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.
I don't know how it is in your place, but where I'm from governments have — at least for the last 15 years — governed exclusively with a max horizon of 4 years (the time until the next elections). Everything is quick-fixes or patches that kick the can down the road. It's very hard to convince people to care and vote for you if you promise to show results over the next generations, vs if you bump up pensions next year or something.
Basically, to give a different example, that's in essence why you the response to "traffic is abysmal" is "we will widen the urban highways cutting through the city" rather than "we will implement a plan to actually redesign our city away from car-exclusiveness".
- 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.
It's not rocket science to set up a continuous leader feedback mechanism.
By and large, everyone knows.
Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.
If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.
The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.
For elementary school they absolutely do not know.
In my town the most acclaimed teachers were those organising many recitals with the kids and stuff like that.
Except that 20 years later parents were saying to the strict ones that just taught the material how good they were.
So yeah everybody knows. Not immediately though!
I still remember all of the teachers that were really good and I remember some of the ones that were bad, the ones that were good. I wish that many of them could have lived long enough for me to say thank you.
Can you? How? Do you have a questionnaire or something?
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.
Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...
I have a close family member with actual attention deficit and extreme hyperactivity.
You cannot mistake it with normal bored kid.
It's like his brain works at 100% intensity all the time.
When you walk with him through the town, he has to touch every door knob, climb every tree, look into every single car, peep into every hole. In a room he finds new object so interesting that he absolutely has to investigate it, for like 30 seconds and then finds another thing and another and another. 24/7. You see his body is tired, almost falling asleep, but his brain won't stop, he keeps finding new distractions he can't ignore.
You would never mistake it for just a regular bored kid.
Not that all cases are simply the natural state of kids, but that it's overdiagnosed for that very reason.
"Oh your kid can't sit still and learn about some artificial topic by staring at whiteboards and pieces of paper all day? Better load 'em up with drugs, they clearly have ADHD!"
Sounds like something my Gen X dad, who put zero effort into helping me succeed, would tell me as I failed my way through all school with zero direction or ambition and convinced I wasn't capable of anything useful.
I won't claim more people probably think they have ADHD than actually do, and being bored disproportionately more than most in most situations is absolutely one of the symptoms, but it's a wildly incomplete trivialization of a set of debilitating difficulties that can/do carry long into adulthood. and is heritable.
The opposite, but it doesn't mean the attention is held.
> ...or are these just difficult kids to manage in a room full of kids...?
If you remove "just", "to", and "of kids" then yes.
People—kids and adults—with severe ADHD struggle to manage in all sorts of rooms that others struggle dramatically less in, if they're undiagnosed and have no resources for dealing with it.
If you look back through history, you don't suppose you might find a pattern of people saying, "Kids these days," do you?
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.
> I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
Which distinction can't be made?
> It's exactly because of the politics...
Which politics, concretely?
I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
You said, and I quoted:
> The politics were mostly fine, but the students... were the problem.
The distinction, thus, is between "the politics" and "the students".
In the rest of my comment, I clearly exhibited that the thing that made "the students" problematic for you were "the politics" that they were expressing.
> Which politics, concretely?
The politics that underlie the false disability claims.
And also the politics that your student expressed by making the statement:
> 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
Which are the same politics described in the post above yours:
> it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying.
Which are also "the politics" that everyone means when it comes to conflicts between students and teachers in the modern era, and the ones that form the basis of the conflict that TFA is about. Which is to say, the politics whereby educators can do no right, and everything is discriminatory. You described yourself being put in a double bind: first you were politically pressured to make an accommodation for a "high disability rate" that you didn't even believe to be legitimate (and I think you were probably correct in this), and then you were told that this, too, would be considered discriminatory.
In short: the politics whereby the term "discriminatory" (and "bigoted", and the family of related -isms and -phobias) is simply a political bludgeon, which need not be connected to any ordinary understanding of what it means to treat people fairly or equally.
It is all shell games because the goal is not actually to improve outcomes (there is not even agreement about how to measure outcomes), but to keep the system feeling constant shame for supposed "discrimination" when outcomes are disparate.
> I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
I explained a very clear notion: that when you described "the students" causing problems in response to someone describing "the politics" causing problems, you were talking about substantively the same phenomena. The students play a key role in perpetuating the political games, either because they stand to benefit personally or because they have been indoctrinated in some form or another.
> Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
You seem to be under the impression that I dispute your claims about false disability claims. I absolutely do not, and I was agreeing with you on this point.
What I am trying to explain to you is that these claims are part of a political expression: the fact that they might succeed is a show of political power, and the underlying theory of how to accommodate them is either not scientific or not actually aimed at optimizing per-student outcomes (or both). In particular, the metrics are not based in anything related to the described goals, but given purely in terms of identity-characteristic demographics of those who succeed.
It seems that multiple people read:
> 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.
and somehow concluded that I am somehow legitimizing "those claims". I am genuinely unable to understand that.
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.
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.
Writing down stuff has always been what you make of it.
No they can't. An amazing typist is 120 wpm. A slow speaker might be 150 wpm and fast talkers over 300 wpm.
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.
I bought a cheap graphics tablet, and still handwrite my math, but on a digital whiteboard on my PC so I can save and take backups of it, and waste less paper. But I still get the tactility, and its associated benefits (the act of handwriting something helps you remember it better)
I'm not disagreeing at all here, I tried live latexing my math courses and it was hard. I wish I had had access to a cellphone + good digitization back then. (just scanning it in was kinda pointless and I graduated about the time Android came out)
This was by far the biggest time sink in my maths courses, and frankly, a giant waste of time. Sure, the end result looked beautiful but I think I understood less of it than if I'd just written it all down on A4 ruled paper in gel pen.
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...
Learning to read I can see that handwriting directly relates but beyond that it seems like there must be more effective ways to engage with the material than just making the writing method more complex. I'd say the same about lectures; interacting with someone who understands the material can be quite valuable but spending a lot of time listening to the same thing that could be read can't be the most effective way to learn even if the complexity of the transmission does help some with memory. I hope this type of research goes beyond basic handwriting vs typing and looks into the effectiveness of additional ways of engaging with information.
