Bigotry of low expectations: San Fransisco's decision to delay algebra to 9th grade backfires

[SInNYC]

This is a complete disgrace and it’s a huge reason why California has dropped significantly in education rankings over the years .

We should “trust the experts” though

I am completely agaist delaying algebra, but this is not the reason CA K-12 education is so bad. Their numbers started going bad in the 80s-90s and hit rock bottom in the early 2000s (they were even below FL and several  deep south states). Most would ascribe it to proposition 13.

[OSR stands with Israel]

This is a complete disgrace and it’s a huge reason why California has dropped significantly in education rankings over the years .

We should “trust the experts” though

I am completely agaist delaying algebra, but this is not the reason CA K-12 education is so bad. Their numbers started going bad in the 80s-90s and hit rock bottom in the early 2000s (they were even below FL and several  deep south states). Most would ascribe it to proposition 13.

They are still below FL and TX . This is the ranking of K-12 education by state :

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12

Out of the 4 major states :


Florida is ranked 16th
New York is ranked 19th
Texas is ranked 35th
California is ranked 40th


That is embarrassingly bad especially given that CA is also the most “new economy” driven state out of the 4

[Sestak]

I think we need to drastically reform education away from the classical renessiance type of education. Most people don't need algebra, but would benefit from mastering basic math skills. And learning more practical math concepts like taxes, economic data, data managment in the workplace, starting a business etc.

I think basic algebra is fine and everyone should know the basics. Anything beyond that should be an optional path. I think most people would be far better off with a required statistics course in high school. I took algebra in middle school and I can't say that any of my higher math classes in high school have helped me in the real world. I didn't take a statistics class until college.

Algebra II is useless in real life unless you need them for college STEM courses. Even then, for calculus, all that Algebra II is really used for is to calculate the fundamential theorem of calculus.

what kind of galaxy take is this

[jojoju1998]

This is a complete disgrace and it’s a huge reason why California has dropped significantly in education rankings over the years .

We should “trust the experts” though

I am completely agaist delaying algebra, but this is not the reason CA K-12 education is so bad. Their numbers started going bad in the 80s-90s and hit rock bottom in the early 2000s (they were even below FL and several  deep south states). Most would ascribe it to proposition 13.

They are still below FL and TX . This is the ranking of K-12 education by state :

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12

Out of the 4 major states :


Florida is ranked 16th
New York is ranked 19th
Texas is ranked 35th
California is ranked 40th


That is embarrassingly bad especially given that CA is also the most “new economy” driven state out of the 4

California only does well economically, because it attracts other people, from other states and countries.

It does horrible at preparing it's own kids.


Then again; one of my math teachers threw a ruler at a student and cursed everyone else.

[Benjamin Frank]

I think we need to drastically reform education away from the classical renessiance type of education. Most people don't need algebra, but would benefit from mastering basic math skills. And learning more practical math concepts like taxes, economic data, data managment in the workplace, starting a business etc.

I think basic algebra is fine and everyone should know the basics. Anything beyond that should be an optional path. I think most people would be far better off with a required statistics course in high school. I took algebra in middle school and I can't say that any of my higher math classes in high school have helped me in the real world. I didn't take a statistics class until college.

Algebra II is useless in real life unless you need them for college STEM courses. Even then, for calculus, all that Algebra II is really used for is to calculate the fundamential theorem of calculus.

what kind of galaxy take is this

I'm not sure which part you're referring to. I probably should have said that all Algebra II is needed for in first level calculus it to prove the fundamental theorem of calculus. After that, it's proven using calculus and then everything else in a basic first year differential and integral calculus calculus formulas and algebra I (integral calculus requires more than memorizing and manipulating formulas which is why it's  more difficult than differential calculus for most students.)

Have you ever used logs, exponents, polynomials, linear equations or matrices in real life?  I can't see how they would be used by anybody outside of a STEM field.  Algebra I is certainly needed for essentially applied science or engineering type things (though not often thought of as that way) like carpentry and cooking, but nothing in the, for non STEM people, completely pointless abstract algebra II.

Except for quadratic equations, I thought that was part of algebra I.

Factoring quadratic equations and graphing are fun anyway. Puzzles and drawing.

[dead0man]

California only does well economically, because it attracts other people, from other states and countries.

