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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
bzmrgonz wrote 25 min ago:
I think this is a Global phenomenon guys. In my humble opinion STEAM
kids will need to be assigned 2 agents (quite honestly, I think every
kid)... a digital brain and a digital tutor(s). We also have to revamp
the entire curriculum, just hear me out; Why do we not memorize binary
or assembly in computer science? Why do we allow calculators after a
certain grade? Because we have abstracted large portions of the lower
level structures in those disciplines. The medical industry is suppose
to be revamping requirements for medical professions, and I think the
STEAM programs should do the same.
spwa4 wrote 31 min ago:
The critical difference between SAT and high school grades, of course,
is that high school grades are easy to fake, especially on the school
level (both ways, up and down).
Schools being organized the way they are, in most locations high school
grades is code for letting the local government decide who gets to go
to university and who doesn't.
vondur wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
Getting rid of the SAT was a huge mistake and many Universities are
finally seeing it for the problems it's caused. The fact that so many
students are getting into the UC system and not able to do high school
level algebra is one of the symptoms of it. The Cal State System is
also having the same issues, we now give University credit for remedial
(high school level) Mathematics and English courses.
WalterBright wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
To nobody's surprise, the SATs actually measure math competence which
is crucial for success in STEM.
linuxhansl wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
Please, not the SAT!
My son is prepping for the SAT and I am helping him. I studied physics
and computer science, and was a advanced math A+ student...
IMHO: The SAT is useless, solving equations under artificial time
constraints is something that only happens in these kind of tests. The
focus is on solving problems fast and getting a good score, and nobody
really cares if you understand the math behind it.
So, please, if you go back to testing, find something more useful than
the SAT.
trunnell wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
I'm in the SF bay area w/ middle school and high school age kids.
Between San Jose and San Francisco, 15%-30% of kids are in private
school (it's 30% in SF where the public schools are extra
dysfunctional). That's far above the California statewide average of 8%
in private school.
Among our peers, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of kids are doing
advanced math outside of school, typically either Russian School of
Math or Art of Problem Solving. This group only partially overlaps with
the private school group. This is happening despite the fact that both
public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of
school!
So by decelerating math in the public school, incentives were created
for privileged parents to take matters in their own hands and put their
kids into programs that accelerate math education far beyond what
public schools used to do. We now have a system that is creating even
wider disparities in outcomes. It stands to reason that it's producing
far less equitable outcomes, too, given that extremely bright kids who
happen to be in lower-resourced schools have fewer opportunities.
Universal screening for giftedness, advanced public school math
courses, and the SAT -- all avenues for advancement regardless of
background -- were all eliminated.
naet wrote 39 min ago:
I'm in Oakland with a three year old and I'm looking to either move
to a better school district or pay for an expensive private school.
I used to be a substitute teacher for the Oakland unified school
district and I straight up refuse to send my son there. I have seen
firsthand that these kids are not being taught well and the
shortcomings compound year over year until you end with high school
level students that are unequipped to learn at the high school level,
often only barely able to read. Completely unequipped to read
critically at the level needed for a proper high school education.
Students get passed on to the next level no matter what, even if they
lack the basic skills needed to succeed at that level.
It has only gone downhill since I left, and is now facing something
like a hundred million dollar deficit in budget which will likely
lead to deeper cuts and worse student outcomes.
I'm not sure what I will do but the deadline to figure it out is fast
approaching. Probably we will move, but not sure how to find the
right place that isn't too far away or out of our budget but can
offer a better future / stronger education for my children. I don't
have the solution, but I know other places have done much better than
my city sadly. I've read that states like Mississippi have been able
to dramatically improve their educational outcomes with certain
literacy programs.
gretch wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
> This is happening despite the fact that both public and private
school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
Do you have more info on this? Where is it coming from and what does
it look like?
Because this is actually crazy if true.
Like, just compare to a situation where they strongly discourage
Reading outside of school.
Not to mention that math is just a basic life skill and it gets
exercised just going through normal every day stuff (at least middle
school level math)
niwtsol wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
Could you elaborate on the reasoning they "strongly discourage math
outside of school"? I'm genuinely curious how that would be a stance
they take.
rawgabbit wrote 21 min ago:
Not the OP. I assume the public school teachers don't want to
answer when the student says "my Russian math teacher said to do
this" instead of the common core math that is being taught.
URI [1]: https://www.mathschool.com/blog/parent-resources/what-is-r...
Balgair wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
For the non Californians here, there is very important context on
admissions that may not be widely known.
Under the 1960 California Master Plan, the top 12.5% of California high
school graduates have automatic entry into the UC system.
That is no longer quite the case though. Nowadays, under the
Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) system, the top 9% of high
school graduates are guaranteed a spot in the UC system, regardless of
rejection to school. That said, you will commonly hear about the Master
Plan in conversations here without the nuance.
In practice, this is typically UC-Merced or UC-Riverside as the UCs of
last resort.
That said, about 32% of all UC entrants are in the ELC system. So, I'd
assume that around 32% of incoming UCSD (the UC in question in the
article) entrants are ELC.
The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) found that
~80% of ELC entrants came from below average schools.
So, assuming nothing special here, 0.8*0.32 = ~0.25, or ~25% of
incoming UCSD students came from an 'bad' high school.
> Statewide, 37.3% of students meet math learning standards in the
grades that are tested.
Look, there are a lot of complicated stats and math that I just do not
have the coffee for here. But a 'failing' 25% of incoming entrants is
in the right ball park.
The University of Texas system has a similar matriculation standard
too.
TLDR: Failing high schools are the root cause here. UC professors
should get out of the ivory tower more. None of this is surprising.
epistasis wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
> UC professors should get out of the ivory tower more. None of this
is surprising.
This dig seems misaimed, inaccurate, and inapplicable to the request
of having SAT factor into admission.
MyHonestOpinon wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
I think providing access to remedial resources, free meals at school,
do more for disadvantage students than lowering the requirements. Also
make sure there are enough slots for anyone who is able to pass the
requirements.
throw6784 wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Its bad for natives and African Americans. The whole system is designed
to keep them poor and powerless
rs999gti wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
All I have to say is LOL to holistic admissions.
Use standardized testing. We cannot power the future with feels, we
need STEM grads.
pickleballcourt wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
The only possible counterpoint Iâd say is SAT math is quite trivial
and also can be prepared for? Not that I think there are better
alternatives out there.
sometimelurker wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
the SAT is a (probably biased but relatively good) measure of
willpower. it can be prepared for but its not fun
rahimnathwani wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
"In 11th grade, the most relevant grade relating to college readiness,
30.5% of students met or exceeded math learning standards. Of these,
nearly half exceeded the learning standard â marking them as likely
to be the best prepared for a college STEM major."
You can see this 30.5% in the 'grade 11' chart on this page: [1]
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: [2] Academics presumably have multiple
reasons to want students showing up having mastered the prerequisites
of whichever class they're taking.
URI [1]: https://tools.encona.com/caaspp-explorer#slots=state&s=math
URI [2]: https://tools.encona.com/caaspp-explorer#slots=state%7E76%2Cst...
u1hcw9nx wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
If STEM degrees produce low quality graduates, the value of degree
decreases:
1. Employers must add more math testing before hiring to see that they
get what they need.
2. Wages drop to with match the knowledge and skill. Become prompt
engineer $25/h no permanent job.
3. Immigrants to the rescue!
ryandamm wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
The root cause of the collapse in math education in California is one
bad researcher's work, combined with politics.
Briefly, a Stanford-affiliated "researcher" named Jo Boaler produced
two deeply underpowered studies claiming to show that putting all
students in the same grade-level math course led to better outcomes for
everyone â even the kids that would've normally been tracked into
advanced math. But she only tested results on grade-level math â 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: [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death-s...
kyboren wrote 43 min ago:
I agree with everything you wrote about maladministration of
California's math curricula, but:
> since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in
per-pupil
funding for public education (excluding college, I think).
This is totally incorrect. California ranked 6th in total per-pupil
spending in 2023[0].
California has a formulaic mandate on K-12 funding amounts (Prop 98)
and schools are funded through both property taxes (affected by Prop
13) and general funds via the LCFF, which directs extra funds towards
schools with more disadvantaged students.
In fact, funding levels keep hitting record after record, with only
mandatory Prop 98 spending rising from $59B in 2013-14[1] to $127.1B
in 2026-27[2], despite an enrollment decline of ~7% over that
period[3].
[0]: [1]: [2]: [3]:
URI [1]: https://reason.org/k12-ed-spending/2025-spotlight/
URI [2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...
URI [3]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...
URI [4]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/
richard_chase wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
In my public high school, the teachers just didn't teach and everyone
passed.
maxglute wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
Severe asian deficit because reasons.
macspoofing wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good
predictor of college success.
Well .. is it? We have decades of data that should either prove or
disprove this. Why is this even an argument? There is an underlying,
easily-veriable, objective reality.
kepler1 wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
I think there's conflating of problems here (at for the moment let's
talk about primary school K-12 rather than university level).
There is a fundamental problem with a good percentage of public schools
right now, where the previous expectations of child behavior, learning
ability, and classroom teaching outcome has been broken. And instead
of coming up with ways to fix that, lots of people are trying to patch
the holes at the output side.
Unfortunately, public schools have to serve everyone, including:
-- kids who have learning disabilities, which seems to be disturbingly
an increasing fraction of the population, which costs lots and lots of
extra money to pay for
-- kids who don't behave properly in school, which is a degradation of
the expectations and frankly, reflection of the standards of families
at home
-- "phone-it-in"ism of unfortunately a large enough portion of public
school teachers, who are a combination of not the best trained, and
honestly, not allowed to enforce discipline any more due to "equity"
and liability rules that govern this now.
And instead of being able to fix these problems, concerned people try
to look at the easier thing to "fix" which is to rig the outcome to
"look right". Until it blatantly and obviously fails. And disserves
a generation of kids in the meantime with their hypothesis about how it
was going to work.
That's why you have dumbing down of entrance standards, as well as
avoiding standardized tests (whether for the claimed reason of being
"inequitable" or the worse lazy reason of "it's so stressful for the
kids").
In the meantime, those with the means take their kids out of public
school because no parent wants to conduct the experiment on their own
kid.
And you then watch as our society generally falls behind other
countries that are not yet so rich that they can afford to have kids
failing and still somehow end up somewhat ok in life.
rayiner wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
MIT dropped the SAT requirement only to bring it back a few years ago:
[1] .
Dropping standardized test requirements is disconcerting. Of all of the
institutions that should be making decisions neutrally based on the
evidence, itâs universities. The fact that even institutions like MIT
changed their admissions policies according to ideas that arenât
backed by evidence.
URI [1]: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-s...
undeveloper wrote 55 min ago:
didn't MIT, like most other schools change this only in wake of
COVID? A pandemic resulting in a significant amount of your potential
applicants from applying is pretty good reason.
rayiner wrote 2 min ago:
[delayed]
sosodev wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
Isnât this contradictory to your point? They dropped it, collected
data, and then reverted when the evidence suggested they made the
wrong choice.
rayiner wrote 16 min ago:
The data has showed that standardized tests are highly predictive
for decades. Schools made the change despite the data. Then they
changed back not because the data changed, but because it became
apparent they couldnât tolerate the burdens of not screening
students properly.
Lonestar1440 wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
We need to ensure a diverse student body - by making sure that smart
kids of every race, class, and culture are given a thorough math
education.
The K-12 public schools in California fail too many kids; and far too
many poor, minority kids. Rather than fix this, we ban 8th grade
algebra because we don't like the racial makeup of the advanced math
track.
We can, in fact, have it both ways. But it will take change and be
resisted by people who, ironically, claim to be helping the poor
minorities most hurt today.
jrflo wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity
rather than GPA. You can always get extra help with homework, projects,
etc. if you have a better funded support system. Single subject/unit
tests in high school are also much more narrow in scope and easier to
prepare for. A standardized test on the other hand is so wide in
breadth that raw abilities will shine more.
cryzinger wrote 50 min ago:
The SAT/ACT prep school industry is a thing. I grew up with many,
many kids whose (wealthy) parents sent them to SAT prep summer school
every year from age 12 to 17.
jrflo wrote 21 min ago:
Oh for sure. But there's also a huge industry for private tutors,
homework help, writing help, etc- which more directly translates
dollars to GPA points. My thinking is that the translation between
dollars to SAT/ACT points is much less than that.
k6hkUZtLUM wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Years ago, students would take placement exams when they enrolled in
the community college. This was great for their education. They would
spend a year or two getting to college level english and math.