For example, I like "don't guess" as a major principle of learning (per B.F. Skinner) to cultivate awareness of how reliable your memory is and avoid remembering incorrect answers as much as possible. The process of determining and looking up things that you aren't fairly certain about seems like something that could also engage wider brain activity and do so in a way that is more directly relevant to what you are learning.
Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.
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.
I will just say whiteboard > blackboard. I get allergies just thinking about it x)
I used to hate writing on the ipad but the thing that was transformational for me was a “paperlike”[1] screen protector, which makes the surface feel a lot nicer to write on.
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
Visualisation helps of course, but if you want to be good at maths, you need to put the work and try to solve tons of problems. Most of what 3blue1brown shows in his fancy videos are things you can drawn on your own on a paper, and if you've never done it yourself, chances are you don't understand.
The problem with digital tools is that it's easy to get distracted. If you watch 5 minutes of 3blue1brown and then 20 random videos, it's not going to help.
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.
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.
please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
For me this meant I recalled it way better. I hardly looked at the notes afterwards, but writing them down were crucial. I also could follow the process and ask questions where I didn't understand a step. When I did review the notes, they were very well structured and thus very informative.
The absolute worst lectures I had were slide-based. I either had to focus on transliteration to notes, but that meant I had to focus on that rather than what the professor was saying. And if I did the opposite I didn't write notes and thus could hardly recall the details if at all.
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).
1. pay attention for the first 5-10 minutes. I'm really going to try this time!
2. hear something interesting, and your mind starts wandering
3. uhoh, i have no idea what the lecture is talking about now. i'll just keep daydreaming. don't even think about raisigin your hand to ask a question because it'll reveal that you haven't been listening.
4. go home and read the textbook to figure learn the content
University was free and there was no test for enrolling in STEM degrees, and you could retry exams every semester as much as you wanted to. But goddamit exams were HARD and if you weren’t prepared enough you would keep failing until you gave up. We weren’t entitled because we weren’t paying customers.
Also because Italy is Italy we had unlimited beer and wine on tap in the canteen. For real.
Furthermore, the social systems in Italy mean that the failure is not that problematic especially for kids from poor backgrounds. And therefore, risk of depression etc was much lower.
In short what I want to say is that the university exam system is not as important as the social security/welfare state for better student outcomes.
This also ties into Harvard's grade inflation. If you think about it, if only the countries best mathematicians are joining Harvard, it doesn't make sense for any of them to receive a D on a mathematics course just because they are not that good compared to the rest of the class but are still in top 2% country wise.
The real problem here again is that US has a few good universities and a lot of bad ones. But this again, can just also be due to the size of US, but also is affected by social welfare state and equality.
Imho the problems are even deeper: they’re at culture level.
But that’s where things get controversial, so i’ll hint at the problems and stop here.
All the students at Harvard are all selected from the tail end of the distribution and are very capable.
The students at Scandinavian universities are selected to a degree, but represent a far broader range of the distribution and correspondingly there's a broader range of exam results.
Of course, other things are at play here (there is grade inflation at Harvard, the schools obviously operate differently, student disposition is (very) different (e.g., Scandinavian students are far less likely to care a lot about their grades), etc) but students from Harvard would do well at your university in Sweden. Also, the level of the material at Harvard is likely higher.
This is my experience from attending an Ivy undergrad and then doing graduate school in Scandinavia. I actually left my MSc program in Scandinavia because I thought the level of the courses was too low. (I ultimately returned for the PhD---I found the profs and researchers in Scandinavia to be first class/excellent. Much better than I ever will be.)
I disagree with that, it is common knowledge that these students will get A's if they do a semester in the US.
I should also note I've taken courses in Europe where the failure rate was like 60%, but I've also taken courses where just about every student got (the equivalent of) an A. Easy grading occurs in Euroland as well. Or other phenomenona, like niche courses that tend to only attract talented, interested students.
P.S. The "common" in "common knowledge" is not some claim of accuracy/correctness and does not lend credence to your point---a lot of things that are common knowledge are false! (I bet most things that fall under that description are false to a degree, or at least in terms of each individuals' average understanding.)
P.P.S. Failure in the US system and the European systems are very different things. In most US schools, failing is permanently recorded on your transcript and cannot be erased. You also cannot retake an exam you've failed. You just get the one shot. So the cost of failure in the US is much higher than in Europe, where it's absolutely routine. The US system also samples students more often, with course grades consisting of many homeworks, multiple exams, etc---this gives an early signal to students doing poorly they need to get their shit together and also prevents students from falling behind. In Europe it's often just a single final exam, which may be a whole of 10-15 minutes if it's an oral exam, and you may be permitted to take the exam even if you haven't really been doing the work (often you need some perfunctory thing like 50% of the points from the homework to qualify). All these factors are also responsible for high European failure rates---it's definitely not just the Americans going easy.
It seems like there is a pretty good way to handle this. Make the only letter grades A and F, i.e. it's pass/fail, but then additionally provide class rank percentile.
Even if everyone gets an A, in a class of 1000 students, someone is going to be at the 90th percentile and someone is going to be at the 10th and you can't inflate your way out of that.
We do not have beer and wine at the canteen though :cry: But maybe that’s good because we would just drink ourselves to death.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/03/plan-to-rein-...
No cap on A minuses though.
Looking student grades for 2025.
A's 30% B's 45%
2 out of 254 got an A+
I look at grade inflation still being a problem at elite schools and shake my head.
Having insight into the Dutch university education system I've noticed that the students here are incredibly entitled, and even cite "being paying customers" when they disagree with the difficulty of course work or the scoring they get and diagree with.
My experience of my Nordic university time, some 20 years ago mirrors yours. Not unlimited retakes, but very hard exams and no one had this "customer" attitude. Just nose to the grindstone, very long days in the library, every single day of the week.