It does horrible at preparing it's own kids.

hey, that's America's plan!

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Have you ever used logs, exponents, polynomials, linear equations or matrices in real life?  I can't see how they would be used by anybody outside of a STEM field.

Not going to comment on the rest of the post because it's been enough time since Algebra I/II for me to remember what is in what, but this one made me laugh. I use these things all the time, but then I spend ~50 hours/week working a STEM job.

But even taking your question at face value, I'd say that exponential growth/decay is a pretty important concept for a lay person to understand (hard to think of a better example of this than COVID). In general I think distinguishing between multiplicative and additive processes (for which understanding the relationship between log/exponential is fundamental) is a good thing to understand. Among the people I work with their intuition for logarithms is pretty disappointing.

[SevenEleven]

The fundamental problem is still the way math is taught and not the students.

It's the parents. Much of the issues regarding our youth can boil down to the type of person who is having children in this era.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The fundamental problem is still the way math is taught and not the students.

It's the parents. Much of the issues regarding our youth can boil down to the type of person who is having children in this era.

What does this mean? Bizarrely eugenic undertones to this.

[An American Tail: Fubart Goes West]

AP classes are a scam. Duel enrollment and CLEP exams are the way to go.

AP classes have become a scam.  40 years ago when I was in high school, I took several AP classes and did well enough on the exams to get lots of college credit and graduate early.  They hardly do that anymore with AP exams now (the University of California system remains the exception)--perhaps some exemptions at best.

I am skeptical that colleges "hardly" accept AP exams for class credit nowadays. At my alma mater, the University of Maryland, I was able to use AP exams to amass three semesters' worth of credits. The chart posted by the University of Maryland for the 2021–22 school year shows that almost every AP exam was accepted for class credit. I would imagine that this is normal. What evidence do you have that it is not?

Must be a public flagship vs private elite/liberal arts school thing, or maybe a pre-health thing as well.

The above is probably correct.  I was premed at Vanderbilt in the 1980s, and college credit would be generally given for AP exam scores of 3, 4, and 5.    That allowed me (and others in my class) to graduate early with huge savings.   That option hardly exists at Vanderbilt and other private schools today.  

My daughter is now at a private university--took several AP classes in high school with scores of 3 and 4--no college credit whatsoever but rather the option to place into higher level classes in disciplines irrelevant to her major.  If she had gone to UGA or the UC schools where she had been accepted, it would be a different story.  

When I went to a UC school roughly a decade ago, the AP credits weren’t that useful. They counted as empty units basically. I had priority registration, but if I didn’t they at least would have been good for getting me ahead of most freshmen. I think that they got me out of having to take a lower division English class. That being said, the AP classes (especially Chem and Calc AB (didn’t do BC since I twice failed the tests to skip a year of middle school math, but had friends that did)) were very helpful in providing a good foundation for my freshman year of college. STEM major with a STEM minor and a humanities minor.

[Vosem]

AP classes are a scam. Duel enrollment and CLEP exams are the way to go.

AP classes have become a scam.  40 years ago when I was in high school, I took several AP classes and did well enough on the exams to get lots of college credit and graduate early.  They hardly do that anymore with AP exams now (the University of California system remains the exception)--perhaps some exemptions at best.

I am skeptical that colleges "hardly" accept AP exams for class credit nowadays. At my alma mater, the University of Maryland, I was able to use AP exams to amass three semesters' worth of credits. The chart posted by the University of Maryland for the 2021–22 school year shows that almost every AP exam was accepted for class credit. I would imagine that this is normal. What evidence do you have that it is not?

Must be a public flagship vs private elite/liberal arts school thing, or maybe a pre-health thing as well.

At Ohio State I was able to get >80 credits (I forget the exact number) using AP credit, but my brother, who went to UF and took a similar amount of AP classes at the same high school -- and if anything posted better results than I did -- got about half as much. My friend who went to Yale for undergrad got nothing.

AP classes are a ludicrously cheap alternative to actually taking college classes for credit (in 2014, you paid $91 to test out of thousands of dollars' worth of college credit); the idea that they're a scam comes from people noticing that many students fail and being upset that standards are not lower.