That program is expensive and apparently made people âfeel badâ.
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 âpassâ
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.
randusername wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
> We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must
reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the
material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other
quantitatively demanding fields
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.
bgc wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
The November report mentioned in the article goes into (disturbing)
details:
URI [1]: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
randusername wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
> To address the large number of underprepared students, the
Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus
entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects
(grades 1-8)
ouch
Alifatisk wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
Is this really surprising to anyone? Especially the oldies?
I remember decades ago when I started high school. We were all given
laptops, but the teachers had a whole lecture on when to use laptops
and for what.
One thing that stuck with me was how one of the teachers pointed out
that we should still take notes and do our homework on physical
notebooks, this is because we learn better that way. Things stick to
our memory much more when we write it with our hand compared to writing
it on the computer.
We were supposed to use electronics as little as possible until we
grasp the subject. Pen and paper is enough in the beginning.
We have truly entered a era where electronic devices is part of our
daily life, its now a necessity to have it on us at all times. Of all
the places, I would have expected schools to be sensitive towards whats
allowed in class and whatnot.
If I could decide, I would have banned all electronic devices in class
(there is exceptions of course).
cute_boi wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
First make SAT/ACT free. Then we will talk about it.
nradov wrote 3 hours 35 min ago:
The open letter from UC faculty is here.
URI [1]: https://ucstudentsuccess.org/
999900000999 wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
Community College is the way to go for most students. The UCs cost too
much, for the first 2 years you can either spend 2400$ at a community
college or 32k at a UC.
Even if your family has the money, put that extra 30k in an index and
you have a home down payment by the time you finish school.
>Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of
color and those from lower-income families â 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.
WarmWash wrote 3 hours 39 min ago:
Why do we have such an easy time accepting peoples intrinsic athletic
ability and such a difficult time accepting people's intrinsic mental
ability?
To me this is a 1:1 comparison, but people lose their mind when I make
the comparison. College isn't for everyone just like amateur league
sport isn't for everyone.
I feel like I am going to a minor league baseball game and seeing a
shortstop on the field with the motor control of a toddler, and while
everyone is cheering them, I think I'm taking crazy pills wondering who
the hell steered this guy towards baseball his whole life.
themacguffinman wrote 43 min ago:
I think it's because mental ability and personal worth is pretty
strongly tied in the modern world, in that way calling someone
deficient is like insulting them. I don't know if you can escape that
dynamic, intellect is just very important in modern work and culture.
To judge someone as mentally deficient is essentially relegating them
to the bottom rungs of the modern economy and status hierarchy in a
way that judging athletic ability doesn't do, so naturally it's not
comfortable for people to make that judgement.
csomar wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
athletic games are fun and there is some money in these small circles
but that's not what runs the economy. So it's only affecting a very
small percentage of society vs. mental ability which affect most of
society. The french revolution, communism, capitalism, etc.. It is a
very heated topic and it's about who gets to control/have power.
dartharva wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
Please.. undergrad college in any stream is a very achievable
baseline that literally anyone not afflicted with a pathological
mental condition can pass, provided they are interested themselves
and are subjected to classes from instructors who are serious about
their jobs. All you need is some basic level of discipline and
direction. College is not some kind of academic olympics.
sherburt3 wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Thanks for chiming in Young Sheldon
nradov wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
There's a huge difference in how much intrinsic athletic ability
matters depending on the sport. It's a bigger factor in a sport like
baseball or tennis where eyesight and coordination are so critical;
you can only train those things to a limited extent. But for sports
that rely more on strength and endurance than technical skill pretty
much anyone has the potential to reach a high level of performance
(not Olympic level but like NCAA division 3 level) regardless of
intrinsic ability. It's mostly a matter of being disciplined and
grinding out the workouts every day for years.
throwawaypath wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
>Why do we have such an easy time accepting peoples intrinsic
athletic ability and such a difficult time accepting people's
intrinsic mental ability?
You know why. It leads to something so heretical even alluding to it
could cause irreparable harm to your reputation.
weakfish wrote 38 min ago:
Awwww, poor throwawaypath, you're so downtrodden and oppressed :(
If you're going to be racist online, at least have the backbone to
say it outright.
maxglute wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
This broadly true but economy isn't run on NBA, NHL, MLA, i.e. a few
1000 of 5 standard deviation talent where separation is mostly
genetics. Academia need to develop magnitude more passable high end
workers, the genetic pool for that is large and system biases towards
culture to fill 1,000,000s of 1-2 standard deviation brains. You need
to hammer minor leaguers to see if they make it to rookie league or
whatever level below AAA that system has demand for. Reasonable
system would be to herd everyone through filtering process and throw
drop outs into vocational training or soft subjects that should not
be elevated on same level of STEM, not because they're less valuable
people blah blah, but the pipeline should distinguish and prioritize
strategic sectors.
BobaFloutist wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
Because intrinsic ability is such a vanishingly small part of the
equation that we can't know who could actually be the best until we
actually give everyone a fair shot.
There might be the rare generational talent that, starting in their
discipline at age 18 with no prior exposure and poor nutrition,
education, health, exercise, etc, could outcompete your average loser
brought up with every advantage and private lessons from age 6, but
in general I wouldn't expect talent to out in those circumstances.
And school's not supposed to be about filtering for rare generational
talents, at least not first and foremost. It's supposed to be about
getting everyone as far as they can go, and if we separate people
into "smart" and "dumb" buckets before they're old enough to ever
have actually gotten a chance, some people will be stuck in the
"dumb" buckets their whole life that could've been a solid
contributer to society if society ever cared enough to invest in
them.
Or, another way of looking at it: Everything else is made to put a
thumb on the scale. Everything else is designed from the ground up to
advantage the advantaged. Public school is supposed to be one of the
few institutions that mitigates that, that tries to put a thumb on
the other side at least a little, to help level things out. And the
people with the advantages hate that, and try their hardest to thwart
it, whether through private schools, through pushing public schools
to make different "tracks", or whatever.
make3 wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
No one is saying there isn't, but it's objectively a stupid massive
oversimplification of how complex things like a human brain and human
learning really are.
For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people
are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold.
School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access
to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health.
We also have very strong incentives as a society, as an economy and
as a democracy to have as many educated people as possible, to work
on setting the best conditions possible for people to learn
650 wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
What do you mean people used to do a lot better? As far as I know
[1] was a thing until recently.
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.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
make3 wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
Before devices and AI came. we're seeing a reversal of the Flynn
effect trend
avs733 wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
There is a nother factor worth mentioning in the admissions piece - the
proababilistic accuracy in admissions alongside massive increases in
the number of applications students send out. The first admissions
criteria is basically the ability to succeed at the institution
academically. It used to be typically applied to a handful, maybe 10
max, universities. Now it is not uncommon to hear from students they
applied to 40 or 50. In 2017, my university got 31k applications and
accepted 7.4k students. In 2025 those numbers were 68k and 8.5k - the
number of acceptances were up 20%, the applications were up 115%. If
you assume admissions process has a 95% accuracy, that predicts a huge
increase in 'false positives' dropping from 85% of students we expect
to be 'correctly' prepared to 74%.
Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math
learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors
- No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because
parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were
learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it
well as a conceptual matter).
Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores,
they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for
understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in
advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and
understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have
learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.
A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their
middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it
'calculation as a defense against analysis'
SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap.
K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly)
quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have
stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has
useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a
115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to
make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.
everybodyknows wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
Web site built for the petition campaign: [1] Direct link to its FAQ
page: [2] 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:
URI [1]: https://ucstudentsuccess.org/
URI [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxdfw0gIE2UW9k5cqtf6FVMaclI_A...
URI [3]: https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/...
rdtsc wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
What did they expect to happen? Is it one of those things when they say
"They may be a professor but they can't tie their shoes!". Surely, they
should have seen it coming.
I see quotes from faculty there about this being "unexpected", like
"the bottom dropped out". Are they just pretending to be surprised or
actually surprised...
nonethewiser wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
>What did they expect to happen?
A mixture.
1) They were delusional and thought SAT/ACT scores werent useful
signals for selecting qualified candidates.
2) They didn't care and prioritized the ability to admit people based
off race and other demographics.
And now they are resolving the dissonance between their mission and
admission policy.
Johnathan Haidt detailed this dynamic a long time ago in a lecture at
Duke entitled "Two incompatible sacred values in American
universities." The incompatible values being "truth" and "social
justice."
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/Gatn5ameRr8
travisgriggs wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
Itâs ok. In the future, no one will do math. Mathematicians will be
directors, with a team of math bots that they administer and direct.
Instead of being managed, they will become the managers of mathematic
autonomons. Universities need to get with the program.
/s
ptek wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
Internet streamers will need to know basic math unless they are
clowns.
booleandilemma wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
But they are clowns.
pgh wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
The lack of any subject level standardised US high school certification
to prove skill-level for matriculation still boggles my mind. I realise
this is fundamentally a curriculum issue, as itâs set at a local
level. Thereâs AP, but thatâs not universally available.
declan_roberts wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
The best option for a high achiever is to get out of the high school
crab bucket as soon as possible. Drop out and take your GED and start
community college (often free). Public high school is a terrible
place to be a smart kid.
floren wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
I don't see that much advantage in pushing them out of the crab
bucket and into the rat race. As a smart kid in a small rural high
school, I had so much free time to read and pursue my other
interests, because school wasn't demanding.
declan_roberts wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
I didn't even know what freedom was until I "dropped out" of high
school and enrolled in community college (dual enrollment
program). Suddenly I went from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM school day to a
9:00 AM to 12:00 PM school day. Wow that was incredible.
Not to mention I was no longer graded on attendance or
"participation". What a relief. Sometimes I'd skip my last class
and have lunch at my high school with my friends (I was
technically dual-enrolled). They'd go back to class and I'd go
goof off.
Needless to say, the following year about 2/3rds of them selected
community college.
WillAdams wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
For my part, it has always killed me that schools don't do as one
system which I once briefly attended did --- divide courses between
academic and social --- academic classes are attended at one's
ability level, while social classes are at one's age level.
I was in 4th grade, but attended 8th grade math, science, English,
and history (there was a 4 grade cap until after 8th grade classes)
while my homeroom, Phys. ed., and social studies were with my 4th
grade age peers.
Some teachers at the school were also accredited as faculty at a
nearby college, and for students who were able to take courses which
weren't able to be taught, either a professor from the college would
come to the school to be taught, or arrangements would be made to bus
students to the college.
It wasn't uncommon for students to be awarded a college diploma along
with their high school diploma at graduation and there were multiple
instances of multiple majors being completed.
gamander2 wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
That's a brilliant system.
hedora wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
This doesn't surprise me at all. From what I can tell, California's
education system has moved from "equality" (which I would define as
providing similar opportunities to all the kids) to focusing on
"equity" (which I think they define as dictating the same outcome for
all kids).
To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on
their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They
explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the
idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids,
so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial
discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead
of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or
something after I finish my coffee.
That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being
implemented.
Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the
curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to
the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear
that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets
supplemented.
Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than
terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of
the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close
/ shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would
be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within
the district.
Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the
next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to
use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia
(or whatever the red states are pushing).
adolph wrote 2 min ago:
> If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to
close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational
system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter
schools within the district.
K-12 education funding is strange. It has social welfare like
elements like an entitlement, but is provisioned as a conditionally
compulsory service like a jail.
It suffers from similar cost/benefit illegibility as healthcare, with
its triangulation of patient, provider and payor, only remove
decision making from the patient and on the provider side add local
politics to upper management and union rules to workers.
Maybe that it works at all is testament to people caring about kids.
armchairhacker wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
> I think all funding in California education (other than terminal
levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the
percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
I disagree, and Iâm the person who said underperforming kids should
be put in work programs or mental institutions ( [1] ).
I shouldâve 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 âschoolsâ that teach vocations, then âschoolsâ where
students play around and see therapists, both for students who
arenât 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).