I took the cpu architecture and operating systems class exam about six or seven times. It was incredibly frustrating and demoralising at the time but looking back it made absolute sense and was completely worth it.
I’ve been living off the learning from that course for the last ten years.
And believe me when i say it’s definitely visible when you’re talking with somebody that took that course (or an equivalent one from a different university) and actually understood the topics.
I think the large class model and a barrier of exams to advance makes sense in Europe. I've not been in the University of California system for years, but the school I went to - some classes didn't always hold up a level of academic rigor.
I have way more interest in history and philosophy but the way I figured is I can learn all of that on my own because all you need is to read. Math is actually hard so I better get "trained by someone" at it.
Speaking for myself I have in the last five years or so been learning I have much more of a capacity for making art than I had thought. My art is nothing special, but I am improving every time I practice. But when I was younger I thought that I was just good at STEM-yy things and bad at other things. Relatively speaking I am better at STEM-yy than art-yy things, and I'm probably worse at art-yy things than most other people. But I have huge room for growth and I think I will eventually produce some beautiful watercolors.
As an aside, I've also found that almost everyone thinks they're bad at math? My friends with PhDs don't think they're good at math but they've forgotten more than I know about it. I think I'm bad at math but I can prove a thing or two. My spouse thinks they're bad at math, and they can't do the things I can do. But a few months ago they needed to do some simple algebra at work, and a coworker said, "dang, I wish I was good at math."
Somewhere out there Terence Tao is saying he's alright at math but he has nothing on that Euler fellow.
There was one person, though, that I just could not get anywhere with. Even after several private lessons. Turned out that somehow she convinced herself that she will never get it and never be able to progress. Even if she did get it right one week, the next week was as if that never happened. I found no way across that barrier :(
It is what differentiates stem fields fron liberal arts, in my biased view. You are either talented at maths, physics, chemistry or you just grind, study with thr books snd exercises, until you know enough to pass the exams.
Coming from gymnasium/high schoolit is very different. There the teachers tell you what to do, at uni you have to figure out yourself how you need to study to get the results.
US universities have been known in Europe for being a childs play, if you were any good at all in stem fields
When the kiddo was dealing with common core stuff, I threw up my hands ... the approach made no sense, but sold text books.
Anybody can learn math.
I'm actually surprised that sentiments like this still exist. We work in technology, we've had enough contact with enough people to know that there is a difference between motivation to learn a hard technical field and the aptitude to actually do that field. "Anybody can learn basic addition" is mostly true. "Anybody can learn linear algebra" is not.
Most people also never had the fortune of having someone describe why resolving quadratic equations is meaningful or how it developed.
An example of a somewhat dense but very approachable topic with good motivation is this book: https://web.osu.cz/~Zusmanovich/teach/books/visual-group-the...
You could say that not every adult, 2 deviations from the IQ median for the sake of rigor (we lose 2.5% of the population under), capable of reading might be able to follow it, and I would accept the argument. At the same time almost every adult was also indoctrinated in such a way they "hate maths", even though their only experience is dealing with numbers, operations and memorizing formulas that might eventually be useful.
I'm not sure this translates well, but the best allegory I could make to illustrate my point is "the fish does not think about the water".
The main point is that the educational environment most people have to deal with: public school in most countries, focused on rote memorization of formulas for passing tests, is the main factor on the incredibly inefficient and adversarial perception of most students and adults.
If you are able to understand something as "basic" as higher order effects in economics and societies, accrued from an understanding of rates of change from calculus, you are of course extremely privileged. On the other hand you are not some gifted unicorn with a special brain, you are just lucky (exceptions exist, but even they have to be somewhat lucky).
[Edit: grammar, ambiguity]
It's cruel to tell students that everyone can learn maths. Neither "everyone" nor "maths" is strictly true, you know it's not true, and most of the students also know it's not true. If you just told them "everyone in the class can improve" then it would be correct and uplifting!
Terrence Tao is a gifted unicorn with a special brain and this makes him lucky, as does his excellent education. Everything is luck when you look at it from enough of a distance.
[0] For example, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11532492/
One speculation I'd be fine to make would be that high IQ could be associated with survival bias, e.g. someone who is already quite adept at identifying patterns might be able to derive meaning from structures without requiring the motivation that compounds over time for others "less gifted". But I am happy to accept it's just a very convenient speculation.
Sure, Terence Tao might be a gifted unicorn with a special brain, he had of course the circumstance and means to have his potential thoroughly leveraged. Maybe someone "gifted" that is forced to memorize the quadratic formula to pass a test gets bored (but not gifted or motivated enough to complete the square on their own).
Edit: I agree with the rigor on "everyone" and "maths" (not everyone, not all maths), I hoped we had shared context on this basic assumption (which I expected to be a frivolous pedantism, I stand corrected nevertheless). I also appreciate the point about cruelty (which, in the schooling context, I believe goes beyond just our specific topic) but this textbox is too small to contain my wonderful argument.
This it total gibberish. No one cares about this sort of academic correction for observed outcomes. "Hmm some kids are continuously scoring better on math exams. Our pedagogy must be wrong! We must teach better." In reality math teachers who are good are extremely rare because people who are good at math tend to not be teachers.
> In reality math teachers who are good are extremely rare because people who are good at math tend to not be teachers.
It's hard to take your argument seriously when your own sentence corroborates what I'm trying to convey.
I always thought the low EU-local fees for European universities were based on EU residency, not citizenship.
The harder problem is to enter Germany, but as you have EU citizenship, that's not a problem for you.
Edit: if anyone’s confused, there was a typo in the original post. I corrected it.
That's funny because Italians seem to seize every opportunity available to study abroad, particularly in the USA, and especially at the graduate level.
Maybe it doesn’t happen much in practice?
