pressure for teachers to pass more?
friend, you can just say "oops, my article was about high school, my bad". no need to start being a dick.
>Are you disputing [...]
i am disputing your claim: "You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you" (as i have reiterated 3 times now).
you have now morphed it into a completely different claim, which appears to be something along the lines of "you should not fail more than 30% of your class". which, for most of my classes, would be approaching 24 students i could fail. 12x your initial claim!
hack1312 8 hours ago [-]
Deliciously ironic that your “just use AI” reply cites a story that isn’t related.
Ekaros 9 hours ago [-]
Also these are most likely the first classes. You can not block most of your entering cohort. Or even any way significant part. At least in the system these professors exist in. In some other systems like say German where getting in easy and getting rid of some is normal would be different.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
This shouldn't be a hard problem to solve. At the state university I'm most familiar with, every incoming Freshman takes a math assessment test. If they don't pass it, they have to take remedial coursework (which does not count towards their degree requirements).
And yes, every student takes it, even the ones with high school AP math and high SAT math scores. The only exception might be if they have already completed and passed actual accredited university math courses for credit.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
Even my local community college does it this way, I believe for both math and English.
zdragnar 8 hours ago [-]
Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.
SpicyLemonZest 8 hours ago [-]
The processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of what's happening at their campus (https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...): their remedial math placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering grade 1-8 math which had not previously been needed.
SoftTalker 8 hours ago [-]
> 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025
Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from 2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years behind in everything when they got to college.
zdragnar 4 hours ago [-]
A senior in highschool two or three years behind should not need extra-remedial classes for grades 1-8 maths during their first year at college, and especially not 600+ of them at once.
firesteelrain 7 hours ago [-]
The system is working as designed. If they don’t want to provide remedial then they need some pre-admission test to weed them out. The students can try again later after maturing more or taking community college classes.
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
Right? That's what the source article is about, the UC faculty would like to resume using the SAT and ACT as pre-admissions tests.
firesteelrain 5 hours ago [-]
I am more saying that isn’t enough. You can get a sufficient SAT/ACT score and still need remedial training
vkou 8 hours ago [-]
Is there a shortage of students who have a grasp of elementary school math, who apply to UC?
Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12?
Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in California.
SpicyLemonZest 8 hours ago [-]
You're misunderstanding the problem. It's not that the UCs are admitting a bunch of special exceptions who failed out of high school math; these are people who got decent grades and are supposed to know the material.
ihsw 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
declan_roberts 9 hours ago [-]
The types of students who are entering college needing dramatic remedial math are not the ones you want to fail in large numbers.
radiator 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds somewhat defeatist. Besides, the teacher nevers wants to fail anyone. Teachers would be happy if all students performed well.
SoftTalker 8 hours ago [-]
If I may assume, I think GP is alluding to the likelihood that such students are going to be minorities from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. If they are failing in large numbers, that will open the door to claims of systemic discrimination.
swiftcoder 8 hours ago [-]
This is why universities have offered what amount to remedial math classes for donkey's years. Even in the early 2000's, if you showed up to Calculus I without sufficient preparation, you'd find yourself bounced to Pre-Calculus by the end of the week.
thewebguyd 8 hours ago [-]
In 2005 I had to take placement tests before I could even enroll in my classes, so someone who wasn't actually ready for Calculus wouldn't get to enroll in it if they didn't pass the placement tests.
It was all part of the admissions process.
7 hours ago [-]
kzz102 8 hours ago [-]
Tenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is still very important in universities. This is not generally true for non-tenured and adjunct professors, but for a different reason -- their job review rely on a large part on student feedback forms, and failing students are not happy students.
The idea that if only all professors stood their ground then somehow students will be motivated to study doesn't pan out in practice, though. There is already a significant number of students who are perpetually struggling. They are missing basic prerequisites, and instead of catching up on them, they repeated try and fail at learning the same materials, passing only when they got a lenient instructor. The problem compounds because failing brings helplessness and exacerbates their mental issues, which brings more failing. The university cannot sit on their high ground and watch these students struggle, especially if their number reaches a critical mass.
vkou 8 hours ago [-]
The universities can just fail them out and admit people who barely missed the admission bar in their place. Many of them will make it.
What's wrong with making universities easier to get into, but harder to stay in?
jobs_throwaway 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of hurt feelings. Which to be clear is productive. We treat university students with kid gloves far too much
rTX5CMRXIfFG 7 hours ago [-]
Costs the failing students money and mental health issues, which are bad, if you care about those things
ModernMech 2 hours ago [-]
I was hired in my current role to replace one such professor who was fired because he insisted on giving a majority of his class failing grades. And honestly, it was the right call; he was being kind of unprofessional about it. He was teaching a very difficult subject -- C++ -- as an expert, and then getting mad that people weren't also experts at C++ within 3 months. So I agree that professors should have more control and authority over their classes, but also at the same time those professors who fail large swathes of their classes can be really unpleasant.
dmoy 9 hours ago [-]
This sounds like the real underlying problem then
Shank 9 hours ago [-]
It's kind of like how if you owe the bank $1000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $100M, they have a problem. You just can't reasonably ignore a huge portion of the class as a professor without a serious amount of documentation, and proof that you've tried to escalate and solve the issue. Ultimately, people are paying for these courses, and it's probably better to teach something rather than nothing.
9dev 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds like people are paying for these courses is part of the actual problem, then? Students should not have any kind of entitlement whatsoever to pass classes other than merit.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
Well... Maybe. From a customer point of view, they are paying for education. If they aren't getting education that's a problem.
From a future employer point of view, they are looking for credentials. But the future employer isn't paying for it.
Do we just admit that the purpose of school is to provide credentials, and that's what the students are actually paying for?
9dev 8 hours ago [-]
Framing it as a transaction is part of the problem IMHO. We have a collective interest that the majority of the population gets the best education possible. Turning universities into credential stores leads to all the negative side effects we're dealing with - pay to play schemes, dubious credential mills, rich families bribing universities, and so on.
lokar 9 hours ago [-]
They should not admit students who have little chance of success
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, but these students are likely two groups; those who are never going to be good at math, and those who were never really taught math.
The latter may need an opportunity to succeed.
lokar 8 hours ago [-]
I agree, but they should be admitted into some special program. Like, turn up in July for 3 months of catch-up instruction 4 hrs a day.
streptomycin 49 minutes ago [-]
That's exactly what they did at my college (non-California state school) 20 years ago. Special program for students from poor high schools who otherwise wouldn't be admitted, where they came in the summer before freshman year and had to pass some prep classes first. IDK what the actual long term results were, but seems like a better idea than nothing.
eudamoniac 1 hours ago [-]
If you were never taught math, that sucks, but you shouldn't be admitted to a university. That's just not what needs to be happening. Go catch up on math at your own and reapply when ready.
account42 8 hours ago [-]
At the university level it should be up to the student to ensure that they learn what they need.
bmn__ 7 hours ago [-]
Under the circumstance that the primary and secondary education levels have failed to adequately prepare a student for tertiary level, I think your idea would be unfair.
eudamoniac 1 hours ago [-]
The university teaches what it teaches; it exists as a place of higher learning. If the student is unprepared for that, they are unprepared to attend. It's not university's job to fix shitty high schools' teachings and redo lower learning. Go get a highschool tutor if you need that.
smcg 7 hours ago [-]
It's difficult to assess which students have a chance of success without standardized testing.
"In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0".
Math 2 is the remedial elementary and middle school math course at UC SD. Lack of standardized testing plus grade inflation contributes to this outcome.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
There are several interrelated problems.
conartist6 9 hours ago [-]
A particular historical virus comes to mind
ginko 7 hours ago [-]
When I studied in Austria everyone with a high school diploma would be eligible to matriculate at Vienna University of Technology[1], but then the first semester courses would have a bunch of "knock-out" exams that would have a large chunk of first semester students fail and eventually drop out.
IMO this is "fairer" but of course it means you might lose a semester. Helps that there's barely any tuition fees.
[1] Even then (~2005) that wasn't the case for all universities though. Medical university already had entrance exams, mainly due to the high number of German students trying to enroll.
jancsika 8 hours ago [-]
> i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math.
"gaps" implies a critical mass of students who require middle-school math reteaching.
> i teach.
If you've taught for a non-trivial amount of time, you did one of the following with that class:
* graded on a curve so you don't fail half the class
* failed half the class, and got suspended (pours one out for my compsci professor in college who did that!)
Which was it?
pas 1 hours ago [-]
(at least in Budapest, many moons ago) highly technical programs had some really infamous classes. but people had a lot of chances to pass the exams. each semester about 3. and it was possible to take the class 3 times (the 3rd required a permission, but it was formality, it was granted almost to everyone)
so in the end if someone was unprepared, they had at least a year to get their shit together. (but the exams rarely required real maths mastery, mostly rote memorization of proofs and a few typical problem types with really mechanical solutions.)
it's so strange to read about a professor getting suspended for being too strict.
john_strinlai 8 hours ago [-]
>If you've taught for a non-trivial amount of time,
i have
>you did one of the following with that class: [...] Which was it?
these are not the only two options.
mos_basik 5 hours ago [-]
I'm genuinely interested in how you approached that kind of situation, then. (And I'm not the commenter who presented what you're saying was a false dilemma)
adrr 8 hours ago [-]
They could just accept the kids who are at or above grade level. There are way more kids at or above grade level who graduate from California high school like my nephew who took AP calc and missed only question on the math of his SAT. He couldn't get into any UC schools and instead had to leave the state for college.
We could set up a standardized test for the UC schools ensure that the students being accepted have minimum baseline normalized across all applicants. We could call it scholastic aptitude test or the American College Test.
fabian2k 9 hours ago [-]
It's a different country and a different time, but when I studied (a natural science) there were dedicated courses at the start for refreshing high school math. Those were optional, and covered relatively simple topics.
There was also a real math lecture that went into topics above high school math, but also contained some repetition. All other courses mostly relied on what was contained there.
So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you don't have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to cover the stuff usually needed.
john_strinlai 9 hours ago [-]
>So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you don't have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to cover the stuff usually needed.
we do! those are dedicated courses, where it is expected that the students are taking it to catch up (i.e. no prereq)
students can also drop a course within the first 4 weeks for no penalty, and retake it in a later semester if they figure out they they are behind and would not perform well.
malshe 9 hours ago [-]
I agree with you and think this claim needs a lot more evidence. In my university we have been providing remedial math classes for freshman students for a long time. They must pass these before taking regular classes that have math prerequisites.
colechristensen 8 hours ago [-]
I had to take a math placement test which was exactly "do you need to take remedial math?" in test form, passing the test was a prereq for a large swath of math/science/engineering classes
malshe 8 hours ago [-]
Makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine giving up significant chunk of my regular teaching for offering remedial math!
9 hours ago [-]
simonw 9 hours ago [-]
Have you observed a reduction in the number of students who match those pre-requisites over time?
john_strinlai 9 hours ago [-]
i have not tracked it, so this isn't based in data. but, no, i have not noticed any major trends.
i dont have any 1st-year courses though, which is where a lot of students are filtered out (for various reasons), so im not in the best position to answer that question.
spiralcoaster 7 hours ago [-]
Now imagine a significant portion of your students are missing the prerequisites.
Do you really think these professors are up in arms about a few students who don't have the prereqs? It obviously must be a large enough proportion to worry about.
It's no longer "if a student somehow makes it into my class", it's "many students are currently making it into my class"
rTX5CMRXIfFG 8 hours ago [-]
What isn’t fair is for schools to take students’ matriculation and set them up for years of debt, apparently without any intention of educating them properly as per your comment. Better for schools to just screen based on standardized test scores
john_strinlai 8 hours ago [-]
>without any intention of educating them properly as per your comment.
my comment in no way implies that we have don't have an intention of educating our students properly
rTX5CMRXIfFG 7 hours ago [-]
I know, but your comment also in no way implies that you are taking into account the bigger picture here, where the criticism is directed at the admissions process, and wherein universities are honestly at fault.
If university-level classes have pre-requisites that should be taught in high school, then universities should screen for that and disqualify students who do not have the required competency. They should not be taking the students' money, admit them in the institution, and then let them enroll in classes that they are not prepared to succeed in. That's outright extortion. Many of those students have to take on debt to pay for their education, and besides the financial cost, it's a waste of time, and their failures would be mentally crushing and have lifelong repercussions.
I sympathize with educators in that they cannot slow the whole class down, but that's the point: universities shouldn't be putting educators in a position to compromise the teaching. Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences. For the student, that requires a focused (and in many cases, guided) study of those subject areas and before university, without the stress of catching up to university-level courses that are already being taken at the same time.
john_strinlai 7 hours ago [-]
>I know
then why did you accuse me of not intending to educate my students?
>Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences.
you havent bothered to ask what "pointing in the right direction" entails, and are making (wrong) assumptions.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 6 hours ago [-]
You’re making this about yourself
john_strinlai 6 hours ago [-]
yes, obviously, because you called me out specifically. and you are using what i said, without necessary context, and extrapolating it generally to "educators". i'm not cool with either.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 6 hours ago [-]
First comment is explicitly directed at schools, and I expressed approval of the petitioning educators
Feel free to take further offense, but I’m not expecting any substantial replies
delusional 9 hours ago [-]
Because the like teaching and believe in giving their students/customers the best possible education?
I get not wanting to waste the time of the better students, but if too many student are behind, whose time are you really wasting?
thinkingtoilet 8 hours ago [-]
But it goes both ways. If a student doesn't have the prerequisite knowledge for a class it is absolutely unfair and decidedly not the best possible education to slow the class down for students who are prepared. If a class requires X, and you don't have X, that's a you problem, not a university/teacher problem.
delusional 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's helpful to be that rigid about it. Both the teacher and the student has an interest in the student learning something. Sometimes we have to give each other a bit of leeway to get to the destination.
There's a whole "philosophy of education" discussion I'd like to avoid, but the goal of education isn't really to educate one person to their maximum potential, but rather to educate as many people as well as possible. The individual should sacrifice for the collective.
Trying to make it a straight forward linear dependency chain displays a sort of autistic adherence to rigid hierarchy that's really common in software people, but really uncommon everywhere else.
thinkingtoilet 3 hours ago [-]
This isn't high school. This is a college, specifically for STEM majors. At what point does this not apply? Can someone take a high level Spanish course without having spoken a word of Spanish and expect the teacher to cater to them? If not, why not?
hedora 9 hours ago [-]
This doesn't surprise me at all. From what I can tell, California's education system has moved from "equality" (which I would define as providing similar opportunities to all the kids) to focusing on "equity" (which I think they define as dictating the same outcome for all kids).
To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids, so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or something after I finish my coffee.
That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being implemented.
Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets supplemented.
Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.
Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).
julianeon 8 hours ago [-]
> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.
The system gets gamified and the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically, every student who can't pay for tutoring or full-time care, which is a very technical form of "excellence".
Bratmon 8 hours ago [-]
I think the answer to this is that schooling/care for people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal school should be a totally different budget with different success criteria than the budget for normal school.
There are two different and contradictory goals here- the current dynamic where every gain for one is a loss for the other creates a ton of bad outcomes across the board.
mswphd 7 hours ago [-]
"people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal school" is not a clearly divisible population from the regular student population though. Many (but not all) districts deal with disabilities via IEPs, or Individual Education Plans. They are tailored to particular students, and can be fairly common. They make things less of a clear binary than 2 separate school systems would really need.
It's worse because there's been a trend among elite districts to push students to (fraudulently) get a diagnosed disability, so that they can get accommodations on tests and raise their chances to be admitted to an elite university. So, a proposal to partition the school system into a lesser system for students with disabilities would face pushback by the aforementioned elite district parents. While they are participating in a fraud (and so it would perhaps be morally fine for them to face repercussions for it), I imagine it would make implementing any such plan very difficult.
ajsnigrutin 7 hours ago [-]
Yep, the abuse is happening over here in slovenia too, you get some diagnosis for the kid, you get 50% more test-taking time, extra help in school, extra accomodations for other stuff, and in the end, your grade is worth the same (for grade averages and high school or college acceptance) as someone elses who finished in regular amount of time. No remarks anywhere saying "while student A and B have the same point average, student B had 50% more time on the test".
So yeah, I kinda understand why parents get the diagnoses for their kids, but the system is unfair.
smileson2 7 hours ago [-]
In my experience ( to be fair which was a while ago ) things like that just end up making things worse trapping people and leading to a lot of lashing out
Honestly education really feels overthought and micromanaged already the whole setup is unhealthy
8 hours ago [-]
HelloNurse 8 hours ago [-]
You are assuming that there should be distinct "schooling/care for people with disabilities" and "normal school", rather than integration, and further assuming that public schools should be competing with each other to defend and increase their budget, rather than cooperating.
What sad place do you come from?
tash9 6 hours ago [-]
As a parent of a kid that has special needs (at a minor level), there really is a separate set of skills needed to teach to these kids, as well as needing a better student teacher ratio. It made a huge difference for my kid.
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
I just don't see how it's possible to construct a classroom environment that can simultaneously serve an 8th grader who's ready to start learning algebra and an 8th grader with dyscalculia who struggles with basic arithmetic. (I'd be sympathetic to "let's try our best", except that people often propose to try our best by declaring that first kid isn't actually ready.)
MattGrommes 2 hours ago [-]
I've always thought we should get rid of grades altogether. There should be curricula that builds upward but if a kid masters 4th grade math, they should move on up right then, not wait for half a year to join 5th grade or have to retake 4th grade. Obviously there are operational challenges with this but it's got to be better than having bored advanced kids, the shame of being "left behind", etc. The kid with dyscalculia should be able to move at their own pace.
actionfromafar 7 hours ago [-]
But maybe they don't need to attend completely different schools, either.
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
I agree, but I don't think that's what's being proposed. Many special ed programs today work on that principle: try to mainstream everyone in the classes they can be, run separate classes for the cases where that won't work, and everyone kinda understands that the participants in special ed aren't expected to be as successful in their educational pursuits.
Bratmon 7 hours ago [-]
> What sad place do you come from?
The American public education system
bmn__ 7 hours ago [-]
> What sad place do you come from?
Do you have an actual argument? Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.
Reality check: in most countries, if you made a public demand of effectively depriving the disabled of the proper care they want and deserve, they would regard you as an inhumane monster, and the education ministry would refer you to state prosecution for violating the constitution.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
> Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.
Regrettably. A place where money rules and brains die
sieabahlpark 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
Do you want to get rid of "advanced" course options and push every student into the same bucket?
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
I'd be fine with that. It would provide an incentive to care about the bottom 75th percentile along with the spoiled rich kids
ofjcihen 6 hours ago [-]
Just FYI I was dirt poor and from a crap neighborhood and qualified for and benefited from these AP classes. Not all kids who succeed only succeed because of their background.
tracker1 6 hours ago [-]
Similar.. not dirt poor, but bottom 1/3.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
I am from the same situation. I speak from experience: social mobility in public school is the exception. I would have done just fine without AP classes at all, as I am sure you would have. It's the kids who need help that benefit from school.
AP classes exist to pad the resumes of rich kids and justify their being propelled into academic situations that should rightfully belong to others. Prove me wrong
ofjcihen 2 hours ago [-]
So because you weren’t personally benefitted as much as others no one should benefit from them.
One of my AP classes taught us how to spot logical fallacies. Seems to have benefitted me well enough.
tracker1 4 hours ago [-]
AP classes allow those who are capable of working ahead of the general students to do so. It has zero to do with wealth. What others are hurt by you being able to take an AP class? Nobody is saying to remove remedial classes for those who have trouble keeping up.. but you shouldn't punish those capable of working ahead by putting everyone in the same class.
Your tirade sounds more like neo-communist garbage from someone who has never experienced communism. See the Yugoslavian comment in this thread for a counter example... where in actual communism, you emphatically push the capable ahead and allow success.
I don't have to prove you wrong as your assertions are wrong on their face and you have not said anything to backup your own assertions. I don't know how old you are, but you seem to have been dropped in the modern "equity" rabbit hole.
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level. Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.
Beyond this, the entire point of higher education is to push those who are able to higher levels, not to drag the 75% along for the ride.
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
> The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level.
Who do you think produces all the value in the world? It's not the people organizing the labor, it's the goddamn laborers.
> Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.
What do you think we would be eating if we left the world up to the rich nerds? We would have starved many millennia ago.
tracker1 6 hours ago [-]
I said specifically "advance humanity" ... simple labor doesn't advance humanity. It's absolutely necessary, but it also doesn't require a college education.
Advancing humanity is coming up with cures for disease, or inventing useful things. We manage to feed the world with a fraction of the labor it once took to do so. It wasn't the common laborer that came up with solutions that effectively eliminated food scarcity.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not a big fan of the myth of progress, so your pleas are falling on deaf ears. I see no reason to prioritize the education of the rich in our public schools
tracker1 4 hours ago [-]
You have provided no evidence that wealth is a driving factor in any given public school. For that matter, progress is not a myth.. again, we literally eliminated food scarcity through industrialization. That's not a myth. Try again.
6 hours ago [-]
ajsnigrutin 7 hours ago [-]
That's horrible. Smarter kids could get a better education, but they can't, because the teachers have to deal with illiterate kids that don't want to learn in the first place.
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe if we tried to educate all our kids instead of just the rich ones they wouldn't be illiterate
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
We do... The VAST majority of kids go through public education... It's mostly a matter of effort, and that comes down to mostly parent pressure on having their kids do the work.
Maybe if we actually held kids that can't do the work back, they wouldn't be illiterate. Let social pressure do the work it's meant to. For that matter, let parents do the work they're supposed to.
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ajsnigrutin 7 hours ago [-]
Some kids are just stupid, and it doesn't matter if they're rich or poor, there's nothing you can do about it. No need to keep everyone at the stupidest kids level.
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
Half of them are in AP classes. let's not pretend our methods of sorting kids into castes makes any sense. Let's be honest: this is about money and attention, and you want to grind the poor kids into dust
ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago [-]
It's not about money, you're the one who just thinks about money. Maybe, by your logic, if someone gave you $100 now, you'd become smarter and look wider... but probably not.
Sorting into better highschools and worse ones, and better classes and worse was done even back in my times, in what used to be yugoslavia, with communism, red stars and a dictator. You want better kids to excell as much as they can, and you want the stupid kids to at least learn to read and write for their boring communist factory jobs for the next 40 years, even if they never get to learn how to solve differential eqations... if you keep the kids together, the stupid ones still won't be able to do basic math and there would be no time left over for the smarter ones to learn more. There was no correlation between money and stupidity of kids.
Some kids are smart enough to become engineers, some can barely read, there's no need for them to be in the same classroom.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tracker1 4 hours ago [-]
The post you are replying to is literally talking about actual communism.
Education in communism will leave anyone underperforming behind... You'll get shuffled of into a vocational school young and injected into the workforce early.
Do you really think communism expends extra effort on underperforming students? No they get shuffled off as soon as prudent.
daedrdev 8 hours ago [-]
The current situation, where students succeed regardless if they completely failed to learn and do zero work is also pretty bad
zozbot234 7 hours ago [-]
> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.
Most struggling students are not special ed. It's a serious mistake to conflate the two. In some ways special ed students are taken better care of than the typical remedial student, since training for special ed happens to focus on effective instructional methods (such as direct instruction) that are actively deplored by most progressive educators as "demeaning" towards their profession.
wisty 6 hours ago [-]
You're too optimistic on the skills of teachers and school admin.
Let's ignore good teachers and principals, they aren't an issue.
Bad teachers and admin will do what bad students do when facing a high stakes test - forget that learning is important and just do a crap job gaming the test, and often do worse than if they would focus on just doing the content properly.
A bunch of people here probably don't see the issue - they think that they would do a good job learning or teaching a student when focusing on a specific test. But it's not the good teachers and good students who are the issue. A bad teacher might give students the same past paper every week for a year, and their bad students just memorise the right answers for the multiple choice. This is just an example, there are lots of bad strategies and the bad teachers will find them all (while the good teachers ignore all the noise).
It's the bad teachers and students that the system needs to fix, and too heavy an exam focus will screw it up (as will zero exam focus).
"Well just fire the bad teachers lol" um ... ok ... that's a bold strategy, but you can't axe that many and not massively increase their salaries to find replacements. You want super star individual performers, you gotta pay to attract them. You want a cheap consistent workforce where the bad eggs do less damage, focus on a good process that the weaker ones can follow, not rewards for individual success.
bee_rider 6 hours ago [-]
I’m not going to defend the broader plan (I don’t believe in it, or at least, I haven’t thought about it enough to be convinced either way). But for the ejection issue, one possibility would be to just count all ejected students as a “fail” for the school, right?
Then, the incentive would shift to prevent the students they don’t want from entering the school in the first place. Which could be a real pain for the students. But, this does seems like it would incentivize the schools to do what the original poster wanted, check that the incoming students actually learned what they were supposed to.
ryandamm 7 hours ago [-]
This already happens — my district when I was in school, and my son's district now, both have / had "alternative" high schools that kids get transferred to when they're struggling. Kids who are dropping out inevitably get transferred as part of the process; the high school they were originally attending has stellar graduation rates. The alternative high school has miserable graduation rates, but no one really cares.
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
Public school districts cannot expel students in California.
toshinoriyagi 7 hours ago [-]
No, but they can transfer them, which is what the comment you replied to was worried about. My partner used to be an elementary school teacher and frequently complained about the school she worked at. The district transferred a large percentage of students with IEPs (individualized education program, a plan for special care/resources for students with disabilities, often related to poor behavior) from other schools in the district to hers.
Her school did not have adequate resources to handle these students, so they always had multiple students with severe behavioral issues that should have been in a dedicated classroom with a special education trained teacher, but were just in regular teachers' classes. Naturally, the teachers were burnt out from working with too many challenging kids they were not trained to take care of and the other students had worse learning outcomes.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
> the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically
Top schools aren’t that way merely because of socioeconomics.
Levitz 6 hours ago [-]
Well, depends. "Socioeconomics" has been utterly abused as a concept for political gain.
Are top schools that way for social and economic reasons? I mean what else is there to blame? Are they that way because of being different in the department of what progressives actually mean by "socioeconomic factors"? No, not really.
ajsnigrutin 7 hours ago [-]
In what was in my time yugoslavia and isn't anymore, we had a similar system and it worked great.
From the austria-hungary time, the primary school (8 years, ~6/7 to 14/15yo, now 9 years, where preschool became year 1) was mandatory, and after that it was your decision what to do next.
You could then go to a "general high school" (gymnasium) for the next 4 years, and some of them were better than others (mostly because of students, but teachers too), and you had to collect enough points from grades and standardized testing in primary school to be accepted there. All the illiterate idiots didn't have enough points to get accepted, so you'd be in a nice class with comparable peers and teachers could teach new stuff instead of repeat the stuff the students should already know. The classes were "general" (math, languages, history, geography, etc.) and the idea was to prepare you for college.
The less-smart students went either to "not that good" gymnasiums or to other highschools, like the one for electricians or construction workers, farmers, etc., where they would get the legally required education to later eg. become an electrician or something after 3 years or 4, without the need for college or extra schooling and with the reduced amount of "general" subjects (only 1 or two years of history instead of 4, etc.).
The system somehow worked and still does.
xdennis 6 hours ago [-]
> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling.
You're saying that like it's a bad thing.
I'm continuously surprised by how America, a supposed capitalist country is more communist than some communist countries.
I grew up in Romania, after the revolution, but we still had basically the same education system. Even in communist Romania, if you wanted to get into a good high-school, you had to pass exams, and if you didn't perform well in school, you got left behind.
Everyone understood that if you wanted kids to succeed, you couldn't let the slow kids pull down the smart kids.
ryandrake 9 hours ago [-]
Measuring (and funding) schools based on student outcome is fraught because a student's performance / preparedness for the "next level" is not entirely a function of the school. There are other significant parameters, including parental upbringing, home life stability, neighborhood safety, friends, hunger/nutrition, various trauma and abuse, the list goes on. I'm sure it's been studied, but I'd bet "school quality" is not even close to number 1 on the list of predictors of educational outcome.
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
This is true. There are safeguards (that are currently failing) that my program would engage:
- The state is legally required to provide those kids with an education.
- There is funding allocated to help those districts.
If "we will not pay you if the kids do not learn" means there are zero schools in those districts then (1) the state government will get sued for not doing its job (because closing 100% of the schools makes the failure objective and obvious) and (2) it will have to update those funding formulas so that it is possible for some school (state run, or private) to break even while providing an education in those areas.
gausswho 8 hours ago [-]
With sympathy to your appeal that 100% closures will force us to reckon with the problem, I suspect it'd only lead to missing the forest for the trees. This would come with substantial pains to the community. Potentially ones that knock-on to other pains.
You're at the root of why this is a tricky problem to solve. In fact there is no solution, just a wide basket of expensive things we should aspire to do to improve affairs.
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
What pain, exactly?
- The local public school goes from 80 kids per grade to 40, and a new school opens across the street or just rents an existing building from the existing school district.
- Funding stays flat, and academic performance goes up.