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060371
sometimelurker wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
> ... you can compute a derivative by 12th grade
The fact that calculus is seen by the public as something really
really hard needs to be fixed. I taught myself differentiation in 7th
and I'm not proud of it because it's not difficult. Maybe the issue
is crappy curriculums and incentives putting the best mathematicians
on Wall Street rather than in public schools, but there needs to be a
cultural push of some sort. I've given a million last minute math
lessons to some of my less math inclined friends, and there is no
barrier at all stopping people from learning a ton more math than is
taught in schools.
> ... some kids are more talented at some things than other kids ...
This idea is 100% true, but I don't think its a helpful idea in the
context of making people learn more math. Unlucky people who
internalize this idea end up thinking they are innately worse at
understanding abstract ideas, and end up not trying that hard. I
completely believe anyone capable of doing a euclidian proof in
geometry class can read and fully understand the Bitcoin whitepaper -
but they don't. And the barrier for understanding Bitcoin is probably
lower than geometry.
> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than
terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of
the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
This, but at a more localized level by giving teachers bonuses
depending on how well the students do in the next grade.
upboundspiral wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
I know many teachers and funding already works the way you describe:
the better a school's students do, the more funding it gets (schools
also get funding for the number of days the students show up).
What this does is make it so anyone with a pulse gets a passing
grade.
What teachers actually want and need is the ability to fail people.
At one district the math department wanted to fail a bunch of kids
until the principal intervened, saying they should pass more people,
and make exams worth less of the grade.
Teachers need the support from the state and the district to be
allowed to fail students early in their academic journey so that
students can get the help they need immediately and prevent them from
reaching high school and still not knowing their times tables.
MSFT_Edging wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
> If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to
close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational
system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter
schools within the district.
This would absolutely deepen the issue.
Public school has faced various compounding issues over the years
related to policies like this. One big example is teaching to the
test, diminishing the actual education because the standardized tests
are the deciding factor whether or not the school gets funding.
Ironically, it would make it worse because a lot of school problems
simply are funding problems. Public schools in wealthier
neighborhoods do better because wealthier families can afford to
support the children, where poorer areas have way less access. These
problems begin to compound.
The SAT thing was pushed aside originally because it was partially an
indicator of who could afford tutoring on the specific weirdness of
the SAT vs who was on their own.
Kids who grow up poor also tend to have more home responsibilities.
Parents may work longer hours(or be a useless deadbeat), kids will
have to watch their siblings or take on part time jobs which cut into
the time they can dedicate to education.
I do agree that the equity approach is short sighted and the totally
wrong approach, but the correct approach would cause riots when the
policy calls for funneling more funds to the worse performing schools
to stand up tutoring early. Money can solve the issues of "wealthy
areas can afford tutoring", money spent on teachers to provide better
educational materials, and generally more spent on additional
teachers overall, to cover problematic students who distract the rest
of the class.
Destroying public school infrastructure due to a systemic problem
would be a colossal mistake. All you need to know about adding a
profit motive to education can be seen in private colleges, where
education often takes a backseat to metrics like research positions,
tuition costs skyrocketing, and even more overpaid admins compared to
the public sector.
ams92 wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Equality is more expensive. Itâs much easier to just cut advanced
classes and shove the upper percentile students closer to the average
in the name of having equal outcomes for all races.
Similar to other issues in this country, we like to address the
symptoms of economic inequality instead of attacking it at the
source.
throwawaypath wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
And if you call out the insanity, they'll say you're suffering from
"White fragility." If you say this may impact the prospects of your
children, they'll say you're suffering from "imagined persecution."
kys11 wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
I saw a solution proposed yesterday: drop the bottom X% of students
at every grade starting around middle school and put them in a work
program. The X can be variable, I think the original post suggested
that the percentage dropped grows into high school. Students would be
allowed to re attempt when ready.
mark242 wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
"If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to
close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational
system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter
schools within the district."
There is zero incentive for "people outside the educational system"
to do this. Kids will absolutely suffer because of this plan.
The answer to this, like always, is that teachers need to be paid
more.
cdcarter wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
Can you share some credible sources on "schools banning calculus"?
Googling seems to primarily show up Quora and indeed HN discussions,
and no actual policy proposal or news article.
dabluecaboose wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
> This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back
door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states
are pushing).
Well, my red state public school taught me calculus, algebra, and
evolution without making the claim that knowledge is somehow racist.
So maybe those in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones
dyauspitr wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
The solution is simple and every Asian country does this. You need to
have nationwide testing at key intervals up to three times during
your entire schooling. If you fail that you can keep retrying. Gaming
it is a very hard because the people grading are thousands of miles
away and have no idea who you are besides an ID number. This will
also lead to a common curriculum that everyone has to prepare for.
The bar for this common curriculum is very high in places like Japan,
South Korea, China, and India. Doing this will also almost guarantee
that a huge number of black and Latino kids are not gonna pass
school. The truth is theyâre culturally just not educationally
focused at a family level. There might also be a genetic element to
this though Iâm not sure because kids of African immigrants perform
pretty well. This is what all of these curricular dumbing down
programs are trying to counteract.
maxglute wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
PRC has affirmative action points on gaokao for "underperforming"
minorities, well it's been phased out to economically disadvantaged
minorities last few years to mitigate privilege stacking. So system
not incompatible with affirmative action, but even then tier2 PRC
schools the affirmative action floor is still like 95th percentile
tier1 closer to 99.9 percentile, i.e. not something that can be
gamed like in US by 75th percentile SAT scores, athletics, donors,
personality scores, diversity.
121789 wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
I think you have equity and equality exactly reversed
iamkrazy wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
No he hasn't.
recursivedoubts wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
Give the money to the parents in the form of income-adjusted vouchers
to spend on education as they see fit.
hedora wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
That creates a market for lemons.
How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare
between educational opportunities for their kids?
The status quo says that the schools do not measure outcomes (and
when they do, they do not publish it, or publish it on a long
delay), so any objective data parents could use is not available.
graemep wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
> How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare
between educational opportunities for their kids?
If you have a significant number of illiterate parents they could
hardly do worse than your current system!
They can judge by reputation, talking to parents with kids
currently in a school, etc. IMO that is better than publishing
metrics because then schools focus on the metrics: this is a huge
problem in the UK where metrics are published.
In my experience parents (regardless of educational level) make
better decisions than the system does, and there is research to
back it up (outcomes for home educated kids for whom parents make
all the decisions).
recursivedoubts wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
As opposed to the current market for education?
Parents know which schools are good and which aren't. They are
intrinsically interested in their child's education in a way that
no one else is. It's an obvious solution.
hypersoar wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
I can find no evidence that California ever tried "banning high
school calculus". The chapter in the much-maligned mathematics
framework on high school [0] makes no such proposal, and indeed
suggests consolidating the prerequisite classes to make it easier to
reach calculus without acceleration in middle school:
> An alternative to eighth-grade acceleration would be to adjust the
high school curriculum instead, eliminating redundancies in the
content of current courses, so that students do not need four courses
before Calculus. As enacted, Algebra II tends to repeat a significant
amount of the content of Algebra I, and Precalculus repeats content
from Algebra II. While recognizing that some repetition of content
has value, further analysis should be conducted to evaluate how high
school course pathways may be redesigned to create more streamlined
pathways that allow students to take three years of middle school
foundations and still reach advanced mathematics courses such as
calculus.
Nor can I find any evidence that they "reject the idea that some kids
are more talented at somethings than other kids". Instead, their FAQ
[1] includes:
> All students deserve powerful mathematics instruction. High-level
mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but
rather can be cultivated.
> All students, regardless of background, language of origin,
learning differences, or foundational knowledge are capable and
deserving of depth of understanding and engagement in rich
mathematics tasks.
This is not remotely the same as the silly framing of "if you can
compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial
discrimination". It's about not giving up on students who are
undeserved by mathematics education as it is currently constituted.
I myself have mixed feelings on "de-tracking" mathematics courses. I
benefited from accelerated math classes and would have been bored to
tears if forced to take classes at the standard pace. But I also
understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more
resources to students who are already succeeding. It's a thorny
problem. But this comment adopts the framing of right-wing propaganda
rather than the actual contents of the framework.
[0] [1]
URI [1]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathframeworkch8.p...
URI [2]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp
akramachamarei wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
> But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to
allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding.
Where does your understanding come from? I'd imagine that educating
less-gifted (intellectually or socioeconomically) students would be
more expensive. To some extent, I can imagine there being
additional costs to providing advanced education, such as if you
need to higher better qualified teachers, or if somehow the
textbooks are more expensive. And there might be costs in providing
multiple tracks, such as having additional teachers, which could
occur depending on the number of students. But I can also imagine
advanced students' classes requiring fewer teaching assistants,
fewer educational commodities (calculators, laptops), perhaps.
59percentmore wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Ladies and gentlemen, the modern eugenicist.
Meanwhile, an anecdote:
11th Grade: Precalculus, all A's
12th Grade: AP Calculus, C average, one D quarter (in the middle of
my parents' divorce, onset of body dysmorphia/dysphoria, college
entrance applications, senior research practicum)
College Sophomore Year: Applied Calculus, aced, highest final score
in the class
Post-college self-study: Failure to advance
Circumstances affect performance.
>so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial
discrimination benefiting you or something
Within the wider historical scope, in America, specifically: yes.
Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and
succeeding despite that. That's why it's systemic. A cold summer day
doesn't negate the existence of climate change.
hedora wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
I'll assume you misread the thread. You're arguing that teaching
calculus in public school is a form of eugenics.
If that's actually what you're arguing, I'd love to hear more (if
only for entertainment value).
akramachamarei wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
> Within the wider historical scope
In what situations would you attribute effects to concrete,
near-term causes instead or abstract, historical ones? In
particular, why do you attribute academic success in some areas to
historical racism instead of (presumably) modern poverty? In other
words, given a cohort of poor kids and not poor kids, which
outcomes of each group would you assign to historical racism and
why? In particular, would you expect different groups to perform
better or worse after controlling for things other than race and
experiences of racism?
empath75 wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
> if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial
discrimination benefiting you or something.
--
It's not really racial discrimination per se, but there's a strong
parental-educational/economic/class element which is still tied to
race in the US unfortunately.. It's not reason not to have high
school calculus but it's still something to keep in account.
retrac wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
It's so strange to see this happen in the USA when our education
system up here in Canada has essentially the same set of cultural and
social values and there's plenty to gripe about but we haven't had
the 'levelling' thing. There have been attempts but it has strongly
resisted by parents. [1] I think there may be more realization up
here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the
same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need
spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a
parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's
class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the
teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and
probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts.
Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of
abnormality.
URI [1]: https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...
borski wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
> I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted
education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way
remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed.
and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
> When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are
a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's
class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all
the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and
probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts.
Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind
of abnormality.
YES. I could not agree more.
jjmarr wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
I attended a specialized math and science program (MaCS) in the
TDSB. It was gutted by removing selective admissions in favour of a
lottery, precisely because of the report you've cited.
The "levelling" is real in Canada and good private schools often
manage to skip multiple grade levels.
Funnily enough, I've seen the opposite in the USA. My highly driven
American friends somehow manage to get entire associate's degrees
before finishing high school, which is unthinkable in Canada.
retrac wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
They reversed the lottery thing after just two years as a failure
and reinstated the previous policies. [1] > âThey decided to
put ideology ahead of student achievement,â said Yu. âIn
reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving
students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort
of environment,â he said.
URI [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lotte...
jackmott42 wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
In countries where students perform better, they do the opposite of
your plan. Resources are pumped into the failing schools to get them
to do better.
You seem to be just arguing for even more privatization in American
which is awful, the kids that are failing have parents that won't be
paying for good education or setting up schools. They won't bother
with it at all if it isn't public and required.
akramachamarei wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
> the kids that are failing have parents that won't be paying for
good education
As in, they would be spending their vouchers on things besides
education? Because typically when people speak of privatizing
education it means creating a marketplace of educators which
parents select and buy with publicly funded vouchers.
Catloafdev wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
This is absurdly problematic. Your solution is basically handicapping
the schools with kids that perform worse and then potentially closing
them? That doesn't solve the problem, this is just pro-Charter School
propaganda that ignores the real-world effects of these positions.