I think we need to drastically reform education away from the classical renessiance type of education. Most people don't need algebra, but would benefit from mastering basic math skills. And learning more practical math concepts like taxes, economic data, data managment in the workplace, starting a business etc.

I think basic algebra is fine and everyone should know the basics. Anything beyond that should be an optional path. I think most people would be far better off with a required statistics course in high school. I took algebra in middle school and I can't say that any of my higher math classes in high school have helped me in the real world. I didn't take a statistics class until college.

Algebra II is useless in real life unless you need them for college STEM courses. Even then, for calculus, all that Algebra II is really used for is to calculate the fundamential theorem of calculus.

what kind of galaxy take is this

I'm not sure which part you're referring to. I probably should have said that all Algebra II is needed for in first level calculus it to prove the fundamental theorem of calculus. After that, it's proven using calculus and then everything else in a basic first year differential and integral calculus calculus formulas and algebra I (integral calculus requires more than memorizing and manipulating formulas which is why it's  more difficult than differential calculus for most students.)

Have you ever used logs, exponents, polynomials, linear equations or matrices in real life?  I can't see how they would be used by anybody outside of a STEM field.  Algebra I is certainly needed for essentially applied science or engineering type things (though not often thought of as that way) like carpentry and cooking, but nothing in the, for non STEM people, completely pointless abstract algebra II.

At least a feel for how exponents work is an essential skill for understanding the modern world, yes. I don't know how you could explain, say, a retirement plan to someone who doesn't understand it, or how someone could possibly be an informed voter without understanding exponential growth.

[Benjamin Frank]

Have you ever used logs, exponents, polynomials, linear equations or matrices in real life?  I can't see how they would be used by anybody outside of a STEM field.

Not going to comment on the rest of the post because it's been enough time since Algebra I/II for me to remember what is in what, but this one made me laugh. I use these things all the time, but then I spend ~50 hours/week working a STEM job.

But even taking your question at face value, I'd say that exponential growth/decay is a pretty important concept for a lay person to understand (hard to think of a better example of this than COVID). In general I think distinguishing between multiplicative and additive processes (for which understanding the relationship between log/exponential is fundamental) is a good thing to understand. Among the people I work with their intuition for logarithms is pretty disappointing.

Yes, you are correct on this. I should not have included exponents. However, I think I can still argue that exponents are poorly taught in Algebra II, and learning about exponents, as your example shows would still be necessary for biology (as well as the non STEM psychology) in college, if not biology in high school, which requires probability and statistics which requires knowing exponents. In addition to exponential growth (and decay) is carrying capacity, which is an important concept in real life as well.

Including exponents was a stupid error on my part, I hope that it doesn't take away from my overall point that Algebra II is badly and likely for many students harmfully taught as an abstraction without context that relies on memorizing formulas and plugging in numbers to manipulate the formulas and does not  explain the underlying concepts, including with logs. That might explain why intuition for logarithms (and exponents) is pretty disappointing.

[Associate Justice PiT]

The fundamental problem is still the way math is taught and not the students.

It's the parents. Much of the issues regarding our youth can boil down to the type of person who is having children in this era.

What does this mean? Bizarrely eugenic undertones to this.

     I've noticed an increasing proportion of serious, hard-working people who would be good parents are opting out of having children citing the bad state of the world today. Meanwhile, people who lack foresight and just act on their flesh continue to have random, unwanted children who grow up developing bad habits. I work two jobs, one white collar and the other in a warehouse; the folks in the latter are having a lot more kids and have much worse lives and life habits than the folks in the former. Anecdotal ofc, and I have no idea if that is what SevenEleven was talking about, but it's what came to my mind when I read that post.

[SInNYC]

This is a complete disgrace and it’s a huge reason why California has dropped significantly in education rankings over the years .

We should “trust the experts” though

I am completely agaist delaying algebra, but this is not the reason CA K-12 education is so bad. Their numbers started going bad in the 80s-90s and hit rock bottom in the early 2000s (they were even below FL and several  deep south states). Most would ascribe it to proposition 13.

They are still below FL and TX . This is the ranking of K-12 education by state :

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12

Out of the 4 major states :


Florida is ranked 16th
New York is ranked 19th
Texas is ranked 35th
California is ranked 40th


That is embarrassingly bad especially given that CA is also the most “new economy” driven state out of the 4

ie, the algebra thing has nothing to do with CAs poor education system (just to restate, I am not for removing/delaying algebra).