That said, in my country (in EU), it's not indefinite tries. The fourth and later attempts (up to 8, I think) have oral exams in front of a panel of professors so that they can evaluate if there is actual lack of knowledge or if there is some sort of problem between the student and the professor. The student must by then pay for the attempt to pass the exam. It's not expensive, though, it's just another incentive to make the student really be sure to be prepared.
You still pay for university depending on your income (technically what's called ISEE), although this is usually capped at around ~3k€/year
There are still tests for enrolling in STEM degrees, most notably the TOLC-I test, especially for those degrees with limited numbers.
I have also never seen beer or wine taps in my university.
It is true however that some exams are generally hard and a lot of people fail them. Some are for good reasons, others because the professor is a dickhead. As always there is a lot of variability.
Last I looked, China and the US account for 18/20 major contributions to chemistry annually in the last 8+ years and the US was leading for a decade before 2018.
IUPAC works to keep exams international so you can't just say Americans are dumb. They are taking the same exams and the failing is permanent, not forgiven. So it's even harder to succeed in the US compared with Italy, based on your description.
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.
it seems to me this is a ratcheting effect. If a larger than average is discouraged, even implicitly by being called to a meeting, people will target under the average. Repeat this and you'll quickly find the average plummeting
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.
The problem is our education system cannot support giving these students "unlimited time and attention".
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!
Aren't the issues that there is no collateral/nothing to repossess? What kind of issuer would give a 5 or 6 figure loan with no collateral and nothing to repossess?
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...
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.
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.
Freshman admissions at UC San Diego are for a different group. They have a 28% acceptance rate, not the most selective in the country but far from taking anyone with a pulse. The admissions office intends to reject people who doesn't know how to do basic math, letting them know that this isn't the right pathway for them, but they're not able to do that reliably without standardized tests.
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.
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.
Oh, wait
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.
"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 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.
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.
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
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"
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
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
The American public education system
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
'redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results'
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'
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.
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.
If you had been poor as an adult, you’d know that it’s very difficult to stay on SNAP if you have any income. It incentivizes not working if you want to feed your family.
You mention people who aren’t on disability — well, it’s very hard to get on disability. Go find a social worker and ask. They’ll tell you stories about people living on the streets with diagnosed schizophrenia having to stand in front of a judge for an appeal because SSDI was rejected twice.
What percentage of people who are on SNAP actually disabled and unable to work, I wonder? It’s far high than the number of people who actually receive SSDI.
This is why I ask if you’ve been poor — the devil is in the details on these programs and you are confidently misinterpreting those details.
Data (alone) = Noise
Data + Context = Information
Experimentation + Error = Experience
Information + Experience = Knowledge
Knowledge + Humility = WisdomI don't think folk should bother debating with this user, I don't think they're conversing in good faith.
Try being less closed-minded.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> pretend everything's a zero sum game
This claim is truly amazing. My post is exactly a rejection of the notion of a zero sum game. How can you reconcile the assertion that you can both enable excellence and assist the poor? Perhaps your aren't familiar with what a zero sum game is.
You don't achieve true solidarity by crippling those better off. In fact, that is what produces zero sum game thinking, because people get defensive, and rightly so.
> absolve yourself of doing any of the hard work to improve things.
What does that even mean? A parent's responsibility is first and foremost to their own children. If you don't accept that, then we have nothing further here to discuss. Children are not the sacrificial lambs of your pet political project.
(I am a bit curious about your accomplishments here, since you so self-righteously demand "hard work" from others. Did you force your own children to attend a garbage school when you could have given them a better option? I suppose that's at least consistent, but it is still unjust and a failure of parenting.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The decline is across demographics, across geographies, and correlated with an increase young mental health issues.
The answer is staring us in the face, quite literally, as we type this. We put a cheating and dopamine producing machine in the hands of children without any regulations. Of course it is harming their academic performance.
Ask a football coach if there kids are going to play tackle football and you'll be surprised how often you they won't let them. Ask an educator or psychologist at what age they give smart devices to their kids, and I'd guess it is 3-4 years above the median.
The policy doesn't matter when we're actively damaging the brains of children, which are not fully developed.
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.
I was a terrible student until high school — where I could start entering into college classes and/or skip classes — because the pace was too slow and I got bored and caused issues. Having the opportunity to do advanced classes was a huge gift for me and my peers I no longer disrupted.
> 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.
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.)
> "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
> Stephen Jay Gould
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.
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
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).
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.
--
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you provide a link?
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.
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.
I own the house I live in because of the school district it put us in. It allowed my children to literally walk a couple blocks to their elementary school. I can afford to and do send my children to all the extra-curricular learning opportunities I can. And they have latched onto it and started asking for more things in the areas they are interested in. I can send my children to all the fucking dance or music lessons they can handle. I buy them literally every book that they ask for. My children are in the top 5% of every fucking metric, but it has nothing to do with "equality". It has to do with the opportunities we've been able to afford them. Opportunities that the vast majority of Americans cannot or will not follow up on. But people like you are willing to judge those kids as less deserving because they don't pass some arbitrary fucking test that I have been preparing my kids for their entire lives. But that's "equal" and "fair". Unlike "equity" where we take other things into consideration.
Where are my kids go to school there’s plenty of classes for gifted kids (as in kids who excel in a traditional school environment). And there’s plenty of help for kids with challenges.
But it feels like there’s really nothing to try to move the needle for anyone else, anyone not super motivated or with specific challenges.
If you doing “ok” nobody cares.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
I am left with more questions, however. To paraphrase your final paragraph, you expect that efforts to undo the effects of past racism—those effects which we collectively call systemic racism(?)—is necessary to snip that past racism from the causal chain to present ills. But I'm left wondering if this language of systemic racism is even particularly useful in describing the situation.
That is, it seems the manifestation of this framing is to address these downstream effects (poverty, etc.), none of which are inherently racial, but affect educational outcomes. But it seems to me that framing the problem nonracially and focusing solely on the proximal causes of educational issues has the same (or better!) manifestations as the racial framing.