You've identified a real issue with the 'equality' vs 'equity'
concept, that doesn't lead to 'Close public schools and switch
everything to Charter schools', that's an absurd conclusion.
freediddy wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
You don't live in the Bay Area.
Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas
like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford
it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly
what the OP was saying.
Schools are incentivized to focus on struggling kids because test
scores are how teachers and schools are evaluated. The kids at the
high end of the class are literally ignored. I know this because in
my old neighborhood many parents were complaining about this. And
then on top of it, the superintendent was begging parents for
donations because they didn't have enough money.
Catloafdev wrote 57 min ago:
I'm not saying it isn't in your personal best interest to
consider switching your kids out of public schooling. The problem
is that the public schools need to be fixed, not abandoned.
There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to
Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition"
and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to
make room for more profit in the child education industry"
Fixing public education is the boring, slow, difficult,
real-world answer. Privatizing education further is just adding
fuel to the fire.
adrr wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
Everyone blames the school. Its the mentality of parents and kids
at the schools. Kids go to charter school. 90% of the kids in my
10 years class meet or exceed grade level on the state test. She
is surrounded by kids who push her up and parents that push their
kids. Teachers care because the parents and kids care. My wife
had half hour call last night with my daughters special project
teacher because they want showcase the kids work and have the kids
give speeches on it.
You don't get that dedication unless you're at private school. It
democratizes private education for the masses. Also have lots of
volunteer teachers and student teachers from local universities so
the ratio is 1 instructor to 10 students. Special project teacher
is a volunteer who is earning her masters at Harvard.
throwaway5752 wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
It's funnier because it's old, failed policy that they are
recycling without being aware of it because they are ignorant. All
old things really do become new again.
Levitz wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
Did that "old, failed policy" yield better results than the
current one?
wagwang wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
It's the current set of policy that is failing. All literacy and
math score are down across the entire country and theyve been
going down for the past 10 years.
CGMthrowaway wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
What is your issue with redirecting funding from sucky schools
towards ones that deliver results, while allowing school choice for
students at the same time? I may be naive but that sounds fairly
good
Catloafdev wrote 46 min ago:
Taking you at face value, the first step is to address the
framing here:
'redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that
deliver results'
This is not quite the reality of how this works. What you have to
recognize here is that being pro-Charter school legislation means
that you are in favor of spending less on public education, and
giving that money to private education companies who already
charge and make profit.
You are advocating for draining public education. That's the
position this takes. And you believe it's better to give it to
private education, all for-profit entities. So you have to
recognize that the position here isn't "give more money to better
schools" it's "give money to private for-profit companies and
take it directly away from public education"
'allowing school choice for students'
This is a talking point that doesn't hold any water. They claim
that by giving parents some tiny affordance, that somehow enables
them to enroll their children in expensive Charter schools.
That's not how that works. What they're doing is giving a very
tiny % of the money they are taking from public education, and
giving it to the families as direct cash. Why is this a problem?
Because the amount doesn't cover tuition. It's not enough.
Families in poverty can't afford multi-thousand-dollar tuition
just because they got a $1k check in the mail. The math doesn't
math. It only helps families that were already capable of
affording it, or on the borderline.
But the bigger problem is that it directly harms public
education. So then what happens is that public education gets
_worse_ at the expense of the people who can afford private
schooling.
So all this to say, defunding public schools is not a good
position, and they are doing everything they can to try to dress
it up and muddy the conversation.
alwa wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
One obstacle is geography, and the built environment. Schools are
of their communities. Even if you do bus people around, they come
home to the same places, norms, and situations; not all education
happens in the classroom, and âyou donât belong hereâ is a
thing. The rich schools are in the rich places. The poor schools
are in the poor places. The outcomesâoftenânot always, but
oftenâreflect that. Is a deeply-depressed neighborhood really
improved by starving its school? Or deeming it unworthy of a
having a school altogether, and emptying its children out to
places that âhave it more togetherâ?
Another is the idea that schools are motivated by money in the
same way profit-seeking ventures are. A companyâs shareholders
might respond to financial threats and incentives, but the
teachers on district-regulated wages? Whatâs the phrase,
canât squeeze blood from a turnip?
Then thereâs of course the construct validity of standardized
tests as a measure of âsuckinessââtheyâre easy to
administer at scale and to compare across years and between
schoolsâbut do they really capture every flavor of good work
thatâs done at a school? Theyâre 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 schoolâs
âsuckinessâ as a function of its⦠what, budget? Staff
bonuses? Whoever exactly is it who weâre proposing to punish by
removing funds? But just as I imagine we can think of kids who
would be fine either wayâone of the less provocative
stereotypes that comes to mind is that of a Tiger Mom kind of
communityâwe can probably think of kids who wonât 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 weâre 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 scoresâand
those are probably the students with guardians least equipped to
exercise âschool choice.â How does punishing their school
improve those kidsâ outcomes?
Often students who perform poorly need more resources, not fewer.
â¦are a few of the counterarguments, anyway.
BobaFloutist wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools
deliver results: selection bias.
It's really easy to have good outcomes when you have the ability
to curate your student population. And though charter schools are
regulated to make it harder for them to curate their student
population, the statistical evidence is pretty unequivocal: they
serve different populations than public schools, and their
"better outcomes" immediately vanish when you control for that.
So, what is the issue with redirecting funding from sucky*
schools towards ones that deliver results**?
* Schools that teach the general population
** Schools that teach a subset of the general population that
always does better
dnautics wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
> Charter schools deliver results the same way that private
schools deliver results: selection bias.
Wasn't there a failing neighborhood school in LA that got
turned into four charter schools that basically rescued the
district, without removing any students?
BobaFloutist wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
I'm not saying that charter schools can never be an
improvement, there's probably very few changes to anything
for which that can be confidently said, since sometimes
systems and organizations get so mired in dysfunction that
even a change that's, on paper, for the worse provides the
needed stimulus to improve things.
I'm saying that people make claims about the systemic
superiority of charter schools that, under examination, don't
hold up, and it doesn't make sense to direct extra funding to
schools that are already getting better results by making
their own job easier. For that matter, many (certainly not
all) of the "best" public schools are benefiting from a
similar phenomenon, which is exactly why California has its
complicated redistribution funding scheme, to avoid rewarding
schools with an easy job and punishing schools with a harder
job.
And people love to come into a system that they don't
understand, regurgitate the most naive, obvious approach that
we have specifically moved on from because these systems
aren't actually that simple, and think they solved the
problem: "What if we rewarded success?" Wow, what a genius,
nobody's ever thought of rewarding success, let's call the
NYT, let's call the Nobel committee, you've finally solved
education, thank god we have you since nobody has ever
thought of giving more funding to schools that are already
doing well by taking it away from schools with struggling
populations. Thank god we have someone here to tell us that
we should financially incentivize good metrics, maybe you can
solve American health care next, and possibly, if you can
find the time, you could address world peace after that.
delecti wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
I don't know, was there? Do you have a link?
dnautics wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
Alain Leroy Locke high school. So I don't know if there
was any academic improvement, but they was certainly a
safety improvement.
Ed (looked it up): there was academic improvement, LAUSD
claims it's not enough, LAUSD is comparing against
neighboring districts, which were not as distressed at the
outset, "18 years to improve should have been enough".
Safety is considerably improved. Alumni and district
residents seem to want to keep the school. Locke high
school is currently going through a charter renewal
challenge.
Bratmon wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
Unpopular opinion: If we have evidence that shows that keeping
all the smart kids in one group creates massively better
outcomes for that group, then that's something we should be
doing everywhere, not something we should ban.
borski wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
Itâs not actually that unpopular; there are plenty of
gifted programs, though the tide has turned to controversy
around them more in recent years.
I continue to believe that gifted kids are special needs
kids, and that they shouldnât be in the same classroom as
those who are struggling for all of their classes.
People donât like to talk about gifted kids, except to
imply that being âtoo smartâ 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 arenât challenged.
SamoyedFurFluff wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
I believe the evidence claimed is that there arenât better
outcomes for smart kids. Schools that claim they have better
outcomes just selected for kids that would always have better
outcomes. Like if I claimed my basketball team has better
outcomes because I got to make sure all my players were above
6 foot. These 6 foot players donât necessarily benefit from
being in a team with other 6 foot players, but Iâm saying
people should apply for my team because Iâm doing so much
better than the team that canât make those weeding out
decisions. Iâm intentionally conflating the success of my
capacity to select for success with my capacity to coach a
team.
Bratmon wrote 38 min ago:
But surely if having the best possible basketball team is
important for national success, then it makes sense to pour
more resources into the players with more talent
nkrisc wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Because itâs not a real choice. As household income decreases,
the odds the child goes to the nearest school (regardless of how
good it is) increases.
Are you providing after school child care options or
transportation to their school of choice? If not, then itâs
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.
hedora wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
> except now public money will be going to private entities
Right, now you've come full circle to the core of my proposal:
If the charter schools are not producing students that perform
well academically, then they do not get paid. Instead, the
investor that funded the charter school takes a bath.
This is capitalism at its finest:
- The local government provides a competitive backstop. If you
do worse than that floor, then you do not get to compete.
- If your product is not fit for purpose, then you do not get
paid. Private money subsidized the experiment, and only in
places where the existing system had already failed.
- If the charter school (or anarcho-communist parent commune,
or whichever team you want to root for) manages to reliably
produce students that go on to perform well, then they solved
an "insolvable" problem. Yay competition!
Over time, as the average district improves, so do the academic
standards and the goalposts. Schools that once did well but
are no longer competitive get phased out, so the funding model
builds continuous improvement in. Nothing stops the public
school districts from outcompeting the private entities. (In
theory, the public districts have an unfair advantage - they
don't have to turn a profit.)
habinero wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
> If the charter schools are not producing students that
perform well academically, then they do not get paid
Some people have never heard of Goodhart's law and it shows
lol. It leads to terrible ideas like this which make the same
mistake again and again.
I want you to think -- really think -- about the ambiguities
in "perform well academically". How do you measure this? Test
scores? Grades? If it's grades, then you've just given
everyone at that school an incentive to never fail anyone, no
matter what. If it's test scores, we already know that leads
to teaching to the test, which hurts academics in general. It
massively incentivizes cheating and fraud. It incentivizes
kicking out any student who has any problems whatsoever.
For every complex problem there is an solution that is clear,
simple, and wrong.
nkrisc wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
The charter schools will do fine because they will attract
wealthy students from all over who can afford to travel
farther for a better school. So these charter schools will
monopolize public funding for educating the wealthiest
students, while poorer students will attend the nearest
school regardless of quality and the schools will suffer as
students struggle due to issues outside the control of the
school (home life, familial financial struggles, etc.) The
extremes at both ends will just be magnified.
Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggle because the people
who live there are struggling.
The charter school model is attempting to solve the problem
in a vacuum, but the problem does not exist in a vacuum.
rayiner wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
> Because itâs not a real choice. As household income
decreases, the odds the child goes to the nearest school
(regardless of how good it is) increases.
The âoddsâ donât tell you whether or not itâs a âreal
choice.â Families that value education will take advantage of
those opportunities. Families that donât value education will
get what they get.
Lots of families donât value education and thereâs 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
donât care about school. Everyoneâs dad is a logger or
fisherman or something like that, and putting effort into
academics isnât 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 donât 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 arenât impressed.
That doesnât matter to her, because she is extremely
internally motivated, but most people just go with their social
flow: they wonât work hard for achievements people around
them donât value.
borski wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
Surely itâs possible that a family might value education
but not have the literal time, if they are working non stop,
to take the kids to a further school? Or to take care of them
afterward?
Youâre avoiding the point by saying âanyone who cares
can,â 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 donât value
education. This is about where others make that choice for
them.
rayiner wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Most people arenât âworking non stop.â Out of
non-disabled SNAP recipients with children, only 10% work
full time, and only 33% work more than 20 hours a week: [1]
(table a.26)
URI [1]: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/...
jnovek wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
There is so much context here that youâre missing â
have you ever been poor before?
rayiner wrote 22 min ago:
Everyone in my wifeâs family grew up poor and many
still are. My wife lived in a converted barn for part
of her childhood.
Regardless, the data is the data! Only 10% of parents
on SNAP work full time.
borski wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
Most of the people I know who work two or more jobs also
do not get SNAP. Sometimes, itâs pride, and sometimes,
itâs logistics.