Although irrelevant to this discussion, there are obviously many rankings, but most agree that CA is still bad but not as bad as it was is in the early 00s, and its now at the top of the southern states. One ranking is: https://scholaroo.com/report/state-education-rankings/

[Benjamin Frank]

The fundamental problem is still the way math is taught and not the students.

It's the parents. Much of the issues regarding our youth can boil down to the type of person who is having children in this era.

If that were true, the students would be struggling in all subjects and not just math. They wouldn't necessarily be struggling in other subjects as badly as in math, of course.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

The fundamental problem is still the way math is taught and not the students.

It's the parents. Much of the issues regarding our youth can boil down to the type of person who is having children in this era.

What does this mean? Bizarrely eugenic undertones to this.

     I've noticed an increasing proportion of serious, hard-working people who would be good parents are opting out of having children citing the bad state of the world today. Meanwhile, people who lack foresight and just act on their flesh continue to have random, unwanted children who grow up developing bad habits. I work two jobs, one white collar and the other in a warehouse; the folks in the latter are having a lot more kids and have much worse lives and life habits than the folks in the former. Anecdotal ofc, and I have no idea if that is what SevenEleven was talking about, but it's what came to my mind when I read that post.

This is roughly what I was thinking of too. Women with less formal education generally have kids earlier in life, although it doesn't seem like the ones who are are having more than one... yet. I'm not old enough for most of my work/school/social/etc contacts to have significant fertility differences beyond deciding whether or not they want kids at all. Maybe the tables will have turned in 5-10 years as this post might suggest.

[SevenEleven]

The fundamental problem is still the way math is taught and not the students.

It's the parents. Much of the issues regarding our youth can boil down to the type of person who is having children in this era.

What does this mean? Bizarrely eugenic undertones to this.

     I've noticed an increasing proportion of serious, hard-working people who would be good parents are opting out of having children citing the bad state of the world today. Meanwhile, people who lack foresight and just act on their flesh continue to have random, unwanted children who grow up developing bad habits. I work two jobs, one white collar and the other in a warehouse; the folks in the latter are having a lot more kids and have much worse lives and life habits than the folks in the former. Anecdotal ofc, and I have no idea if that is what SevenEleven was talking about, but it's what came to my mind when I read that post.

Essentially, yes. Also of note is the high proportion of single parents.

[Alben Barkley]

We need to shut down San Francisco until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The fundamental problem is still the way math is taught and not the students.

It's the parents. Much of the issues regarding our youth can boil down to the type of person who is having children in this era.

What does this mean? Bizarrely eugenic undertones to this.

     I've noticed an increasing proportion of serious, hard-working people who would be good parents are opting out of having children citing the bad state of the world today. Meanwhile, people who lack foresight and just act on their flesh continue to have random, unwanted children who grow up developing bad habits. I work two jobs, one white collar and the other in a warehouse; the folks in the latter are having a lot more kids and have much worse lives and life habits than the folks in the former. Anecdotal ofc, and I have no idea if that is what SevenEleven was talking about, but it's what came to my mind when I read that post.

Essentially, yes. Also of note is the high proportion of single parents.

I think there's a lot of truth to this but I think that has much to do more with people's circumstances than it is anything about "the type of person." You both are describing things that happen much more often under poverty and social dysfunction.

[emailking]

For instance, I don't think there is any logical reason why the speed of light is what it is or why objects in a vacuum fall at 9.81/, students just have to learn the numbers (and if there is a logical reason the explanation I'm sure sure would hurt my brain anyway.)

9.81 comes from the mass of the Earth and the strength of gravity (Newton's constant).

speed of light can be derived as the reciprocal of the square root of the magnetic permeability in vacuum times the electric permittivity in vacuum.

Just replaces 2 questions with 4 more but they do come from somewhere lol.

[emailking]

I think we need to drastically reform education away from the classical renessiance type of education. Most people don't need algebra, but would benefit from mastering basic math skills. And learning more practical math concepts like taxes, economic data, data managment in the workplace, starting a business etc.