- Administrators get to decide which teachers to lay off, and they will be de facto fired if they get rid of the high performers while keeping the low performers.
- If the union contracts make it impossible to retain the high-performers, then the school eventually shuts down, and teachers that are competitive on the job market get hired by the new school for similar pay / benefits.
- Teachers at the new school get evaluated on whether they do their job, and the new administrators have a strong financial incentive to use performance-based evaluation instead of seniority / nepotism / whatever.
I see no downside whatsoever.
gausswho 8 hours ago [-]
The pains I was thinking of largely occupy the transitionary period of a school closing before alternatives are open.
When does the deficient school close? After this new school is opened? If not, what happens to students and families that depend on an education in the interim?
Who pays for this new school? Must they immediately show improvement or do they get some years to show that their approach is working better?
Will the metrics even be accurate in the new school? Will there be a self-selecting bias in the newly formed student body?
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think these details are particularly hard to work out:
- You can shrink the deficient school to zero by reducing teacher count starting in the lower grades and moving up, and by allowing parents to opt for transfers in higher grades.
- The building still exists, so you could reuse it. Or, investors could build a new school. Obviously, there's some lag in the measurement, since it requires a few years of student data. I'd say look at the first and second derivative of the test scores. Note that the claw-back model deeply screws over investors that fund substandard schools. This is likely to create stranded real-estate for the next round of investors to buy at a discount.
- The metrics are produced downstream, so there shouldn't be measurement bias. There probably will be self-selection bias. There are existing funding mechanisms to deal with challenging student bodies. If those are working, then the per-student funding of the old school with skyrocket. If the old school still fails, then that produces a high-revenue group of students for some other new school to take on. If those funding mechanisms are not working, then it creates an externally detectable signal to the outside world that the problem is one level up (no schools in certain areas), making it easy for voters / courts to intervene (currently, those funding mechanisms are failing, and no one is held accountable).
convolvatron 6 hours ago [-]
investors? you're going to raise the cost of primary education to accommodate enough of a margin to attract investors? I thought we were talking about public education so that people in our society can at least read - a task that we're doing pretty bad at. The private school system for the 1% is doing just fine already.
jazzkingrt 8 hours ago [-]
I have many concerns with this kind of funding model, but I don't think the measurement problem is so serious. Performance incentives in education typically reward improvement of the student cohort relative to how it was performing the previous year, or even use value-added models that use multiple past years to predict the student trajectory.
amluto 8 hours ago [-]
It’s also fraught because schools will spend increasingly large fractions of the time preparing kids for tests instead of teaching them anything.
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
Doesn't this whole story suggest that the aversion to "preparing kids for tests" was wrong? The UC system changed its admissions policies to help kids who weren't prepared for tests, and now they have a bunch of students who don't seem to have been taught anything despite their high grades.
pelagicAustral 7 hours ago [-]
Wasn't this the plot of the Wire season 3 or something?
Novosell 7 hours ago [-]
It is one part of the plot that focuses on inner city schooling in season 4 :)
M3L0NM4N 8 hours ago [-]
The number 1 predictor of educational outcome is IQ by a long shot, which is hardly affected by any of the factors you listed. Yes, high IQ kids usually have high IQ parents who are likely to prevent those things, partly because they are likely high income, but none of those are as important as how smart the child is.
thewebguyd 8 hours ago [-]
The heritability of IQ actually changes based on wealth, so its the other way around. A child from a wealthy family will reach their potential, where one from a poorer family will not. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14629696/)
A child may have the genetic potential but never reach their potential because of outside factors. One's environment shapes one's brain development.
That's why equity is just as important as equality in education. Equity is understanding that children start from different circumstances and may need specific support to actually reach their potential.
Although the biggest factor here would just be for society to make sure no child has an upbringing where food, shelter, other lack of resources are a problem.
scarmig 8 hours ago [-]
That mistakes the point of education. Schools do not exist to fix every social problem, and demanding they treat fixing every social problem as their number one priority is how we got into this mess of "teach nothing but make sure everyone passes" in the first place.
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, but back when California was poorer, it had some of the best schools in the nation. Now that it's richer, the schools are collapsing, so it's really hard to argue that systematic social problems are the root cause.
ses1984 7 hours ago [-]
The only thing that changed is that California got richer, and it just so happens that wealth was evenly distributed.
How convenient.
dnautics 6 hours ago [-]
california spends about ~2.5k more per pupil in low income districts than high income districts.
I’m not sure what this has to do with the assertion above.
mrgoldenbrown 4 hours ago [-]
Ideally, schools shouldn't have to fix every social problem, but in practice, in modern day America, schools are stuck being the backstop. Schools shouldn't have to provide breakfast to kids, but they do because we keep cutting SNAP and other basic assistance programs. So schools need to pick up the slack, because you can't teach a kid if they're starving.
thewebguyd 7 hours ago [-]
I said "society" not "schools." No, schools do not exist to fix every social problem.
But my point was that wealth = a child more likely to reach their potential. That's a real gap, and a real social problem that needs addressed, by the powers (government) capable of addressing it.
However, schools do have a duty to provide a safe and conducive environment for education. Many don't offer that. Many have meals that are inadequate, many have a bullying problem that schools refuse to address, many care more about their sports stars than they do providing equal opportunity for education, etc.
59percentmore 7 hours ago [-]
>Schools do not exist to fix every social problem
By law, they monopolize up to half of a child's waking life for more than half of the year. This time commitment requires that parents put at least one meal, a substantial portion of the child's physical development, and almost all of their intellectual development (and, by extension, a substantial portion of their behavioral development) in the hands of the school.
If educational institutions are not taking seriously their potential influence on the social outcomes of their students, they're completely misunderstanding the practical mantle they've taken on. And so have you.
scarmig 7 hours ago [-]
That's one philosophy, sure. My philosophy is that schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed, no matter what rhetoric they put out about equity and social problems.
(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)
59percentmore 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure where you got the idea that, "A school shouldn't pass students who haven't attained grade-level mastery," and, "Schools have an obligation to support the development of children beyond their basic academic achievement," were mutually exclusive. I certainly didn't state that.
thewebguyd 7 hours ago [-]
> schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed
I don't disagree.
But at the same time, it's also important to ask: was that child offered to learn and apply themselves in the same, stable environment as a child from a more wealthy upbringing? If the answer is no, that child was done a disservice. If the answer is yes, and they still fail, obviously don't graduate them...
The goal shouldn't ever be "Just pass everyone" it should be making sure that every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
chasd00 6 hours ago [-]
> every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
If you’re 18 and can’t read/write/math there is no opportunity to succeed, giving them a diploma doesn’t change that. At some point the child is just out of time no matter the circumstance.
stogot 7 hours ago [-]
Not only failed, but then commit a fraudulent activity to cover up their sins leading to a systemic destruction of society and theft of taxes
borski 7 hours ago [-]
> A child from a wealthy family will reach their potential, where one from a poorer family will not.
may not. I’m not just being pedantic; it’s very important to recognize that being impoverished is not the same as being incapable.
But it does mean you’re living life on hard mode.
M3L0NM4N 5 hours ago [-]
This is far from proven fact. There are studies that show this effect, and there are studies that disagree. I can certainly see the argument for it being true in extremely Low-SES evnironments, but I don't believe this is true for the vast majority of Americans, and certainly isn't why California schools have such poor outcomes.
tracker1 7 hours ago [-]
Most people are pretty average and plenty of average people make it through a typical Bachelors program just fine.
While there may be some concepts that some will struggle with or unable to handle, the VAST majority of school comes down to the effort an individual puts in. You won't pass with zero effort. Some may be able to skate by with less effort because they can reason better, but in the end it will always come down to effort put in.
If you are not high IQ, that means you need to put more effort if you want to get "straight A's"... it is emphatically not an excuse to give up, not try or lower standards. I say this as someone somewhat high IQ who was a bit lazy and easily distracted in school. There were lots of kids that weren't as smart that got high grades and did well.. because they put in the work. I'm also a bit older than a lot of people here (early 50's).
M3L0NM4N 5 hours ago [-]
Okay, I do agree with this. IQ probably correlates with effort a little, but my anecdotal experience is that the most successful people in my school were primarily smart as opposed to being hard workers. Of course, there is a lot of overlap and exceptions.
BobaFloutist 7 hours ago [-]
It's actually zip code.
M3L0NM4N 5 hours ago [-]
There's no IQ correlation with zip code? Think again
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
Almost everything is correlated with zip code, most especially SES, so this comment doesn't really say anything.
a34ta3t 6 hours ago [-]
I scored ~145 on a recent WAIS assessment (with low to average processing scores) and I could train most children to do the same if they started early enough.
That's basically what my upper middle class parents did for me, as the tests were very similar to games I was given since a young age. Of course there are other more important developmental factors like health, stability, and nutrition but those are easier with money too.
Most of HN seem to support a form of modern eugenics.
M3L0NM4N 5 hours ago [-]
This is laughable. Most children (sampled randomly from the United States) could absolutely not score 145 on a WAIS assessment. Your perception of the average children's intelligence is likely skewed by being surrounded by above average intelligence children (maybe in school). It's not eugenics to acknowledge the strong genetic factor of human intelligence.
HelloMcFly 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Catloafdev 8 hours ago [-]
This is absurdly problematic. Your solution is basically handicapping the schools with kids that perform worse and then potentially closing them? That doesn't solve the problem, this is just pro-Charter School propaganda that ignores the real-world effects of these positions. You've identified a real issue with the 'equality' vs 'equity' concept, that doesn't lead to 'Close public schools and switch everything to Charter schools', that's an absurd conclusion.
CGMthrowaway 8 hours ago [-]
What is your issue with redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results, while allowing school choice for students at the same time? I may be naive but that sounds fairly good
BobaFloutist 7 hours ago [-]
Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools deliver results: selection bias.
It's really easy to have good outcomes when you have the ability to curate your student population. And though charter schools are regulated to make it harder for them to curate their student population, the statistical evidence is pretty unequivocal: they serve different populations than public schools, and their "better outcomes" immediately vanish when you control for that.
So, what is the issue with redirecting funding from sucky* schools towards ones that deliver results**?
* Schools that teach the general population
** Schools that teach a subset of the general population that always does better
dnautics 7 hours ago [-]
> Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools deliver results: selection bias.
Wasn't there a failing neighborhood school in LA that got turned into four charter schools that basically rescued the district, without removing any students?
BobaFloutist 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying that charter schools can never be an improvement, there's probably very few changes to anything for which that can be confidently said, since sometimes systems and organizations get so mired in dysfunction that even a change that's, on paper, for the worse provides the needed stimulus to improve things.
I'm saying that people make claims about the systemic superiority of charter schools that, under examination, don't hold up, and it doesn't make sense to direct extra funding to schools that are already getting better results by making their own job easier. For that matter, many (certainly not all) of the "best" public schools are benefiting from a similar phenomenon, which is exactly why California has its complicated redistribution funding scheme, to avoid rewarding schools with an easy job and punishing schools with a harder job.
And people love to come into a system that they don't understand, regurgitate the most naive, obvious approach that we have specifically moved on from because these systems aren't actually that simple, and think they solved the problem: "What if we rewarded success?" Wow, what a genius, nobody's ever thought of rewarding success, let's call the NYT, let's call the Nobel committee, you've finally solved education, thank god we have you since nobody has ever thought of giving more funding to schools that are already doing well by taking it away from schools with struggling populations. Thank god we have someone here to tell us that we should financially incentivize good metrics, maybe you can solve American health care next, and possibly, if you can find the time, you could address world peace after that.
delecti 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know, was there? Do you have a link?
dnautics 6 hours ago [-]
Alain Leroy Locke high school. So I don't know if there was any academic improvement, but they was certainly a safety improvement.
Ed (looked it up): there was academic improvement, LAUSD claims it's not enough, LAUSD is comparing against neighboring districts, which were not as distressed at the outset, "18 years to improve should have been enough". Safety is considerably improved. Alumni and district residents seem to want to keep the school. Locke high school is currently going through a charter renewal challenge.
bsder 4 hours ago [-]
The other LA (Louisiana) had lots of evidence to the contrary. If you force charter schools to participate in a lottery, they almost always come up worse than the public schools (there was a single exception).
We saw this happen in Houston. Many of the worst public schools suddenly "improved". It's a miracle! Oh, they did this by encouraging the lowest performers to drop out. Whoops.
And this is before we start talking about all the high GPA students who now all magically need IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) because it gets them an extra 50% of time on their tests. So, now you have your best students loudly (because these parents are active) soaking up lots of resources genuinely meant for your worst students.
Bratmon 7 hours ago [-]
Unpopular opinion: If we have evidence that shows that keeping all the smart kids in one group creates massively better outcomes for that group, then that's something we should be doing everywhere, not something we should ban.
SamoyedFurFluff 7 hours ago [-]
I believe the evidence claimed is that there aren’t better outcomes for smart kids. Schools that claim they have better outcomes just selected for kids that would always have better outcomes. Like if I claimed my basketball team has better outcomes because I got to make sure all my players were above 6 foot. These 6 foot players don’t necessarily benefit from being in a team with other 6 foot players, but I’m saying people should apply for my team because I’m doing so much better than the team that can’t make those weeding out decisions. I’m intentionally conflating the success of my capacity to select for success with my capacity to coach a team.
Bratmon 5 hours ago [-]
But surely if having the best possible basketball team is important for national success, then it makes sense to pour more resources into the players with more talent
BobaFloutist 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, but in schools we're trying to get the best overall result, not optimize for one amazing school and a bunch of bad ones.
borski 7 hours ago [-]
It’s not actually that unpopular; there are plenty of gifted programs, though the tide has turned to controversy around them more in recent years.
I continue to believe that gifted kids are special needs kids, and that they shouldn’t be in the same classroom as those who are struggling for all of their classes.
People don’t like to talk about gifted kids, except to imply that being “too smart” is somehow bad or unfair, and I think it does them a disservice.
Gifted kids get very, very bored, and lose interest quickly, when they aren’t challenged.
Catloafdev 5 hours ago [-]
Taking you at face value, the first step is to address the framing here:
'redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results'
This is not quite the reality of how this works. What you have to recognize here is that being pro-Charter school legislation means that you are in favor of spending less on public education, and giving that money to private education companies who already charge and make profit.
You are advocating for draining public education. That's the position this takes. And you believe it's better to give it to private education, all for-profit entities. So you have to recognize that the position here isn't "give more money to better schools" it's "give money to private for-profit companies and take it directly away from public education"
'allowing school choice for students'
This is a talking point that doesn't hold any water. They claim that by giving parents some tiny affordance, that somehow enables them to enroll their children in expensive Charter schools. That's not how that works. What they're doing is giving a very tiny % of the money they are taking from public education, and giving it to the families as direct cash. Why is this a problem? Because the amount doesn't cover tuition. It's not enough. Families in poverty can't afford multi-thousand-dollar tuition just because they got a $1k check in the mail. The math doesn't math. It only helps families that were already capable of affording it, or on the borderline.
But the bigger problem is that it directly harms public education. So then what happens is that public education gets _worse_ at the expense of the people who can afford private schooling.
So all this to say, defunding public schools is not a good position, and they are doing everything they can to try to dress it up and muddy the conversation.
alwa 7 hours ago [-]
One obstacle is geography, and the built environment. Schools are of their communities. Even if you do bus people around, they come home to the same places, norms, and situations; not all education happens in the classroom, and “you don’t belong here” is a thing. The rich schools are in the rich places. The poor schools are in the poor places. The outcomes—often—not always, but often—reflect that. Is a deeply-depressed neighborhood really improved by starving its school? Or deeming it unworthy of a having a school altogether, and emptying its children out to places that “have it more together”?
Another is the idea that schools are motivated by money in the same way profit-seeking ventures are. A company’s shareholders might respond to financial threats and incentives, but the teachers on district-regulated wages? What’s the phrase, can’t squeeze blood from a turnip?
Then there’s of course the construct validity of standardized tests as a measure of “suckiness”—they’re easy to administer at scale and to compare across years and between schools—but do they really capture every flavor of good work that’s done at a school? They’re the best thing we have, but does that make them good enough?
The main issue, though, I think we can frame in terms of a slightly different legibility issue: since the school is the only variable we directly control, we model the school’s “suckiness” as a function of its… what, budget? Staff bonuses? Whoever exactly is it who we’re proposing to punish by removing funds? But just as I imagine we can think of kids who would be fine either way—one of the less provocative stereotypes that comes to mind is that of a Tiger Mom kind of community—we can probably think of kids who won’t be fine. The less provocative stereotype that comes to mind is a child with special needs: with an aide, maybe that child may develop enough to participate in society, and we’re a more humane and moral society for trying. For that matter there are other children who are living and growing up in situations where survival is always going to come before their test scores—and those are probably the students with guardians least equipped to exercise “school choice.” How does punishing their school improve those kids’ outcomes?
Often students who perform poorly need more resources, not fewer.
…are a few of the counterarguments, anyway.
nkrisc 7 hours ago [-]
Because it’s not a real choice. As household income decreases, the odds the child goes to the nearest school (regardless of how good it is) increases.
Are you providing after school child care options or transportation to their school of choice? If not, then it’s not a real choice and kids from lower income households will remain disadvantaged.
That is to say, the results will be mostly identical except now public money will be going to private entities. Because that was always the real goal of charter schools.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
> Because it’s not a real choice. As household income decreases, the odds the child goes to the nearest school (regardless of how good it is) increases.
The “odds” don’t tell you whether or not it’s a “real choice.” Families that value education will take advantage of those opportunities. Families that don’t value education will get what they get.
Lots of families don’t value education and there’s nothing you can do for them. My wife is from Oregon, which has terrible test scores. And as far as I can tell, people there simply don’t care about school. Everyone’s dad is a logger or fisherman or something like that, and putting effort into academics isn’t valued.[1] In that environment, the best thing you can do is have charter schools for the minority of families that care. The alternative is to have shitty public schools that don’t serve anyone well.
[1] My wife did so well on the LSAT she got a scholarship to a top 10 law school. But people back home aren’t impressed. That doesn’t matter to her, because she is extremely internally motivated, but most people just go with their social flow: they won’t work hard for achievements people around them don’t value.
borski 7 hours ago [-]
Surely it’s possible that a family might value education but not have the literal time, if they are working non stop, to take the kids to a further school? Or to take care of them afterward?
You’re avoiding the point by saying “anyone who cares can,” and avoiding the economics entirely.
Economics can force choices against your own best interests. If you have an hour between shifts and the school is 45 minutes away, you may have no choice.
This is separate from groups of people who don’t value education. This is about where others make that choice for them.
Most of the people I know who work two or more jobs also do not get SNAP. Sometimes, it’s pride, and sometimes, it’s logistics.
My sister is on SNAP; it took hours, literally, for me to sign her up, and I’m quite “technically savvy” lol
And every year the renewal takes at least two hours in NYC.
jnovek 6 hours ago [-]
There is so much context here that you’re missing — have you ever been poor before?
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
Everyone in my wife’s family grew up poor and many still are. My wife lived in a converted barn for part of her childhood.
Regardless, the data is the data! Only 10% of parents on SNAP work full time.
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
> except now public money will be going to private entities
Right, now you've come full circle to the core of my proposal: If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid. Instead, the investor that funded the charter school takes a bath.
This is capitalism at its finest:
- The local government provides a competitive backstop. If you do worse than that floor, then you do not get to compete.
- If your product is not fit for purpose, then you do not get paid. Private money subsidized the experiment, and only in places where the existing system had already failed.
- If the charter school (or anarcho-communist parent commune, or whichever team you want to root for) manages to reliably produce students that go on to perform well, then they solved an "insolvable" problem. Yay competition!
Over time, as the average district improves, so do the academic standards and the goalposts. Schools that once did well but are no longer competitive get phased out, so the funding model builds continuous improvement in. Nothing stops the public school districts from outcompeting the private entities. (In theory, the public districts have an unfair advantage - they don't have to turn a profit.)
mrgoldenbrown 4 hours ago [-]
In your vision how do you force the charters to accept a representative sample of students? Or do you not force them, and allow them to recruit the easy to educate kids and filter out the expensive kids?
nkrisc 7 hours ago [-]
The charter schools will do fine because they will attract wealthy students from all over who can afford to travel farther for a better school. So these charter schools will monopolize public funding for educating the wealthiest students, while poorer students will attend the nearest school regardless of quality and the schools will suffer as students struggle due to issues outside the control of the school (home life, familial financial struggles, etc.) The extremes at both ends will just be magnified.
Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggle because the people who live there are struggling.
The charter school model is attempting to solve the problem in a vacuum, but the problem does not exist in a vacuum.
habinero 6 hours ago [-]
> If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid
Some people have never heard of Goodhart's law and it shows lol. It leads to terrible ideas like this which make the same mistake again and again.
I want you to think -- really think -- about the ambiguities in "perform well academically". How do you measure this? Test scores? Grades? If it's grades, then you've just given everyone at that school an incentive to never fail anyone, no matter what. If it's test scores, we already know that leads to teaching to the test, which hurts academics in general. It massively incentivizes cheating and fraud. It incentivizes kicking out any student who has any problems whatsoever.
For every complex problem there is an solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.
j_w 7 hours ago [-]
Because the "sucky" schools are statistically where poor people go to school, which statistically is where minorities go to school.
School choice is bad because the only people who benefit from school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to transport their child to the school of their choice.
wagwang 7 hours ago [-]
The people who benefit are not the wealthy, who can afford to simply buy a house in the school district of their desire, but simply middle class parents who care about their kids.
j_w 6 hours ago [-]
Middle class parents are wealthy compared to the average student of a "sucky" school. These schools are typically the in the poorest areas in the state/county.
habinero 6 hours ago [-]
Poor people care about their kids, too. They're just struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on their plates instead of worrying about what college their kids are going to get into.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
False. Charter schools are public schools and often served by school bus routes or other public transit. Walking or cycling can also be options for some students.
The real differentiating factor isn't wealth but simply giving a shit about your children. Parents have to take some minimal effort to enroll their children in a charter school and many simply don't bother.
mrgoldenbrown 7 hours ago [-]
IME the differentiator is the fact that in most states charters have some way of filtering out the least profitable kids is a huge advantage for them, and concentrates the most expensive kids in the public schools.
organsnyder 7 hours ago [-]
It's not just giving a shit: it's also the capacity to act on giving a shit. I'm exhausted at the end of the day after getting the kids to bed, and I'm fortunate to be in a stable marriage, live in a large home that my wife and I own, and work a well-paying WFH job. I can only imagine how tiring it must be to not have those advantages.
There are the parents doing heroics that I can hardly imagine, and they should be celebrated. But we need to design a system that provides a sufficient level of support for those families that only have an average level of capacity.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
> I can only imagine how tiring it must be to not have those advantages
Yes, you can only “imagine” what it’s like for people who are less comfortable than you. But that cuts both ways. It could be that you’re also “imagining” the barriers you think exist to people accessing charter schools. In particular, I suspect you’re incorrectly assuming that people work as much as you do, just for less money.
organsnyder 6 hours ago [-]
Actually, I can more than imagine it. I have friends that are in those situations, and help out when I can.
GoblinSlayer 7 hours ago [-]
How difficult is it?
1. give a shit
2. enroll
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
borski 7 hours ago [-]
Have you ever lived below the poverty line? In order to enroll, you’d have to know about it and manage logistics.
Working 14 hours a day so you can clothe and feed your kid doesn’t leave much time for that.
That doesn’t mean you don’t give a shit.
organsnyder 3 hours ago [-]
There are so many pieces of that step 3 in trying to navigate a school system that isn't accustomed to working with lower-income students.
dirtikiti 7 hours ago [-]
>> School choice is bad because the only people who benefit from school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to transport their child to the school of their choice.
So what?
If "level the playing field" means my kid gets a sub standard education because you have to constantly lower the bar, I don't want to play your game.
This stuff isn't new. Everyone understands the importance of education, and everyone understands the importance of being involved in your child's education.
It isn't about poor and minority. It's about being a good parent.
Some people don't have that ability, and my kid shouldn't be punished for it, regardless of the money in my wallet.
There are plenty of examples of single parent and low income households where they value education and push their kids to doing better.
At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.
j_w 6 hours ago [-]
Okay but if you care this much about school choice why not move to an area with better schools? That's a tool most people already have.
And yes, most people who are complaining about "school choice" have this tool to some extent. Will your living conditions be exactly the same? Probably not.
> At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.
So why don't you take some personal responsibility and put yourself in a residence which is in district for a school that you want your child to go to? Is that not in part your responsibility as a parent? We can both play this stupid game.
dirtikiti 4 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what my single parent did. Took responsibility for being a teenage parent, joined a trade union, paid more for a crappy apartment on the edge of a good school district, and busted their ass everyday to provide.
I don't see what you're arguing here? You're the only one playing a stupid game.
If school choice is a thing, everyone can choose where they send their kid to school... they don't have to pay more for a crappy apartment on the edge of a good school district.
And to top it off, the only poor people this actually affects are poor people who live in an area where there is an actual choice of schools to be made.
Which means there is most likely access to transportation.
a34ta3t 7 hours ago [-]
I love to see the true colors of this vile place when topics like this come up.
dirtikiti 4 hours ago [-]
I know, personal responsibility is such a vile concept.
Everyone can be so much happier if they can blame everyone else and the system for everything bad in their life.
lo_zamoyski 7 hours ago [-]
I am all for helping the worse off. However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because some people have less.
This is slave morality and the logic of ressentiment and envy. It is also profoundly immoral.
Never mind that this approach condemns everyone to a state of perpetual mediocrity, and the poor will always be with us. Mind you, how much you value education is to a large degree a product of the family environment and how supportive it is.
How about we allow excellence to flourish as it does, support it any way we can, and also look for ways to lift those who are worse off out of their condition? The focus should be on making things better, not bizarre idealistic notions like "equality" or "equity", whatever they even mean in real, concrete terms. If we dispense with envy, we focus on objective improvement instead of status-obsessed insecurities.
Of course, I think the most pressing problem in education today is that most "educators" have no damn clue what it even means to be educated anymore. They think they know, but they absolutely do not. It isn't "getting a job", as important as jobs are, or some odd aim of the ideology du jour. Public education in an ideologically-charged society of our stripe is practically condemned to superficiality and poor quality, because all good education begins with an accurate anthropology. We can't even agree on that, so naturally, this produces a lowest common denominator effect. In such a situation especially, permitting a diversity of educational styles and programs is necessary.
And btw, if someone is wealthy enough, they'll move to another school district and make school choice a reality anyway within your regime. People do it all the time. Or would you like a return to latifundia to enforce your vision?
j_w 6 hours ago [-]
> However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because some people have less.
When did I say that I'm in any way pro crippling other students? I'm simply pointing out the socioeconomic reality of school performance.
Comments like yours are vile. Brimming with vitriol.
habinero 6 hours ago [-]
> I am all for helping the worse off. However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because some people have less.
Bruh. It's easy to prattle on about "objective improvement" and "slave morality" and pretend everything's a zero sum game where funding is fixed and we can do nothing to change the system. Neither is true. This is just an excuse to absolve yourself of doing any of the hard work to improve things.
> The focus should be on making things better, not bizarre idealistic notions like "equality" or "equity"
Man, does anyone else hear that high pitched sound? Just me? Huh.
freediddy 7 hours ago [-]
You don't live in the Bay Area.
Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly what the OP was saying.
Schools are incentivized to focus on struggling kids because test scores are how teachers and schools are evaluated. The kids at the high end of the class are literally ignored. I know this because in my old neighborhood many parents were complaining about this. And then on top of it, the superintendent was begging parents for donations because they didn't have enough money.
JuniperMesos 23 minutes ago [-]
> Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly what the OP was saying.
It could also be that fewer of the sorts of people who choose to live (or can afford to live) in places like Saratoga and Cupertino are having children at all.
Catloafdev 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying it isn't in your personal best interest to consider switching your kids out of public schooling. The problem is that the public schools need to be fixed, not abandoned.
There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child education industry"
Fixing public education is the boring, slow, difficult, real-world answer. Privatizing education further is just adding fuel to the fire.
JuniperMesos 20 minutes ago [-]
> There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child education industry"
The case for closing down public schools and replacing them with a for-profit child education industry is that it's systematically easier for all parents to get a better education for their children by abandoning bad schools and only paying good schools in a free market, than it is for parents to participate in the mass political process of fixing public schools, which are government institutions intended to serve a broad mass of people.
Also because different parents have different ideas about what constitutes a good education for their kids, different private schools can differentiate themselves in the marketplace by specializing in different styles of education and attracting different student bases; rather than parents having to democratically coordinate to enact the changes they want in the same mass-scope public school system (and fight against rival groups of parents who want incompatible things).
adrr 3 hours ago [-]
Self inflicted injuries. Bunch of the public schools in large metro areas have removed their gifted and honors programs. Seattle and NY. That will force people into private schools or charter schools. Some districts talked about removing pre-calculus, thats will force kids as well. Dumbing everyone down to the lowest common dominator isn't the solution and public schools should fail if they keep that up. Its banning schools from having separate JV team and varsity team forcing all the athletes into the two teams without looking at ability. Unfair for everyone.
freediddy 4 hours ago [-]
You fix public education by kicking out the fascist left agenda, that believes that high achievement is only from white supremacy, and lowering standards for Black and Brown kids so that they pass but leave high school completely uneducated.