In short, I feel the systemic racism framing is unproductive, because in a prudent implementation it merely adds discussion of distant causes, while identifying the same social issues to address. In an imprudent implementation, it would not only cloud the field with historical discussion, but distract from important proximal issues which don't fit the historical frame, while at the same time alienating people who feel excluded or infantilized or condescended upon based on their immutable characteristics, which is scarcely outweighed by a possible ethnic rallying effect which could boost participation.
I think I need to provide a concrete hypothetical to tidy up. Consider a cohort of struggling students in Virginia, say, old coal town. The sociologist correctly identifies historical racism as a factor in some of the students' issues. So they... what? Acknowledge it? What for? They begin their real work addressing (somehow, idk) the homework environments kids have, their encouragement to succeed, the parents' support, school supplies, whatever. And race comes into the calculations exactly... never. I imagine it would be very disturbing if it did. "We're gonna help the black kids first because Jim Crow happened and that means they need it more." Well... maybe! Why make the approximation? Just focus on the proximal causes and get a precise prescription, no need for rounding.
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.
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 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.
(There are folks working at SFUSD for whom Yu Ming was their top choice of school for their kids.)
There is a veritable cottage industry of admission consultants charging up to $10,000 for interview prepping the family.
- 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.
have you shown them the lengths of the homeworks RSM gives? vastly more depth than any hw a public school would give imo.
https://www.mathschool.com/blog/parent-resources/what-is-rus...
Afaik China has widely carried out this same experiment to basically the same effect, across multiple disciplines. It's the push for so-called "happy education", which involves the relaxation of exam standards inside public schools, and has led to more after-school tutoring to make up the gaps, for families who can afford it. Lowering the common standards simply doesn't really work when there just aren't as many seats in universities as there are people who want to attend them.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The sticking point is that there is a big difference between theory and practice. We end up with elimination of 8th grade algebra in SF, abandoning graduation requirements in Oregon, the Chicago teachers union tweeting that "testing is white supremacy", promoting kids before they have achieved grade level performance, political indoctrination in classrooms (both parties do this), dividing kids into identity groups (oppressors and oppressed), promotion of whole language learning over phonics, and active attacks on the concept of merit.
What makes it difficult to have productive conversations, is that it's very difficult to untangle who has a problem with a given program, versus with the concept of equity (as a theory to make things fair), versus with the fundamental goal of making things more fair, since not everyone even knows for themselves what side they're on, and they freely swap arguments and forces. This is, of course, hardly unique to equity programs, but I think that schools are somewhat unusually susceptible to strong, uninformed opinions, since everyone has to interact with them at some point in their life, and is affected by how they're run for the rest of their life, but not everybody has actually recently bothered to look under the hood. But, I will agree that there is nuance, and we may find that our current approach to thinking about equity programs is fundamentally flawed, and there's even some broad benefit to some level of tracking. I just want to push against people that follow their intuition and present that as established fact.
I will leave you with perhaps my most controversial opinion on the matter, and open myself up even further to criticism by saying that I don't have children, and don't currently intend to ever: People love to throw around the truism that it's natural for parents to want the best for their kids, that you can't ever blame parents for doing whatever they can to give their children every advantage, that, on an individual level, you shouldn't expect altruism from parents if it involves any sacrifice on their kids part. I strongly disagree. I think that parents should be able to recognize when granting their children an advantage disproportionately harms other kids, should value challenging their kids, pushing them to step up, to make their own sacrifices for the sake of others. If nothing else will motivate them, it should at least be clear that their kid will have to live in a world populated by other people's kids, and so we should want those other children to also be happy, healthy, functional, and well educated. Their child may face more competition, but that will also be healthy for them, and help them grow and develop as an adult. I think it's asinine to argue that parents should have a free pass to behave antisocially for the benefit of only their own kids, that it's a bit of a thought-terminating cliche that excuses parents from prosocial expectations. I understand that parents are, fiercely motivated to protect and nurture their children, and I don't think that instinct is wrong, but I think it can easily grow unhealthy, and that they have every bit as much of a responsibility as everyone else to think of others. Maybe more, since those others will eventually be the people that shape their children's world.
When there is too great a difference in ability in a single classroom, teachers struggle to serve everyone's needs. I don't believe anyone is well-served by this.
You're not convinced that it can do that, that it typically does as currently implemented, or that it always will do that?
Presumably you agree that as long as a student is capable of keeping up with the material, they'll do better (in the long run if they get placed in) in a higher level class. Otherwise there would be no benefit in separating the students in the first place! I assume you also agree that we don't have any perfect tools for assessing a kid's potential. Thus, when separating kids, we will necessarily get some wrong, to their detriment. So, I hope, you're willing to concede that this could harm their academic performance.
Now, the extent to which that happens under any given paradigm is very much up for debate. But hopefully this illustrates how separating students by "ability" could harm "anyone's" academic performance.
PS The cutoff from HS to college sports is about as extreme as the jump to the pros...its less than 1% each time.
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.
"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:
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's a satisfiable goal, but it means they have to accept that they need extremely broad and deep remedial courses, and they need to treat admissions more or less like a community college does. Is that what they're looking to do? What are their goals regarding the existing community college system?
They passed AB705 and AB1705 to prevent a community college from putting someone in a remedial classes unless it had very strong evidence they wouldn't be able to pass a regular (transfer-level) class.
So if you go to a community college and intend to study for a STEM degree, you'll be placed in a calculus class.
Why? Did someone make students graduating from high schools who go on to need remedial courses into some kind of metric for the high schools, and the politicians are trying to "solve" the schools' low scores on this metric by cheating?
I'm sorry, I was not prepared for how insane this is. It's super late, so I'm going to need to do it later, but I guess I should go look up those bills.
While it seems obvious that some students should be redirected to remedial classes, the evidence is that very few students made it past those courses. IOW, the obvious solution wasn't working.