My sister is on SNAP; it took hours, literally, for me to
sign her up, and Iâm quite âtechnically savvyâ lol
And every year the renewal takes at least two hours in
NYC.
j_w wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
Because the "sucky" schools are statistically where poor people
go to school, which statistically is where minorities go to
school.
School choice is bad because the only people who benefit from
school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to transport
their child to the school of their choice.
lo_zamoyski wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
I am all for helping the worse off. However, one of the most
repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because
some people have less.
This is slave morality and the logic of ressentiment and envy.
It is also profoundly immoral.
Never mind that this approach condemns everyone to a state of
perpetual mediocrity, and the poor will always be with us. Mind
you, how much you value education is to a large degree a
product of the family environment and how supportive it is.
How about we allow excellence to flourish as it does, support
it any way we can, and also look for ways to lift those who are
worse off out of their condition? The focus should be on making
things better, not bizarre idealistic notions like "equality"
or "equity", whatever they even mean in real, concrete terms.
If we dispense with envy, we focus on objective improvement
instead of status-obsessed insecurities.
Of course, I think the most pressing problem in education today
is that most "educators" have no damn clue what it even means
to be educated anymore. They think they know, but they
absolutely do not. It isn't "getting a job", as important as
jobs are, or some odd aim of the ideology du jour. Public
education in an ideologically-charged society of our stripe is
practically condemned to superficiality and poor quality,
because all good education begins with an accurate
anthropology. We can't even agree on that, so naturally, this
produces a lowest common denominator effect. In such a
situation especially, permitting a diversity of educational
styles and programs is necessary.
And btw, if someone is wealthy enough, they'll move to another
school district and make school choice a reality anyway within
your regime. People do it all the time. Or would you like a
return to latifundia to enforce your vision?
j_w wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
> However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can
cripple everyone else, because some people have less.
When did I say that I'm in any way pro crippling other
students? I'm simply pointing out the socioeconomic reality
of school performance.
Comments like yours are vile. Brimming with vitriol.
habinero wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
> I am all for helping the worse off. However, one of the
most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else,
because some people have less.
Bruh. It's easy to prattle on about "objective improvement"
and "slave morality" and pretend everything's a zero sum game
where funding is fixed and we can do nothing to change the
system. Neither is true. This is just an excuse to absolve
yourself of doing any of the hard work to improve things.
> The focus should be on making things better, not bizarre
idealistic notions like "equality" or "equity"
Man, does anyone else hear that high pitched sound? Just me?
Huh.
dirtikiti wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
>> School choice is bad because the only people who benefit
from school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to
transport their child to the school of their choice.
So what?
If "level the playing field" means my kid gets a sub standard
education because you have to constantly lower the bar, I don't
want to play your game.
This stuff isn't new. Everyone understands the importance of
education, and everyone understands the importance of being
involved in your child's education.
It isn't about poor and minority. It's about being a good
parent.
Some people don't have that ability, and my kid shouldn't be
punished for it, regardless of the money in my wallet.
There are plenty of examples of single parent and low income
households where they value education and push their kids to
doing better.
At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and
not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.
j_w wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
Okay but if you care this much about school choice why not
move to an area with better schools? That's a tool most
people already have.
And yes, most people who are complaining about "school
choice" have this tool to some extent. Will your living
conditions be exactly the same? Probably not.
> At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility
and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good
parent.
So why don't you take some personal responsibility and put
yourself in a residence which is in district for a school
that you want your child to go to? Is that not in part your
responsibility as a parent? We can both play this stupid
game.
a34ta3t wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
I love to see the true colors of this vile place when topics
like this come up.
wagwang wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
The people who benefit are not the wealthy, who can afford to
simply buy a house in the school district of their desire, but
simply middle class parents who care about their kids.
j_w wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
Middle class parents are wealthy compared to the average
student of a "sucky" school. These schools are typically the
in the poorest areas in the state/county.
habinero wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
Poor people care about their kids, too. They're just
struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on their
plates instead of worrying about what college their kids are
going to get into.
nradov wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
False. Charter schools are public schools and often served by
school bus routes or other public transit. Walking or cycling
can also be options for some students.
The real differentiating factor isn't wealth but simply giving
a shit about your children. Parents have to take some minimal
effort to enroll their children in a charter school and many
simply don't bother.
mrgoldenbrown wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
IME the differentiator is the fact that in most states
charters have some way of filtering out the least profitable
kids is a huge advantage for them, and concentrates the most
expensive kids in the public schools.
organsnyder wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
It's not just giving a shit: it's also the capacity to act on
giving a shit. I'm exhausted at the end of the day after
getting the kids to bed, and I'm fortunate to be in a stable
marriage, live in a large home that my wife and I own, and
work a well-paying WFH job. I can only imagine how tiring it
must be to not have those advantages.
There are the parents doing heroics that I can hardly
imagine, and they should be celebrated. But we need to design
a system that provides a sufficient level of support for
those families that only have an average level of capacity.
rayiner wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
> I can only imagine how tiring it must be to not have
those advantages
Yes, you can only âimagineâ what itâs like for people
who are less comfortable than you. But that cuts both ways.
It could be that youâre also âimaginingâ the barriers
you think exist to people accessing charter schools. In
particular, I suspect youâre incorrectly assuming that
people work as much as you do, just for less money.
organsnyder wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
Actually, I can more than imagine it. I have friends that
are in those situations, and help out when I can.
GoblinSlayer wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
How difficult is it?
1. give a shit
2. enroll
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
borski wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Have you ever lived below the poverty line? In order to
enroll, youâd have to know about it and manage
logistics.
Working 14 hours a day so you can clothe and feed your
kid doesnât leave much time for that.
That doesnât mean you donât give a shit.
kubb wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
Why do you even need higher education if you can brain drain educated
people from India?
alex_suzuki wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
Why so complicated? I thought the idea was to rent intelligence
from OpenAI.
999900000999 wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
>Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in
the next phase of their education
The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.
This has already happened in some places.
The bigger macro economic issues would probably be the collapse of
the middle class, rampant housing and food insecurity.
Hirerarcy of needs and all that.
Anyway with The Republicans going out of their way to restrict
student visas it's unclear where our next generation of high achivers
is going to come from.
We sure aren't raising them here.
hedora wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
> The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.
Fraud is illegal. If the law isn't going to be enforced, then
trying to fix the law is useless.
I agree about food insecurity. Nationally, it's worse now than it
was during COVID. California actually made some good progress on
that a few years ago: [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://www.cafoodbanks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SB1...
999900000999 wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
Youâre putting a lot of otherwise good people, teachers of low
income students, into a very bad situation.
Many would just quit, and among those who stayed what are the
options ?
Get fired when the school is shutdown for under performing.
Fill in tests for students.
If we use programming as an example, the best tech manager on
earth canât get a bunch of random people to write production
ready code in a month ( maybe JS, but not Rust).
Public schools canât pick and choose students. Charters sorta
can.
If I ran the school system Iâd 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.
throwaway5752 wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
The people working on this aren't idiots.
There are people who see massive business opportunities for enriching
themselves in privatizing the education system. Some of there points
are reasonable, and sometimes they are frauds. Either way, they lobby
hard and have a lot of generally Republican politicians in their
pockets.
Also, teacher pay is terrible in comparison to the job stress and -
reasonably and expected - educational requirements.
The education system is trying to deal with a probably that is out of
their control, the increasing wealth stratification in the US, while
fending off adversaries that with both good and bad intentioned
reasons are trying to undermine the institutions of public education.
At the same time, we have a totally new societal threat in social
media. If you haven't read "Careless People", read it. You seem
societies around the world locking social media away from kids on the
advice of professional groups of educators, pediatricians, and
psychologists. There are hordes of irresponsible and negligent
parents whose kids are barely functional, and working their way
through the educational pipeline.
There is no easy fix here that anyone is missing. In a democracy,
this is an existential national crisis, as we are all seeing in real
time.
edit: don't ask me who is working on this. It just tells me you are
unserious and just complaining. Try google. Hundreds of thousands of
people are working on this. Please elaborate on your disagreement
with teachers groups (NEA, AFT), the prior administration (American
Rescue Plan), or the current administration (ECCA). Or disagreements
with AmeriCorps or NPSS as private volunteer service groups groups.
Or disagreements with private education advocates (CAPE, NAIS). You
may not like all the administrators and principals and teachers as
individuals working on it in the system, or PTA organizations outside
the system. I could go on all day. But these people are all seriously
concerned about the problem, even though they may disagree in areas -
you are not special in awareness of this issue.
trunnell wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
> The people working on this aren't idiots.
Which people are you referring to?
hedora wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Who's working on this? I think there are some pretty obvious easy
fixes, at least for California:
Find a library that still has a copy of the educational plan
California used back in the 1970's, and do that.
At the time, we had the best schools in the country. The state is
much richer and has much higher income/sales tax rates now than it
did back then. I think that should more than make up for the Prop
13 funding disaster, though it might mean moving some cash around
in the state budget.
kyboren wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
> copy [the] educational plan California used back in the 1970's
I think that would go a long way.
> more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster
Wrong funding disaster. The real funding disaster is Prop 98,
which mandates a certain amount of K-12 spending according to
"the level of funding in 1986-87, General Fund revenues, per
capita personal income, and school attendance". [0]
Specifically, "[...] [T]he Guarantee is in a Test 1 for all years
2024-25 through 2026-27. This means that the funding level of the
Guarantee in these years is equal to roughly 40 percent of
General Fund revenues, plus local property tax revenues. Pursuant
to the Proposition 98 formula, this percentage of General Fund
revenues is not reduced to reflect enrollment adjustments, which
further increases per pupil funding." [0]
Additionally, both property tax revenues (affected by Prop 13)
and general fund revenues are used to fund the LCFF[1], which is
big on "equity" and gives schools with high ESL and generally
disadvantaged students significantly more funds. It also
guarantees funding growth with COLA and population growth
adjustments.
Finally, on top of all that mandatory funding, we're spending
discretionary funds to more than double outlays on special
education vs. FY18-19[0]--which is claimed to be an investment in
student outcomes. And discretionary funds for professional
development. And discretionary funds to pay staff 14 weeks
pregnancy leave. And discretionary funds to give LCFF a nearly
doubled "super COLA".
The state doesn't have a funding problem, it has a spending
problem. And the result of this unchecked spending growth is that
mandatory Prop 98 spending alone is now a record $127.1B vs $59B
in 2013-14 and $78.5B in 2018-19[2]--despite a ~7% enrollment
decline over that period[3]. Meanwhile outcomes have plummeted.
The education administration mafia has the state over a barrel.
Yet somehow most Californians believe that education is
underfunded, usually with a dash of "something something Prop
13". But actually the problem is closer to a resource curse. With
ever-growing guaranteed slices of the budget and discretionary
sweeteners up the wazoo, who needs to actually teach kids?
[0]: [1]: [2]: [3]:
URI [1]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary...
URI [2]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/lcffoverview.asp
URI [3]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu...
URI [4]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-studen...
julianeon wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than
terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of
the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject
students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a
learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to
handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.
The system gets gamified and the "top" schools are just ones that
reject, socioeconomically, every student who can't pay for tutoring
or full-time care, which is a very technical form of "excellence".
xdennis wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to
eject students who are struggling.
You're saying that like it's a bad thing.
I'm continuously surprised by how America, a supposed capitalist
country is more communist than some communist countries.
I grew up in Romania, after the revolution, but we still had
basically the same education system. Even in communist Romania, if
you wanted to get into a good high-school, you had to pass exams,
and if you didn't perform well in school, you got left behind.
Everyone understood that if you wanted kids to succeed, you
couldn't let the slow kids pull down the smart kids.
bee_rider wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
Iâm not going to defend the broader plan (I donât believe in
it, or at least, I havenât thought about it enough to be
convinced either way). But for the ejection issue, one possibility
would be to just count all ejected students as a âfailâ for the
school, right?
Then, the incentive would shift to prevent the students they
donât 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.
wisty wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
You're too optimistic on the skills of teachers and school admin.
Let's ignore good teachers and principals, they aren't an issue.
Bad teachers and admin will do what bad students do when facing a
high stakes test - forget that learning is important and just do a
crap job gaming the test, and often do worse than if they would
focus on just doing the content properly.