For reference, over 50% of Black and Brown kids that graduate from high school in San Francisco Unified School District can't read properly. That is about as racist an outcome as you can imagine, creating generations of undereducated citizens, however this was completely promulgated without a single right-wing influence, it was completely an outcome from pure left-wing educators. They also believe math is white supremacy so they restrict high achievers from taking it at lower grades, which caused many of the Asian families to move to private.
And yet, they spent $2 million renaming schools because I guess they thought that was money better spent than educating Black and Brown kids. That is the zenith of hypocrisy and racism.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
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adrr 7 hours ago [-]
Everyone blames the school. Its the mentality of parents and kids at the schools. Kids go to charter school. 90% of the kids in my 10 years class meet or exceed grade level on the state test. She is surrounded by kids who push her up and parents that push their kids. Teachers care because the parents and kids care. My wife had half hour call last night with my daughters special project teacher because they want showcase the kids work and have the kids give speeches on it.
You don't get that dedication unless you're at private school. It democratizes private education for the masses. Also have lots of volunteer teachers and student teachers from local universities so the ratio is 1 instructor to 10 students. Special project teacher is a volunteer who is earning her masters at Harvard.
throwaway5752 7 hours ago [-]
It's funnier because it's old, failed policy that they are recycling without being aware of it because they are ignorant. All old things really do become new again.
wagwang 7 hours ago [-]
It's the current set of policy that is failing. All literacy and math score are down across the entire country and theyve been going down for the past 10 years.
Levitz 6 hours ago [-]
Did that "old, failed policy" yield better results than the current one?
8 hours ago [-]
f13f1f1f1 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
footy 8 hours ago [-]
> though there isn't really any serious dispute about it factually
citation sorely needed
NewsaHackO 8 hours ago [-]
Wow, what a position
bmn__ 7 hours ago [-]
Human biology is diverse. We can observe ranges of body height, susceptibility to diseases, endurance, melanin expression, intelligence and some more properties, consistent within population groups. The position of GP admits this evidence, it is aligned with reality. Are you? If not, why not? Is your rationality perhaps suppressed through ideology?
watwut 8 hours ago [-]
The actual alternative is to provide resources to schools that are in bad areas. And to provide resources for people in those areas themselves.
JCTheDenthog 7 hours ago [-]
The results from Abbott Districts in New Jersey would suggest that increased funding and resources does little if anything to improve results. Abbott Districts in New Jersey have been getting funding at roughly the same level or higher as the wealthiest districts in the state since 1990, and they have nothing to show for it:
The difference in math proficiency for Abbott students vs. non-Abbott students has stayed roughly the same, while thr language proficiency gap has actually increased.
ninalanyon 7 hours ago [-]
Resources != funding
Resources means teachers qualified, able, and willing to teach in those areas. That probably means paying them more than a similarly qualified teacher in an area that is currently doing better and hence more attractive. But it also means finding head teachers (principals in the US?) who can inspire the whole school, staff, pupils, and parents. Such people are not thick on the ground. And then you have to have stability.
Mere money will not do it, everyone has to work for it.
Levitz 6 hours ago [-]
>Resources means teachers qualified, able, and willing to teach in those areas.
Then the culture in those areas has to change.
It feels like every single other option has to be tried before considering that there's real, settled cultural issues that society ought to tackle. It is insane, and I mean "nobody who ever holds views like these should have access to power or authority on these matters" type of definition of "insane" that there is more concern about equality, or equity, or whatever the last brand of discrimination, than about the problems around not respecting authority and not valuing an education. It is utterly dysfunctional regarding societal growth.
It's not just being poor. It's not just racism. Yes those are absolutely issues in society, but equality of that degree is an affordance you can work on when you have a functional system.
There is no magic teacher, no magic principal, no magic anyone that's going to walk through the door of a school and "set them kids right" with a biblical amount of kindness and understanding. That's a fairy tale, it's utterly detached from reality and a pathetic refusal to look at the problem.
pelagicAustral 8 hours ago [-]
Because there is such good precedents that providing unlimited resources to troubled areas actually fix problems.
TMWNN 7 hours ago [-]
As others have told you, there is no evidence that increased school funding in and of itself results in better results.
Contrary to what is often said, there is no shortage whatsoever of funding for public schools in urban areas. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US. <https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...> Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
empath75 8 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you have some particular groups in mind.
retrac 8 hours ago [-]
It's so strange to see this happen in the USA when our education system up here in Canada has essentially the same set of cultural and social values and there's plenty to gripe about but we haven't had the 'levelling' thing. There have been attempts but it has strongly resisted by parents. [1]
I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.
I attended a specialized math and science program (MaCS) in the TDSB. It was gutted by removing selective admissions in favour of a lottery, precisely because of the report you've cited.
The "levelling" is real in Canada and good private schools often manage to skip multiple grade levels.
Funnily enough, I've seen the opposite in the USA. My highly driven American friends somehow manage to get entire associate's degrees before finishing high school, which is unthinkable in Canada.
retrac 7 hours ago [-]
They reversed the lottery thing after just two years as a failure and reinstated the previous policies.
> “They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.
borski 7 hours ago [-]
> I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
> When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.
YES. I could not agree more.
sometimelurker 6 hours ago [-]
> ... you can compute a derivative by 12th grade
The fact that calculus is seen by the public as something really really hard needs to be fixed. I taught myself differentiation in 7th and I'm not proud of it because it's not difficult. Maybe the issue is crappy curriculums and incentives putting the best mathematicians on Wall Street rather than in public schools, but there needs to be a cultural push of some sort. I've given a million last minute math lessons to some of my less math inclined friends, and there is no barrier at all stopping people from learning a ton more math than is taught in schools.
> ... some kids are more talented at some things than other kids ...
This idea is 100% true, but I don't think its a helpful idea in the context of making people learn more math. Unlucky people who internalize this idea end up thinking they are innately worse at understanding abstract ideas, and end up not trying that hard. I completely believe anyone capable of doing a euclidian proof in geometry class can read and fully understand the Bitcoin whitepaper - but they don't. And the barrier for understanding Bitcoin is probably lower than geometry.
> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
This, but at a more localized level by giving teachers bonuses depending on how well the students do in the next grade.
dabluecaboose 7 hours ago [-]
> This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).
Well, my red state public school taught me calculus, algebra, and evolution without making the claim that knowledge is somehow racist. So maybe those in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones
pseudalopex 9 hours ago [-]
They defined equity as Fair outcomes, treatment, and opportunities for all students.[1]
Is it easier to hold back talented students with a low bar or push untalented ones to a higher bar?
z3c0 8 hours ago [-]
The conundrum of "equality of outcome" vs "equality of opportunity" hinges on that core question. It's weird, and possible contradictory, to see a policy claiming to attempt both.
Most would define a "fair" opportunity as everyone getting the same chances to succeed, but a "fair" outcome would segment on merit. If angling towards fair outcomes, there's usually less uproar over lifting the floor (e.g financial aid), versus lowering the ceiling (e.g. limitations on admissions based on ethnic or financial background).
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
A much better policy would be to raise the floor and not pay attention to equality of outcome.
If the worst school in 2036 California is better than the average school in 2026, then that's an obvious win.
(That goal is completely achievable -- only about a third of California students are grade-level proficient right now.)
redsocksfan45 5 hours ago [-]
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Aurornis 8 hours ago [-]
Innocuous at first glance, but you can see how it could be manipulated into justification for banning advanced math classes and other bad ideas.
programjames 8 hours ago [-]
People have more wildly different definitions for "fair" than "equity".
zahlman 5 hours ago [-]
They can profess all they like to care about opportunities; the actual policies make it abundantly clear that their metric is purely outcome-based instead.
upboundspiral 6 hours ago [-]
I know many teachers and funding already works the way you describe: the better a school's students do, the more funding it gets (schools also get funding for the number of days the students show up).
What this does is make it so anyone with a pulse gets a passing grade.
What teachers actually want and need is the ability to fail people. At one district the math department wanted to fail a bunch of kids until the principal intervened, saying they should pass more people, and make exams worth less of the grade.
Teachers need the support from the state and the district to be allowed to fail students early in their academic journey so that students can get the help they need immediately and prevent them from reaching high school and still not knowing their times tables.
confidantlake 8 hours ago [-]
The most important factor isn't the schools, it is the kids themselves.
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
California used to have the best schools in the country, and roughly a third of our urban population is Silicon Valley. It's home to the largest economy in the US by a large margin, and is one of the richest states.
the only states/territories doing worse at math are DC, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and Alabama.
I'm not sure what Alabama's excuse is, but the other three entries on that list have obvious economic problems (only low income urban, failed power grid, literally blowing away due to climate change).
I would argue that with California's high cost of living, "average" funding in California is still low relatively speaking.
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
True, but I was responding to a comment blaming the children for their under-performance. The funding gap isn't somehow due to those kids not wanting to learn, problems at home, etc.
jerlam 6 hours ago [-]
I am agreeing with you - the funding gap is one of the causes for under-performance.
DFHippie 6 hours ago [-]
I think you also named Alabama's problems. It's one of the poorest states and seems bound and determined to stay that way.
watwut 8 hours ago [-]
Silicon Valley is also the place of serious homeless problem. "The economy" as an abstractions is not what matters - the economy here is some people being super rich while others increasingly outside of good options.
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
That's due to unrelated intentional mismanagement by state and local governments.
Just build enough market rate housing to house the local population, and the issue will solve itself.
"Affordable housing" is a trap for buyers, builders, and policy makers:
- If you buy an affordable housing unit, then when you sell it, you have to charge based on a formula that will be way below the normal appreciation in your area. Basically, the money you put into the house was a sunk investment that's guaranteed to under-perform anything else you could have put it into. You're much better off getting a fixer-upper condo, or just renting + putting the money in an ETF.)
- If you build an affordable housing unit, then the rest of your development project becomes less profitable. Once the project is approved, you're foolishly tying up capital that could have been used to fund additional developments in other states. Also, the affordable housing approval process is slow and politically fraught. While that happens, you're holding a piece of land (and paying interest on it) that might turn out to be worthless, depending on the outcome of local politics. (If you don't believe me, next time you're driving around Silicon Valley, count "proposed development" signs, and categorize them by "badly weathered" or "brand new". "Badly weathered" means someone has been paying a mortgage on the (probably $10's-100's M) field behind the sign for at least a year. They're not paying home mortgage rates for that. It's probably 7-10% interest. That $700K-10M that could have been used to actually build houses.
- If your local government is subsidizing affordable housing, then they're misallocating resources. They could have used that money to expedite permit applications, improve public transit, add bike trails, build parks, increase freeway access or invest in other public goods that make the area more attractive to residents. Those things have a much higher payoff per dollar. Also, the local government has a monopoly on them. By opting to not do them, they are causing economic damage that cannot be routed around by the private sector. Of course, there's also the question of deciding who gets the public funds, and all the corruption and backroom dealing inherent in that process.
alephnerd 8 hours ago [-]
Because most of California isn't Silicon Valley.
The good parts of the Bay Area (which also align to where the majority of the tech industry is) have public schools that haven't changed their curricula despite common core.
On the other hand, the rest of California has had significant financial and budget crises and never recovered from the 2008-13 California budget crisis.
jsLavaGoat 8 hours ago [-]
>public schools that haven't changed their curricula despite common core.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Anyway, most of this has to do with the math framework, not the standards.
alephnerd 7 hours ago [-]
My mom's a teacher at one of these schools, we still have friends sending their kids to them, and I'm still in contact with my HS teachers at that school.
In wealthier areas of the Bay like Saratoga, Cupertino, Campbell, Fremont, Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamorindia, etc the school districts are only paying lip service to common core and still teaching as they were during my time.
Most students take multiple AP classes (and the HSes usually offer 15-20 APs) as well as attend the local CC, UC Berkeley, or Stanford to take additional classes.
The schools that are militantly common core and trying to remove classes are also (frankly) in crap school districts like SFUSD or OUSD where school board elections are dominated by local activists who oftentimes don't even have kids but are using the board as a stepping stone into local politics, and due to their reputations and low pay are unable to hire teachers for more advanced classes anyhow.
There's a reason the kind of house that would go for $1.5M in Sunset would go for $2.5M in the Peninsula or Tri-Valley.
jsLavaGoat 6 hours ago [-]
I am a teacher and I write education software for math as a side gig, which I must have because I'm a teacher.
It's rare for any teacher to just discard the standards. And anyone who says "common core" is talking about something from 20 years ago. The new math framework--already years old--has sparked the latest wave of UC revolts and NO standardized testing is part of it.
"Common core" is the exact opposite. When people say that they are referring to the standards and the tests that go with them. Standards are just standards you can teach them or not, but the framework, something entirely different, give schools guidance on what courses to offer and how to approach it.
The latest framework poo-pooed Calculus and Algebra for advanced middle schoolers in the name of "equity." And dissing admissions tests is part of this movement, that gave us the "Data Science" class that UCs rejected. That was supposed to replace Algebra 2 and therefore make students UC-ready. As someone who taught that class, I can tell you it was a joke. And it had zero, nothing to do with common core. Finding a way to link it to those existing standards was difficult at best.
And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP. Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open. Sorry.
alephnerd 5 hours ago [-]
> And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP...
Yes, but their CASSPP participation rates have fallen from 95-100% to 70s range as some people started explaining to parents how to use section 60615 to withdraw from CASSPP as it clashed with AP and SAT prep schedules - this is a public school where AP participation is in the 70-90% range.
> Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open...
Note how in my earlier response I said wealthier school districts.
This is how it is in the Tri-Valley and richer Peninsula and South Bay school districts. There is some basic malicious compliance with CA standards, but all the households use "Advancement Via Outside Institutions" in 8th grade and get back onto the "AP Calc by 11th/12th grade" track, and most students end up almost entirely taking AP classes by 10th grade so they aren't really impacted by CA standards changes.
jsLavaGoat 2 hours ago [-]
Again, you keep using that word. The standards haven't changed. It's not the standard, this isn't about California's math standards. You're talking about standards, but this is about the framework.
Wealth also correlates with higher test scores. Why? because they are ignoring the framework and doing well with the standards.
This isn't about common core and nothing I have said or you have said changes that.
Even San Francisco rejected the basic premise of that framework's approach to algebra. So it's not just your mom's school either.
Anyway, I'm tired of arguing with your mom indirectly. If any other teachers want to discuss this directly and tell me how I'm wrong, please do.
armchairhacker 6 hours ago [-]
> I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
I should’ve chose better words, so let me clarify here: there should be tiered schools, all funded in relation to how many students they have. One school for gifted students, one for second, … down to “schools” that teach vocations, then “schools” where students play around and see therapists, both for students who aren’t learning even with an IEP.
This is roughly what some European countries like Germany do. Although unlike Germany, I think they should start earlier and allow movement up for students that show improvement.
Ultimately, no student should be educated below their level. LLMs allow a decent teacher to teach at the PhD level (and IME most teachers are decent, because most become teachers out of passion).
MSFT_Edging 6 hours ago [-]
> If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.
This would absolutely deepen the issue.
Public school has faced various compounding issues over the years related to policies like this. One big example is teaching to the test, diminishing the actual education because the standardized tests are the deciding factor whether or not the school gets funding.
Ironically, it would make it worse because a lot of school problems simply are funding problems. Public schools in wealthier neighborhoods do better because wealthier families can afford to support the children, where poorer areas have way less access. These problems begin to compound.
The SAT thing was pushed aside originally because it was partially an indicator of who could afford tutoring on the specific weirdness of the SAT vs who was on their own.
Kids who grow up poor also tend to have more home responsibilities. Parents may work longer hours(or be a useless deadbeat), kids will have to watch their siblings or take on part time jobs which cut into the time they can dedicate to education.
I do agree that the equity approach is short sighted and the totally wrong approach, but the correct approach would cause riots when the policy calls for funneling more funds to the worse performing schools to stand up tutoring early. Money can solve the issues of "wealthy areas can afford tutoring", money spent on teachers to provide better educational materials, and generally more spent on additional teachers overall, to cover problematic students who distract the rest of the class.
Destroying public school infrastructure due to a systemic problem would be a colossal mistake. All you need to know about adding a profit motive to education can be seen in private colleges, where education often takes a backseat to metrics like research positions, tuition costs skyrocketing, and even more overpaid admins compared to the public sector.
mark242 7 hours ago [-]
"If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district."
There is zero incentive for "people outside the educational system" to do this. Kids will absolutely suffer because of this plan.
The answer to this, like always, is that teachers need to be paid more.
ux266478 3 hours ago [-]
> To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus.
Can you provide a link?
ams92 7 hours ago [-]
Equality is more expensive. It’s much easier to just cut advanced classes and shove the upper percentile students closer to the average in the name of having equal outcomes for all races.
Similar to other issues in this country, we like to address the symptoms of economic inequality instead of attacking it at the source.
kys11 7 hours ago [-]
I saw a solution proposed yesterday: drop the bottom X% of students at every grade starting around middle school and put them in a work program. The X can be variable, I think the original post suggested that the percentage dropped grows into high school. Students would be allowed to re attempt when ready.
cdcarter 7 hours ago [-]
Can you share some credible sources on "schools banning calculus"? Googling seems to primarily show up Quora and indeed HN discussions, and no actual policy proposal or news article.
MeetingsBrowser 9 hours ago [-]
> I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
This seems problematic.
Students' success isn't entirely up to the school. Some areas genuinely need more resources than others.
This system punishes areas that need more resources with by removing resources, likely causing a downward spiral.
A generation of kids is left with poor education before the schools eventually close, and then who wants to start a school in an area that has historically struggled when funding depends on them succeeding?
Based on happenings in other states, when public schools close the schools that take their place are from well funded groups who care more about spreading ideologies than running successful or profitable schools.
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
The function isn't "winner takes all". It's a claw back after objective failure.
California already spends tons of extra money on stuff like special ed, and struggling districts. I wouldn't touch that.
So, if there's a high school in a struggling area and it's graduating kids that can't do 7th grade math, then that opens up funding for charters in that area at 150% state average per student, or whatever the current formula us.
recursivedoubts 7 hours ago [-]
Give the money to the parents in the form of income-adjusted vouchers to spend on education as they see fit.
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
That creates a market for lemons.
How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare between educational opportunities for their kids?
The status quo says that the schools do not measure outcomes (and when they do, they do not publish it, or publish it on a long delay), so any objective data parents could use is not available.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
> How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare between educational opportunities for their kids?
If you have a significant number of illiterate parents they could hardly do worse than your current system!
They can judge by reputation, talking to parents with kids currently in a school, etc. IMO that is better than publishing metrics because then schools focus on the metrics: this is a huge problem in the UK where metrics are published.
In my experience parents (regardless of educational level) make better decisions than the system does, and there is research to back it up (outcomes for home educated kids for whom parents make all the decisions).
recursivedoubts 7 hours ago [-]
As opposed to the current market for education?
Parents know which schools are good and which aren't. They are intrinsically interested in their child's education in a way that no one else is. It's an obvious solution.
8 hours ago [-]
adolph 5 hours ago [-]
> If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.
K-12 education funding is strange. It has social welfare like elements like an entitlement, but is provisioned as a conditionally compulsory service like a jail.
It suffers from similar cost/benefit illegibility as healthcare, with its triangulation of patient, provider and payor, only remove decision making from the patient and on the provider side add local politics to upper management and union rules to workers.
Maybe that it works at all is testament to people caring about kids.
121789 7 hours ago [-]
I think you have equity and equality exactly reversed
iamkrazy 7 hours ago [-]
No he hasn't.
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
The solution is simple and every Asian country does this. You need to have nationwide testing at key intervals up to three times during your entire schooling. If you fail that you can keep retrying. Gaming it is a very hard because the people grading are thousands of miles away and have no idea who you are besides an ID number. This will also lead to a common curriculum that everyone has to prepare for. The bar for this common curriculum is very high in places like Japan, South Korea, China, and India. Doing this will also almost guarantee that a huge number of black and Latino kids are not gonna pass school. The truth is they’re culturally just not educationally focused at a family level. There might also be a genetic element to this though I’m not sure because kids of African immigrants perform pretty well. This is what all of these curricular dumbing down programs are trying to counteract.
jltsiren 1 hours ago [-]
Standardized testing is usually foiled by Goodhart's law. If the outcomes of the tests matter, schools start focusing on test prep, at the expense of actual education. It's probably necessary to have one set of standardized tests for college admission, but otherwise they should be abolished, because they are a terrible idea.
Separation of responsibilities is the actual key to good public schools. At least to the extent politicians and administrators can solve the issue. There should be a central entity that sets most of the curriculum and monitors and audits the entities that run the schools. And it must have the power and the resources to intervene if it determines that a school is not performing as expected.
maxglute 7 hours ago [-]
PRC has affirmative action points on gaokao for "underperforming" minorities, well it's been phased out to economically disadvantaged minorities last few years to mitigate privilege stacking. So system not incompatible with affirmative action, but even then tier2 PRC schools the affirmative action floor is still like 95th percentile tier1 closer to 99.9 percentile, i.e. not something that can be gamed like in US by 75th percentile SAT scores, athletics, donors, personality scores, diversity.
dyauspitr 3 hours ago [-]
How is underperforming/disadvantaged minorities not diversity?
Also, I don’t think there’s a problem with using athletics as a criteria for admission.
Other than that, I completely agree with you.
empath75 8 hours ago [-]
> if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something.
--
It's not really racial discrimination per se, but there's a strong parental-educational/economic/class element which is still tied to race in the US unfortunately.. It's not reason not to have high school calculus but it's still something to keep in account.
mc32 8 hours ago [-]
The results were predictable and predicted but politicians, state and local went whole hog on equity. That along with NCLB results on this catastrophe. We’re finally seeing some needed pushback. You can’t just hand out As to everyone and pass everyone as it’s a kindergarten assignment and then expect excellence. You’re teaching people who will become adults and you’re shortchanging them on skills if you don’t require proficiency. It’s also unfair to apt students who put in the time to learn and do well.
I can’t believe they actually went so far as to dismantle the little haven for achievement that was Lowell high school in SF by getting rid of GPA and entrance exams for a few years. Eventually furious alumni got that idiocy overturned but it should have never happened.
We’re also seeing higher ed address grade inflation by capping As at some institutions of renown.
throwawaypath 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jeffbee 9 hours ago [-]
I doubt that you can point to a high school which banned calculus. My guess is that you are referring to a political fight in San Francisco where a very specific racial/ethnic cohort of parents believes that one of the high schools is a Berkeley/Stanford acceptance funnel reserved for them, and they got mad when the government decided to spread the wealth.
From my perspective, there has never been any dumber debate than whether 9th grade math is called "Math" or "Algebra". My kids went to high school in Berkeley where Math is just called Math in grades 9-11 and after that you can take AP Calculus or AP Statistics if you want. And this is not Woke 1.0 stuff because the courses have been named that way forever.
scarmig 8 hours ago [-]
The revisionism here is astounding. Yes, San Francisco eliminated algebra for all 8th graders in public schools. It was not a simple rename. Parents sent their kids to supplementary private classes that taught the same curriculum as the old algebra class did, and it was not a redundant recap of the new not-algebra class.
I understand the motivation to deny that San Francisco banned middle school algebra: it's embarrassing, and it was disastrous for student outcomes. But it was a very real thing.
(The Lowell debate was a separate thing: should an academic-focused magnet school be able to use a standardized test to determine proficiency? Or should it be a lottery?)
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
They planned to do it state wide. The ban was blocked. It did not happen.
However, you can read the proposal if you want to see what sort of reasoning leads to "UC is admitting students to STEM majors, then finding out the students are not prepared for pre-algebra".
8 hours ago [-]
throwaway5752 8 hours ago [-]
The people working on this aren't idiots.
There are people who see massive business opportunities for enriching themselves in privatizing the education system. Some of there points are reasonable, and sometimes they are frauds. Either way, they lobby hard and have a lot of generally Republican politicians in their pockets.
Also, teacher pay is terrible in comparison to the job stress and - reasonably and expected - educational requirements.
The education system is trying to deal with a probably that is out of their control, the increasing wealth stratification in the US, while fending off adversaries that with both good and bad intentioned reasons are trying to undermine the institutions of public education.
At the same time, we have a totally new societal threat in social media. If you haven't read "Careless People", read it. You seem societies around the world locking social media away from kids on the advice of professional groups of educators, pediatricians, and psychologists. There are hordes of irresponsible and negligent parents whose kids are barely functional, and working their way through the educational pipeline.
There is no easy fix here that anyone is missing. In a democracy, this is an existential national crisis, as we are all seeing in real time.
edit: don't ask me who is working on this. It just tells me you are unserious and just complaining. Try google. Hundreds of thousands of people are working on this. Please elaborate on your disagreement with teachers groups (NEA, AFT), the prior administration (American Rescue Plan), or the current administration (ECCA). Or disagreements with AmeriCorps or NPSS as private volunteer service groups groups. Or disagreements with private education advocates (CAPE, NAIS). You may not like all the administrators and principals and teachers as individuals working on it in the system, or PTA organizations outside the system. I could go on all day. But these people are all seriously concerned about the problem, even though they may disagree in areas - you are not special in awareness of this issue.
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
Who's working on this? I think there are some pretty obvious easy fixes, at least for California:
Find a library that still has a copy of the educational plan California used back in the 1970's, and do that.
At the time, we had the best schools in the country. The state is much richer and has much higher income/sales tax rates now than it did back then. I think that should more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster, though it might mean moving some cash around in the state budget.
kyboren 7 hours ago [-]
> copy [the] educational plan California used back in the 1970's
I think that would go a long way.
> more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster
Wrong funding disaster. The real funding disaster is Prop 98, which mandates a certain amount of K-12 spending according to "the level of funding in 1986-87, General Fund revenues, per capita personal income, and school attendance". [0]
Specifically, "[...] [T]he Guarantee is in a Test 1 for all years 2024-25 through 2026-27. This means that the funding level of the Guarantee in these years is equal to roughly 40 percent of General Fund revenues, plus local property tax revenues. Pursuant to the Proposition 98 formula, this percentage of General Fund revenues is not reduced to reflect enrollment adjustments, which further increases per pupil funding." [0]
Additionally, both property tax revenues (affected by Prop 13) and general fund revenues are used to fund the LCFF[1], which is big on "equity" and gives schools with high ESL and generally disadvantaged students significantly more funds. It also guarantees funding growth with COLA and population growth adjustments.
Finally, on top of all that mandatory funding, we're spending discretionary funds to more than double outlays on special education vs. FY18-19[0]--which is claimed to be an investment in student outcomes. And discretionary funds for professional development. And discretionary funds to pay staff 14 weeks pregnancy leave. And discretionary funds to give LCFF a nearly doubled "super COLA".
The state doesn't have a funding problem, it has a spending problem. And the result of this unchecked spending growth is that mandatory Prop 98 spending alone is now a record $127.1B vs $59B in 2013-14 and $78.5B in 2018-19[2]--despite a ~7% enrollment decline over that period[3]. Meanwhile outcomes have plummeted.
The education administration mafia has the state over a barrel. Yet somehow most Californians believe that education is underfunded, usually with a dash of "something something Prop 13". But actually the problem is closer to a resource curse. With ever-growing guaranteed slices of the budget and discretionary sweeteners up the wazoo, who needs to actually teach kids?
In countries where students perform better, they do the opposite of your plan. Resources are pumped into the failing schools to get them to do better.
You seem to be just arguing for even more privatization in American which is awful, the kids that are failing have parents that won't be paying for good education or setting up schools. They won't bother with it at all if it isn't public and required.
akramachamarei 7 hours ago [-]
> the kids that are failing have parents that won't be paying for good education
As in, they would be spending their vouchers on things besides education? Because typically when people speak of privatizing education it means creating a marketplace of educators which parents select and buy with publicly funded vouchers.
hypersoar 8 hours ago [-]
I can find no evidence that California ever tried "banning high school calculus". The chapter in the much-maligned mathematics framework on high school [0] makes no such proposal, and indeed suggests consolidating the prerequisite classes to make it easier to reach calculus without acceleration in middle school:
> An alternative to eighth-grade acceleration would be to adjust the high school curriculum instead, eliminating redundancies in the content of current courses, so that students do not need four courses before Calculus. As enacted, Algebra II tends to repeat a significant amount of the content of Algebra I, and Precalculus repeats content from Algebra II. While recognizing that some repetition of content has value, further analysis should be conducted to evaluate how high school course pathways may be redesigned to create more streamlined pathways that allow students to take three years of middle school foundations and still reach advanced mathematics courses such as calculus.
Nor can I find any evidence that they "reject the idea that some kids are more talented at somethings than other kids". Instead, their FAQ [1] includes:
> All students deserve powerful mathematics instruction. High-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated.