I think basic algebra is fine and everyone should know the basics. Anything beyond that should be an optional path. I think most people would be far better off with a required statistics course in high school. I took algebra in middle school and I can't say that any of my higher math classes in high school have helped me in the real world. I didn't take a statistics class until college.

Agreed. Everybody uses algebra even if they don't think they do. I also think basic geometry should be taught, can leave out proofs and such.

[Benjamin Frank]

I think we need to drastically reform education away from the classical renessiance type of education. Most people don't need algebra, but would benefit from mastering basic math skills. And learning more practical math concepts like taxes, economic data, data managment in the workplace, starting a business etc.

I think basic algebra is fine and everyone should know the basics. Anything beyond that should be an optional path. I think most people would be far better off with a required statistics course in high school. I took algebra in middle school and I can't say that any of my higher math classes in high school have helped me in the real world. I didn't take a statistics class until college.

Agreed. Everybody uses algebra even if they don't think they do. I also think basic geometry should be taught, can leave out proofs and such.

I don't have a problem with the way math it taught up to and including grade seven, as I think some rote learning is necessary for the basics, though students learn best in different ways, and I don't have a problem with anything that it taught up to and including grade 10, which includes geometry exponents and trigonometry.

I especially have a problem with trigonometry being taught using calculators

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-someone-has-to-run-the-fabs?

Repost: Someone has to run the fabs
Egalitarianism is important but we neglect STEM education at our peril

In 2014, the city of San Francisco decided to try to improve equity in math education by barring kids from taking algebra in 8th grade. The results were highly disappointing — Black and Latino kids’ math skills did not improve, and the achievement gap widened, thanks to richer White and Asian families hiring private tutors to teach their kids algebra.

This incident — whose results are sad but entirely predictable — highlights how some Americans think we can increase equity in math education by simply teaching less math. But this doesn’t make the world more equal — rich kids have the private resources to learn on their own, while poor kids need the state to teach them. Paring back the role of the state is rarely a recipe for equity.

But there’s probably a wider consequence of this type of shenanigan as well. At a time when America is desperately trying to re-shore strategic industries like semiconductors, we need a broad workforce with basic numeracy even more than usual. The more we refuse to teach our kids math — not the well-prepared upper crust, but the broad middle of the distribution — the more we’ll be dependent on immigration to run the fabs. And while immigration is great, I don’t have infinite confidence in our government’s willingness to open the gates. We need to train our own people too.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Fabs are a vivid illustration of the need for a strong STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education system in the United States. In recent years there’s a push to de-emphasize STEM, mostly out of egalitarian concerns. But this push is wrongheaded. Egalitarianism is a worthy goal, but de-emphasizing or limiting STEM isn’t going to make us a more equal society; it’ll just make us economically weaker.

Noah Smith on the debate with in the US education system on equity. Can anecdotally confirm the part about many highly educated STEMlords being bleeding heart progressive types who want higher taxation on the affluent and stronger social services.

The problem with this debate is that both sides are misguided. The opponents of gifted education are generally focused on the wrong kinds of equity, while the supporters of gifted education are generally too focused on education as talent screening.

People who think that gifted education, accelerated math classes, etc. are engines of inequity are only partially right. Yes, it’s possible for selective schools to become pipelines to success that leave others behind, but plenty of research and many policy experiments have shown that school choice is not very effective at improving grades. And the practice of shunting kids into accelerated math classes based on test scores hasn’t been shown to have a long-lasting effect (though interestingly it does seem to modestly decrease racial and gender gaps in access to accelerated classes).

Forcing kids to take all the same classes is just focusing on the wrong kind of equity. What ultimately matters are economic outcomes, and those can (and should) be made more equitable through taxes, spending, and other economy-wide measures. We shouldn’t stop kids from taking hard STEM classes just because we’re worried that they’ll have a better chance of becoming rich STEMlords; instead, we should just tax the STEMlords more (in fact, the STEMlords themselves tend to support this). In fact, we don’t need an economically unequal society in order to incentivize people to run the fabs — those TSMC engineers working dawn to dusk aren’t even making big bucks.

[dead0man]

https://twitter.com/kane/status/1765245232906403919?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp...

[Badger]

https://twitter.com/kane/status/1765245232906403919?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp...

Sounds like a ton of progressives told the board to F off as well. You don't get 85% of the vote in San Francisco without that.

Common sense rules.