A bunch of people here probably don't see the issue - they think
that they would do a good job learning or teaching a student when
focusing on a specific test. But it's not the good teachers and
good students who are the issue. A bad teacher might give students
the same past paper every week for a year, and their bad students
just memorise the right answers for the multiple choice. This is
just an example, there are lots of bad strategies and the bad
teachers will find them all (while the good teachers ignore all the
noise).
It's the bad teachers and students that the system needs to fix,
and too heavy an exam focus will screw it up (as will zero exam
focus).
"Well just fire the bad teachers lol" um ... ok ... that's a bold
strategy, but you can't axe that many and not massively increase
their salaries to find replacements. You want super star
individual performers, you gotta pay to attract them. You want a
cheap consistent workforce where the bad eggs do less damage, focus
on a good process that the weaker ones can follow, not rewards for
individual success.
ajsnigrutin wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
In what was in my time yugoslavia and isn't anymore, we had a
similar system and it worked great.
From the austria-hungary time, the primary school (8 years, ~6/7 to
14/15yo, now 9 years, where preschool became year 1) was mandatory,
and after that it was your decision what to do next.
You could then go to a "general high school" (gymnasium) for the
next 4 years, and some of them were better than others (mostly
because of students, but teachers too), and you had to collect
enough points from grades and standardized testing in primary
school to be accepted there. All the illiterate idiots didn't have
enough points to get accepted, so you'd be in a nice class with
comparable peers and teachers could teach new stuff instead of
repeat the stuff the students should already know. The classes were
"general" (math, languages, history, geography, etc.) and the idea
was to prepare you for college.
The less-smart students went either to "not that good" gymnasiums
or to other highschools, like the one for electricians or
construction workers, farmers, etc., where they would get the
legally required education to later eg. become an electrician or
something after 3 years or 4, without the need for college or extra
schooling and with the reduced amount of "general" subjects (only 1
or two years of history instead of 4, etc.).
The system somehow worked and still does.
zozbot234 wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to
eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has
a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to
handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.
Most struggling students are not special ed. It's a serious
mistake to conflate the two. In some ways special ed students are
taken better care of than the typical remedial student, since
training for special ed happens to focus on effective instructional
methods (such as direct instruction) that are actively deplored by
most progressive educators as "demeaning" towards their profession.
rayiner wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
> the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically
Top schools arenât that way merely because of socioeconomics.
Levitz wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
Well, depends. "Socioeconomics" has been utterly abused as a
concept for political gain.
Are top schools that way for social and economic reasons? I mean
what else is there to blame? Are they that way because of being
different in the department of what progressives actually mean by
"socioeconomic factors"? No, not really.
ryandamm wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
This already happens â my district when I was in school, and my
son's district now, both have / had "alternative" high schools that
kids get transferred to when they're struggling. Kids who are
dropping out inevitably get transferred as part of the process; the
high school they were originally attending has stellar graduation
rates. The alternative high school has miserable graduation rates,
but no one really cares.
Bratmon wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
I think the answer to this is that schooling/care for people with
disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal
school should be a totally different budget with different success
criteria than the budget for normal school.
There are two different and contradictory goals here- the current
dynamic where every gain for one is a loss for the other creates a
ton of bad outcomes across the board.
smileson2 wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
In my experience ( to be fair which was a while ago ) things
like that just end up making things worse trapping people and
leading to a lot of lashing out
Honestly education really feels overthought and micromanaged
already the whole setup is unhealthy
mswphd wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
"people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to
succeed in normal school" is not a clearly divisible population
from the regular student population though. Many (but not all)
districts deal with disabilities via IEPs, or Individual
Education Plans. They are tailored to particular students, and
can be fairly common. They make things less of a clear binary
than 2 separate school systems would really need.
It's worse because there's been a trend among elite districts to
push students to (fraudulently) get a diagnosed disability, so
that they can get accommodations on tests and raise their chances
to be admitted to an elite university. So, a proposal to
partition the school system into a lesser system for students
with disabilities would face pushback by the aforementioned elite
district parents. While they are participating in a fraud (and so
it would perhaps be morally fine for them to face repercussions
for it), I imagine it would make implementing any such plan very
difficult.
ajsnigrutin wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
Yep, the abuse is happening over here in slovenia too, you get
some diagnosis for the kid, you get 50% more test-taking time,
extra help in school, extra accomodations for other stuff, and
in the end, your grade is worth the same (for grade averages
and high school or college acceptance) as someone elses who
finished in regular amount of time. No remarks anywhere saying
"while student A and B have the same point average, student B
had 50% more time on the test".
So yeah, I kinda understand why parents get the diagnoses for
their kids, but the system is unfair.
HelloNurse wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
You are assuming that there should be distinct "schooling/care
for people with disabilities" and "normal school", rather than
integration, and further assuming that public schools should be
competing with each other to defend and increase their budget,
rather than cooperating.
What sad place do you come from?
tash9 wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
As a parent of a kid that has special needs (at a minor level),
there really is a separate set of skills needed to teach to
these kids, as well as needing a better student teacher ratio.
It made a huge difference for my kid.
bmn__ wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
> What sad place do you come from?
Do you have an actual argument? Shaming tactics are ineffective
on HN.
Reality check: in most countries, if you made a public demand
of effectively depriving the disabled of the proper care they
want and deserve, they would regard you as an inhumane monster,
and the education ministry would refer you to state prosecution
for violating the constitution.
throwaway27448 wrote 40 min ago:
> Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.
Regrettably. A place where money rules and brains die
Bratmon wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
> What sad place do you come from?
The American public education system
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
Do you want to get rid of "advanced" course options and push
every student into the same bucket?
throwaway27448 wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
I'd be fine with that. It would provide an incentive to care
about the bottom 75th percentile along with the spoiled rich
kids
ofjcihen wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
Just FYI I was dirt poor and from a crap neighborhood and
qualified for and benefited from these AP classes. Not all
kids who succeed only succeed because of their background.
throwaway27448 wrote 43 min ago:
I am from the same situation. I speak from experience:
social mobility in public school is the exception. I
would have done just fine without AP classes at all, as I
am sure you would have. It's the kids who need help that
benefit from school.
AP classes exist to pad the resumes of rich kids and
justify their being propelled into academic situations
that should rightfully belong to others. Prove me wrong
tracker1 wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Similar.. not dirt poor, but bottom 1/3.
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly
the same level. Do you think you'd have the internet or
iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.
Beyond this, the entire point of higher education is to
push those who are able to higher levels, not to drag the
75% along for the ride.
throwaway27448 wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
> The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to
nearly the same level.
Who do you think produces all the value in the world?
It's not the people organizing the labor, it's the
goddamn laborers.
> Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if
everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.
What do you think we would be eating if we left the world
up to the rich nerds? We would have starved many
millennia ago.
tracker1 wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
I said specifically "advance humanity" ... simple labor
doesn't advance humanity. It's absolutely necessary,
but it also doesn't require a college education.
Advancing humanity is coming up with cures for disease,
or inventing useful things. We manage to feed the
world with a fraction of the labor it once took to do
so. It wasn't the common laborer that came up with
solutions that effectively eliminated food scarcity.
throwaway27448 wrote 59 min ago:
I'm not a big fan of the myth of progress, so your
pleas are falling on deaf ears. I see no reason to
prioritize the education of the rich in our public
schools
ajsnigrutin wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
That's horrible. Smarter kids could get a better education,
but they can't, because the teachers have to deal with
illiterate kids that don't want to learn in the first
place.
throwaway27448 wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Maybe if we tried to educate all our kids instead of just
the rich ones they wouldn't be illiterate
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
We do... The VAST majority of kids go through public
education... It's mostly a matter of effort, and that
comes down to mostly parent pressure on having their
kids do the work.
Maybe if we actually held kids that can't do the work
back, they wouldn't be illiterate. Let social pressure
do the work it's meant to. For that matter, let
parents do the work they're supposed to.
ajsnigrutin wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
Some kids are just stupid, and it doesn't matter if
they're rich or poor, there's nothing you can do about
it. No need to keep everyone at the stupidest kids
level.
throwaway27448 wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
Half of them are in AP classes. let's not pretend our
methods of sorting kids into castes makes any sense.
Let's be honest: this is about money and attention,
and you want to grind the poor kids into dust
ajsnigrutin wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
It's not about money, you're the one who just
thinks about money. Maybe, by your logic, if
someone gave you $100 now, you'd become smarter and
look wider... but probably not.
Sorting into better highschools and worse ones, and
better classes and worse was done even back in my
times, in what used to be yugoslavia, with
communism, red stars and a dictator. You want
better kids to excell as much as they can, and you
want the stupid kids to at least learn to read and
write for their boring communist factory jobs for
the next 40 years, even if they never get to learn
how to solve differential eqations... if you keep
the kids together, the stupid ones still won't be
able to do basic math and there would be no time
left over for the smarter ones to learn more. There
was no correlation between money and stupidity of
kids.
Some kids are smart enough to become engineers,
some can barely read, there's no need for them to
be in the same classroom.
throwaway27448 wrote 57 min ago:
I just see an excuse to leave poor children
behind. Ideally this would look like communism,
but until then, we're stuck fighting you losers
SpicyLemonZest wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
I just don't see how it's possible to construct a classroom
environment that can simultaneously serve an 8th grader who's
ready to start learning algebra and an 8th grader with
dyscalculia who struggles with basic arithmetic. (I'd be
sympathetic to "let's try our best", except that people often
propose to try our best by declaring that first kid isn't
actually ready.)
actionfromafar wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
But maybe they don't need to attend completely different
schools, either.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
I agree, but I don't think that's what's being proposed.
Many special ed programs today work on that principle: try
to mainstream everyone in the classes they can be, run
separate classes for the cases where that won't work, and
everyone kinda understands that the participants in special
ed aren't expected to be as successful in their educational
pursuits.
hedora wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
Public school districts cannot expel students in California.
toshinoriyagi wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
No, but they can transfer them, which is what the comment you
replied to was worried about. My partner used to be an elementary
school teacher and frequently complained about the school she
worked at. The district transferred a large percentage of
students with IEPs (individualized education program, a plan for
special care/resources for students with disabilities, often
related to poor behavior) from other schools in the district to
hers.
Her school did not have adequate resources to handle these
students, so they always had multiple students with severe
behavioral issues that should have been in a dedicated classroom
with a special education trained teacher, but were just in
regular teachers' classes. Naturally, the teachers were burnt out
from working with too many challenging kids they were not trained
to take care of and the other students had worse learning
outcomes.
daedrdev wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
The current situation, where students succeed regardless if they
completely failed to learn and do zero work is also pretty bad
confidantlake wrote 3 hours 52 min ago:
The most important factor isn't the schools, it is the kids
themselves.
hedora wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
California used to have the best schools in the country, and
roughly a third of our urban population is Silicon Valley. It's
home to the largest economy in the US by a large margin, and is one
of the richest states.
Yet, somehow, for math: [1] 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).
URI [1]: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sf...
DFHippie wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
I think you also named Alabama's problems. It's one of the
poorest states and seems bound and determined to stay that way.
rsanek wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
Note that with that link you're looking at data that is over a
decade old. Alabama is actually doing better than California in
the most recent grade 4 math profile.
URI [1]: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?...
jerlam wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
California had below average (for US states) school funding per
student until recently: [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://edsource.org/2026/california-education-funding-r...
hedora wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
True, but I was responding to a comment blaming the children
for their under-performance. The funding gap isn't somehow due
to those kids not wanting to learn, problems at home, etc.
jerlam wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
I am agreeing with you - the funding gap is one of the causes
for under-performance.
alephnerd wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Because most of California isn't Silicon Valley.
The good parts of the Bay Area (which also align to where the
majority of the tech industry is) have public schools that
haven't changed their curricula despite common core.
On the other hand, the rest of California has had significant
financial and budget crises and never recovered from the 2008-13
California budget crisis.
jsLavaGoat wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
>public schools that haven't changed their curricula despite
common core.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Anyway, most of
this has to do with the math framework, not the standards.
alephnerd wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
My mom's a teacher at one of these schools, we still have
friends sending their kids to them, and I'm still in contact
with my HS teachers at that school.
In wealthier areas of the Bay like Saratoga, Cupertino,
Campbell, Fremont, Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamorindia, etc the
school districts are only paying lip service to common core
and still teaching as they were during my time.