> All students, regardless of background, language of origin, learning differences, or foundational knowledge are capable and deserving of depth of understanding and engagement in rich mathematics tasks.
This is not remotely the same as the silly framing of "if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination". It's about not giving up on students who are undeserved by mathematics education as it is currently constituted.
I myself have mixed feelings on "de-tracking" mathematics courses. I benefited from accelerated math classes and would have been bored to tears if forced to take classes at the standard pace. But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding. It's a thorny problem. But this comment adopts the framing of right-wing propaganda rather than the actual contents of the framework.
> But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding.
Where does your understanding come from? I'd imagine that educating less-gifted (intellectually or socioeconomically) students would be more expensive. To some extent, I can imagine there being additional costs to providing advanced education, such as if you need to higher better qualified teachers, or if somehow the textbooks are more expensive. And there might be costs in providing multiple tracks, such as having additional teachers, which could occur depending on the number of students. But I can also imagine advanced students' classes requiring fewer teaching assistants, fewer educational commodities (calculators, laptops), perhaps.
kubb 8 hours ago [-]
Why do you even need higher education if you can brain drain educated people from India?
alex_suzuki 8 hours ago [-]
Why so complicated? I thought the idea was to rent intelligence from OpenAI.
throwaway613746 8 hours ago [-]
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999900000999 8 hours ago [-]
>Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education
The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.
This has already happened in some places.
The bigger macro economic issues would probably be the collapse of the middle class, rampant housing and food insecurity.
Hirerarcy of needs and all that.
Anyway with The Republicans going out of their way to restrict student visas it's unclear where our next generation of high achivers is going to come from.
We sure aren't raising them here.
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
> The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.
Fraud is illegal. If the law isn't going to be enforced, then trying to fix the law is useless.
I agree about food insecurity. Nationally, it's worse now than it was during COVID. California actually made some good progress on that a few years ago:
I haven't checked food insecurity rates since then, but you may have noticed that food collection barrels have become rare around the holidays. At least for a few years, the food banks in Silicon Valley were truck-constrained, not food-constrained, so those barrels weren't worth the effort.
999900000999 6 hours ago [-]
You’re putting a lot of otherwise good people, teachers of low income students, into a very bad situation.
Many would just quit, and among those who stayed what are the options ?
Get fired when the school is shutdown for under performing.
Fill in tests for students.
If we use programming as an example, the best tech manager on earth can’t get a bunch of random people to write production ready code in a month ( maybe JS, but not Rust).
Public schools can’t pick and choose students. Charters sorta can.
If I ran the school system I’d set up *paid* apprenticeship to job programs in high schools. Actually get these kids real careers. You SHOULD be able to afford an apartment with a high school degree.
59percentmore 8 hours ago [-]
Ladies and gentlemen, the modern eugenicist.
Meanwhile, an anecdote:
11th Grade: Precalculus, all A's
12th Grade: AP Calculus, C average, one D quarter (in the middle of my parents' divorce, onset of body dysmorphia/dysphoria, college entrance applications, senior research practicum)
College Sophomore Year: Applied Calculus, aced, highest final score in the class
Post-college self-study: Failure to advance
Circumstances affect performance.
>so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something
Within the wider historical scope, in America, specifically: yes. Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that. That's why it's systemic. A cold summer day doesn't negate the existence of climate change.
akramachamarei 7 hours ago [-]
> Within the wider historical scope
In what situations would you attribute effects to concrete, near-term causes instead or abstract, historical ones? In particular, why do you attribute academic success in some areas to historical racism instead of (presumably) modern poverty? In other words, given a cohort of poor kids and not poor kids, which outcomes of each group would you assign to historical racism and why? In particular, would you expect different groups to perform better or worse after controlling for things other than race and experiences of racism?
59percentmore 1 hours ago [-]
Wrong premise. Near-term and historical causes are intertwined, inexorably-linked. Both cohorts are the result of historical racism. Hence,
>Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that.
I would expect the continued, sustained, and unburdened efforts to address and undo the effects of the policies and behaviors that make up what we know to be and have been systemic racism are necessary in order to remove historical racism as a cause of contemporary circumstances.
hedora 7 hours ago [-]
I'll assume you misread the thread. You're arguing that teaching calculus in public school is a form of eugenics.
If that's actually what you're arguing, I'd love to hear more (if only for entertainment value).
59percentmore 1 hours ago [-]
>You're arguing that teaching calculus in public school is a form of eugenics.
If that's your assessment, then you are, ironically, yourself proof of the failure of the American education system. (If you were educated in it. If not, you're proof of the failure of whatever system you were educated in.)
There is no reasonable read of the previous message that could lead the to conclusion that that was its argument. None. Zero.
Nervhq 2 hours ago [-]
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StateflowsLabs 9 hours ago [-]
"The surge in math deficiencies after dropping the SAT highlights a systemic issue: grade inflation. Without a standardized baseline like the SAT/ACT, a 4.0 GPA from a high school with relaxed standards looks identical to a 4.0 from a highly rigorous one.
Paradoxically, removing test requirements harms underprivileged students the most. Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection. In contrast, building a competitive profile based entirely on expensive extracurriculars, sports, and elite summer camps is far more wealth-dependent. Standardized testing isn't perfect, but it's often the only objective equalizer we have."
CalRobert 9 hours ago [-]
I wasn't underprivileged but I did go to a terrible evangelical high school that had no honors or AP classes (AP bio at a place teaching creationism would've been something else...) and I think I only got in to a decent college on the strength of my SAT and ACT scores. My grades were OK (except in bio, where I refused to acknowledge young Earth creationism) but not amazing.
RealityVoid 8 hours ago [-]
> My grades were OK (except in bio, where I refused to acknowledge young Earth creationism) but not amazing.
This is... Wild.
CalRobert 6 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is the Adventists seem to produce good hospitals but are still creationists. I guess it’s not a big deal how we got here if you just want to do medicine.
smcg 7 hours ago [-]
It's very common in US private schools.
nyeah 6 hours ago [-]
I think this depends a lot on how you select the set of private schools you're looking at.
Henchman21 3 hours ago [-]
Please provide a reference to this.
tclancy 7 hours ago [-]
Uh, it's been a while since I've been inside one, but I would guess it's very common in a certain strain of US private schools, not as a rule.
cm2012 7 hours ago [-]
No it is not lol. Incredibly rare
6 hours ago [-]
econ 8 hours ago [-]
Who gets to set the curriculum is a much bigger deal than given credit for. So many teachers complaining about the shit they have to teach. I remember one who didn't necessarily disagree but wondered why Al Gore should be the one to decide what goes into the [mandatory] documentary (in the Netherlands)
CalRobert 6 hours ago [-]
An inconvenient truth was mandatory viewing in NL?
econ 3 hours ago [-]
That's what she said.
happytoexplain 9 hours ago [-]
I can't read the article - do they explain why they think this is a "paradox"?
delecti 6 hours ago [-]
Expectation: removing standardized tests will give more opportunity to students who historically tend to do worse on those tests, like poor kids.
Reality: removing standardized tests means that universities have to put more weight on the rest of the college application, such as extracurricular activities which are often expensive and thus disadvantage poor kids.
Calling it a "paradox" is maybe a little hyperbolic, but basically it did the opposite of what they expected.
happytoexplain 4 hours ago [-]
But this is relative, right? We're talking about SATs vs just relying on grades. Do poor kids do worse on SATs relative to how they do in their class grades, as compared to other kids? I kind of just figured poor kids do worse overall.
I think the "paradox" is that you'd expect disadvantaged students to perform worse on standardized testing.
akramachamarei 7 hours ago [-]
Personally, I don't think they actually believe it's paradoxical, I think the authors are just trying to be polite to those who criticize standardized testing with identity politics. Politeness can aid in persuasion, so I don't blame them.
nyeah 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's paradoxical at all. This was the original strength of the SAT system.
eunos 9 hours ago [-]
And SAT as high school math exam itself I think is way too easy. They should design another test which can clearly distinguish top 1% or even 0.1%.from others
linguae 9 hours ago [-]
When I was in high school in California more than 20 years ago, SAT math alone was insufficient for admissions to STEM programs at mid-ranked and top-ranked universities. I was required to take the SAT Math IIC subject test, which went up to pre-calculus. We were also strongly encouraged to take calculus in high school. There are two AP Calculus exams: AB (which covers the first semester of university calculus) and BC (which covers the first two semesters).
raincole 9 hours ago [-]
There are already such tests. They're called International ___ Olympiad.
jobs_throwaway 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, the scores at the top are way too bunched. A perfect score should indicate generational genius, not the 100th smartest kid your year in California.
nradov 6 hours ago [-]
That's not a real problem for UC admissions. They accept thousands of students every year. Anyone who scores near perfect (within the margin of error) should be admitted to at least one UC campus. If that's not happening then the problem is with the admissions criteria, not with the SAT.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
Yup. SAT is just a _bad_ test. It's way too easy to get top scores there, and the whole calculator section should be removed.
SAT also makes it easy to just mechanically grind it because the problems are so simple that you can just memorize their "shapes".
We need a test with a smaller number of tasks escalating in complexity. So that the top scores are extremely rare.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
> Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection.
Sports frequently just requires a ball or a place to run.
In both scenarios, you can still purchase better equipment/training. There are very expensive, effective SAT prep options out there for the wealthy.
criddell 9 hours ago [-]
My kids were able to take some SAT test prep course through their school (partially funded by the PTA) and it helped a lot. They wrote a bunch of practice exams and each time their scores went up. Also, test taking itself is a skill and the more you practice it the better you get at it. If you’ve written the SAT 15 times over the past 2 years, then the 16th time won’t be as stressful and you will know strategies that work and the questions will be familiar.
If you are in a school that doesn’t have a well funded PTA, you are at a disadvantage.
jeffbee 9 hours ago [-]
You can, as of about a year ago, take official SAT practice exams for free in Google Gemini.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
SAT prep is much more than just taking practice exams.
jeffbee 8 hours ago [-]
The person to whom I responded seemed to imply that it consists chiefly or entirely of taking practice exams. I merely wish to point out that if you want your kid to take SAT practice exams every month you can do it for free at home.
ceejayoz 8 hours ago [-]
Such a "SAT test prep course" is going to involve more than just self-guided practice exams. It'll include feedback and coaching to address deficits revealed by those practice exams.
criddell 8 hours ago [-]
This is exactly right. Writing each practice exam only takes a few hours and this course last months. The reset of the time is filled with all the things you talked about.
Plus, for some kids writing a practice exam at home isn’t the same thing as a simulated seating with kids all around and a proctor in the room.
jeffbee 8 hours ago [-]
You seem to be arguing with someone else.
ceejayoz 8 hours ago [-]
No; I'm saying "just take practice exams" isn't what we're really talking about. They are merely a part of high-end test prep offerings.
8 hours ago [-]
triceratops 8 hours ago [-]
Whatever gates you put up, the wealthy can fire cannons of cash at them. You just have to pick the ones least vulnerable to cash barrages.
What is the marginal gain of expensive SAT prep? Versus just doing hundreds of mock tests out of some prep book, like SWEs grinding LeetCode?
adrr 8 hours ago [-]
Sports is the most expensive way to get into college. Tennis is close to $1 million to get your kid into an Ivy league through tennis. Malcom Gladwell wrote about sports and colleges in his book "revenge of the tipping point". Sports is used by the wealthy to get their less academically inclined children in to top schools and some school are expanding it.
valleyer 9 hours ago [-]
Your analogy works against you, given that tons of professional athletes come from poverty.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
Professional athletes are like people who get 1600s on the SAT; a bit of an outlier.
Aarostotle 9 hours ago [-]
That's exactly the point. Top schools are looking for outlier intellectual talent, but the egalitarian approach (high school grade inflation plus weakening of standardized testing) smooths the differences and makes it harder for them to admit the right people.
The visible result has been the weakening of these institutions. Do also observe that this is recursive — as these institutions have lowered their standards over decades, the people who go through them and end up leading them are weaker, too.
t0mpr1c3 8 hours ago [-]
We're talking about the California state education system here. They do not have the option to restrict the provision of their services to a tiny elite. The concerns of "top schools" absorbs altogether too much oxygen.
toast0 7 hours ago [-]
IMHO, California state higher education is setup to be tiered. UC > CSU > Community Colleges. If UC is getting a lot of STEM students that need remedial math, I think something has gone wrong. Those students might be better served by getting their math needs met at a community college and transfering to UC later.
For one, why pay UC prices for remedial math? For two, community college has a lot more sections of remedial math and more experience teaching it.
If you're in a degree that doesn't need much math, taking remedial math at UC is probably fine; but all the STEM degrees want at least the full calculus series (afaik).
Remedial math for STEM students at CSU is probably in the middle. You still don't really want a lot of students in that group, when they could be better served at community college ... but CSU should also be more prepared for it.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
> Top schools are looking for outlier intellectual talent…
Eh, somewhat. They want some of those outliers hobnobbing with the legacies.
BigTTYGothGF 9 hours ago [-]
> tons of professional athletes come from poverty
Is that actually the case?
ptek 9 hours ago [-]
Depends on the sport. I don’t think the Olympic equestrian competitors would be dirt poor.
xhkkffbf 8 hours ago [-]
Read up on Kobe Bryant or Bronny James.
valleyer 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, those are some good counterexamples: both sons of professional athletes. And there are plenty of others.
On the other hand, we have: Allen Iverson, Larry Bird, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Vick, Bo Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Fernando Valenzuela, Albert Pujols, Jim Thorpe, ...
Oh, and LeBron James himself!
So my view is that people of both rich and poor upbringings have a good chance in the sports world these days, at least for those sports where the necessary gear is relatively cheap.
BigTTYGothGF 4 hours ago [-]
> On the other hand
Perhaps I should have instead said "is that still happening at meaningful rates".
LeBron James is an interesting example. Per wiki:
> Realizing that her son would be better off in a more stable family environment, Gloria allowed him to move in with the family of Frank Walker, a local youth football coach who introduced James to basketball when he was nine years old.
and then later he went to a fancy private high school (whose wikipedia page has many notable alumni, all athletes).
So while "from poverty" may be technically accurate, I don't know if I'd count it given all his opportunities later in childhood.
nradov 6 hours ago [-]
Times have changed. Due to the rise of expensive youth travel club sports leagues I suspect we will see fewer poor children turn professional. There will always be a few outliers but if you don't have access to top coaching and extra competitive playing time prior to college then you're really at a disadvantage.
rixed 8 hours ago [-]
According to IA this is mostly a myth though.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
That's not the reality for most youth sports anymore. It's gotten much more competitive. Participating in school sports isn't enough. They generally can't develop the level of skill necessary to gain advantage in college admissions without paying a lot to participate in travel club teams and for private coaching. And I'm not talking just about NCAA recruited athletic scholarships but even for the sort of regular extracurricular sports activities that might give someone an advantage in college admissions.
chasd00 3 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine brought his girl up in club soccer, he was starting to travel to different states for tournaments when she was about 8 years old. It was insanely expensive. The only thing i can think of crazier than club soccer is maybe club cheerleading. Youth sports is completely bonkers if you've never been exposed to it.
duped 8 hours ago [-]
It feels like the problem are the SAT prep courses' existence then
fred_is_fred 7 hours ago [-]
I've been wondering with all the data that's available now couldn't admissions look at a 4.0 from HS A vs a 4.0 at HS B and then compare those to actual grades on the campus once students were in class? Assuming HS A has lower standards, they should be able to tell that a 4.0 isnt as meaningful as a 4.0 from HS B. Seems like a straightforward exercise.
jaco6 6 hours ago [-]
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lokar 9 hours ago [-]
The problem is as never the tests. It was pretending that the difference between a 600 and 625 (or whatever) really predicted anything.
It was the silly idea that with tests you could produce a fair ordering of students based on potential to succeed.
scarmig 9 hours ago [-]
You can absolutely make a bet on who's more likely to succeed based on a 100 point difference, though. It's not absolute, but it's highly predictive. And the reason the SAT was dropped wasn't because admissions were being forced to blindly accept 620 over 610 (they never were), but so that people who scored hundreds of points below the mean could be admitted (in the pursuit of other institutional goals).
lokar 9 hours ago [-]
We have decades of data (test score vs grades and degree completion). They should gather it up and calculate the answers.
Flip answer: the bucket width should be 2.5 times the score improved of a prep course.
raincole 9 hours ago [-]
Any working system has to rely on some arbitrary rules. Drawing a line between students who scored 600 and 625 is still infinitely better than drawing it based on the decision-makers' moods.
lokar 9 hours ago [-]
Or, treat 600-625 as a tie, and use a lottery.
chaostheory 9 hours ago [-]
As imperfect standardized tests are, they are still more fair and less biased than using arbitrary judgement on extra curriculars
lokar 8 hours ago [-]
Bucket to the observed predictive power of the score, resolve ties with a lottery .
akramachamarei 6 hours ago [-]
Would this be fixed buckets? I.e. would you treat 649-650 more predictive than 648-649? Presumably that wouldn't work. I'm sure there's some algorithm that could do this but it seems subtle.
Obviously, if a school has a cutoff score bucketing is easy, but with excess applicants ordering becomes necessary. I guess this sort of probabilistic score would induce an order for any given student relative to sufficiently superior or inferior applicants.... I'm now kinda curious to figure this problem out. Did not expect an algorithms problem to arise in this thread lol
lokar 5 hours ago [-]
And you don’t want a 100% cutoff. You need to admit some people just under the threshold since the scores are relative. You need fresh data to keep the model tuned.
Some kind of weighted lottery
akramachamarei 3 hours ago [-]
Allow me to propose a model for this score-based ordering with fuzziness. (Perhaps we can call this problem probabilistic rasterization.)
The final output of an execution of the system, given a static, complete set of applicants is a particular ordering of applicants. Since lottery is involved, there are multiple acceptable orderings for a given input set. The question is to define a set of criteria to classify acceptable orderings, and a desired probability distribution of orderings, which can be satisfied by an algorithm for a maximal proportion of inputs.
For example, given a set of applicants A with score function F, we notate an ordering relation R(x,y) such that, given a limited number of seats, applicant y will be admitted before applicant x. For shorthand, x < y means R(x,y).
Possible acceptance criteria for an ordering R may include:
(1) Given some d in the codomain of F (presumably a group), FOR ALL x,y in A, if F(x) + d ≤ F(y), then x < y
Possible criteria for the distribution of orderings may include:
(1) FOR ALL x,y in A, if F(x) = F(y) then P(x < y) = P(x > y)
jpadkins 9 hours ago [-]
who uses SAT scores as "potential succeed"??
lokar 9 hours ago [-]
The original argument for standardized tests was to pick based on how well you would do in university (vs who your parents know).
trunnell 6 hours ago [-]
I'm in the SF bay area w/ middle school and high school age kids.
Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8% in private school.
Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of Math or Art of Problem Solving. This group only partially overlaps with the private school group. This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes. It stands to reason that it's producing far less equitable outcomes, too, given that extremely bright kids who happen to be in lower-resourced schools have fewer opportunities. Universal screening for giftedness, advanced public school math courses, and the SAT -- all avenues for advancement regardless of background -- were all eliminated.
niwtsol 6 hours ago [-]
Could you elaborate on the reasoning they "strongly discourage math outside of school"? I'm genuinely curious how that would be a stance they take.
trunnell 4 hours ago [-]
We've heard:
- It can make kids "overconfident when they see material they think they already know, so they end up not engaging."
- Some programs, particularly RSM, are criticized for valuing speed over depth. Current culture for K-8 math teachers is the opposite, they value depth over speed.
Left unsaid:
- It can make the teacher's job harder when the class has a wide span of abilities.
- Current teaching culture is skeptical of accelerating and/or skipping grades in math.
Notably, we've never heard English teachers be upset about a kid reading a book outside of school that's above grade level, or using advanced vocabulary in an essay. They tend to praise it.
rawgabbit 5 hours ago [-]
Not the OP. I assume the public school teachers don't want to answer when the student says "my Russian math teacher said to do this" instead of the common core math that is being taught.
I'm in Oakland with a three year old and I'm looking to either move to a better school district or pay for an expensive private school. I used to be a substitute teacher for the Oakland unified school district and I straight up refuse to send my son there. I have seen firsthand that these kids are not being taught well and the shortcomings compound year over year until you end with high school level students that are unequipped to learn at the high school level, often only barely able to read. Completely unequipped to read critically at the level needed for a proper high school education. Students get passed on to the next level no matter what, even if they lack the basic skills needed to succeed at that level.
It has only gone downhill since I left, and is now facing something like a hundred million dollar deficit in budget which will likely lead to deeper cuts and worse student outcomes.
I'm not sure what I will do but the deadline to figure it out is fast approaching. Probably we will move, but not sure how to find the right place that isn't too far away or out of our budget but can offer a better future / stronger education for my children. I don't have the solution, but I know other places have done much better than my city sadly. I've read that states like Mississippi have been able to dramatically improve their educational outcomes with certain literacy programs.
gretch 6 hours ago [-]
> This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
Do you have more info on this? Where is it coming from and what does it look like?
Because this is actually crazy if true.
Like, just compare to a situation where they strongly discourage Reading outside of school.
Not to mention that math is just a basic life skill and it gets exercised just going through normal every day stuff (at least middle school level math)
WarmWash 8 hours ago [-]
Why do we have such an easy time accepting peoples intrinsic athletic ability and such a difficult time accepting people's intrinsic mental ability?
To me this is a 1:1 comparison, but people lose their mind when I make the comparison. College isn't for everyone just like amateur league sport isn't for everyone.
I feel like I am going to a minor league baseball game and seeing a shortstop on the field with the motor control of a toddler, and while everyone is cheering them, I think I'm taking crazy pills wondering who the hell steered this guy towards baseball his whole life.
BobaFloutist 7 hours ago [-]
Because intrinsic ability is such a vanishingly small part of the equation that we can't know who could actually be the best until we actually give everyone a fair shot.
There might be the rare generational talent that, starting in their discipline at age 18 with no prior exposure and poor nutrition, education, health, exercise, etc, could outcompete your average loser brought up with every advantage and private lessons from age 6, but in general I wouldn't expect talent to out in those circumstances.
And school's not supposed to be about filtering for rare generational talents, at least not first and foremost. It's supposed to be about getting everyone as far as they can go, and if we separate people into "smart" and "dumb" buckets before they're old enough to ever have actually gotten a chance, some people will be stuck in the "dumb" buckets their whole life that could've been a solid contributer to society if society ever cared enough to invest in them.
Or, another way of looking at it: Everything else is made to put a thumb on the scale. Everything else is designed from the ground up to advantage the advantaged. Public school is supposed to be one of the few institutions that mitigates that, that tries to put a thumb on the other side at least a little, to help level things out. And the people with the advantages hate that, and try their hardest to thwart it, whether through private schools, through pushing public schools to make different "tracks", or whatever.
6 hours ago [-]
themacguffinman 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's because mental ability and personal worth is pretty strongly tied in the modern world, in that way calling someone deficient is like insulting them. I don't know if you can escape that dynamic, intellect is just very important in modern work and culture. To judge someone as mentally deficient is essentially relegating them to the bottom rungs of the modern economy and status hierarchy in a way that judging athletic ability doesn't do, so naturally it's not comfortable for people to make that judgement.
nradov 6 hours ago [-]
There's a huge difference in how much intrinsic athletic ability matters depending on the sport. It's a bigger factor in a sport like baseball or tennis where eyesight and coordination are so critical; you can only train those things to a limited extent. But for sports that rely more on strength and endurance than technical skill pretty much anyone has the potential to reach a high level of performance (not Olympic level but like NCAA division 3 level) regardless of intrinsic ability. It's mostly a matter of being disciplined and grinding out the workouts every day for years.
maxglute 7 hours ago [-]
This broadly true but economy isn't run on NBA, NHL, MLA, i.e. a few 1000 of 5 standard deviation talent where separation is mostly genetics. Academia need to develop magnitude more passable high end workers, the genetic pool for that is large and system biases towards culture to fill 1,000,000s of 1-2 standard deviation brains. You need to hammer minor leaguers to see if they make it to rookie league or whatever level below AAA that system has demand for. Reasonable system would be to herd everyone through filtering process and throw drop outs into vocational training or soft subjects that should not be elevated on same level of STEM, not because they're less valuable people blah blah, but the pipeline should distinguish and prioritize strategic sectors.
csomar 6 hours ago [-]
athletic games are fun and there is some money in these small circles but that's not what runs the economy. So it's only affecting a very small percentage of society vs. mental ability which affect most of society. The french revolution, communism, capitalism, etc.. It is a very heated topic and it's about who gets to control/have power.
throwawaypath 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
weakfish 5 hours ago [-]
Awwww, poor throwawaypath, you're so downtrodden and oppressed :(
If you're going to be racist online, at least have the backbone to say it outright.
undeveloper 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dartharva 6 hours ago [-]
Please.. undergrad college in any stream is a very achievable baseline that literally anyone not afflicted with a pathological mental condition can pass, provided they are interested themselves and are subjected to classes from instructors who are serious about their jobs. All you need is some basic level of discipline and direction. College is not some kind of academic olympics.
sherburt3 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks for chiming in Young Sheldon
make3 8 hours ago [-]
No one is saying there isn't, but it's objectively a stupid massive oversimplification of how complex things like a human brain and human learning really are.
For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold.
School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health.
We also have very strong incentives as a society, as an economy and as a democracy to have as many educated people as possible, to work on setting the best conditions possible for people to learn
Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated.
The measure (college degree) became a target, and thus it stopped functioning as intended.
make3 6 hours ago [-]
Before devices and AI came. we're seeing a reversal of the Flynn effect trend
jdw64 9 hours ago [-]
Looking at the world, it seems we all go through similar systemic issues. Naturally, in East Asian cultures where the fervor for education is overheated, this phenomenon tended to manifest much earlier.
When specific exams are abolished or watered down under the banner of 'diversity and equal opportunity,' the wealthy actually gain a massive advantage. Of course, the exam system itself inherently favors the rich as well.
The reason is simple: weakening exams naturally forces the strengthening of alternative metrics. During the transition period when a new system is introduced to society, wealthy parents are far better equipped to adapt than poorer ones.
Korea’s 'Spoon Class Theory' (where rich parents are gold spoons and poor parents are dirt spoons) and Japan’s 'Parent Gacha' (parent lottery) stem from this exact dynamic.
Sure, standardized testing benefits the wealthy because they can hire top-tier tutors. However, when the rules of the system change entirely, the underprivileged simply do not have the buffer or resources to keep up with the shift.
constantius 26 minutes ago [-]
Insightful.
I wonder if there will come a time where being conservative is seen as being on the side of the working class, the poor, and the disadvantaged, because inequality is so far gone that any change to the system is too likely to be exploited by the ruling class/the rich and make things worse.
Arguably, some must already feel this way.
anal_reactor 8 hours ago [-]
When school doesn't force kids to study, there is a growing gap between parents who do and those who don't. Wealth is just a proxy for that.
jdw64 8 hours ago [-]
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MyHonestOpinon 6 hours ago [-]
I agree. The rich kids will always have an advantage. But let me ask why are we playing this like a zero sum game? Do we not have enough education for anyone who is willing to put up the work?
jdw64 6 hours ago [-]
The ideal of education is holistic growth, but functionally, it's a positional good. An Ivy League, MIT, or UC Berkeley degree is valuable precisely because others do not have it, not simply because you do.
Add to this the fact that global productivity is maxed out, yet access to the tools of production remains highly restricted. This is the core issue. If the number of good jobs is fixed, hiring is a zero-sum game.
When education becomes universally accessible, we don't get equality; we just get higher hurdles. Just look at the dev industry. It used to be that knowing a local CMS was enough to get a job. Now, you are forced to grind leetcode and memorize the deep architecture of tech stacks you'll never actually use just to pass the filtering process.
I don't think there's any real solution to this inequality. It's a reality, and any attempt to 'solve' it is bound to fail
constantius 18 minutes ago [-]
So your post got flagged, and I wonder what was controversial about it.
Wouldn't you agree that this zero-sum quality ultimately stems from increasing wealth inequality?
While scarcity is a reality indeed, more egalitarian societies, where life can be satisfactory whether you've studied with billionaire kids or in your town's vocational college, the issue is much lesser.
I'd argue measures that reduce wealth inequality would be the solution.
delfinom 6 hours ago [-]
We do have tons of education resources available nation wide. Over here in NYC, we have the highest per-capita spending on students with some of the worse outcome rates in the country. The biggest problem nobody wants to address is parental involvement.
Parents who want their kids to learn and excel will get their kids to learn and excel. Be it through their own involvement with classwork or actively hunting out better education opportunities. _Money_ helps but it isn't the end-all solution.
Meanwhile, if you have parents who treat schools as day care and do jackshit to be involved in their kids education. Well, those are the failing students you get.
Shit, I'll add as a child of two eastern european immigrants. My parents both worked 2 jobs each for years while I was in public school here in the US, they immigrated with basically nothing to their name and hard labor jobs. And they would still make time to help me with homework.
chaidhat 9 hours ago [-]
As a product of the STEM post-SAT UC system (UCLA ‘26), I never personally experienced “middle school math” being taught or a lack of mathematical understanding.