Being an engineer, my instinct would be to fix those classes so that they did work. However, legislators think at a different level and reasoned that the remedial classes constituted a false promise that costs students dearly (time, money, hopes, and dreams).
I've learned a lot, but the one example I want to raise is one I learned about how some other community colleges have addressed the same problem. In some states that where the solution wasn't mandated or constrained by legislation, schools replaced their conventional placement test and remedial courses track with repeatable, low-stakes testing. When you fail the test, it points out where you were weak and directs you to study material, and then you can study only the parts you struggled with and retake it as soon as you want, as many times as you want, for free. If you fail repeatedly you're offered a kind of integrated online course that is self-paced rather than a fixed semester length and has a really favorable class size (15 students, 2 instructors). It's sold as a service community colleges can buy into, and I really know nothing about it, so I don't want to name the vendor. I don't know if their particular tests are actually good, of if their streamlined course recapitulate any of the failings of conventional remedial courses.
But the general outline seems... pretty good, right? It isn't expensive for the students, it isn't a lengthy detour, and it doesn't work by lowering standards or potentially fraudulently promoting unprepared students (which I imagine adjunct professors at community colleges are systemically pressured to do at institutions where administrators care about their pass rates).
I'm not sure if "Come back as soon as you're ready, here's where you struggled, here's where to get extra support if you need it, all of this is free" should be considered fixing the remedial courses or bypassing them, but it seems doable and like it addresses the time, money, and stigmatization/discouragement problems with old-school remedial tracks.
Anyway I hope California can get more creative here and try to get serious about measuring success (i.e., actually do more testing of learning outcomes when they make changes like this, instead of just looking at course completion rates). It seems like a solvable problem.
Meaning, the demographic distribution of students taking (and re-taking) the entrance exam is likely to not match the distribution of the state as a whole.
Rather than seeing this as a positive because it leads to the advancement of those who would be otherwise held back from high paying jobs, it will be denounced in coded language.
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.
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 think the focus on the SAT as a mechanism for this detracts from this as the SAT isn't really an designed to sus out topical placement, right?
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).
Decades, plural? Perhaps that could happen two decades ago, but I doubt much more than that. Three decades ago you were lucky if your school had a computer lab.
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.
Even after admissions, why aren't they using placement tests and prerequisites to handle this? Also why would you try to teach someone middle school math during a STEM class in college instead of just... urging them to drop the class and letting their grades reflect their competency if they choose to stay?
Both the latter 2 are big choices for a university administration to make, so it's much easier to ask the professors to make up the difference. That's why it's the faculty and not the admin demanding this; they know what the admins are asking them to do is impossible.
I attended community college in my hometown, as well as a university elsewhere, and eventually completed my undergraduate education.
While I attended the community college, which openly advertises that it has no admissions requirements at all, I also worked there as a tutor in math. Since it had no entry requirements, the school had decent placement tests and a pretty damn comprehensive suite of remedial math courses. Some of the students I tutored were studying arithmetic (negative numbers, exponentiation), and some were even practicing how to pronounce and write out numbers by name in English and map those to Arabic numerals. There was no amount of ignorance that could make you unteachable there, as far as I could tell; you just had to find the right course.
Their math classes also included stuff you'd normally take at a university: when I was there, I took first-order logic, differential and integral calculus, vector calculus, systems of differential equations, statistics, discrete math, and probably some others I didn't take or forgot about. Some of those courses I had to retake at university anyway because of transfer credit limits and things like that, and in some of those cases, the community college version was actually better anyway (the university ones were fine).
I think it's awesome that the school had really weak admissions and really strong placement, and that it can take an earnest and reasonably intelligent high school dropout from the basics they missed all the way to being ready to dive into upper-division, in-major courses in STEM at a university.
It seems like that's an unspoken possibility for universities, too. Round out the catalogue, beef up placement exam regimes, further partnerships with local community colleges, lean into early exams and pre-tests within courses, and when students prove to be really unprepared, direct them to an appropriate class. It's not a matter of "waste 4 years just to not be able to graduate", it's "okay, it's going to take you longer to graduate because you have to take this detour in this subject area, so here's what your path now looks like". And of course dropping out or trying and failing are still (painful! expensive!) options, as they always were.
I'm not saying this is easy or cheap or a responsibility I expect universities to want. But "teach students the thing" can be a much saner option than the article seems to describe, which is hijacking existing courses that are purportedly focused on something else in order to teach their prerequisites inline.
We can't solve the intentional sabotage of our educational system by keeping kids in it for longer via remedial classes, which are supposed to be focused on kids who have personal barriers to learning, not systemically-imposed ones.
And I agree that the correct fix to bad primary and secondary school learning outcomes has to be focused on the school and home environments of students in primary and secondary school. I also think the current structure of higher education (a service you buy, at great cost, typically with non-dischargeable debt) makes detours (like remedial course sequences or just failing to place into a course for a given semester) and failed experiments (getting admitted to a school or program you're just not ready for) extremely costly and high-stakes for students.
Issues crop up here in university classrooms and university admissions offices, but it's obvious that the problem's root is nowhere near there.
I kinda wanna contest one thing, though: the function of college degrees in the job market is a credential that signals, among other things, a competence floor. "Keeping" people (virtually always adults, by the time the enter university) longer should be minimized where it doesn't produce more competence (something that cannot be measured by completion rates). But if efforts to shorten that path achieve that goal by diluting the accuracy of the credential as a competency signal, downstream consumers of that signal will just stop relying on it. That's what is happening here with universities bringing back the use of the SAT in the face of the competency signaling failure of high school diplomas, and it can also happen with community college transfer credits, associate's degrees, or bachelor's degrees. And when the problem hits the job market, employers are likely to turn even more to that diffuse set of signals (personal networks, clubs, vibes that draw on stereotypes, legacy networks, credentials that take even more schooling) that are actually worse in equity terms because they are more informal, more path-dependent, and harder to crack for skilled and talented people of disadvantaged backgrounds.