Most students take multiple AP classes (and the HSes usually
offer 15-20 APs) as well as attend the local CC, UC Berkeley,
or Stanford to take additional classes.
The schools that are militantly common core and trying to
remove classes are also (frankly) in crap school districts
like SFUSD or OUSD where school board elections are dominated
by local activists who oftentimes don't even have kids but
are using the board as a stepping stone into local politics,
and due to their reputations and low pay are unable to hire
teachers for more advanced classes anyhow.
There's a reason the kind of house that would go for $1.5M in
Sunset would go for $2.5M in the Peninsula or Tri-Valley.
jsLavaGoat wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
I am a teacher and I write education software for math as a
side gig, which I must have because I'm a teacher.
It's rare for any teacher to just discard the standards.
And anyone who says "common core" is talking about
something from 20 years ago. The new math
framework--already years old--has sparked the latest wave
of UC revolts and NO standardized testing is part of it.
"Common core" is the exact opposite. When people say that
they are referring to the standards and the tests that go
with them. Standards are just standards you can teach them
or not, but the framework, something entirely different,
give schools guidance on what courses to offer and how to
approach it.
The latest framework poo-pooed Calculus and Algebra for
advanced middle schoolers in the name of "equity." And
dissing admissions tests is part of this movement, that
gave us the "Data Science" class that UCs rejected. That
was supposed to replace Algebra 2 and therefore make
students UC-ready. As someone who taught that class, I can
tell you it was a joke. And it had zero, nothing to do with
common core. Finding a way to link it to those existing
standards was difficult at best.
And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP.
Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for
decades out in the open. Sorry.
alephnerd wrote 31 min ago:
> And I promise your mom's school at least gives the
CAASPP...
Yes, but their CASSPP participation rates have fallen
from 95-100% to 70s range as some people started
explaining to parents how to use section 60615 to
withdraw from CASSPP as it clashed with AP and SAT prep
schedules - this is a public school where AP
participation is in the 70-90% range.
> Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for
decades out in the open...
Note how in my earlier response I said wealthier school
districts.
This is how it is in the Tri-Valley and richer Peninsula
and South Bay school districts. There is some basic
malicious compliance with CA standards, but all the
households use "Advancement Via Outside Institutions" in
8th grade and get back onto the "AP Calc by 11th/12th
grade" track, and most students end up almost entirely
taking AP classes by 10th grade so they aren't really
impacted by CA standards changes.
watwut wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
Silicon Valley is also the place of serious homeless problem.
"The economy" as an abstractions is not what matters - the
economy here is some people being super rich while others
increasingly outside of good options.
hedora wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
That's due to unrelated intentional mismanagement by state and
local governments.
Just build enough market rate housing to house the local
population, and the issue will solve itself.
"Affordable housing" is a trap for buyers, builders, and policy
makers:
- If you buy an affordable housing unit, then when you sell it,
you have to charge based on a formula that will be way below
the normal appreciation in your area. Basically, the money you
put into the house was a sunk investment that's guaranteed to
under-perform anything else you could have put it into. You're
much better off getting a fixer-upper condo, or just renting +
putting the money in an ETF.)
- If you build an affordable housing unit, then the rest of
your development project becomes less profitable. Once the
project is approved, you're foolishly tying up capital that
could have been used to fund additional developments in other
states. Also, the affordable housing approval process is slow
and politically fraught. While that happens, you're holding a
piece of land (and paying interest on it) that might turn out
to be worthless, depending on the outcome of local politics.
(If you don't believe me, next time you're driving around
Silicon Valley, count "proposed development" signs, and
categorize them by "badly weathered" or "brand new". "Badly
weathered" means someone has been paying a mortgage on the
(probably $10's-100's M) field behind the sign for at least a
year. They're not paying home mortgage rates for that. It's
probably 7-10% interest. That $700K-10M that could have been
used to actually build houses.
- If your local government is subsidizing affordable housing,
then they're misallocating resources. They could have used
that money to expedite permit applications, improve public
transit, add bike trails, build parks, increase freeway access
or invest in other public goods that make the area more
attractive to residents. Those things have a much higher
payoff per dollar. Also, the local government has a monopoly
on them. By opting to not do them, they are causing economic
damage that cannot be routed around by the private sector. Of
course, there's also the question of deciding who gets the
public funds, and all the corruption and backroom dealing
inherent in that process.
mc32 wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
The results were predictable and predicted but politicians, state and
local went whole hog on equity. That along with NCLB results on this
catastrophe. Weâre finally seeing some needed pushback. You
canât just hand out As to everyone and pass everyone as itâs a
kindergarten assignment and then expect excellence. Youâre teaching
people who will become adults and youâre shortchanging them on
skills if you donât require proficiency. Itâs also unfair to apt
students who put in the time to learn and do well.
I canât 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.
Weâre also seeing higher ed address grade inflation by capping As
at some institutions of renown.
pseudalopex wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
They defined equity as Fair outcomes, treatment, and opportunities
for all students.[1]
URI [1]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/qs/ea/
zahlman wrote 36 min ago:
They can profess all they like to care about opportunities; the
actual policies make it abundantly clear that their metric is
purely outcome-based instead.
Aurornis wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
Innocuous at first glance, but you can see how it could be
manipulated into justification for banning advanced math classes
and other bad ideas.
programjames wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
People have more wildly different definitions for "fair" than
"equity".
avidiax wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
What is a "fair" outcome?
Is it easier to hold back talented students with a low bar or push
untalented ones to a higher bar?
z3c0 wrote 3 hours 19 min ago:
The conundrum of "equality of outcome" vs "equality of
opportunity" hinges on that core question. It's weird, and
possible contradictory, to see a policy claiming to attempt both.
Most would define a "fair" opportunity as everyone getting the
same chances to succeed, but a "fair" outcome would segment on
merit. If angling towards fair outcomes, there's usually less
uproar over lifting the floor (e.g financial aid), versus
lowering the ceiling (e.g. limitations on admissions based on
ethnic or financial background).
hedora wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
A much better policy would be to raise the floor and not pay
attention to equality of outcome.
If the worst school in 2036 California is better than the
average school in 2026, then that's an obvious win.
(That goal is completely achievable -- only about a third of
California students are grade-level proficient right now.)
jeffbee wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
I doubt that you can point to a high school which banned calculus. My
guess is that you are referring to a political fight in San Francisco
where a very specific racial/ethnic cohort of parents believes that
one of the high schools is a Berkeley/Stanford acceptance funnel
reserved for them, and they got mad when the government decided to
spread the wealth.
From my perspective, there has never been any dumber debate than
whether 9th grade math is called "Math" or "Algebra". My kids went to
high school in Berkeley where Math is just called Math in grades 9-11
and after that you can take AP Calculus or AP Statistics if you want.
And this is not Woke 1.0 stuff because the courses have been named
that way forever.
scarmig wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
The revisionism here is astounding. Yes, San Francisco eliminated
algebra for all 8th graders in public schools. It was not a simple
rename. Parents sent their kids to supplementary private classes
that taught the same curriculum as the old algebra class did, and
it was not a redundant recap of the new not-algebra class.
I understand the motivation to deny that San Francisco banned
middle school algebra: it's embarrassing, and it was disastrous for
student outcomes. But it was a very real thing.
(The Lowell debate was a separate thing: should an academic-focused
magnet school be able to use a standardized test to determine
proficiency? Or should it be a lottery?)
hedora wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
They planned to do it state wide. The ban was blocked. It did not
happen.
However, you can read the proposal if you want to see what sort of
reasoning leads to "UC is admitting students to STEM majors, then
finding out the students are not prepared for pre-algebra".
MeetingsBrowser wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
> I think all funding in California education (other than terminal
levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the
percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
This seems problematic.
Students' success isn't entirely up to the school. Some areas
genuinely need more resources than others.
This system punishes areas that need more resources with by removing
resources, likely causing a downward spiral.
A generation of kids is left with poor education before the schools
eventually close, and then who wants to start a school in an area
that has historically struggled when funding depends on them
succeeding?
Based on happenings in other states, when public schools close the
schools that take their place are from well funded groups who care
more about spreading ideologies than running successful or profitable
schools.
hedora wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
The function isn't "winner takes all". It's a claw back after
objective failure.
California already spends tons of extra money on stuff like special
ed, and struggling districts. I wouldn't touch that.
So, if there's a high school in a struggling area and it's
graduating kids that can't do 7th grade math, then that opens up
funding for charters in that area at 150% state average per
student, or whatever the current formula us.
ryandrake wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
Measuring (and funding) schools based on student outcome is fraught
because a student's performance / preparedness for the "next level"
is not entirely a function of the school. There are other significant
parameters, including parental upbringing, home life stability,
neighborhood safety, friends, hunger/nutrition, various trauma and
abuse, the list goes on. I'm sure it's been studied, but I'd bet
"school quality" is not even close to number 1 on the list of
predictors of educational outcome.
amluto wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
Itâs also fraught because schools will spend increasingly large
fractions of the time preparing kids for tests instead of teaching
them anything.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
Doesn't this whole story suggest that the aversion to "preparing
kids for tests" was wrong? The UC system changed its admissions
policies to help kids who weren't prepared for tests, and now
they have a bunch of students who don't seem to have been taught
anything despite their high grades.
pelagicAustral wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Wasn't this the plot of the Wire season 3 or something?
Novosell wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
It is one part of the plot that focuses on inner city schooling
in season 4 :)
jazzkingrt wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
I have many concerns with this kind of funding model, but I don't
think the measurement problem is so serious. Performance incentives
in education typically reward improvement of the student cohort
relative to how it was performing the previous year, or even use
value-added models that use multiple past years to predict the
student trajectory.
M3L0NM4N wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
The number 1 predictor of educational outcome is IQ by a long shot,
which is hardly affected by any of the factors you listed. Yes,
high IQ kids usually have high IQ parents who are likely to prevent
those things, partly because they are likely high income, but none
of those are as important as how smart the child is.
a34ta3t wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
I scored ~145 on a recent WAIS assessment (with low to average
processing scores) and I could train most children to do the same
if they started early enough.
That's basically what my upper middle class parents did for me,
as the tests were very similar to games I was given since a young
age. Of course there are other more important developmental
factors like health, stability, and nutrition but those are
easier with money too.
Most of HN seem to support a form of modern eugenics.
M3L0NM4N wrote 49 min ago:
This is laughable. Most children (sampled randomly from the
United States) could absolutely not score 145 on a WAIS
assessment. Your perception of the average children's
intelligence is likely skewed by being surrounded by above
average intelligence children (maybe in school). It's not
eugenics to acknowledge the strong genetic factor of human
intelligence.
BobaFloutist wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
It's actually zip code.
M3L0NM4N wrote 48 min ago:
There's no IQ correlation with zip code? Think again
tptacek wrote 2 min ago:
Almost everything is correlated with zip code, most
especially SES, so this comment doesn't really say anything.
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
Most people are pretty average and plenty of average people make
it through a typical Bachelors program just fine.
While there may be some concepts that some will struggle with or
unable to handle, the VAST majority of school comes down to the
effort an individual puts in. You won't pass with zero effort.
Some may be able to skate by with less effort because they can
reason better, but in the end it will always come down to effort
put in.
If you are not high IQ, that means you need to put more effort if
you want to get "straight A's"... it is emphatically not an
excuse to give up, not try or lower standards. I say this as
someone somewhat high IQ who was a bit lazy and easily distracted
in school. There were lots of kids that weren't as smart that
got high grades and did well.. because they put in the work. I'm
also a bit older than a lot of people here (early 50's).
M3L0NM4N wrote 44 min ago:
Okay, I do agree with this. IQ probably correlates with effort
a little, but my anecdotal experience is that the most
successful people in my school were primarily smart as opposed
to being hard workers. Of course, there is a lot of overlap and
exceptions.
thewebguyd wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
The heritability of IQ actually changes based on wealth, so its
the other way around. A child from a wealthy family will reach
their potential, where one from a poorer family will not. ( [1] )
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.