I’ve had my fair share of classes which throw you into the deep end and not many which coddle you. Never seen any professor teaching middle school mathematics. A lot of professors started off with a vague idea of prerequisites, covered the basic ideas and usually go straight into the deep end with new material. It is up to the student to make sure they are acquainted with the prerequisites, go to discussions or office hours to ask TAs or the professor, or just drop the class and do it next quarter (without penalty). At least in my four years at UCLA, we have ample opportunity to do it and the TAs are 90% empathetic towards “stupid questions.”
So in my personal opinion, I think profs shouldn’t be wasting time teaching basic math and there are more than enough opportunities for the student to learn it at their time in the UC.
dieselgate 55 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for sharing your post-SAT experience and it's similar to mine (UCD engineering '14). The article mentions "middle school math" for people in first semester calculus but doesn't specify which calculus series. There were at least three when I was in undergrad: engineering/physics/math, biology/life-science, and business/econ series.
rahimnathwani 7 hours ago [-]
"In 11th grade, the most relevant grade relating to college readiness, 30.5% of students met or exceeded math learning standards. Of these, nearly half exceeded the learning standard — marking them as likely to be the best prepared for a college STEM major."
Politicians in California want the ethnic mix of students at public universities to reflect the ethnic mix of the state population. They cannot achieve this goal if colleges use academic preparedness as the main factor in admissions:
Academics presumably have multiple reasons to want students showing up having mastered the prerequisites of whichever class they're taking.
k6hkUZtLUM 8 hours ago [-]
Years ago, students would take placement exams when they enrolled in the community college. This was great for their education. They would spend a year or two getting to college level english and math.
That program is expensive and apparently made people “feel bad”. The colleges were no longer allowed to require placement tests. Then they were no longer allowed to offer remedial courses (courses that did not count toward a degree) and students went directly into college english and math.
The failure rates are astounding. About 1 in 3 at a large CC.
This issue is trickling up from k-12 being required to “pass” everyone to the colleges with that same pressure.
We need our policy to focus on education achievement rather than number-of-degrees. The incentive is short sighted and the ramifications could result in our local economies declining with ineffective employees, fewer successful businesses, etc.
Dropping standardized test requirements is disconcerting. Of all of the institutions that should be making decisions neutrally based on the evidence, it’s universities. The fact that even institutions like MIT changed their admissions policies according to ideas that aren’t backed by evidence.
sosodev 7 hours ago [-]
Isn’t this contradictory to your point? They dropped it, collected data, and then reverted when the evidence suggested they made the wrong choice.
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
The data has showed that standardized tests are highly predictive for decades. Schools made the change despite the data. Then they changed back not because the data changed, but because it became apparent they couldn’t tolerate the burdens of not screening students properly.
undeveloper 5 hours ago [-]
didn't MIT, like most other schools change this only in wake of COVID? A pandemic resulting in a significant amount of your potential applicants from applying is pretty good reason.
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
That was a coincidence. MIT announced it was dropping the SAT on March 20, 2020, just a day after the first statewide lockdown order. The announcement says that they had already planned to make the change before COVID: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/a-special-announcement... (“And last, but certainly not least: I know we are making this announcement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We had already been planning to make this change…”)
The UC system dropped the SAT in May 2021, in a settlement of a lawsuit that argued standardized tests were discriminatory.
Alifatisk 8 hours ago [-]
Is this really surprising to anyone? Especially the oldies?
I remember decades ago when I started high school. We were all given laptops, but the teachers had a whole lecture on when to use laptops and for what.
One thing that stuck with me was how one of the teachers pointed out that we should still take notes and do our homework on physical notebooks, this is because we learn better that way. Things stick to our memory much more when we write it with our hand compared to writing it on the computer.
We were supposed to use electronics as little as possible until we grasp the subject. Pen and paper is enough in the beginning.
We have truly entered a era where electronic devices is part of our daily life, its now a necessity to have it on us at all times. Of all the places, I would have expected schools to be sensitive towards whats allowed in class and whatnot.
If I could decide, I would have banned all electronic devices in class (there is exceptions of course).
tedggh 9 hours ago [-]
My nephews came to the US in their early teens as non English speakers. They struggled in some of the courses but still got good grades reported to their parents. So, apparently some teachers will put them on a bus together with other minorities and take them on a day trip to the museum instead of math class, but they would still get graded. They retuned back to Spain and had a very difficult time graduating from high school because of math. So I’m not sure how well of a predictor high school is.
BigTTYGothGF 9 hours ago [-]
> "We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.
When I was a grad student in a mediocre university in a different state thirty years ago we had a lot of kids in a similar situation. This was resolved by means of a pre-placement exam, and the ones who scored the worst had to take one of two remedial math classes, the lower of which was solidly at the middle school level. The university had a SAT requirement at the time.
The pre-placement exam had two versions that were used on alternate days, and a student could take it as often as they liked.
This may be a new experience for those particular UC faculty, but it is not a new phenomenon.
godsinhisheaven 9 hours ago [-]
Out of the current population of college students today, what percentage shouldn't really be there, be it for lack of intelligence or too much? (e.g. smart ceo guy dropping out.) 10%? 20%? 50%? If you can't do high school level math, much less middle school, do you deserve to be in college? It really strikes at what the purpose of college is: is it for educating people, no matter their prior abilities? Or is it to foster our best and brightest to put them on a path towards advancing society? Or is it to create well-rounded individuals, knowledgeable in many different domains? I admit, perhaps the purpose is all of the above, but if so, things that try to be everything for everyone often have to make sacrifices in one area to improve another.
eunos 9 hours ago [-]
It's very astonishing that sometime I heard folks with very high SAT including math /science/programming accolades failed to get admission in UCs but you have severe math deficit like this.
kyboren 6 hours ago [-]
But were those folks members of politically desirable racial groups? Or were they Asian?
confidantlake 8 hours ago [-]
It is depressing but not surprising.
Lonestar1440 8 hours ago [-]
We need to ensure a diverse student body - by making sure that smart kids of every race, class, and culture are given a thorough math education.
The K-12 public schools in California fail too many kids; and far too many poor, minority kids. Rather than fix this, we ban 8th grade algebra because we don't like the racial makeup of the advanced math track.
We can, in fact, have it both ways. But it will take change and be resisted by people who, ironically, claim to be helping the poor minorities most hurt today.
jrflo 8 hours ago [-]
It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA. You can always get extra help with homework, projects, etc. if you have a better funded support system. Single subject/unit tests in high school are also much more narrow in scope and easier to prepare for. A standardized test on the other hand is so wide in breadth that raw abilities will shine more.
cryzinger 5 hours ago [-]
The SAT/ACT prep school industry is a thing. I grew up with many, many kids whose (wealthy) parents sent them to SAT prep summer school every year from age 12 to 17.
jrflo 5 hours ago [-]
Oh for sure. But there's also a huge industry for private tutors, homework help, writing help, etc- which more directly translates dollars to GPA points. My thinking is that the translation between dollars to SAT/ACT points is much less than that.
pasttense01 3 hours ago [-]
Something many people here miss: UCSD is a selective institution. UC San Diego’s most recent published first-year acceptance rate is about 28.4% for fall 2025, based on 136,740 applicants and 38,846 admits. UCSD’s own admissions page also summarizes this as a 28% admit rate. The lousy students aren't even going to apply since they know they will be rejected. So we are not talking about an open enrollment institution where you would expect a significant number of students to need remedial math help; we are talking about the cream of the crop of California high school graduates many of which don't know high school math.
ryandamm 7 hours ago [-]
The root cause of the collapse in math education in California is one bad researcher's work, combined with politics.
Briefly, a Stanford-affiliated "researcher" named Jo Boaler produced two deeply underpowered studies claiming to show that putting all students in the same grade-level math course led to better outcomes for everyone — even the kids that would've normally been tracked into advanced math. But she only tested results on grade-level math — of course the would-be advanced kids did better on "grade level" math if they've taken it recently. The loss is the advanced math they didn't take.
I fought with my son's middle school administration about this precise issue. It is the stated policy of CA's state level education department to de-emphasize advanced math and tracking, in favor of these deeply suspect ideas. I'm pretty progressive in general, but this is braindead stupid, alarming, and self-defeating. (If you care about equity, you NEED to have options in the public school for the underprivileged gifted kids! the rich kids have lots of options and will be fine.)
It's deeply depressing, but education has long been a weak spot for California; since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think). But to compound that with this wrongheaded, moronic, politically suspect and quantitatively incorrect policy is... infuriating.
kyboren 5 hours ago [-]
I agree with everything you wrote about maladministration of California's math curricula, but:
> since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil
funding for public education (excluding college, I think).
This is totally incorrect. California ranked 6th in total per-pupil spending in 2023[0].
California has a formulaic mandate on K-12 funding amounts (Prop 98) and schools are funded through both property taxes (affected by Prop 13) and general funds via the LCFF, which directs extra funds towards schools with more disadvantaged students.
In fact, funding levels keep hitting record after record, with only mandatory Prop 98 spending rising from $59B in 2013-14[1] to $127.1B in 2026-27[2], despite an enrollment decline of ~7% over that period[3].
This is interesting news to me, thank you. I'm curious if the per-pupil spending includes locally raised funds; the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor, and districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate. So public schools function as local charities and inevitably have fundraising arms to make up the shortfall. This has been true since at least the 1980s when I was in school, and is definitely still true today.
bzmrgonz 5 hours ago [-]
I think this is a Global phenomenon guys. In my humble opinion STEAM kids will need to be assigned 2 agents (quite honestly, I think every kid)... a digital brain and a digital tutor(s). We also have to revamp the entire curriculum, just hear me out; Why do we not memorize binary or assembly in computer science? Why do we allow calculators after a certain grade? Because we have abstracted large portions of the lower level structures in those disciplines. The medical industry is suppose to be revamping requirements for medical professions, and I think the STEAM programs should do the same.
adolph 4 hours ago [-]
Memorizing binary would certainly revamp the A in STEAM.
STEAM takes STEM education a step further by integrating “Arts” into the
acronym, encompassing language arts, drama, graphic design, visual arts,
music, and new media.
> We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields
I was annoyed to not find specifics. I would be surprised if the K12 school board and university STEM professors are in agreement about what middle school mathematics is.
Trig comes to mind as a common stumbling block. I could be forgetting, but I don't recall much of it on the SAT. If I had to pick one area of math where the gap between learning something initially and actually being shown its broader applicability is the longest, it would be that. Like a decade between SOHCAHTOA and diffeq / fourier probably.
> To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8)
And here's the slick 50-page, double-column manifesto from the UC establishment, unsigned of course, on the subject -- giving us a sense of the scale of the bureaucratic blob that the petitioners are up against:
Getting rid of the SAT was a huge mistake and many Universities are finally seeing it for the problems it's caused. The fact that so many students are getting into the UC system and not able to do high school level algebra is one of the symptoms of it. The Cal State System is also having the same issues, we now give University credit for remedial (high school level) Mathematics and English courses.
pgh 9 hours ago [-]
The lack of any subject level standardised US high school certification to prove skill-level for matriculation still boggles my mind. I realise this is fundamentally a curriculum issue, as it’s set at a local level. There’s AP, but that’s not universally available.
WillAdams 9 hours ago [-]
For my part, it has always killed me that schools don't do as one system which I once briefly attended did --- divide courses between academic and social --- academic classes are attended at one's ability level, while social classes are at one's age level.
I was in 4th grade, but attended 8th grade math, science, English, and history (there was a 4 grade cap until after 8th grade classes) while my homeroom, Phys. ed., and social studies were with my 4th grade age peers.
Some teachers at the school were also accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and for students who were able to take courses which weren't able to be taught, either a professor from the college would come to the school to be taught, or arrangements would be made to bus students to the college.
It wasn't uncommon for students to be awarded a college diploma along with their high school diploma at graduation and there were multiple instances of multiple majors being completed.
gamander2 7 hours ago [-]
That's a brilliant system.
declan_roberts 8 hours ago [-]
The best option for a high achiever is to get out of the high school crab bucket as soon as possible. Drop out and take your GED and start community college (often free). Public high school is a terrible place to be a smart kid.
floren 7 hours ago [-]
I don't see that much advantage in pushing them out of the crab bucket and into the rat race. As a smart kid in a small rural high school, I had so much free time to read and pursue my other interests, because school wasn't demanding.
declan_roberts 7 hours ago [-]
I didn't even know what freedom was until I "dropped out" of high school and enrolled in community college (dual enrollment program). Suddenly I went from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM school day to a 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM school day. Wow that was incredible.
Not to mention I was no longer graded on attendance or "participation". What a relief. Sometimes I'd skip my last class and have lunch at my high school with my friends (I was technically dual-enrolled). They'd go back to class and I'd go goof off.
Needless to say, the following year about 2/3rds of them selected community college.
throwawaypath 2 hours ago [-]
This is what "math is racist" brought us to.
japhyr 9 hours ago [-]
Anecdotal data point: My son is finishing 9th grade, and he's taking 10th grade math because he got ahead a year when he was younger. At his school, you're exempted from having to take the final exam if you're passing with a reasonable grade at the end of the semester. He said there are about four students who don't have to take the final exam.
Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds, it's only gotten more difficult.
t0mpr1c3 8 hours ago [-]
True. COVID has set the entire cohort back, in terms of education but also every other aspect of personal development.
999900000999 8 hours ago [-]
Community College is the way to go for most students. The UCs cost too much, for the first 2 years you can either spend 2400$ at a community college or 32k at a UC.
Even if your family has the money, put that extra 30k in an index and you have a home down payment by the time you finish school.
>Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.
Ehh, you can't balance the world so easily. I was never going to go straight to a 4 year college because I didn't have a stable home situation.
rs999gti 7 hours ago [-]
All I have to say is LOL to holistic admissions.
Use standardized testing. We cannot power the future with feels, we need STEM grads.
What did they expect to happen? Is it one of those things when they say "They may be a professor but they can't tie their shoes!". Surely, they should have seen it coming.
I see quotes from faculty there about this being "unexpected", like "the bottom dropped out". Are they just pretending to be surprised or actually surprised...
nonethewiser 8 hours ago [-]
>What did they expect to happen?
A mixture.
1) They were delusional and thought SAT/ACT scores werent useful signals for selecting qualified candidates.
2) They didn't care and prioritized the ability to admit people based off race and other demographics.
And now they are resolving the dissonance between their mission and admission policy.
Johnathan Haidt detailed this dynamic a long time ago in a lecture at Duke entitled "Two incompatible sacred values in American universities." The incompatible values being "truth" and "social justice."
If STEM degrees produce low quality graduates, the value of degree decreases:
1. Employers must add more math testing before hiring to see that they get what they need.
2. Wages drop to with match the knowledge and skill. Become prompt engineer $25/h no permanent job.
3. Immigrants to the rescue!
MyHonestOpinon 7 hours ago [-]
I think providing access to remedial resources, free meals at school, do more for disadvantage students than lowering the requirements. Also make sure there are enough slots for anyone who is able to pass the requirements.
richard_chase 7 hours ago [-]
In my public high school, the teachers just didn't teach and everyone passed.
JCTheDenthog 9 hours ago [-]
>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.
I mean, it seems pretty clear from the last 6 years of experience by professors and others that grades (or at least grades in isolation) aren't a good predictor at all for this. The problem is removing the use of standardized tests here was done for ideological reasons. You can already tell by the use of the word "inequitable" here, because a certain insane subset of policymakers and the public believe that we should push for equal outcomes ("equity") over equal opportunity (usually referred to as simply "equality").
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
> the public believe that we should push for equal outcomes ("equity") over equal opportunity (usually referred to as simply "equality")
This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people talking about equity.
Providing a hearing aid to someone hard of hearing so they can learn is equity. Their outcomes aren't guaranteed; an obstacle to achieving them is removed.
JCTheDenthog 9 hours ago [-]
>This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people talking about equity.
From the wiki article you linked:
>Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society. Equity proponents believe that some are at a larger disadvantage than others and aims to compensate for this to ensure that everyone can attain the same lifestyle.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
Note: everyone can, not everyone will.
That's opportunity, not a guarantee. Yes?
indoordin0saur 4 hours ago [-]
But what's the rationale in removing advanced math or objective measures of talent such as SAT tests?
9dev 9 hours ago [-]
If you hold a race, but some people start further behind others, they have a longer track to run. I think we can agree that to call it a fair race, we'd want to accommodate for the track length.
JCTheDenthog 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, but if some people are faster than others because they have longer legs or because they've trained more etc. then people without such advantages aren't given special accomodation. It actually runs in my family that we have very short legs in comparison to our torsos. For example I'm 6' tall but look like I'm 6' 4" or thereabouts when sitting down next to someone with more normal proportions. In spite of this disadvantage, one of my brothers did cross country in high school and still runs half-marathons every year or so. He doesn't demand to be given a head start or to have time subtracted to accommodate his inherent disadvantage, because that's the difference between equality and equity.
9dev 8 hours ago [-]
And that's commendable, but what if your brother would not have had time for doing cross country in high school because he had to care for his siblings as your parents were poor and working double shifts? Or so heavily indebted due to a cancer therapy that he couldn't afford running shoes?
> people without such advantages aren't given special accomodation
They are not - but I'm specifically talking about the reverse case, where people start with extra disadvantages that cause them to start even further behind their peers. Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social contexts.
JCTheDenthog 8 hours ago [-]
>And that's commendable, but what if your brother would not have had time for doing cross country in high school because he had to care for his siblings as your parents were poor and working double shifts? Or so heavily indebted due to a cancer therapy that he couldn't afford running shoes?
That's awful and unfortunate, but he still shouldn't have an extra hour shaved from his half-marathon times over his competitors, because the half-marathon isn't measuring "How fast could you have run this in an alternate universe where you had no disadvantages". It's measuring "How fast can you run this, full stop."
Poor Black kids who had uninvolved parents that didn't help them to learn math better aren't helped by affirmative action because you're just setting them up for failure in the actual college level math classes they end up in (and are woefully unprepared for). The SAT measures how capable you are at math because that's what matters for college, not how capable you might have been in a different reality.
>Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social contexts.
If I try to join the PGA tour, they aren't going to consider my handicap.
ceejayoz 8 hours ago [-]
Those are certainly shitty ways to ensure equity. Why are they what you jump to?
What if we did a better job helping parents with childcare and healthcare?
JCTheDenthog 8 hours ago [-]
>Those are certainly shitty ways to ensure equity. Why are they what you jump to?
Because they're effectively what proponents of equity have implemented in practice:
>What if we did a better job helping parents with childcare and healthcare?
I mean we've already spent trillions on such efforts over the last half century, and the effects have been pretty minimal (and in some cases I'd argue outright counterproductive). See Abbott Districts in New Jersey, the Head Start preschool program, subsidized daycare in every state, etc.
ceejayoz 8 hours ago [-]
> Because they're effectively what proponents of equity have implemented in practice…
So you agree with the goal of equity, but not the approaches taken so far?
JCTheDenthog 8 hours ago [-]
No, I actually believe that the terrible implementation is inherently tied to the ideology, in large part because the ideology is rooted in a blank slate view of differences in humans. I believe in equality of opportunity, I don't give a damn about equality of outcomes.
elteto 8 hours ago [-]
Following your analogy, what equity efforts turn in practice is to not only accommodate for track length for those that start behind, but also to cut one leg off of those perceived to be ahead.
9dev 8 hours ago [-]
My point wasn't that every existing equity effort is justified and flawless, but that there is a clear reason why some kind of levelling is required if you want to live in a fair society - and I do believe most of us want that.
elteto 7 hours ago [-]
It's funny you mention fair, because to me a fair society is one where smart kids are not penalized for being so.
So yes, we all want fair, but what we think of as fair can be wildly different.
valleyer 9 hours ago [-]
From your link:
> Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
Also from my link:
> factors specific to one's personal conditions should not interfere with the potential of academic success
JCTheDenthog 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, but the reality is that such conditions do interfere with the potential of academic success, as much as proponents of equity like to argue otherwise. If I had a severe brain injury as a child, or my mom drank and did a ton of drugs while pregnant with me, or any number of other reasons, I will probably be far less academically successful than in the counterfactual reality where I didn't get a brick dropped on my head as a child.
Equality proponents argue that brick-on-head and no-brick-on-head should be judged by the same standards. Equity proponents argue that brick-on-head should be given advantages over no-brick-on-head to make them obtain substantially similar educational outcomes.
Once again, from your own link:
>Equity recognizes this uneven playing field and aims to take extra measures by giving those in need more than those who are not. Equity aims to achieve equal outcomes for groups, also called substantive equality. Equity aims to ensure that everyone's lifestyle is equal, even if that requires unequal distribution of access and goods.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
In your scenarios, equity proponents would tend to advocate for things like extra testing time, access to tutoring, etc.
(And systemic efforts to prevent dropping bricks on childrens' heads in the first place.)
JCTheDenthog 9 hours ago [-]
>In your scenarios, equity proponents would tend to advocate for things like extra testing time, access to tutoring, etc.
So you claim, but in reality proponents of equity instituted a system that gave Black students a roughly 450 point advantage over Asian students on the SAT:
Note that the NYT, in their pure, non-partisan spirit of fairness and equity, somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students.
ceejayoz 9 hours ago [-]
> somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students
Make up your mind? If their having to score higher than Black students is unfair, how is "Asian-Americans had to score 140 points higher on their SATs than whites" not also unfair?
What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect lifelong achievement? As I noted elsewhere in the thread, wealth (translated to parenting time, tutoring access, better schools, etc.) can help do better on the SAT. How does one account for that?
JCTheDenthog 8 hours ago [-]
I didn't say it was fair, I was pointing out the NYT being racially biased (as per usual). Imagine at a school that Jenny gets 10 cookies from the teacher, Timmy gets 3, and Johnny gets two. Billy sees all this, but he has a crush on Jenny, so when he tells everyone on the playground about it he doesn't say "Jenny got way more cookies than Johnny, that's so unfair!" Instead he says "Timmy got more cookies than Johnny, that's so unfair!". That's the ridiculousness that I'm pointing out here.
>What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect lifelong achievement?
It was never intended to?
>How does one account for that?
It's impossible to account for everything. As much as the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors have attempted to quantify and measure everything, it's simply not possible in reality. If someone could devise a better means of measurement than current standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, I would happily welcome them.
But one thing is pretty clear and certain: the SAT is a far better measure of mathematical aptitude that high school grades, and until better measures can be found and implemented I fully support continuing to use it for college admissions and college math placement.
ceejayoz 8 hours ago [-]
> I was pointing out the NYT being racially biased
But we apparently agree that "somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students" is actually accurate on their part?
(The article also openly explains why, if you go past the headline a bit.)
> It was never intended to?
Then we shouldn't use it as such.
JCTheDenthog 8 hours ago [-]
>But we apparently agree that "somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students" is actually accurate on their part?
I agree that Whites also got an unfair advantage over Asians in college admissions, yes (I haven't kept up with the state of things since some recentish supreme court decisions so I don't know if this is actually still the case).
>Then we shouldn't use it as such.
It isn't used as such. It's used to measure a student's current aptitude in math and English, hence the discontinuation of its use in California leading to the poor math outcomes for students described in the article this entire thread is about.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
> Equity proponents argue that brick-on-head should be given advantages over no-brick-on-head to make them obtain substantially similar educational outcomes.
The problem is that the solution that they're proposing is to force _everyone_ to have that brick-on-head. With maybe two or three bricks for especially "advantaged" categories.
TimorousBestie 9 hours ago [-]
> Sure, but the reality is that such conditions do interfere with the potential of academic success, as much as proponents of equity like to argue otherwise.
This is a bizarre claim in the second clause. Proponents of equity do recognize that various conditions impact academic potential; otherwise, they wouldn’t attempt to ameliorate them.
You even quoted, “Equity recognizes this uneven playing field. . .” so where did “. . . as much as proponents of equity like to argue otherwise,” even come from?
JCTheDenthog 8 hours ago [-]
The person I was replying to quoted the article saying "conditions should not interfere", my point was that they do interfere, and will continue to interfere, in spite of all the efforts and hands on the scale and discrimination that equity proponents try to implement. Equity fundamentally arises from a more or less "blank-slatist" view of humans, which is why it leads to such insane outcomes when it comes into contact with reality.
TimorousBestie 8 hours ago [-]
> The person I was replying to quoted the article saying "conditions should not interfere", my point was that they do interfere, and will continue to interfere, in spite of all the efforts and hands on the scale and discrimination that equity proponents try to implement.
So? Name a social intervention that did achieve all its goals.
> Equity fundamentally arises from a more or less "blank-slatist" view of humans
Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not particularly persuasive.
JCTheDenthog 8 hours ago [-]
>So? Name a social intervention that did achieve all its goals.
That's not my argument though? In any case, I believe that many of the ideas that have been proposed (and actually implemented) by proponents of equity aren't just failing to meet their goals, I believe they are actively harmful to them (and to the health of society as a whole).
>Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not particularly persuasive.
Blank slatism in one form or another goes all the way back to the Greeks. In any case, belief in blank slatism is effectively a prerequisite for believing in one of the primary standards used by equity proponents to judge if a system is equitable or not: disparate impact. You can't a priori assume that disparate impact is proof of discrimination unless you also discount inherent differences in human capability and performance.
elteto 8 hours ago [-]
That all sounds great in theory but in practice it devolves not into only giving extra help to those in need, but also to _take away_ from those perceived to have some sort of advantage. See for example NYC's idiotic plan to close gifted and talended kindergarten programs in public schools.
The truth is that it is a hell of a lot easier to lower the bar for everyone than to raise it. I.e. it's a lot easier to make dumb kids than to make smart ones, so in the name of equity we shall have dumber ones.
9 hours ago [-]
pickleballcourt 7 hours ago [-]
The only possible counterpoint I’d say is SAT math is quite trivial and also can be prepared for? Not that I think there are better alternatives out there.
sometimelurker 6 hours ago [-]
the SAT is a (probably biased but relatively good) measure of willpower. it can be prepared for but its not fun
linuxhansl 6 hours ago [-]
Please, not the SAT!
My son is prepping for the SAT and I am helping him. I studied physics and computer science, and was a advanced math A+ student...
IMHO: The SAT is useless, solving equations under artificial time constraints is something that only happens in these kind of tests. The focus is on solving problems fast and getting a good score, and nobody really cares if you understand the math behind it.
So, please, if you go back to testing, find something more useful than the SAT.
WalterBright 6 hours ago [-]
To nobody's surprise, the SATs actually measure math competence which is crucial for success in STEM.
collabs 9 hours ago [-]
something that came to my mind as I was reading the comments here -- the thing is that in the quest for professionalism, we have sidelined a lot of people who would be good at teaching in favor of people who are good at jumping hoops. there is a famous quote saying "when the measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure"
ryukoposting 8 hours ago [-]
Goodhart's Law (that quote) is actually one of the motivations for moving away from ACT and SAT as college entry benchmarks. "Teaching to the test" is a rampant problem in the US.
UC is seeing flaws in departing from those benchmarks, though. The thing is, % of students getting admitted to college is itself a measure for schools and school districts. If GPA is how you get kids into college, well...
It's not a teacher problem, it's a district and state problem. As a teacher, if kids are failing your classes (which nowadays seems to be "getting anything less than an A") your school district blames you.
To me, it seems that Goodhart's Law is an inherent problem for education in the information era, no matter how you cut it. If there's one good thing that can be said about ACT and SAT, they're relatively difficult for schools to game. GPA inflation is trivial.
How would you "teach to the test" for these in a way that looks different from just teaching arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, etc?
indoordin0saur 4 hours ago [-]
I agree that Goodhart's law doesn't really apply to well designed tests.
matwood 8 hours ago [-]
For almost all math at the HS level, teaching to the test is exactly what you want.
jknoepfler 3 hours ago [-]
If you're admitting students to Berkeley who can't figure out how to independently close gaps in their own knowledge quickly (formal or otherwise), you have bigger problems.
I self-taught a bunch of remedial math when I went back to University after many years out. Khan Academy exists. Math tutors exist. They don't just exist, they're amazing.
If I can self-teach basic sequences and series or polynomial factorization or whatever at the age of 30 while juggling a full time job and a full computer science syllabus, an unemployed Berkeley freshman shouldn't struggle with it unless they have a legitimate disability or something.
Balgair 7 hours ago [-]
For the non Californians here, there is very important context on admissions that may not be widely known.
Under the 1960 California Master Plan, the top 12.5% of California high school graduates have automatic entry into the UC system.
That is no longer quite the case though. Nowadays, under the Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) system, the top 9% of high school graduates are guaranteed a spot in the UC system, regardless of rejection to school. That said, you will commonly hear about the Master Plan in conversations here without the nuance.
In practice, this is typically UC-Merced or UC-Riverside as the UCs of last resort.
That said, about 32% of all UC entrants are in the ELC system. So, I'd assume that around 32% of incoming UCSD (the UC in question in the article) entrants are ELC.