It's true that sometimes employers or universities or others are looking for largely arbitrary filters, because they have more qualified candidates available than they actually can deal with, in which case the function of a college degree or a high school may no longer be primarily about signaling a competency floor. I think that case is even worse, though. Consider the case of universities: instead of buying test prep or subject area tutoring, high SES families end up seeking to reproduce their advantage through favors, legacy networks, interview coaching, application coaching, etc.
Degrading the competency signals of educational credentials creates a cascading fraudulent promotion failure. Degrading or eliminating the aptitude signals of quantitative entrance tests ends up burdening the people who are supposed to be helped with not just failure and detours but massive debt. You can't solve scarcity problems by removing information.
Thanks for your engagement and sorry for writing too much. :)
I think it's because socioeconomic status is much more correlated with tests (40% of variance explained) than grades (<10% of variance explained): https://cshe.berkeley.edu/news/family-background-accounts-40...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qeeeGJ4100oM-mK0g-1Z34VqEaF...
I'm surprised the correlation between SES and grades is so low.
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/
No, it really isn't. Again, just mandated Prop 98 state spending on K-12 is $127.1B for next year, with this year's enrollment at just about 5.8 million students. That works out to $21k per pupil not including all discretionary state spending, federal spending, and other local funding (like the fundraising you're talking about).
> districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate
Since 2013, under the LCFF, districts with a very high amount of property tax revenue only get "basic aid" from the state, but this is only a small fraction of school districts. Anyway the funding disparity is the entire point of the LCFF: The idea is to give rich districts less and poor districts more.
It's frustratingly difficult to get my fellow Californians to understand that our schools are, if anything, over-funded, and that throwing ever more money into the black hole is unlikely to improve our abysmal outcomes.
Part of it is declining enrollment, part of it is Baumol’s cost disease (a living wage is pretty high here! Teachers get paid well on a national scale and very poorly on a local scale).
But yeah… education is simply not well-run in California. I find that pretty indisputable.
It is indeed indisputable that education is not well-run here. But it's not going to be easy to fix. For starters, nearly 100% of the people I talk to about this issue believe, like you, that the problem is Prop 13 and underfunded schools. I don't know where this idea came from but it's remarkably pervasive and consistent across demographics.
But the biggest problem IMO is that the education administration mafia has a stranglehold on our one-party state and things are broken just the way they like it.
There are weird relics of the underfunded past, but you can’t blame the educational failures on lack of budget.
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.
> But the vote went against the UC Academic Senate’s own Standardized Testing Task Force, which said use of test scores could actually boost admission rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and school districts.
The UC actually commissioned a faculty panel to investigate whether requiring test scores undercut the changes of disadvantaged students, and the panel found the opposite effect, and yet the administration got rid of the tests anyway. This is the clearest indication to me that the policymakers are entirely concerned with image and symbolism and not with any actual attempt to help anyone. They did the exact thing that their own people told them would hurt the very people they were ostensibly trying to help.
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.
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 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.
He's ahead in some areas, having some skills from as far as 7th grade, but mostly he's more in the 5th grade band by now. His MAP test score is 50th percentile for 12th grade. This means, basically, he knows more math than 50% of 12th graders who take the MAP test.
This really blew my mind at first, but these kinds of single-scale tests are really valuable for this purpose. We should be reaching for a solid absolute standard, not grading everything on a curve and passing people who haven't demonstrated real mastery.
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.
Use standardized testing. We cannot power the future with feels, we need STEM grads.
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 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
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.
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.
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?
The claim "Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society." demonstrates a clear intent to force the issue. "Equality of outcome" could not possibly be more clear or explicit of a phrase.
> 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.
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.
(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.
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.
This is a complete non-sequitur.
> Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not particularly persuasive.
It makes no sense whatsoever to refer to a strawman. Locke's conception (presumably this is what you mean if you say "from the 17th century") is obviously not what's being argued against here, since in fact the opposition to these "equity" policies generally comes from classical liberals. Rather, this is about ascribing the much more recent view of thinkers such as Michael Howe to the "equity" proponents, and rejecting it in favour of what actual scientific research demonstrates (qv. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa#Psychology_and_neu...).
That is to say: the claim presented is that equal opportunity will lead to equal outcome due to an inherently equal starting point, and that is simply false. Genetic propensities to all sorts of things are readily proven (and so is the heritability of those propensities); but even identical twins could end up with unequal outcomes through differences in individual psychology (motivations, interests, etc.) or even just sheer luck.
It is absolutely not a strawman that "equity proponents" assert this obviously false claim. We know this because of quotes like the one starting off the discussion. Again:
> 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.
If you aim to achieve equal outcomes, and you understand that equal opportunities do not and cannot produce equal outcomes, then you cannot logically claim to endorse equal opportunities. The pursuit of your goals, and your measurement of success, will necessarily entail abandonment of equal opportunity.
The claim behind
> Equity aims to ensure that everyone's lifestyle is equal, even if that requires unequal distribution of access and goods.
is "Unequal distribution of access and goods is justified by a result of equal lifestyles".
The reason there is an argument is because of the assertion:
> > 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.
In other words: "Actually, people talking about equity believe that we should push for equal opportunity over equal outcomes".
The only logical way to not recognize the immediate and obvious contradiction is to suppose that these are not actually separate goals. But the equity proponents also have no excuse for such an obviously false supposition.
from your cited wikipedia page: "Equity is equality of outcome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_equity#Equity
giving somebody a hearing aid is basic decency, but will it erase all deficits, guaranteed? no.
IQ is a different page of the book, it basically says that a kid with a high IQ who needs a hearing aid is likely to do better on the SAT than a kid with a lower IQ and perfect hearing. Sadly there is no "IQ aid". But just as families with a Down Syndrome child love that child every bit as much, IQ is not a measure of worth as a human, but simply "this kid can run the cognitive 40m dash faster"
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.
