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