The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) found that ~80% of ELC entrants came from below average schools.
So, assuming nothing special here, 0.8*0.32 = ~0.25, or ~25% of incoming UCSD students came from an 'bad' high school.
> Statewide, 37.3% of students meet math learning standards in the grades that are tested.
Look, there are a lot of complicated stats and math that I just do not have the coffee for here. But a 'failing' 25% of incoming entrants is in the right ball park.
The University of Texas system has a similar matriculation standard too.
TLDR: Failing high schools are the root cause here. UC professors should get out of the ivory tower more. None of this is surprising.
epistasis 6 hours ago [-]
> UC professors should get out of the ivory tower more. None of this is surprising.
This dig seems misaimed, inaccurate, and inapplicable to the request of having SAT factor into admission.
9 hours ago [-]
spwa4 5 hours ago [-]
The critical difference between SAT and high school grades, of course, is that high school grades are easy to fake, especially on the school level (both ways, up and down).
Schools being organized the way they are, in most locations high school grades is code for letting the local government decide who gets to go to university and who doesn't.
macspoofing 7 hours ago [-]
>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.
Well .. is it? We have decades of data that should either prove or disprove this. Why is this even an argument? There is an underlying, easily-veriable, objective reality.
throw6784 7 hours ago [-]
Its bad for natives and African Americans. The whole system is designed to keep them poor and powerless
7 hours ago [-]
avs733 8 hours ago [-]
There is a nother factor worth mentioning in the admissions piece - the proababilistic accuracy in admissions alongside massive increases in the number of applications students send out. The first admissions criteria is basically the ability to succeed at the institution academically. It used to be typically applied to a handful, maybe 10 max, universities. Now it is not uncommon to hear from students they applied to 40 or 50. In 2017, my university got 31k applications and accepted 7.4k students. In 2025 those numbers were 68k and 8.5k - the number of acceptances were up 20%, the applications were up 115%. If you assume admissions process has a 95% accuracy, that predicts a huge increase in 'false positives' dropping from 85% of students we expect to be 'correctly' prepared to 74%.
Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).
Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.
A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'
SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.
kepler1 7 hours ago [-]
I think there's conflating of problems here (at for the moment let's talk about primary school K-12 rather than university level).
There is a fundamental problem with a good percentage of public schools right now, where the previous expectations of child behavior, learning ability, and classroom teaching outcome has been broken. And instead of coming up with ways to fix that, lots of people are trying to patch the holes at the output side.
Unfortunately, public schools have to serve everyone, including:
-- kids who have learning disabilities, which seems to be disturbingly an increasing fraction of the population, which costs lots and lots of extra money to pay for
-- kids who don't behave properly in school, which is a degradation of the expectations and frankly, reflection of the standards of families at home
-- "phone-it-in"ism of unfortunately a large enough portion of public school teachers, who are a combination of not the best trained, and honestly, not allowed to enforce discipline any more due to "equity" and liability rules that govern this now.
And instead of being able to fix these problems, concerned people try to look at the easier thing to "fix" which is to rig the outcome to "look right". Until it blatantly and obviously fails. And disserves a generation of kids in the meantime with their hypothesis about how it was going to work.
That's why you have dumbing down of entrance standards, as well as avoiding standardized tests (whether for the claimed reason of being "inequitable" or the worse lazy reason of "it's so stressful for the kids").
In the meantime, those with the means take their kids out of public school because no parent wants to conduct the experiment on their own kid.
And you then watch as our society generally falls behind other countries that are not yet so rich that they can afford to have kids failing and still somehow end up somewhat ok in life.
Nervhq 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
travisgriggs 9 hours ago [-]
It’s ok. In the future, no one will do math. Mathematicians will be directors, with a team of math bots that they administer and direct. Instead of being managed, they will become the managers of mathematic autonomons. Universities need to get with the program.
/s
ptek 9 hours ago [-]
Internet streamers will need to know basic math unless they are clowns.
booleandilemma 8 hours ago [-]
But they are clowns.
cute_boi 8 hours ago [-]
First make SAT/ACT free. Then we will talk about it.
For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!
I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.
Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.
And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students.
0: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years.
I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me.
Activist teachers are also a thing.
I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here.
Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.
- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)
- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the bad ones impairs and burns out the others
Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle. Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with outcome-less proscriptive policies.
* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?
That completely ignores the social and political aspects.
You need to understand that the people who have the authority to do so do not want to document bad teachers, ever. Documenting bad teachers makes political waves and principals and superintendents never want to make waves because that impedes their ability to both do their job as well as get their next job.
Even if a teacher is very bad, they may be well-liked or be an important part of the community. If you attempt to remove that teacher, they may rally support from the community that can be extremely noisy and inconvenient.
Hard guidance is needed for kids. Hard guidance requires authority. So either you give teachers that authority which is very hard especially in diverse settings, or you make the family environment give better implicit and explicit guidance.
Now, the government will always attempt to solve it using the tools they have, which is the school, but it is destined to have vanishingly little success if at all.
I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
> And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
Case in point. It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.
> I had a student claim...
Again, this is the student expressing the politics in question.
Ancient Hindus divided life into four parts, the earliest was called "Brahmacharya" - core tenet of it was celibacy, but sons of kings and rich merchants lived ascetic lives in the teacher's house who was also an ascetic and a sage - no rich clothes, no luxury foods or comfort.
This was supposed to last till the age of 16, going as high as 21 for some.
The Buddhist monastery-universities of India also kept students under similar conditions - celibate, ascetic, and far from luxury.
Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.
A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
Is there something stopping you, or anyone from writing it down and taking notes in class and then reviewing it later as needed? Not just process it in lecture time, but regurgitate it to physical form for later review.
Also, I would definitely constrain this into educational groups, where K-6 are much different from college (post mandatory) education.
Many people can type as fast/faster than they talk, and when typing it is possible to try and type verbatim what is being said. In this case, there is no understanding. (If you've ever taken a class not all that is said is pertinent and not all that is pertinent is said)
I personally don't revisit my written notes their purpose is uniquely for me to remember/understand what I've written.
I haven't read up on it much myself, but any discussion along the lines of this subthread re: "handwriting > typing" is probably discussing research that's starting to be talked about more and more in the past 5 years or so (maybe the pandemic and online learning accelerated interest?)
here's a 5m clip of a neuroscientist presenting to the US Senate this year on correlation between dropping academic performance and use of tech in classrooms in many countries over many years, and asking for more research into mechanisms and causation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
and here's a paper from a couple years ago describing differences in observed brain activity between handwriting and typewriting and some discussion of how this could be a mechanism of the kind the video was talking about https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
>Is there something stopping you from...
No, but I feel like it's not hard to argue that default are important.
It is a skill, but everybody seems to think it will just happen on its own.
Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand? Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free essay writing...
The teenage brain is not prepared for addiction of digital magnitude.
You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).
In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.
The invasion of tech into the classroom has not produced more capable graduates. There's a lot of empirical evidence to the contrary.
The mind is a muscle, and developing that muscle is the education system's main purpose.
...and studies show, inferior for recall:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not helpful!
Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system nearly entirely for part of the handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on.
Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend to flicker. This is more of a strain.
Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.
In the early internet days I couldn't help but notice people who read zero books now spend the whole day reading.
I think it means the tool is used the wrong way? Interactive should be e-paper or real paper. Dull cramming or basic reading skills would be a good fit for glowing displays.
Perhaps we even need a device that can do both.
My take is that the test won't make kids better at math. At best, it'll drift towards investment in reward-hacking the exam (like it always was).
I think it was idiotic to make it optional to begin with. The stats they're talking about, though, can't be a primarily admissions-signal problem. Whatever they're using these days in lieu of exams are imperfect proxies for math skill, sure, but it's not like they're admitting kids off their CoD K:D. Kids taking APs and stacking extracurriculars are generally motivated. So, if even the motivated ones show up unable to do middle school math, the cause is more systemic than "we stopped testing."
My vote: TikTok brain rot. I build LLM products and I see how the parasocial pull shows up even when the products have nothing to do with companionship. I watched one user obsessively spin up 44 separate chats around a K-Pop vampire character over a week. The product is NOT designed for that. The pull toward frictionless digital reward is just that strong, and that's what kids' attention is up against now. Math is the most effortful, least immediately rewarding thing they do. Doesn't stand a chance against an infinite feed, and I guess infinite vampires either.
Which is why the ask from the faculty is kind of arrogant. The article, at least, doesn't even float a hypothesis for WHY math skills collapsed, simply assuming standardized testing fixes it. I wholly believe in standardized testing — but it measures the problem, it doesn't fix it.
I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.
The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”.
It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.
Teachers don’t make those decisions, school boards do. School boards are elected or appointed political entities.
Teachers are humans just like you, and like or dislike work for the same reasons you do, including your unoriginal display of classic American anti-intellectualism.
So even a willing school board is unable to do more than rubber stamp the status quo.
All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw and calculate on paper and submit the result.
It’s much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter (replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a geometry problem.
please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly) figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your betters."
And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate, politics, war, and future generations)
My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those of mine (USA).
This is like the pi vs tau debate.
I seriously do not understand why maths teachers are so unable to relate to their non-mathematically inclined students
i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach middle-school math.
i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it into my class without a passing-grade grasp of the prerequisites, i will point them in the right direction to get caught up, but i am not spending any class time on it. its not fair to the other students.
whenever i have had a larger-than-normal percent of my students failing, i am provided an opportunity to explain it.
This is a silly perspective, but the blank slate folks really got their tendrils in just about anywhere. In reality, some people are simply bad at math. More education will help, but they will always be disadvantaged compared to people who are more naturally predisposed. (note, I'm quite bad at math myself)
It may seem altruistic to err on the side of caution here and try to catch the kids that fall through the gaps, (again, assuming that they are falling through the gaps due to systemic failures) but as the article points out, there is a limit to this approach; eventually it brings the talented students down and degrades the program.
Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.
The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.
Universities are business as any other!
At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.
this seems absurdly low, from my experience. but i have only taught in one school, so maybe we're the outlier? i would say one to two failing students per course is the baseline, not the cap.
can you share where you are getting this number from? is that the guideline where you teach?
See also: Adele Jones, Steven Aird, Diane Tirado
It's a complete national mess. You don't know what will happen in your school until you do it. Half of the country hates hard teachers, the other half loves them.
your article appears to be about high school?
1 to 2 failing students per course is expected (from lived experience, not ai)
which you appear to be basing on a high school article your ai supplied you, which is irrelevant to how many students a post-secondary institution can fail per semester.
overlapping math levels is unrelated.
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-c...
Here's more, spoon-fed style:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/14/students-fail...
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2008/05/23/if_students_fail...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/22/accusations-f...
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-c...
friend, you can just say "oops, my article was about high school, my bad". no need to start being a dick.
>Are you disputing [...]
i am disputing your claim: "You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you" (as i have reiterated 3 times now).
you have now morphed it into a completely different claim, which appears to be something along the lines of "you should not fail more than 30% of your class". which, for most of my classes, would be approaching 24 students i could fail. 12x your initial claim!
And yes, every student takes it, even the ones with high school AP math and high SAT math scores. The only exception might be if they have already completed and passed actual accredited university math courses for credit.
Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from 2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years behind in everything when they got to college.
Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12?
Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in California.
It was all part of the admissions process.
The idea that if only all professors stood their ground then somehow students will be motivated to study doesn't pan out in practice, though. There is already a significant number of students who are perpetually struggling. They are missing basic prerequisites, and instead of catching up on them, they repeated try and fail at learning the same materials, passing only when they got a lenient instructor. The problem compounds because failing brings helplessness and exacerbates their mental issues, which brings more failing. The university cannot sit on their high ground and watch these students struggle, especially if their number reaches a critical mass.
What's wrong with making universities easier to get into, but harder to stay in?
From a future employer point of view, they are looking for credentials. But the future employer isn't paying for it.
Do we just admit that the purpose of school is to provide credentials, and that's what the students are actually paying for?
The latter may need an opportunity to succeed.
"In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0".
Math 2 is the remedial elementary and middle school math course at UC SD. Lack of standardized testing plus grade inflation contributes to this outcome.
IMO this is "fairer" but of course it means you might lose a semester. Helps that there's barely any tuition fees.
[1] Even then (~2005) that wasn't the case for all universities though. Medical university already had entrance exams, mainly due to the high number of German students trying to enroll.
"gaps" implies a critical mass of students who require middle-school math reteaching.
> i teach.
If you've taught for a non-trivial amount of time, you did one of the following with that class:
* graded on a curve so you don't fail half the class
* failed half the class, and got suspended (pours one out for my compsci professor in college who did that!)
Which was it?
so in the end if someone was unprepared, they had at least a year to get their shit together. (but the exams rarely required real maths mastery, mostly rote memorization of proofs and a few typical problem types with really mechanical solutions.)
it's so strange to read about a professor getting suspended for being too strict.
i have
>you did one of the following with that class: [...] Which was it?
these are not the only two options.
We could set up a standardized test for the UC schools ensure that the students being accepted have minimum baseline normalized across all applicants. We could call it scholastic aptitude test or the American College Test.
There was also a real math lecture that went into topics above high school math, but also contained some repetition. All other courses mostly relied on what was contained there.
So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you don't have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to cover the stuff usually needed.
we do! those are dedicated courses, where it is expected that the students are taking it to catch up (i.e. no prereq)
students can also drop a course within the first 4 weeks for no penalty, and retake it in a later semester if they figure out they they are behind and would not perform well.
i dont have any 1st-year courses though, which is where a lot of students are filtered out (for various reasons), so im not in the best position to answer that question.
Do you really think these professors are up in arms about a few students who don't have the prereqs? It obviously must be a large enough proportion to worry about.
It's no longer "if a student somehow makes it into my class", it's "many students are currently making it into my class"
my comment in no way implies that we have don't have an intention of educating our students properly
If university-level classes have pre-requisites that should be taught in high school, then universities should screen for that and disqualify students who do not have the required competency. They should not be taking the students' money, admit them in the institution, and then let them enroll in classes that they are not prepared to succeed in. That's outright extortion. Many of those students have to take on debt to pay for their education, and besides the financial cost, it's a waste of time, and their failures would be mentally crushing and have lifelong repercussions.
I sympathize with educators in that they cannot slow the whole class down, but that's the point: universities shouldn't be putting educators in a position to compromise the teaching. Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences. For the student, that requires a focused (and in many cases, guided) study of those subject areas and before university, without the stress of catching up to university-level courses that are already being taken at the same time.
then why did you accuse me of not intending to educate my students?
>Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences.
you havent bothered to ask what "pointing in the right direction" entails, and are making (wrong) assumptions.
Feel free to take further offense, but I’m not expecting any substantial replies
I get not wanting to waste the time of the better students, but if too many student are behind, whose time are you really wasting?
There's a whole "philosophy of education" discussion I'd like to avoid, but the goal of education isn't really to educate one person to their maximum potential, but rather to educate as many people as well as possible. The individual should sacrifice for the collective.
Trying to make it a straight forward linear dependency chain displays a sort of autistic adherence to rigid hierarchy that's really common in software people, but really uncommon everywhere else.
To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids, so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or something after I finish my coffee.
That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being implemented.
Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets supplemented.
Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.
Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).
This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.
The system gets gamified and the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically, every student who can't pay for tutoring or full-time care, which is a very technical form of "excellence".
There are two different and contradictory goals here- the current dynamic where every gain for one is a loss for the other creates a ton of bad outcomes across the board.
It's worse because there's been a trend among elite districts to push students to (fraudulently) get a diagnosed disability, so that they can get accommodations on tests and raise their chances to be admitted to an elite university. So, a proposal to partition the school system into a lesser system for students with disabilities would face pushback by the aforementioned elite district parents. While they are participating in a fraud (and so it would perhaps be morally fine for them to face repercussions for it), I imagine it would make implementing any such plan very difficult.
So yeah, I kinda understand why parents get the diagnoses for their kids, but the system is unfair.
Honestly education really feels overthought and micromanaged already the whole setup is unhealthy
What sad place do you come from?
The American public education system
Do you have an actual argument? Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.
Reality check: in most countries, if you made a public demand of effectively depriving the disabled of the proper care they want and deserve, they would regard you as an inhumane monster, and the education ministry would refer you to state prosecution for violating the constitution.
Regrettably. A place where money rules and brains die
AP classes exist to pad the resumes of rich kids and justify their being propelled into academic situations that should rightfully belong to others. Prove me wrong
One of my AP classes taught us how to spot logical fallacies. Seems to have benefitted me well enough.
Your tirade sounds more like neo-communist garbage from someone who has never experienced communism. See the Yugoslavian comment in this thread for a counter example... where in actual communism, you emphatically push the capable ahead and allow success.
I don't have to prove you wrong as your assertions are wrong on their face and you have not said anything to backup your own assertions. I don't know how old you are, but you seem to have been dropped in the modern "equity" rabbit hole.
Beyond this, the entire point of higher education is to push those who are able to higher levels, not to drag the 75% along for the ride.
Who do you think produces all the value in the world? It's not the people organizing the labor, it's the goddamn laborers.
> Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.
What do you think we would be eating if we left the world up to the rich nerds? We would have starved many millennia ago.
Advancing humanity is coming up with cures for disease, or inventing useful things. We manage to feed the world with a fraction of the labor it once took to do so. It wasn't the common laborer that came up with solutions that effectively eliminated food scarcity.
Maybe if we actually held kids that can't do the work back, they wouldn't be illiterate. Let social pressure do the work it's meant to. For that matter, let parents do the work they're supposed to.
Sorting into better highschools and worse ones, and better classes and worse was done even back in my times, in what used to be yugoslavia, with communism, red stars and a dictator. You want better kids to excell as much as they can, and you want the stupid kids to at least learn to read and write for their boring communist factory jobs for the next 40 years, even if they never get to learn how to solve differential eqations... if you keep the kids together, the stupid ones still won't be able to do basic math and there would be no time left over for the smarter ones to learn more. There was no correlation between money and stupidity of kids.
Some kids are smart enough to become engineers, some can barely read, there's no need for them to be in the same classroom.
Education in communism will leave anyone underperforming behind... You'll get shuffled of into a vocational school young and injected into the workforce early.
Do you really think communism expends extra effort on underperforming students? No they get shuffled off as soon as prudent.
Most struggling students are not special ed. It's a serious mistake to conflate the two. In some ways special ed students are taken better care of than the typical remedial student, since training for special ed happens to focus on effective instructional methods (such as direct instruction) that are actively deplored by most progressive educators as "demeaning" towards their profession.
Let's ignore good teachers and principals, they aren't an issue.
Bad teachers and admin will do what bad students do when facing a high stakes test - forget that learning is important and just do a crap job gaming the test, and often do worse than if they would focus on just doing the content properly.
A bunch of people here probably don't see the issue - they think that they would do a good job learning or teaching a student when focusing on a specific test. But it's not the good teachers and good students who are the issue. A bad teacher might give students the same past paper every week for a year, and their bad students just memorise the right answers for the multiple choice. This is just an example, there are lots of bad strategies and the bad teachers will find them all (while the good teachers ignore all the noise).
It's the bad teachers and students that the system needs to fix, and too heavy an exam focus will screw it up (as will zero exam focus).
"Well just fire the bad teachers lol" um ... ok ... that's a bold strategy, but you can't axe that many and not massively increase their salaries to find replacements. You want super star individual performers, you gotta pay to attract them. You want a cheap consistent workforce where the bad eggs do less damage, focus on a good process that the weaker ones can follow, not rewards for individual success.
Then, the incentive would shift to prevent the students they don’t want from entering the school in the first place. Which could be a real pain for the students. But, this does seems like it would incentivize the schools to do what the original poster wanted, check that the incoming students actually learned what they were supposed to.
Her school did not have adequate resources to handle these students, so they always had multiple students with severe behavioral issues that should have been in a dedicated classroom with a special education trained teacher, but were just in regular teachers' classes. Naturally, the teachers were burnt out from working with too many challenging kids they were not trained to take care of and the other students had worse learning outcomes.
Top schools aren’t that way merely because of socioeconomics.
Are top schools that way for social and economic reasons? I mean what else is there to blame? Are they that way because of being different in the department of what progressives actually mean by "socioeconomic factors"? No, not really.
From the austria-hungary time, the primary school (8 years, ~6/7 to 14/15yo, now 9 years, where preschool became year 1) was mandatory, and after that it was your decision what to do next.
You could then go to a "general high school" (gymnasium) for the next 4 years, and some of them were better than others (mostly because of students, but teachers too), and you had to collect enough points from grades and standardized testing in primary school to be accepted there. All the illiterate idiots didn't have enough points to get accepted, so you'd be in a nice class with comparable peers and teachers could teach new stuff instead of repeat the stuff the students should already know. The classes were "general" (math, languages, history, geography, etc.) and the idea was to prepare you for college.
The less-smart students went either to "not that good" gymnasiums or to other highschools, like the one for electricians or construction workers, farmers, etc., where they would get the legally required education to later eg. become an electrician or something after 3 years or 4, without the need for college or extra schooling and with the reduced amount of "general" subjects (only 1 or two years of history instead of 4, etc.).
The system somehow worked and still does.
You're saying that like it's a bad thing.
I'm continuously surprised by how America, a supposed capitalist country is more communist than some communist countries.
I grew up in Romania, after the revolution, but we still had basically the same education system. Even in communist Romania, if you wanted to get into a good high-school, you had to pass exams, and if you didn't perform well in school, you got left behind.
Everyone understood that if you wanted kids to succeed, you couldn't let the slow kids pull down the smart kids.
- The state is legally required to provide those kids with an education.
- There is funding allocated to help those districts.
If "we will not pay you if the kids do not learn" means there are zero schools in those districts then (1) the state government will get sued for not doing its job (because closing 100% of the schools makes the failure objective and obvious) and (2) it will have to update those funding formulas so that it is possible for some school (state run, or private) to break even while providing an education in those areas.
You're at the root of why this is a tricky problem to solve. In fact there is no solution, just a wide basket of expensive things we should aspire to do to improve affairs.
- The local public school goes from 80 kids per grade to 40, and a new school opens across the street or just rents an existing building from the existing school district.
- Funding stays flat, and academic performance goes up.
- Administrators get to decide which teachers to lay off, and they will be de facto fired if they get rid of the high performers while keeping the low performers.
- If the union contracts make it impossible to retain the high-performers, then the school eventually shuts down, and teachers that are competitive on the job market get hired by the new school for similar pay / benefits.
- Teachers at the new school get evaluated on whether they do their job, and the new administrators have a strong financial incentive to use performance-based evaluation instead of seniority / nepotism / whatever.
I see no downside whatsoever.
When does the deficient school close? After this new school is opened? If not, what happens to students and families that depend on an education in the interim?
Who pays for this new school? Must they immediately show improvement or do they get some years to show that their approach is working better?
Will the metrics even be accurate in the new school? Will there be a self-selecting bias in the newly formed student body?
- You can shrink the deficient school to zero by reducing teacher count starting in the lower grades and moving up, and by allowing parents to opt for transfers in higher grades.
- The building still exists, so you could reuse it. Or, investors could build a new school. Obviously, there's some lag in the measurement, since it requires a few years of student data. I'd say look at the first and second derivative of the test scores. Note that the claw-back model deeply screws over investors that fund substandard schools. This is likely to create stranded real-estate for the next round of investors to buy at a discount.
- The metrics are produced downstream, so there shouldn't be measurement bias. There probably will be self-selection bias. There are existing funding mechanisms to deal with challenging student bodies. If those are working, then the per-student funding of the old school with skyrocket. If the old school still fails, then that produces a high-revenue group of students for some other new school to take on. If those funding mechanisms are not working, then it creates an externally detectable signal to the outside world that the problem is one level up (no schools in certain areas), making it easy for voters / courts to intervene (currently, those funding mechanisms are failing, and no one is held accountable).
A child may have the genetic potential but never reach their potential because of outside factors. One's environment shapes one's brain development.
That's why equity is just as important as equality in education. Equity is understanding that children start from different circumstances and may need specific support to actually reach their potential.
Although the biggest factor here would just be for society to make sure no child has an upbringing where food, shelter, other lack of resources are a problem.
How convenient.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...
But my point was that wealth = a child more likely to reach their potential. That's a real gap, and a real social problem that needs addressed, by the powers (government) capable of addressing it.
However, schools do have a duty to provide a safe and conducive environment for education. Many don't offer that. Many have meals that are inadequate, many have a bullying problem that schools refuse to address, many care more about their sports stars than they do providing equal opportunity for education, etc.
By law, they monopolize up to half of a child's waking life for more than half of the year. This time commitment requires that parents put at least one meal, a substantial portion of the child's physical development, and almost all of their intellectual development (and, by extension, a substantial portion of their behavioral development) in the hands of the school.
If educational institutions are not taking seriously their potential influence on the social outcomes of their students, they're completely misunderstanding the practical mantle they've taken on. And so have you.
(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)
I don't disagree.
But at the same time, it's also important to ask: was that child offered to learn and apply themselves in the same, stable environment as a child from a more wealthy upbringing? If the answer is no, that child was done a disservice. If the answer is yes, and they still fail, obviously don't graduate them...
The goal shouldn't ever be "Just pass everyone" it should be making sure that every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
If you’re 18 and can’t read/write/math there is no opportunity to succeed, giving them a diploma doesn’t change that. At some point the child is just out of time no matter the circumstance.
may not. I’m not just being pedantic; it’s very important to recognize that being impoverished is not the same as being incapable.
But it does mean you’re living life on hard mode.
While there may be some concepts that some will struggle with or unable to handle, the VAST majority of school comes down to the effort an individual puts in. You won't pass with zero effort. Some may be able to skate by with less effort because they can reason better, but in the end it will always come down to effort put in.
If you are not high IQ, that means you need to put more effort if you want to get "straight A's"... it is emphatically not an excuse to give up, not try or lower standards. I say this as someone somewhat high IQ who was a bit lazy and easily distracted in school. There were lots of kids that weren't as smart that got high grades and did well.. because they put in the work. I'm also a bit older than a lot of people here (early 50's).
That's basically what my upper middle class parents did for me, as the tests were very similar to games I was given since a young age. Of course there are other more important developmental factors like health, stability, and nutrition but those are easier with money too.
Most of HN seem to support a form of modern eugenics.
It's really easy to have good outcomes when you have the ability to curate your student population. And though charter schools are regulated to make it harder for them to curate their student population, the statistical evidence is pretty unequivocal: they serve different populations than public schools, and their "better outcomes" immediately vanish when you control for that.
So, what is the issue with redirecting funding from sucky* schools towards ones that deliver results**?
* Schools that teach the general population
** Schools that teach a subset of the general population that always does better
Wasn't there a failing neighborhood school in LA that got turned into four charter schools that basically rescued the district, without removing any students?
I'm saying that people make claims about the systemic superiority of charter schools that, under examination, don't hold up, and it doesn't make sense to direct extra funding to schools that are already getting better results by making their own job easier. For that matter, many (certainly not all) of the "best" public schools are benefiting from a similar phenomenon, which is exactly why California has its complicated redistribution funding scheme, to avoid rewarding schools with an easy job and punishing schools with a harder job.
And people love to come into a system that they don't understand, regurgitate the most naive, obvious approach that we have specifically moved on from because these systems aren't actually that simple, and think they solved the problem: "What if we rewarded success?" Wow, what a genius, nobody's ever thought of rewarding success, let's call the NYT, let's call the Nobel committee, you've finally solved education, thank god we have you since nobody has ever thought of giving more funding to schools that are already doing well by taking it away from schools with struggling populations. Thank god we have someone here to tell us that we should financially incentivize good metrics, maybe you can solve American health care next, and possibly, if you can find the time, you could address world peace after that.
Ed (looked it up): there was academic improvement, LAUSD claims it's not enough, LAUSD is comparing against neighboring districts, which were not as distressed at the outset, "18 years to improve should have been enough". Safety is considerably improved. Alumni and district residents seem to want to keep the school. Locke high school is currently going through a charter renewal challenge.
We saw this happen in Houston. Many of the worst public schools suddenly "improved". It's a miracle! Oh, they did this by encouraging the lowest performers to drop out. Whoops.
And this is before we start talking about all the high GPA students who now all magically need IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) because it gets them an extra 50% of time on their tests. So, now you have your best students loudly (because these parents are active) soaking up lots of resources genuinely meant for your worst students.
I continue to believe that gifted kids are special needs kids, and that they shouldn’t be in the same classroom as those who are struggling for all of their classes.
People don’t like to talk about gifted kids, except to imply that being “too smart” is somehow bad or unfair, and I think it does them a disservice.
Gifted kids get very, very bored, and lose interest quickly, when they aren’t challenged.