It very obviously is not. The equity proponents are extremely vocal about expecting equal outcomes; their metrics are stated entirely in terms of equality of outcome; they can constantly be observed decrying people as bigoted specifically for arguing for equality of opportunity instead. You were shown clear evidence of this downthread, and you pivoted and failed to engage squarely with a very simple argument.
I want to make sure this is perfectly clear.
When you say "getting a score of x on the SAT qualifies you for university", you are doing equality of opportunity. When you say "getting a score of f(x) on the SAT qualifies you for university, where f is chosen such that the racial makeup of university entrants matches the racial makeup of {applicants, the local general population, ...}", you are doing equality of outcome.
...And probably also violating the law, although of course it's up to the courts whether this constitutes a "racial quota", Princeton (per the opinion piece, and also Yale and Duke) substantively did the latter, which is how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... happened. As it happens, Students for Fair Admissions won their case.
(The policies in question were also likely detrimental, overall, to white students, but it was politically impossible for a white student group to bring such a case. You can see that even in the linked opinion piece, the discrimination against Asians is described as pro-white even though white students still had to do much better than black students to be given the same level of consideration.)
> Providing a hearing aid to someone hard of hearing so they can learn is equity.
This is disproven by both rhetoric and observable policy. It's all based on equality-of-outcome metrics; every disparity of outcome is directly cited to justify the claim that the work is not done. Either equality of opportunity is conflated with equality of outcome; or it is not actually the goal and any claims of such are dishonest.
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.
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.
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."
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?
It does create some perverse incentives, to be sure. "Test mills" are an ongoing issue, especially in urban areas, in both public and charter schools. Basically admin guts all liberal arts programs, theater, music, history, etc, institutes some draconian discipline system, and kids just do practice tests over and over until they graduate from high school. Great standardized test scores, and virtually zero practical value to be had from the education the kids received. I know someone who got a 30 on the ACT and didn't learn that Africa was a continent and not a country until 9th grade.
You understand that you're contradicting yourself here, yes? The entire point is to have a difficult-to-game test. Teaching people to do well on the SAT looks an awful lot like actually getting them to understand the things that the SAT is intended to ensure they understand (plus a little bit of generic test-taking skill that would apply equally well to any test in the same format). And if you don't have that, you only have things that are worse.
in other words, accept them, then put them in remedial math/etc before they can go onto the classes that require that math/etc?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least in public schools were you don't have an incentive to give everyone an A, maybe private schools are different.
I think the "paradox" is that you'd expect disadvantaged students to perform worse on standardized testing.
You really don't see a problem with that? Our best students should not be "admitted to at least one UC campus". They should have their pick of the UCs and should be getting generous scholarships to entice them. There is absolutely loads of bunching near the top the distribution which makes it impossible for actually-top students to differentiate themselves.
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.
Why? What would the point of this be beyond bragging rights?
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)
/s
Now that there is some grudgin recognition of this idea, it might do to remind people that high SAT scores on Verbal are correlated, and salient in non STEM subjects.
and that there is no known way to increase scores significantly, neither from early intervention nor sustained practice. And, depressingly from an egalitarian perspective, there is a strong genetic correlation.
You could read more about the measured statistics, the "mainstream science on intelligence" and "bell curve"s, but sadly the scientists studying it have been cancelled by people who did not like the results.
No, there isn't. Hope that helps your mood!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/
Intelligence — the ability to learn, reason and solve problems — is at the forefront of behavioural genetic research. Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait. Recent genome-wide association studies have successfully identified inherited genome sequence differences that account for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence. These findings open new avenues for research into the causes and consequences of intelligence using genome-wide polygenic scores that aggregate the effects of thousands of genetic variants. In this Review, we highlight the latest innovations and insights from the genetics of intelligence and their applications and implications for science and society.
read what it says carefully: they've correlated genes to a small percentage of the heritability of intelligence. That means there is much more heritability than they have yet found a source for.
Life is an intelligence test. During the school years, differences in intelligence are largely the reason why some children master the curriculum more readily than other children. Differences in school performance predominantly inform prospects for further education, which in turn lead to social and economic opportunities such as occupation and income. In the world of work, intelligence matters beyond educational attainment because it involves the ability to adapt to novel challenges and tasks that describe the different levels of complexity of occupations. Intelligence also spills over into many aspects of everyday life such as the selection of romantic partners and choices about health care1. This is why intelligence — often called general cognitive ability2 — predicts educational outcomes3, occupational outcomes4,5 and health outcomes6 better than any other trait. It is also the most stable psychological trait, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.54 from age 11 years to age 90 years7. Box 1 describes what intelligence is and how it is assessed.
see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellig...
I want to add: I put as much effort into my original comment disagreeing with your claim as you put into your casual assertion that some people are genetically inferior to others. I feel comfortable with how this discussion has played out.
The project then is to use modern genetics to replicate that number and, as importantly, to identify the genes that contribute to that variance. Of course, he's unable to do so: this is the famous "Missing Heritability Problem", that large-scale genetic surveys, as methods have improved and deconfounding is applied, have only managed to associate specific genes with something like 15% of the variance.
In this paper (again, as I understand it) Plomin takes 10% of the total variance as established by GWAS, and then expects much of the rest of the "missing" heritability to be accounted for by rare variants that current GWAS methods can't pick up. But the math for that probably can't work (this paper is from 2018, though, and everything I've read about rare variant stuff has been in the last few years).
† I don't think he believes this, though; I think he's an 80%-er.
Look at where advanced civilisations started, and it's clear as night and day.
Disease factors were probably the biggest factor in selection until very recently (and maybe now is just a temporary blip before a return to the historical pattern). Disease almost wiped out the Native Americans and strongly held sub-Saharan Africa back.
Looking at that you'd have to wonder how ever it ended with Whitey on the Moon.
Maybe there are other factors at play.
(Or are you just trolling me? If that's what it is, I have it coming, but I can't tell.)
The evidence shows the opposite, SAT testing allows hardworking/gifted minorities to get ahead.