You are advocating for draining public education. That's the position this takes. And you believe it's better to give it to private education, all for-profit entities. So you have to recognize that the position here isn't "give more money to better schools" it's "give money to private for-profit companies and take it directly away from public education"
This is a talking point that doesn't hold any water. They claim that by giving parents some tiny affordance, that somehow enables them to enroll their children in expensive Charter schools. That's not how that works. What they're doing is giving a very tiny % of the money they are taking from public education, and giving it to the families as direct cash. Why is this a problem? Because the amount doesn't cover tuition. It's not enough. Families in poverty can't afford multi-thousand-dollar tuition just because they got a $1k check in the mail. The math doesn't math. It only helps families that were already capable of affording it, or on the borderline.But the bigger problem is that it directly harms public education. So then what happens is that public education gets _worse_ at the expense of the people who can afford private schooling.
So all this to say, defunding public schools is not a good position, and they are doing everything they can to try to dress it up and muddy the conversation.
Another is the idea that schools are motivated by money in the same way profit-seeking ventures are. A company’s shareholders might respond to financial threats and incentives, but the teachers on district-regulated wages? What’s the phrase, can’t squeeze blood from a turnip?
Then there’s of course the construct validity of standardized tests as a measure of “suckiness”—they’re easy to administer at scale and to compare across years and between schools—but do they really capture every flavor of good work that’s done at a school? They’re the best thing we have, but does that make them good enough?
The main issue, though, I think we can frame in terms of a slightly different legibility issue: since the school is the only variable we directly control, we model the school’s “suckiness” as a function of its… what, budget? Staff bonuses? Whoever exactly is it who we’re proposing to punish by removing funds? But just as I imagine we can think of kids who would be fine either way—one of the less provocative stereotypes that comes to mind is that of a Tiger Mom kind of community—we can probably think of kids who won’t be fine. The less provocative stereotype that comes to mind is a child with special needs: with an aide, maybe that child may develop enough to participate in society, and we’re a more humane and moral society for trying. For that matter there are other children who are living and growing up in situations where survival is always going to come before their test scores—and those are probably the students with guardians least equipped to exercise “school choice.” How does punishing their school improve those kids’ outcomes?
Often students who perform poorly need more resources, not fewer.
…are a few of the counterarguments, anyway.
Are you providing after school child care options or transportation to their school of choice? If not, then it’s not a real choice and kids from lower income households will remain disadvantaged.
That is to say, the results will be mostly identical except now public money will be going to private entities. Because that was always the real goal of charter schools.
The “odds” don’t tell you whether or not it’s a “real choice.” Families that value education will take advantage of those opportunities. Families that don’t value education will get what they get.
Lots of families don’t value education and there’s nothing you can do for them. My wife is from Oregon, which has terrible test scores. And as far as I can tell, people there simply don’t care about school. Everyone’s dad is a logger or fisherman or something like that, and putting effort into academics isn’t valued.[1] In that environment, the best thing you can do is have charter schools for the minority of families that care. The alternative is to have shitty public schools that don’t serve anyone well.
[1] My wife did so well on the LSAT she got a scholarship to a top 10 law school. But people back home aren’t impressed. That doesn’t matter to her, because she is extremely internally motivated, but most people just go with their social flow: they won’t work hard for achievements people around them don’t value.
You’re avoiding the point by saying “anyone who cares can,” and avoiding the economics entirely.
Economics can force choices against your own best interests. If you have an hour between shifts and the school is 45 minutes away, you may have no choice.
This is separate from groups of people who don’t value education. This is about where others make that choice for them.
My sister is on SNAP; it took hours, literally, for me to sign her up, and I’m quite “technically savvy” lol
And every year the renewal takes at least two hours in NYC.
Regardless, the data is the data! Only 10% of parents on SNAP work full time.
Right, now you've come full circle to the core of my proposal: If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid. Instead, the investor that funded the charter school takes a bath.
This is capitalism at its finest:
- The local government provides a competitive backstop. If you do worse than that floor, then you do not get to compete.
- If your product is not fit for purpose, then you do not get paid. Private money subsidized the experiment, and only in places where the existing system had already failed.
- If the charter school (or anarcho-communist parent commune, or whichever team you want to root for) manages to reliably produce students that go on to perform well, then they solved an "insolvable" problem. Yay competition!
Over time, as the average district improves, so do the academic standards and the goalposts. Schools that once did well but are no longer competitive get phased out, so the funding model builds continuous improvement in. Nothing stops the public school districts from outcompeting the private entities. (In theory, the public districts have an unfair advantage - they don't have to turn a profit.)
Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggle because the people who live there are struggling.
The charter school model is attempting to solve the problem in a vacuum, but the problem does not exist in a vacuum.
Some people have never heard of Goodhart's law and it shows lol. It leads to terrible ideas like this which make the same mistake again and again.
I want you to think -- really think -- about the ambiguities in "perform well academically". How do you measure this? Test scores? Grades? If it's grades, then you've just given everyone at that school an incentive to never fail anyone, no matter what. If it's test scores, we already know that leads to teaching to the test, which hurts academics in general. It massively incentivizes cheating and fraud. It incentivizes kicking out any student who has any problems whatsoever.
For every complex problem there is an solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.
School choice is bad because the only people who benefit from school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to transport their child to the school of their choice.
The real differentiating factor isn't wealth but simply giving a shit about your children. Parents have to take some minimal effort to enroll their children in a charter school and many simply don't bother.
There are the parents doing heroics that I can hardly imagine, and they should be celebrated. But we need to design a system that provides a sufficient level of support for those families that only have an average level of capacity.
Yes, you can only “imagine” what it’s like for people who are less comfortable than you. But that cuts both ways. It could be that you’re also “imagining” the barriers you think exist to people accessing charter schools. In particular, I suspect you’re incorrectly assuming that people work as much as you do, just for less money.
1. give a shit
2. enroll
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Working 14 hours a day so you can clothe and feed your kid doesn’t leave much time for that.
That doesn’t mean you don’t give a shit.
So what?
If "level the playing field" means my kid gets a sub standard education because you have to constantly lower the bar, I don't want to play your game.
This stuff isn't new. Everyone understands the importance of education, and everyone understands the importance of being involved in your child's education.
It isn't about poor and minority. It's about being a good parent.
Some people don't have that ability, and my kid shouldn't be punished for it, regardless of the money in my wallet.
There are plenty of examples of single parent and low income households where they value education and push their kids to doing better.
At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.
And yes, most people who are complaining about "school choice" have this tool to some extent. Will your living conditions be exactly the same? Probably not.
> At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.
So why don't you take some personal responsibility and put yourself in a residence which is in district for a school that you want your child to go to? Is that not in part your responsibility as a parent? We can both play this stupid game.
I don't see what you're arguing here? You're the only one playing a stupid game.
If school choice is a thing, everyone can choose where they send their kid to school... they don't have to pay more for a crappy apartment on the edge of a good school district.
And to top it off, the only poor people this actually affects are poor people who live in an area where there is an actual choice of schools to be made.
Which means there is most likely access to transportation.
Everyone can be so much happier if they can blame everyone else and the system for everything bad in their life.
This is slave morality and the logic of ressentiment and envy. It is also profoundly immoral.
Never mind that this approach condemns everyone to a state of perpetual mediocrity, and the poor will always be with us. Mind you, how much you value education is to a large degree a product of the family environment and how supportive it is.
How about we allow excellence to flourish as it does, support it any way we can, and also look for ways to lift those who are worse off out of their condition? The focus should be on making things better, not bizarre idealistic notions like "equality" or "equity", whatever they even mean in real, concrete terms. If we dispense with envy, we focus on objective improvement instead of status-obsessed insecurities.
Of course, I think the most pressing problem in education today is that most "educators" have no damn clue what it even means to be educated anymore. They think they know, but they absolutely do not. It isn't "getting a job", as important as jobs are, or some odd aim of the ideology du jour. Public education in an ideologically-charged society of our stripe is practically condemned to superficiality and poor quality, because all good education begins with an accurate anthropology. We can't even agree on that, so naturally, this produces a lowest common denominator effect. In such a situation especially, permitting a diversity of educational styles and programs is necessary.
And btw, if someone is wealthy enough, they'll move to another school district and make school choice a reality anyway within your regime. People do it all the time. Or would you like a return to latifundia to enforce your vision?
When did I say that I'm in any way pro crippling other students? I'm simply pointing out the socioeconomic reality of school performance.
Comments like yours are vile. Brimming with vitriol.
Bruh. It's easy to prattle on about "objective improvement" and "slave morality" and pretend everything's a zero sum game where funding is fixed and we can do nothing to change the system. Neither is true. This is just an excuse to absolve yourself of doing any of the hard work to improve things.
> The focus should be on making things better, not bizarre idealistic notions like "equality" or "equity"
Man, does anyone else hear that high pitched sound? Just me? Huh.
Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly what the OP was saying.
Schools are incentivized to focus on struggling kids because test scores are how teachers and schools are evaluated. The kids at the high end of the class are literally ignored. I know this because in my old neighborhood many parents were complaining about this. And then on top of it, the superintendent was begging parents for donations because they didn't have enough money.
It could also be that fewer of the sorts of people who choose to live (or can afford to live) in places like Saratoga and Cupertino are having children at all.
There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child education industry"
Fixing public education is the boring, slow, difficult, real-world answer. Privatizing education further is just adding fuel to the fire.
The case for closing down public schools and replacing them with a for-profit child education industry is that it's systematically easier for all parents to get a better education for their children by abandoning bad schools and only paying good schools in a free market, than it is for parents to participate in the mass political process of fixing public schools, which are government institutions intended to serve a broad mass of people.
Also because different parents have different ideas about what constitutes a good education for their kids, different private schools can differentiate themselves in the marketplace by specializing in different styles of education and attracting different student bases; rather than parents having to democratically coordinate to enact the changes they want in the same mass-scope public school system (and fight against rival groups of parents who want incompatible things).
For reference, over 50% of Black and Brown kids that graduate from high school in San Francisco Unified School District can't read properly. That is about as racist an outcome as you can imagine, creating generations of undereducated citizens, however this was completely promulgated without a single right-wing influence, it was completely an outcome from pure left-wing educators. They also believe math is white supremacy so they restrict high achievers from taking it at lower grades, which caused many of the Asian families to move to private.
And yet, they spent $2 million renaming schools because I guess they thought that was money better spent than educating Black and Brown kids. That is the zenith of hypocrisy and racism.
You don't get that dedication unless you're at private school. It democratizes private education for the masses. Also have lots of volunteer teachers and student teachers from local universities so the ratio is 1 instructor to 10 students. Special project teacher is a volunteer who is earning her masters at Harvard.
citation sorely needed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
The difference in math proficiency for Abbott students vs. non-Abbott students has stayed roughly the same, while thr language proficiency gap has actually increased.
Resources means teachers qualified, able, and willing to teach in those areas. That probably means paying them more than a similarly qualified teacher in an area that is currently doing better and hence more attractive. But it also means finding head teachers (principals in the US?) who can inspire the whole school, staff, pupils, and parents. Such people are not thick on the ground. And then you have to have stability.
Mere money will not do it, everyone has to work for it.
Then the culture in those areas has to change.
It feels like every single other option has to be tried before considering that there's real, settled cultural issues that society ought to tackle. It is insane, and I mean "nobody who ever holds views like these should have access to power or authority on these matters" type of definition of "insane" that there is more concern about equality, or equity, or whatever the last brand of discrimination, than about the problems around not respecting authority and not valuing an education. It is utterly dysfunctional regarding societal growth.
It's not just being poor. It's not just racism. Yes those are absolutely issues in society, but equality of that degree is an affordance you can work on when you have a functional system.
There is no magic teacher, no magic principal, no magic anyone that's going to walk through the door of a school and "set them kids right" with a biblical amount of kindness and understanding. That's a fairy tale, it's utterly detached from reality and a pathetic refusal to look at the problem.
Contrary to what is often said, there is no shortage whatsoever of funding for public schools in urban areas. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US. <https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...> Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...
The "levelling" is real in Canada and good private schools often manage to skip multiple grade levels.
Funnily enough, I've seen the opposite in the USA. My highly driven American friends somehow manage to get entire associate's degrees before finishing high school, which is unthinkable in Canada.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m...
> “They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.
> When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.
YES. I could not agree more.
The fact that calculus is seen by the public as something really really hard needs to be fixed. I taught myself differentiation in 7th and I'm not proud of it because it's not difficult. Maybe the issue is crappy curriculums and incentives putting the best mathematicians on Wall Street rather than in public schools, but there needs to be a cultural push of some sort. I've given a million last minute math lessons to some of my less math inclined friends, and there is no barrier at all stopping people from learning a ton more math than is taught in schools.
> ... some kids are more talented at some things than other kids ...
This idea is 100% true, but I don't think its a helpful idea in the context of making people learn more math. Unlucky people who internalize this idea end up thinking they are innately worse at understanding abstract ideas, and end up not trying that hard. I completely believe anyone capable of doing a euclidian proof in geometry class can read and fully understand the Bitcoin whitepaper - but they don't. And the barrier for understanding Bitcoin is probably lower than geometry.
> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
This, but at a more localized level by giving teachers bonuses depending on how well the students do in the next grade.
Well, my red state public school taught me calculus, algebra, and evolution without making the claim that knowledge is somehow racist. So maybe those in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones
[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/qs/ea/
Is it easier to hold back talented students with a low bar or push untalented ones to a higher bar?
Most would define a "fair" opportunity as everyone getting the same chances to succeed, but a "fair" outcome would segment on merit. If angling towards fair outcomes, there's usually less uproar over lifting the floor (e.g financial aid), versus lowering the ceiling (e.g. limitations on admissions based on ethnic or financial background).
If the worst school in 2036 California is better than the average school in 2026, then that's an obvious win.
(That goal is completely achievable -- only about a third of California students are grade-level proficient right now.)
What this does is make it so anyone with a pulse gets a passing grade.
What teachers actually want and need is the ability to fail people. At one district the math department wanted to fail a bunch of kids until the principal intervened, saying they should pass more people, and make exams worth less of the grade.
Teachers need the support from the state and the district to be allowed to fail students early in their academic journey so that students can get the help they need immediately and prevent them from reaching high school and still not knowing their times tables.
Yet, somehow, for math:
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
the only states/territories doing worse at math are DC, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and Alabama.
I'm not sure what Alabama's excuse is, but the other three entries on that list have obvious economic problems (only low income urban, failed power grid, literally blowing away due to climate change).
At times, it was ranked second-worst.
I would argue that with California's high cost of living, "average" funding in California is still low relatively speaking.
Just build enough market rate housing to house the local population, and the issue will solve itself.
"Affordable housing" is a trap for buyers, builders, and policy makers:
- If you buy an affordable housing unit, then when you sell it, you have to charge based on a formula that will be way below the normal appreciation in your area. Basically, the money you put into the house was a sunk investment that's guaranteed to under-perform anything else you could have put it into. You're much better off getting a fixer-upper condo, or just renting + putting the money in an ETF.)
- If you build an affordable housing unit, then the rest of your development project becomes less profitable. Once the project is approved, you're foolishly tying up capital that could have been used to fund additional developments in other states. Also, the affordable housing approval process is slow and politically fraught. While that happens, you're holding a piece of land (and paying interest on it) that might turn out to be worthless, depending on the outcome of local politics. (If you don't believe me, next time you're driving around Silicon Valley, count "proposed development" signs, and categorize them by "badly weathered" or "brand new". "Badly weathered" means someone has been paying a mortgage on the (probably $10's-100's M) field behind the sign for at least a year. They're not paying home mortgage rates for that. It's probably 7-10% interest. That $700K-10M that could have been used to actually build houses.
- If your local government is subsidizing affordable housing, then they're misallocating resources. They could have used that money to expedite permit applications, improve public transit, add bike trails, build parks, increase freeway access or invest in other public goods that make the area more attractive to residents. Those things have a much higher payoff per dollar. Also, the local government has a monopoly on them. By opting to not do them, they are causing economic damage that cannot be routed around by the private sector. Of course, there's also the question of deciding who gets the public funds, and all the corruption and backroom dealing inherent in that process.
The good parts of the Bay Area (which also align to where the majority of the tech industry is) have public schools that haven't changed their curricula despite common core.
On the other hand, the rest of California has had significant financial and budget crises and never recovered from the 2008-13 California budget crisis.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Anyway, most of this has to do with the math framework, not the standards.
In wealthier areas of the Bay like Saratoga, Cupertino, Campbell, Fremont, Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamorindia, etc the school districts are only paying lip service to common core and still teaching as they were during my time.
Most students take multiple AP classes (and the HSes usually offer 15-20 APs) as well as attend the local CC, UC Berkeley, or Stanford to take additional classes.
The schools that are militantly common core and trying to remove classes are also (frankly) in crap school districts like SFUSD or OUSD where school board elections are dominated by local activists who oftentimes don't even have kids but are using the board as a stepping stone into local politics, and due to their reputations and low pay are unable to hire teachers for more advanced classes anyhow.
There's a reason the kind of house that would go for $1.5M in Sunset would go for $2.5M in the Peninsula or Tri-Valley.
It's rare for any teacher to just discard the standards. And anyone who says "common core" is talking about something from 20 years ago. The new math framework--already years old--has sparked the latest wave of UC revolts and NO standardized testing is part of it.
"Common core" is the exact opposite. When people say that they are referring to the standards and the tests that go with them. Standards are just standards you can teach them or not, but the framework, something entirely different, give schools guidance on what courses to offer and how to approach it.
The latest framework poo-pooed Calculus and Algebra for advanced middle schoolers in the name of "equity." And dissing admissions tests is part of this movement, that gave us the "Data Science" class that UCs rejected. That was supposed to replace Algebra 2 and therefore make students UC-ready. As someone who taught that class, I can tell you it was a joke. And it had zero, nothing to do with common core. Finding a way to link it to those existing standards was difficult at best.
And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP. Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open. Sorry.
Yes, but their CASSPP participation rates have fallen from 95-100% to 70s range as some people started explaining to parents how to use section 60615 to withdraw from CASSPP as it clashed with AP and SAT prep schedules - this is a public school where AP participation is in the 70-90% range.
> Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open...
Note how in my earlier response I said wealthier school districts.
This is how it is in the Tri-Valley and richer Peninsula and South Bay school districts. There is some basic malicious compliance with CA standards, but all the households use "Advancement Via Outside Institutions" in 8th grade and get back onto the "AP Calc by 11th/12th grade" track, and most students end up almost entirely taking AP classes by 10th grade so they aren't really impacted by CA standards changes.
Wealth also correlates with higher test scores. Why? because they are ignoring the framework and doing well with the standards.
This isn't about common core and nothing I have said or you have said changes that.
Even San Francisco rejected the basic premise of that framework's approach to algebra. So it's not just your mom's school either.
Anyway, I'm tired of arguing with your mom indirectly. If any other teachers want to discuss this directly and tell me how I'm wrong, please do.
I disagree, and I’m the person who said underperforming kids should be put in work programs or mental institutions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060371).
I should’ve chose better words, so let me clarify here: there should be tiered schools, all funded in relation to how many students they have. One school for gifted students, one for second, … down to “schools” that teach vocations, then “schools” where students play around and see therapists, both for students who aren’t learning even with an IEP.
This is roughly what some European countries like Germany do. Although unlike Germany, I think they should start earlier and allow movement up for students that show improvement.
Ultimately, no student should be educated below their level. LLMs allow a decent teacher to teach at the PhD level (and IME most teachers are decent, because most become teachers out of passion).
This would absolutely deepen the issue.
Public school has faced various compounding issues over the years related to policies like this. One big example is teaching to the test, diminishing the actual education because the standardized tests are the deciding factor whether or not the school gets funding.
Ironically, it would make it worse because a lot of school problems simply are funding problems. Public schools in wealthier neighborhoods do better because wealthier families can afford to support the children, where poorer areas have way less access. These problems begin to compound.
The SAT thing was pushed aside originally because it was partially an indicator of who could afford tutoring on the specific weirdness of the SAT vs who was on their own.
Kids who grow up poor also tend to have more home responsibilities. Parents may work longer hours(or be a useless deadbeat), kids will have to watch their siblings or take on part time jobs which cut into the time they can dedicate to education.
I do agree that the equity approach is short sighted and the totally wrong approach, but the correct approach would cause riots when the policy calls for funneling more funds to the worse performing schools to stand up tutoring early. Money can solve the issues of "wealthy areas can afford tutoring", money spent on teachers to provide better educational materials, and generally more spent on additional teachers overall, to cover problematic students who distract the rest of the class.
Destroying public school infrastructure due to a systemic problem would be a colossal mistake. All you need to know about adding a profit motive to education can be seen in private colleges, where education often takes a backseat to metrics like research positions, tuition costs skyrocketing, and even more overpaid admins compared to the public sector.
There is zero incentive for "people outside the educational system" to do this. Kids will absolutely suffer because of this plan.
The answer to this, like always, is that teachers need to be paid more.
Can you provide a link?
Similar to other issues in this country, we like to address the symptoms of economic inequality instead of attacking it at the source.
This seems problematic.
Students' success isn't entirely up to the school. Some areas genuinely need more resources than others.
This system punishes areas that need more resources with by removing resources, likely causing a downward spiral.
A generation of kids is left with poor education before the schools eventually close, and then who wants to start a school in an area that has historically struggled when funding depends on them succeeding?
Based on happenings in other states, when public schools close the schools that take their place are from well funded groups who care more about spreading ideologies than running successful or profitable schools.
California already spends tons of extra money on stuff like special ed, and struggling districts. I wouldn't touch that.
So, if there's a high school in a struggling area and it's graduating kids that can't do 7th grade math, then that opens up funding for charters in that area at 150% state average per student, or whatever the current formula us.
How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare between educational opportunities for their kids?
The status quo says that the schools do not measure outcomes (and when they do, they do not publish it, or publish it on a long delay), so any objective data parents could use is not available.
If you have a significant number of illiterate parents they could hardly do worse than your current system!
They can judge by reputation, talking to parents with kids currently in a school, etc. IMO that is better than publishing metrics because then schools focus on the metrics: this is a huge problem in the UK where metrics are published.
In my experience parents (regardless of educational level) make better decisions than the system does, and there is research to back it up (outcomes for home educated kids for whom parents make all the decisions).
Parents know which schools are good and which aren't. They are intrinsically interested in their child's education in a way that no one else is. It's an obvious solution.
K-12 education funding is strange. It has social welfare like elements like an entitlement, but is provisioned as a conditionally compulsory service like a jail.
It suffers from similar cost/benefit illegibility as healthcare, with its triangulation of patient, provider and payor, only remove decision making from the patient and on the provider side add local politics to upper management and union rules to workers.
Maybe that it works at all is testament to people caring about kids.
Separation of responsibilities is the actual key to good public schools. At least to the extent politicians and administrators can solve the issue. There should be a central entity that sets most of the curriculum and monitors and audits the entities that run the schools. And it must have the power and the resources to intervene if it determines that a school is not performing as expected.
Also, I don’t think there’s a problem with using athletics as a criteria for admission.
Other than that, I completely agree with you.
--
It's not really racial discrimination per se, but there's a strong parental-educational/economic/class element which is still tied to race in the US unfortunately.. It's not reason not to have high school calculus but it's still something to keep in account.
I can’t believe they actually went so far as to dismantle the little haven for achievement that was Lowell high school in SF by getting rid of GPA and entrance exams for a few years. Eventually furious alumni got that idiocy overturned but it should have never happened.
We’re also seeing higher ed address grade inflation by capping As at some institutions of renown.
From my perspective, there has never been any dumber debate than whether 9th grade math is called "Math" or "Algebra". My kids went to high school in Berkeley where Math is just called Math in grades 9-11 and after that you can take AP Calculus or AP Statistics if you want. And this is not Woke 1.0 stuff because the courses have been named that way forever.
I understand the motivation to deny that San Francisco banned middle school algebra: it's embarrassing, and it was disastrous for student outcomes. But it was a very real thing.
(The Lowell debate was a separate thing: should an academic-focused magnet school be able to use a standardized test to determine proficiency? Or should it be a lottery?)
However, you can read the proposal if you want to see what sort of reasoning leads to "UC is admitting students to STEM majors, then finding out the students are not prepared for pre-algebra".
There are people who see massive business opportunities for enriching themselves in privatizing the education system. Some of there points are reasonable, and sometimes they are frauds. Either way, they lobby hard and have a lot of generally Republican politicians in their pockets.
Also, teacher pay is terrible in comparison to the job stress and - reasonably and expected - educational requirements.
The education system is trying to deal with a probably that is out of their control, the increasing wealth stratification in the US, while fending off adversaries that with both good and bad intentioned reasons are trying to undermine the institutions of public education.
At the same time, we have a totally new societal threat in social media. If you haven't read "Careless People", read it. You seem societies around the world locking social media away from kids on the advice of professional groups of educators, pediatricians, and psychologists. There are hordes of irresponsible and negligent parents whose kids are barely functional, and working their way through the educational pipeline.
There is no easy fix here that anyone is missing. In a democracy, this is an existential national crisis, as we are all seeing in real time.
edit: don't ask me who is working on this. It just tells me you are unserious and just complaining. Try google. Hundreds of thousands of people are working on this. Please elaborate on your disagreement with teachers groups (NEA, AFT), the prior administration (American Rescue Plan), or the current administration (ECCA). Or disagreements with AmeriCorps or NPSS as private volunteer service groups groups. Or disagreements with private education advocates (CAPE, NAIS). You may not like all the administrators and principals and teachers as individuals working on it in the system, or PTA organizations outside the system. I could go on all day. But these people are all seriously concerned about the problem, even though they may disagree in areas - you are not special in awareness of this issue.
Find a library that still has a copy of the educational plan California used back in the 1970's, and do that.
At the time, we had the best schools in the country. The state is much richer and has much higher income/sales tax rates now than it did back then. I think that should more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster, though it might mean moving some cash around in the state budget.
I think that would go a long way.
> more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster
Wrong funding disaster. The real funding disaster is Prop 98, which mandates a certain amount of K-12 spending according to "the level of funding in 1986-87, General Fund revenues, per capita personal income, and school attendance". [0]
Specifically, "[...] [T]he Guarantee is in a Test 1 for all years 2024-25 through 2026-27. This means that the funding level of the Guarantee in these years is equal to roughly 40 percent of General Fund revenues, plus local property tax revenues. Pursuant to the Proposition 98 formula, this percentage of General Fund revenues is not reduced to reflect enrollment adjustments, which further increases per pupil funding." [0]
Additionally, both property tax revenues (affected by Prop 13) and general fund revenues are used to fund the LCFF[1], which is big on "equity" and gives schools with high ESL and generally disadvantaged students significantly more funds. It also guarantees funding growth with COLA and population growth adjustments.
Finally, on top of all that mandatory funding, we're spending discretionary funds to more than double outlays on special education vs. FY18-19[0]--which is claimed to be an investment in student outcomes. And discretionary funds for professional development. And discretionary funds to pay staff 14 weeks pregnancy leave. And discretionary funds to give LCFF a nearly doubled "super COLA".
The state doesn't have a funding problem, it has a spending problem. And the result of this unchecked spending growth is that mandatory Prop 98 spending alone is now a record $127.1B vs $59B in 2013-14 and $78.5B in 2018-19[2]--despite a ~7% enrollment decline over that period[3]. Meanwhile outcomes have plummeted.
The education administration mafia has the state over a barrel. Yet somehow most Californians believe that education is underfunded, usually with a dash of "something something Prop 13". But actually the problem is closer to a resource curse. With ever-growing guaranteed slices of the budget and discretionary sweeteners up the wazoo, who needs to actually teach kids?
[0]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...
[1]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/lcffoverview.asp
[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...
[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/
Which people are you referring to?
As in, they would be spending their vouchers on things besides education? Because typically when people speak of privatizing education it means creating a marketplace of educators which parents select and buy with publicly funded vouchers.
> An alternative to eighth-grade acceleration would be to adjust the high school curriculum instead, eliminating redundancies in the content of current courses, so that students do not need four courses before Calculus. As enacted, Algebra II tends to repeat a significant amount of the content of Algebra I, and Precalculus repeats content from Algebra II. While recognizing that some repetition of content has value, further analysis should be conducted to evaluate how high school course pathways may be redesigned to create more streamlined pathways that allow students to take three years of middle school foundations and still reach advanced mathematics courses such as calculus.
Nor can I find any evidence that they "reject the idea that some kids are more talented at somethings than other kids". Instead, their FAQ [1] includes:
> All students deserve powerful mathematics instruction. High-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated.
> All students, regardless of background, language of origin, learning differences, or foundational knowledge are capable and deserving of depth of understanding and engagement in rich mathematics tasks.
This is not remotely the same as the silly framing of "if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination". It's about not giving up on students who are undeserved by mathematics education as it is currently constituted.
I myself have mixed feelings on "de-tracking" mathematics courses. I benefited from accelerated math classes and would have been bored to tears if forced to take classes at the standard pace. But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding. It's a thorny problem. But this comment adopts the framing of right-wing propaganda rather than the actual contents of the framework.
[0] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathframeworkch8.p... [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp
Where does your understanding come from? I'd imagine that educating less-gifted (intellectually or socioeconomically) students would be more expensive. To some extent, I can imagine there being additional costs to providing advanced education, such as if you need to higher better qualified teachers, or if somehow the textbooks are more expensive. And there might be costs in providing multiple tracks, such as having additional teachers, which could occur depending on the number of students. But I can also imagine advanced students' classes requiring fewer teaching assistants, fewer educational commodities (calculators, laptops), perhaps.
The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.
This has already happened in some places.
The bigger macro economic issues would probably be the collapse of the middle class, rampant housing and food insecurity.
Hirerarcy of needs and all that.
Anyway with The Republicans going out of their way to restrict student visas it's unclear where our next generation of high achivers is going to come from.
We sure aren't raising them here.
Fraud is illegal. If the law isn't going to be enforced, then trying to fix the law is useless.
I agree about food insecurity. Nationally, it's worse now than it was during COVID. California actually made some good progress on that a few years ago:
https://www.cafoodbanks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SB138...
I haven't checked food insecurity rates since then, but you may have noticed that food collection barrels have become rare around the holidays. At least for a few years, the food banks in Silicon Valley were truck-constrained, not food-constrained, so those barrels weren't worth the effort.
Many would just quit, and among those who stayed what are the options ?
Get fired when the school is shutdown for under performing.
Fill in tests for students.
If we use programming as an example, the best tech manager on earth can’t get a bunch of random people to write production ready code in a month ( maybe JS, but not Rust).
Public schools can’t pick and choose students. Charters sorta can.
If I ran the school system I’d set up *paid* apprenticeship to job programs in high schools. Actually get these kids real careers. You SHOULD be able to afford an apartment with a high school degree.
Meanwhile, an anecdote:
11th Grade: Precalculus, all A's
12th Grade: AP Calculus, C average, one D quarter (in the middle of my parents' divorce, onset of body dysmorphia/dysphoria, college entrance applications, senior research practicum)
College Sophomore Year: Applied Calculus, aced, highest final score in the class
Post-college self-study: Failure to advance
Circumstances affect performance.
>so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something
Within the wider historical scope, in America, specifically: yes. Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that. That's why it's systemic. A cold summer day doesn't negate the existence of climate change.
In what situations would you attribute effects to concrete, near-term causes instead or abstract, historical ones? In particular, why do you attribute academic success in some areas to historical racism instead of (presumably) modern poverty? In other words, given a cohort of poor kids and not poor kids, which outcomes of each group would you assign to historical racism and why? In particular, would you expect different groups to perform better or worse after controlling for things other than race and experiences of racism?
>Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that.
I would expect the continued, sustained, and unburdened efforts to address and undo the effects of the policies and behaviors that make up what we know to be and have been systemic racism are necessary in order to remove historical racism as a cause of contemporary circumstances.
If that's actually what you're arguing, I'd love to hear more (if only for entertainment value).
If that's your assessment, then you are, ironically, yourself proof of the failure of the American education system. (If you were educated in it. If not, you're proof of the failure of whatever system you were educated in.)
There is no reasonable read of the previous message that could lead the to conclusion that that was its argument. None. Zero.
Paradoxically, removing test requirements harms underprivileged students the most. Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection. In contrast, building a competitive profile based entirely on expensive extracurriculars, sports, and elite summer camps is far more wealth-dependent. Standardized testing isn't perfect, but it's often the only objective equalizer we have."
This is... Wild.
Reality: removing standardized tests means that universities have to put more weight on the rest of the college application, such as extracurricular activities which are often expensive and thus disadvantage poor kids.
Calling it a "paradox" is maybe a little hyperbolic, but basically it did the opposite of what they expected.
I think the "paradox" is that you'd expect disadvantaged students to perform worse on standardized testing.
SAT also makes it easy to just mechanically grind it because the problems are so simple that you can just memorize their "shapes".
We need a test with a smaller number of tasks escalating in complexity. So that the top scores are extremely rare.
Sports frequently just requires a ball or a place to run.
In both scenarios, you can still purchase better equipment/training. There are very expensive, effective SAT prep options out there for the wealthy.
If you are in a school that doesn’t have a well funded PTA, you are at a disadvantage.
Plus, for some kids writing a practice exam at home isn’t the same thing as a simulated seating with kids all around and a proctor in the room.
What is the marginal gain of expensive SAT prep? Versus just doing hundreds of mock tests out of some prep book, like SWEs grinding LeetCode?
The visible result has been the weakening of these institutions. Do also observe that this is recursive — as these institutions have lowered their standards over decades, the people who go through them and end up leading them are weaker, too.
For one, why pay UC prices for remedial math? For two, community college has a lot more sections of remedial math and more experience teaching it.
If you're in a degree that doesn't need much math, taking remedial math at UC is probably fine; but all the STEM degrees want at least the full calculus series (afaik).
Remedial math for STEM students at CSU is probably in the middle. You still don't really want a lot of students in that group, when they could be better served at community college ... but CSU should also be more prepared for it.
Eh, somewhat. They want some of those outliers hobnobbing with the legacies.
Is that actually the case?
On the other hand, we have: Allen Iverson, Larry Bird, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Vick, Bo Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Fernando Valenzuela, Albert Pujols, Jim Thorpe, ...
Oh, and LeBron James himself!
So my view is that people of both rich and poor upbringings have a good chance in the sports world these days, at least for those sports where the necessary gear is relatively cheap.
Perhaps I should have instead said "is that still happening at meaningful rates".
LeBron James is an interesting example. Per wiki: > Realizing that her son would be better off in a more stable family environment, Gloria allowed him to move in with the family of Frank Walker, a local youth football coach who introduced James to basketball when he was nine years old.
and then later he went to a fancy private high school (whose wikipedia page has many notable alumni, all athletes).
So while "from poverty" may be technically accurate, I don't know if I'd count it given all his opportunities later in childhood.
It was the silly idea that with tests you could produce a fair ordering of students based on potential to succeed.
Flip answer: the bucket width should be 2.5 times the score improved of a prep course.
Obviously, if a school has a cutoff score bucketing is easy, but with excess applicants ordering becomes necessary. I guess this sort of probabilistic score would induce an order for any given student relative to sufficiently superior or inferior applicants.... I'm now kinda curious to figure this problem out. Did not expect an algorithms problem to arise in this thread lol
Some kind of weighted lottery
The final output of an execution of the system, given a static, complete set of applicants is a particular ordering of applicants. Since lottery is involved, there are multiple acceptable orderings for a given input set. The question is to define a set of criteria to classify acceptable orderings, and a desired probability distribution of orderings, which can be satisfied by an algorithm for a maximal proportion of inputs.
For example, given a set of applicants A with score function F, we notate an ordering relation R(x,y) such that, given a limited number of seats, applicant y will be admitted before applicant x. For shorthand, x < y means R(x,y).
Possible acceptance criteria for an ordering R may include:
(1) Given some d in the codomain of F (presumably a group), FOR ALL x,y in A, if F(x) + d ≤ F(y), then x < y
Possible criteria for the distribution of orderings may include:
(1) FOR ALL x,y in A, if F(x) = F(y) then P(x < y) = P(x > y)
Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8% in private school.
Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of Math or Art of Problem Solving. This group only partially overlaps with the private school group. This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even wider disparities in outcomes. It stands to reason that it's producing far less equitable outcomes, too, given that extremely bright kids who happen to be in lower-resourced schools have fewer opportunities. Universal screening for giftedness, advanced public school math courses, and the SAT -- all avenues for advancement regardless of background -- were all eliminated.
- It can make kids "overconfident when they see material they think they already know, so they end up not engaging."
- Some programs, particularly RSM, are criticized for valuing speed over depth. Current culture for K-8 math teachers is the opposite, they value depth over speed.
Left unsaid:
- It can make the teacher's job harder when the class has a wide span of abilities.
- Current teaching culture is skeptical of accelerating and/or skipping grades in math.
Notably, we've never heard English teachers be upset about a kid reading a book outside of school that's above grade level, or using advanced vocabulary in an essay. They tend to praise it.
https://www.mathschool.com/blog/parent-resources/what-is-rus...
It has only gone downhill since I left, and is now facing something like a hundred million dollar deficit in budget which will likely lead to deeper cuts and worse student outcomes.
I'm not sure what I will do but the deadline to figure it out is fast approaching. Probably we will move, but not sure how to find the right place that isn't too far away or out of our budget but can offer a better future / stronger education for my children. I don't have the solution, but I know other places have done much better than my city sadly. I've read that states like Mississippi have been able to dramatically improve their educational outcomes with certain literacy programs.
Do you have more info on this? Where is it coming from and what does it look like?
Because this is actually crazy if true.
Like, just compare to a situation where they strongly discourage Reading outside of school.
Not to mention that math is just a basic life skill and it gets exercised just going through normal every day stuff (at least middle school level math)
To me this is a 1:1 comparison, but people lose their mind when I make the comparison. College isn't for everyone just like amateur league sport isn't for everyone.
I feel like I am going to a minor league baseball game and seeing a shortstop on the field with the motor control of a toddler, and while everyone is cheering them, I think I'm taking crazy pills wondering who the hell steered this guy towards baseball his whole life.
There might be the rare generational talent that, starting in their discipline at age 18 with no prior exposure and poor nutrition, education, health, exercise, etc, could outcompete your average loser brought up with every advantage and private lessons from age 6, but in general I wouldn't expect talent to out in those circumstances.
And school's not supposed to be about filtering for rare generational talents, at least not first and foremost. It's supposed to be about getting everyone as far as they can go, and if we separate people into "smart" and "dumb" buckets before they're old enough to ever have actually gotten a chance, some people will be stuck in the "dumb" buckets their whole life that could've been a solid contributer to society if society ever cared enough to invest in them.
Or, another way of looking at it: Everything else is made to put a thumb on the scale. Everything else is designed from the ground up to advantage the advantaged. Public school is supposed to be one of the few institutions that mitigates that, that tries to put a thumb on the other side at least a little, to help level things out. And the people with the advantages hate that, and try their hardest to thwart it, whether through private schools, through pushing public schools to make different "tracks", or whatever.
If you're going to be racist online, at least have the backbone to say it outright.
For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold.
School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health.
We also have very strong incentives as a society, as an economy and as a democracy to have as many educated people as possible, to work on setting the best conditions possible for people to learn
The human body is quite complex as well.
Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated.
The measure (college degree) became a target, and thus it stopped functioning as intended.
When specific exams are abolished or watered down under the banner of 'diversity and equal opportunity,' the wealthy actually gain a massive advantage. Of course, the exam system itself inherently favors the rich as well.
The reason is simple: weakening exams naturally forces the strengthening of alternative metrics. During the transition period when a new system is introduced to society, wealthy parents are far better equipped to adapt than poorer ones.
Korea’s 'Spoon Class Theory' (where rich parents are gold spoons and poor parents are dirt spoons) and Japan’s 'Parent Gacha' (parent lottery) stem from this exact dynamic.
Sure, standardized testing benefits the wealthy because they can hire top-tier tutors. However, when the rules of the system change entirely, the underprivileged simply do not have the buffer or resources to keep up with the shift.
I wonder if there will come a time where being conservative is seen as being on the side of the working class, the poor, and the disadvantaged, because inequality is so far gone that any change to the system is too likely to be exploited by the ruling class/the rich and make things worse.
Arguably, some must already feel this way.
Add to this the fact that global productivity is maxed out, yet access to the tools of production remains highly restricted. This is the core issue. If the number of good jobs is fixed, hiring is a zero-sum game.
When education becomes universally accessible, we don't get equality; we just get higher hurdles. Just look at the dev industry. It used to be that knowing a local CMS was enough to get a job. Now, you are forced to grind leetcode and memorize the deep architecture of tech stacks you'll never actually use just to pass the filtering process.
I don't think there's any real solution to this inequality. It's a reality, and any attempt to 'solve' it is bound to fail
Wouldn't you agree that this zero-sum quality ultimately stems from increasing wealth inequality?
While scarcity is a reality indeed, more egalitarian societies, where life can be satisfactory whether you've studied with billionaire kids or in your town's vocational college, the issue is much lesser.
I'd argue measures that reduce wealth inequality would be the solution.
Parents who want their kids to learn and excel will get their kids to learn and excel. Be it through their own involvement with classwork or actively hunting out better education opportunities. _Money_ helps but it isn't the end-all solution.
Meanwhile, if you have parents who treat schools as day care and do jackshit to be involved in their kids education. Well, those are the failing students you get.
Shit, I'll add as a child of two eastern european immigrants. My parents both worked 2 jobs each for years while I was in public school here in the US, they immigrated with basically nothing to their name and hard labor jobs. And they would still make time to help me with homework.
I’ve had my fair share of classes which throw you into the deep end and not many which coddle you. Never seen any professor teaching middle school mathematics. A lot of professors started off with a vague idea of prerequisites, covered the basic ideas and usually go straight into the deep end with new material. It is up to the student to make sure they are acquainted with the prerequisites, go to discussions or office hours to ask TAs or the professor, or just drop the class and do it next quarter (without penalty). At least in my four years at UCLA, we have ample opportunity to do it and the TAs are 90% empathetic towards “stupid questions.”
So in my personal opinion, I think profs shouldn’t be wasting time teaching basic math and there are more than enough opportunities for the student to learn it at their time in the UC.
Politicians in California want the ethnic mix of students at public universities to reflect the ethnic mix of the state population. They cannot achieve this goal if colleges use academic preparedness as the main factor in admissions:
https://tools.encona.com/caaspp-explorer#slots=state%7E76%2C...
Academics presumably have multiple reasons to want students showing up having mastered the prerequisites of whichever class they're taking.
That program is expensive and apparently made people “feel bad”. The colleges were no longer allowed to require placement tests. Then they were no longer allowed to offer remedial courses (courses that did not count toward a degree) and students went directly into college english and math.
The failure rates are astounding. About 1 in 3 at a large CC.
This issue is trickling up from k-12 being required to “pass” everyone to the colleges with that same pressure.
We need our policy to focus on education achievement rather than number-of-degrees. The incentive is short sighted and the ramifications could result in our local economies declining with ineffective employees, fewer successful businesses, etc.
Dropping standardized test requirements is disconcerting. Of all of the institutions that should be making decisions neutrally based on the evidence, it’s universities. The fact that even institutions like MIT changed their admissions policies according to ideas that aren’t backed by evidence.
The UC system dropped the SAT in May 2021, in a settlement of a lawsuit that argued standardized tests were discriminatory.
I remember decades ago when I started high school. We were all given laptops, but the teachers had a whole lecture on when to use laptops and for what.
One thing that stuck with me was how one of the teachers pointed out that we should still take notes and do our homework on physical notebooks, this is because we learn better that way. Things stick to our memory much more when we write it with our hand compared to writing it on the computer.
We were supposed to use electronics as little as possible until we grasp the subject. Pen and paper is enough in the beginning.
We have truly entered a era where electronic devices is part of our daily life, its now a necessity to have it on us at all times. Of all the places, I would have expected schools to be sensitive towards whats allowed in class and whatnot.
If I could decide, I would have banned all electronic devices in class (there is exceptions of course).
When I was a grad student in a mediocre university in a different state thirty years ago we had a lot of kids in a similar situation. This was resolved by means of a pre-placement exam, and the ones who scored the worst had to take one of two remedial math classes, the lower of which was solidly at the middle school level. The university had a SAT requirement at the time.
The pre-placement exam had two versions that were used on alternate days, and a student could take it as often as they liked.
This may be a new experience for those particular UC faculty, but it is not a new phenomenon.
The K-12 public schools in California fail too many kids; and far too many poor, minority kids. Rather than fix this, we ban 8th grade algebra because we don't like the racial makeup of the advanced math track.
We can, in fact, have it both ways. But it will take change and be resisted by people who, ironically, claim to be helping the poor minorities most hurt today.
Briefly, a Stanford-affiliated "researcher" named Jo Boaler produced two deeply underpowered studies claiming to show that putting all students in the same grade-level math course led to better outcomes for everyone — even the kids that would've normally been tracked into advanced math. But she only tested results on grade-level math — of course the would-be advanced kids did better on "grade level" math if they've taken it recently. The loss is the advanced math they didn't take.
Here's an article: https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death...
I fought with my son's middle school administration about this precise issue. It is the stated policy of CA's state level education department to de-emphasize advanced math and tracking, in favor of these deeply suspect ideas. I'm pretty progressive in general, but this is braindead stupid, alarming, and self-defeating. (If you care about equity, you NEED to have options in the public school for the underprivileged gifted kids! the rich kids have lots of options and will be fine.)
It's deeply depressing, but education has long been a weak spot for California; since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think). But to compound that with this wrongheaded, moronic, politically suspect and quantitatively incorrect policy is... infuriating.
> since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think).
This is totally incorrect. California ranked 6th in total per-pupil spending in 2023[0].
California has a formulaic mandate on K-12 funding amounts (Prop 98) and schools are funded through both property taxes (affected by Prop 13) and general funds via the LCFF, which directs extra funds towards schools with more disadvantaged students.
In fact, funding levels keep hitting record after record, with only mandatory Prop 98 spending rising from $59B in 2013-14[1] to $127.1B in 2026-27[2], despite an enrollment decline of ~7% over that period[3].
[0]: https://reason.org/k12-ed-spending/2025-spotlight/
[1]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...
[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...
[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/
I was annoyed to not find specifics. I would be surprised if the K12 school board and university STEM professors are in agreement about what middle school mathematics is.
Trig comes to mind as a common stumbling block. I could be forgetting, but I don't recall much of it on the SAT. If I had to pick one area of math where the gap between learning something initially and actually being shown its broader applicability is the longest, it would be that. Like a decade between SOHCAHTOA and diffeq / fourier probably.
ouch
https://ucstudentsuccess.org/
Direct link to its FAQ page:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxdfw0gIE2UW9k5cqtf6FVMaclI...
And here's the slick 50-page, double-column manifesto from the UC establishment, unsigned of course, on the subject -- giving us a sense of the scale of the bureaucratic blob that the petitioners are up against:
https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
I was in 4th grade, but attended 8th grade math, science, English, and history (there was a 4 grade cap until after 8th grade classes) while my homeroom, Phys. ed., and social studies were with my 4th grade age peers.
Some teachers at the school were also accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and for students who were able to take courses which weren't able to be taught, either a professor from the college would come to the school to be taught, or arrangements would be made to bus students to the college.
It wasn't uncommon for students to be awarded a college diploma along with their high school diploma at graduation and there were multiple instances of multiple majors being completed.
Not to mention I was no longer graded on attendance or "participation". What a relief. Sometimes I'd skip my last class and have lunch at my high school with my friends (I was technically dual-enrolled). They'd go back to class and I'd go goof off.
Needless to say, the following year about 2/3rds of them selected community college.
Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds, it's only gotten more difficult.
Even if your family has the money, put that extra 30k in an index and you have a home down payment by the time you finish school.
>Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.
Ehh, you can't balance the world so easily. I was never going to go straight to a 4 year college because I didn't have a stable home situation.
Use standardized testing. We cannot power the future with feels, we need STEM grads.
https://ucstudentsuccess.org/
I see quotes from faculty there about this being "unexpected", like "the bottom dropped out". Are they just pretending to be surprised or actually surprised...
A mixture.
1) They were delusional and thought SAT/ACT scores werent useful signals for selecting qualified candidates.
2) They didn't care and prioritized the ability to admit people based off race and other demographics.
And now they are resolving the dissonance between their mission and admission policy.
Johnathan Haidt detailed this dynamic a long time ago in a lecture at Duke entitled "Two incompatible sacred values in American universities." The incompatible values being "truth" and "social justice."
https://youtu.be/Gatn5ameRr8
1. Employers must add more math testing before hiring to see that they get what they need.
2. Wages drop to with match the knowledge and skill. Become prompt engineer $25/h no permanent job.
3. Immigrants to the rescue!
I mean, it seems pretty clear from the last 6 years of experience by professors and others that grades (or at least grades in isolation) aren't a good predictor at all for this. The problem is removing the use of standardized tests here was done for ideological reasons. You can already tell by the use of the word "inequitable" here, because a certain insane subset of policymakers and the public believe that we should push for equal outcomes ("equity") over equal opportunity (usually referred to as simply "equality").
This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people talking about equity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_equity
Providing a hearing aid to someone hard of hearing so they can learn is equity. Their outcomes aren't guaranteed; an obstacle to achieving them is removed.
From the wiki article you linked:
>Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society. Equity proponents believe that some are at a larger disadvantage than others and aims to compensate for this to ensure that everyone can attain the same lifestyle.
That's opportunity, not a guarantee. Yes?
> people without such advantages aren't given special accomodation
They are not - but I'm specifically talking about the reverse case, where people start with extra disadvantages that cause them to start even further behind their peers. Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social contexts.
That's awful and unfortunate, but he still shouldn't have an extra hour shaved from his half-marathon times over his competitors, because the half-marathon isn't measuring "How fast could you have run this in an alternate universe where you had no disadvantages". It's measuring "How fast can you run this, full stop."
Poor Black kids who had uninvolved parents that didn't help them to learn math better aren't helped by affirmative action because you're just setting them up for failure in the actual college level math classes they end up in (and are woefully unprepared for). The SAT measures how capable you are at math because that's what matters for college, not how capable you might have been in a different reality.
>Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social contexts.
If I try to join the PGA tour, they aren't going to consider my handicap.
What if we did a better job helping parents with childcare and healthcare?
Because they're effectively what proponents of equity have implemented in practice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...
>What if we did a better job helping parents with childcare and healthcare?
I mean we've already spent trillions on such efforts over the last half century, and the effects have been pretty minimal (and in some cases I'd argue outright counterproductive). See Abbott Districts in New Jersey, the Head Start preschool program, subsidized daycare in every state, etc.
So you agree with the goal of equity, but not the approaches taken so far?
So yes, we all want fair, but what we think of as fair can be wildly different.
> Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society.
> factors specific to one's personal conditions should not interfere with the potential of academic success
Equality proponents argue that brick-on-head and no-brick-on-head should be judged by the same standards. Equity proponents argue that brick-on-head should be given advantages over no-brick-on-head to make them obtain substantially similar educational outcomes.
Once again, from your own link:
>Equity recognizes this uneven playing field and aims to take extra measures by giving those in need more than those who are not. Equity aims to achieve equal outcomes for groups, also called substantive equality. Equity aims to ensure that everyone's lifestyle is equal, even if that requires unequal distribution of access and goods.
(And systemic efforts to prevent dropping bricks on childrens' heads in the first place.)
So you claim, but in reality proponents of equity instituted a system that gave Black students a roughly 450 point advantage over Asian students on the SAT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...
Note that the NYT, in their pure, non-partisan spirit of fairness and equity, somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students.
Make up your mind? If their having to score higher than Black students is unfair, how is "Asian-Americans had to score 140 points higher on their SATs than whites" not also unfair?
What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect lifelong achievement? As I noted elsewhere in the thread, wealth (translated to parenting time, tutoring access, better schools, etc.) can help do better on the SAT. How does one account for that?
>What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect lifelong achievement?
It was never intended to?
>How does one account for that?
It's impossible to account for everything. As much as the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors have attempted to quantify and measure everything, it's simply not possible in reality. If someone could devise a better means of measurement than current standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, I would happily welcome them.
But one thing is pretty clear and certain: the SAT is a far better measure of mathematical aptitude that high school grades, and until better measures can be found and implemented I fully support continuing to use it for college admissions and college math placement.
But we apparently agree that "somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students" is actually accurate on their part?
(The article also openly explains why, if you go past the headline a bit.)
> It was never intended to?
Then we shouldn't use it as such.
I agree that Whites also got an unfair advantage over Asians in college admissions, yes (I haven't kept up with the state of things since some recentish supreme court decisions so I don't know if this is actually still the case).
>Then we shouldn't use it as such.
It isn't used as such. It's used to measure a student's current aptitude in math and English, hence the discontinuation of its use in California leading to the poor math outcomes for students described in the article this entire thread is about.
The problem is that the solution that they're proposing is to force _everyone_ to have that brick-on-head. With maybe two or three bricks for especially "advantaged" categories.
This is a bizarre claim in the second clause. Proponents of equity do recognize that various conditions impact academic potential; otherwise, they wouldn’t attempt to ameliorate them.
You even quoted, “Equity recognizes this uneven playing field. . .” so where did “. . . as much as proponents of equity like to argue otherwise,” even come from?
So? Name a social intervention that did achieve all its goals.
> Equity fundamentally arises from a more or less "blank-slatist" view of humans
Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not particularly persuasive.
That's not my argument though? In any case, I believe that many of the ideas that have been proposed (and actually implemented) by proponents of equity aren't just failing to meet their goals, I believe they are actively harmful to them (and to the health of society as a whole).
>Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not particularly persuasive.
Blank slatism in one form or another goes all the way back to the Greeks. In any case, belief in blank slatism is effectively a prerequisite for believing in one of the primary standards used by equity proponents to judge if a system is equitable or not: disparate impact. You can't a priori assume that disparate impact is proof of discrimination unless you also discount inherent differences in human capability and performance.
The truth is that it is a hell of a lot easier to lower the bar for everyone than to raise it. I.e. it's a lot easier to make dumb kids than to make smart ones, so in the name of equity we shall have dumber ones.
My son is prepping for the SAT and I am helping him. I studied physics and computer science, and was a advanced math A+ student...
IMHO: The SAT is useless, solving equations under artificial time constraints is something that only happens in these kind of tests. The focus is on solving problems fast and getting a good score, and nobody really cares if you understand the math behind it.
So, please, if you go back to testing, find something more useful than the SAT.
UC is seeing flaws in departing from those benchmarks, though. The thing is, % of students getting admitted to college is itself a measure for schools and school districts. If GPA is how you get kids into college, well...
It's not a teacher problem, it's a district and state problem. As a teacher, if kids are failing your classes (which nowadays seems to be "getting anything less than an A") your school district blames you.
To me, it seems that Goodhart's Law is an inherent problem for education in the information era, no matter how you cut it. If there's one good thing that can be said about ACT and SAT, they're relatively difficult for schools to game. GPA inflation is trivial.
How would you "teach to the test" for these in a way that looks different from just teaching arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, etc?
I self-taught a bunch of remedial math when I went back to University after many years out. Khan Academy exists. Math tutors exist. They don't just exist, they're amazing.
If I can self-teach basic sequences and series or polynomial factorization or whatever at the age of 30 while juggling a full time job and a full computer science syllabus, an unemployed Berkeley freshman shouldn't struggle with it unless they have a legitimate disability or something.
Under the 1960 California Master Plan, the top 12.5% of California high school graduates have automatic entry into the UC system.
That is no longer quite the case though. Nowadays, under the Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) system, the top 9% of high school graduates are guaranteed a spot in the UC system, regardless of rejection to school. That said, you will commonly hear about the Master Plan in conversations here without the nuance.
In practice, this is typically UC-Merced or UC-Riverside as the UCs of last resort.
That said, about 32% of all UC entrants are in the ELC system. So, I'd assume that around 32% of incoming UCSD (the UC in question in the article) entrants are ELC.
The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) found that ~80% of ELC entrants came from below average schools.
So, assuming nothing special here, 0.8*0.32 = ~0.25, or ~25% of incoming UCSD students came from an 'bad' high school.
> Statewide, 37.3% of students meet math learning standards in the grades that are tested.
Look, there are a lot of complicated stats and math that I just do not have the coffee for here. But a 'failing' 25% of incoming entrants is in the right ball park.
The University of Texas system has a similar matriculation standard too.
TLDR: Failing high schools are the root cause here. UC professors should get out of the ivory tower more. None of this is surprising.
This dig seems misaimed, inaccurate, and inapplicable to the request of having SAT factor into admission.
Schools being organized the way they are, in most locations high school grades is code for letting the local government decide who gets to go to university and who doesn't.
Well .. is it? We have decades of data that should either prove or disprove this. Why is this even an argument? There is an underlying, easily-veriable, objective reality.
Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).
Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.
A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'
SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.
There is a fundamental problem with a good percentage of public schools right now, where the previous expectations of child behavior, learning ability, and classroom teaching outcome has been broken. And instead of coming up with ways to fix that, lots of people are trying to patch the holes at the output side.
Unfortunately, public schools have to serve everyone, including:
-- kids who have learning disabilities, which seems to be disturbingly an increasing fraction of the population, which costs lots and lots of extra money to pay for
-- kids who don't behave properly in school, which is a degradation of the expectations and frankly, reflection of the standards of families at home
-- "phone-it-in"ism of unfortunately a large enough portion of public school teachers, who are a combination of not the best trained, and honestly, not allowed to enforce discipline any more due to "equity" and liability rules that govern this now.
And instead of being able to fix these problems, concerned people try to look at the easier thing to "fix" which is to rig the outcome to "look right". Until it blatantly and obviously fails. And disserves a generation of kids in the meantime with their hypothesis about how it was going to work.
That's why you have dumbing down of entrance standards, as well as avoiding standardized tests (whether for the claimed reason of being "inequitable" or the worse lazy reason of "it's so stressful for the kids").
In the meantime, those with the means take their kids out of public school because no parent wants to conduct the experiment on their own kid.
And you then watch as our society generally falls behind other countries that are not yet so rich that they can afford to have kids failing and still somehow end up somewhat ok in life.
/s