URI [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14629696/
M3L0NM4N wrote 55 min ago:
This is far from proven fact. There are studies that show this
effect, and there are studies that disagree. I can certainly
see the argument for it being true in extremely Low-SES
evnironments, but I don't believe this is true for the vast
majority of Americans, and certainly isn't why California
schools have such poor outcomes.
borski wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
> A child from a wealthy family will reach their potential,
where one from a poorer family will not.
may not. Iâm not just being pedantic; itâs very important
to recognize that being impoverished is not the same as being
incapable.
But it does mean youâre living life on hard mode.
scarmig wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
That mistakes the point of education. Schools do not exist to
fix every social problem, and demanding they treat fixing every
social problem as their number one priority is how we got into
this mess of "teach nothing but make sure everyone passes" in
the first place.
thewebguyd wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
I said "society" not "schools." No, schools do not exist to
fix every social problem.
But my point was that wealth = a child more likely to reach
their potential. That's a real gap, and a real social problem
that needs addressed, by the powers (government) capable of
addressing it.
However, schools do have a duty to provide a safe and
conducive environment for education. Many don't offer that.
Many have meals that are inadequate, many have a bullying
problem that schools refuse to address, many care more about
their sports stars than they do providing equal opportunity
for education, etc.
59percentmore wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
>Schools do not exist to fix every social problem
By law, they monopolize up to half of a child's waking life
for more than half of the year. This time commitment requires
that parents put at least one meal, a substantial portion of
the child's physical development, and almost all of their
intellectual development (and, by extension, a substantial
portion of their behavioral development) in the hands of the
school.
If educational institutions are not taking seriously their
potential influence on the social outcomes of their students,
they're completely misunderstanding the practical mantle
they've taken on. And so have you.
scarmig wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
That's one philosophy, sure. My philosophy is that schools
that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate
have failed, no matter what rhetoric they put out about
equity and social problems.
(There are limited situations where it does make sense,
logistically, for schools to provision social services.
E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady
food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as
opposed to curricular and classroom management practices
that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for
a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver
that.)
thewebguyd wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
> schools that graduate students who are illiterate and
innumerate have failed
I don't disagree.
But at the same time, it's also important to ask: was
that child offered to learn and apply themselves in the
same, stable environment as a child from a more wealthy
upbringing? If the answer is no, that child was done a
disservice. If the answer is yes, and they still fail,
obviously don't graduate them...
The goal shouldn't ever be "Just pass everyone" it should
be making sure that every child has the same opportunity
and circumstances to succeed.
chasd00 wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
> every child has the same opportunity and
circumstances to succeed.
If youâre 18 and canât read/write/math there is no
opportunity to succeed, giving them a diploma doesnât
change that. At some point the child is just out of
time no matter the circumstance.
stogot wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
Not only failed, but then commit a fraudulent activity to
cover up their sins leading to a systemic destruction of
society and theft of taxes
hedora wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
Yes, but back when California was poorer, it had some of the
best schools in the nation. Now that it's richer, the
schools are collapsing, so it's really hard to argue that
systematic social problems are the root cause.
ses1984 wrote 2 hours 28 min ago:
The only thing that changed is that California got richer,
and it just so happens that wealth was evenly distributed.
How convenient.
dnautics wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
california spends about ~2.5k more per pupil in low
income districts than high income districts.
URI [1]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-calif...
hedora wrote 3 hours 54 min ago:
This is true. There are safeguards (that are currently failing)
that my program would engage:
- The state is legally required to provide those kids with an
education.
- There is funding allocated to help those districts.
If "we will not pay you if the kids do not learn" means there are
zero schools in those districts then (1) the state government will
get sued for not doing its job (because closing 100% of the schools
makes the failure objective and obvious) and (2) it will have to
update those funding formulas so that it is possible for some
school (state run, or private) to break even while providing an
education in those areas.
gausswho wrote 3 hours 26 min ago:
With sympathy to your appeal that 100% closures will force us to
reckon with the problem, I suspect it'd only lead to missing the
forest for the trees. This would come with substantial pains to
the community. Potentially ones that knock-on to other pains.
You're at the root of why this is a tricky problem to solve. In
fact there is no solution, just a wide basket of expensive things
we should aspire to do to improve affairs.
hedora wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
What pain, exactly?
- The local public school goes from 80 kids per grade to 40,
and a new school opens across the street or just rents an
existing building from the existing school district.
- Funding stays flat, and academic performance goes up.
- Administrators get to decide which teachers to lay off, and
they will be de facto fired if they get rid of the high
performers while keeping the low performers.
- If the union contracts make it impossible to retain the
high-performers, then the school eventually shuts down, and
teachers that are competitive on the job market get hired by
the new school for similar pay / benefits.
- Teachers at the new school get evaluated on whether they do
their job, and the new administrators have a strong financial
incentive to use performance-based evaluation instead of
seniority / nepotism / whatever.
I see no downside whatsoever.
gausswho wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
The pains I was thinking of largely occupy the transitionary
period of a school closing before alternatives are open.
When does the deficient school close? After this new school
is opened? If not, what happens to students and families that
depend on an education in the interim?
Who pays for this new school? Must they immediately show
improvement or do they get some years to show that their
approach is working better?
Will the metrics even be accurate in the new school? Will
there be a self-selecting bias in the newly formed student
body?
hedora wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
I don't think these details are particularly hard to work
out:
- You can shrink the deficient school to zero by reducing
teacher count starting in the lower grades and moving up,
and by allowing parents to opt for transfers in higher
grades.
- The building still exists, so you could reuse it. Or,
investors could build a new school. Obviously, there's
some lag in the measurement, since it requires a few years
of student data. I'd say look at the first and second
derivative of the test scores. Note that the claw-back
model deeply screws over investors that fund substandard
schools. This is likely to create stranded real-estate for
the next round of investors to buy at a discount.
- The metrics are produced downstream, so there shouldn't
be measurement bias. There probably will be self-selection
bias. There are existing funding mechanisms to deal with
challenging student bodies. If those are working, then the
per-student funding of the old school with skyrocket. If
the old school still fails, then that produces a
high-revenue group of students for some other new school to
take on. If those funding mechanisms are not working, then
it creates an externally detectable signal to the outside
world that the problem is one level up (no schools in
certain areas), making it easy for voters / courts to
intervene (currently, those funding mechanisms are failing,
and no one is held accountable).
convolvatron wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
investors? you're going to raise the cost of primary
education to accommodate enough of a margin to attract
investors? I thought we were talking about public
education so that people in our society can at least read
- a task that we're doing pretty bad at. The private
school system for the 1% is doing just fine already.
collabs wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
something that came to my mind as I was reading the comments here --
the thing is that in the quest for professionalism, we have sidelined a
lot of people who would be good at teaching in favor of people who are
good at jumping hoops. there is a famous quote saying "when the measure
becomes a target, it stops being a good measure"
ryukoposting wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
Goodhart's Law (that quote) is actually one of the motivations for
moving away from ACT and SAT as college entry benchmarks. "Teaching
to the test" is a rampant problem in the US.
UC is seeing flaws in departing from those benchmarks, though. The
thing is, % of students getting admitted to college is itself a
measure for schools and school districts. If GPA is how you get kids
into college, well...
It's not a teacher problem, it's a district and state problem. As a
teacher, if kids are failing your classes (which nowadays seems to be
"getting anything less than an A") your school district blames you.
To me, it seems that Goodhart's Law is an inherent problem for
education in the information era, no matter how you cut it. If
there's one good thing that can be said about ACT and SAT, they're
relatively difficult for schools to game. GPA inflation is trivial.
antonyt wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
I've never understood the "teaching to the test" argument against
these tests. Take a look at some of the math SAT sample questions:
[1] How would you "teach to the test" for these in a way that looks
different from just teaching arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry,
etc?
URI [1]: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/digital-sat-sa...
matwood wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
For almost all math at the HS level, teaching to the test is
exactly what you want.
jdw64 wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
Looking at the world, it seems we all go through similar systemic
issues. Naturally, in East Asian cultures where the fervor for
education is overheated, this phenomenon tended to manifest much
earlier.
When specific exams are abolished or watered down under the banner of
'diversity and equal opportunity,' the wealthy actually gain a massive
advantage. Of course, the exam system itself inherently favors the rich
as well.
The reason is simple: weakening exams naturally forces the
strengthening of alternative metrics. During the transition period when
a new system is introduced to society, wealthy parents are far better
equipped to adapt than poorer ones.
Koreaâs 'Spoon Class Theory' (where rich parents are gold spoons and
poor parents are dirt spoons) and Japanâs '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.
MyHonestOpinon wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
I agree. The rich kids will always have an advantage. But let me ask
why are we playing this like a zero sum game? Do we not have enough
education for anyone who is willing to put up the work?
delfinom wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
We do have tons of education resources available nation wide. Over
here in NYC, we have the highest per-capita spending on students
with some of the worse outcome rates in the country. The biggest
problem nobody wants to address is parental involvement.
Parents who want their kids to learn and excel will get their kids
to learn and excel. Be it through their own involvement with
classwork or actively hunting out better education opportunities.
_Money_ helps but it isn't the end-all solution.
Meanwhile, if you have parents who treat schools as day care and do
jackshit to be involved in their kids education. Well, those are
the failing students you get.
Shit, I'll add as a child of two eastern european immigrants. My
parents both worked 2 jobs each for years while I was in public
school here in the US, they immigrated with basically nothing to
their name and hard labor jobs. And they would still make time to
help me with homework.
anal_reactor wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
When school doesn't force kids to study, there is a growing gap
between parents who do and those who don't. Wealth is just a proxy
for that.
BigTTYGothGF wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
> "We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must
reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the
material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other
quantitatively demanding fields,â they warned.
When I was a grad student in a mediocre university in a different state
thirty years ago we had a lot of kids in a similar situation. This was
resolved by means of a pre-placement exam, and the ones who scored the
worst had to take one of two remedial math classes, the lower of which
was solidly at the middle school level. The university had a SAT
requirement at the time.
The pre-placement exam had two versions that were used on alternate
days, and a student could take it as often as they liked.
This may be a new experience for those particular UC faculty, but it is
not a new phenomenon.
godsinhisheaven wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
Out of the current population of college students today, what
percentage shouldn't really be there, be it for lack of intelligence or
too much? (e.g. smart ceo guy dropping out.) 10%? 20%? 50%? If you
can't do high school level math, much less middle school, do you
deserve to be in college? It really strikes at what the purpose of
college is: is it for educating people, no matter their prior
abilities? Or is it to foster our best and brightest to put them on a
path towards advancing society? Or is it to create well-rounded
individuals, knowledgeable in many different domains? I admit, perhaps
the purpose is all of the above, but if so, things that try to be
everything for everyone often have to make sacrifices in one area to
improve another.
tedggh wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
My nephews came to the US in their early teens as non English speakers.
They struggled in some of the courses but still got good grades
reported to their parents. So, apparently some teachers will put them
on a bus together with other minorities and take them on a day trip to
the museum instead of math class, but they would still get graded. They
retuned back to Spain and had a very difficult time graduating from
high school because of math. So Iâm not sure how well of a predictor
high school is.
kleiba2 wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
I used to teach high school math. There was a big push for doing
everything digitally. And admittedly, for some topics the use of
technology in the classroom or at home can really be a benefit, for
instance visualizations or interactive exercises. But having a digital
device in class was the number one cause of distraction every time.
For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen +
paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned
upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and
didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting
audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!
I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot
of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too
annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and
how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and
never looked back.
moi2388 wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
Sorry, but Iâm calling absolute bullshit. Blackboards are fine for
teaching maths according to mathematicians. For students, just look
at stuff like 3blue1brown and summer of math and how many people
finally get it because of animations and playing with the maths
instead of some old dude drawing a formula on a blackboard.
This is like the pi vs tau debate.
I seriously do not understand why maths teachers are so unable to
relate to their non-mathematically inclined students
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
Not just for math, but the shift to electronics based learning in
language skills is way behind classic approaches from a century or
more ago. A lot of common core reasoning is based at a level most
younger children cannot yet grasp, and it's no surprise they fail to
adopt at sufficient levels in reality. Then schools systems circle
the wagons to cover up their own failures.
mtrifonov wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
I wouldn't even say it's the devices, exactly. The way I see it, this
is all downstream of kids spending more time online than in real life
(because all THEIR friends are online, rather than in real life).
Device time-out doesn't exactly remediate that structural issue. And
the whole testing debate kind of sails right past it.
My take is that the test won't make kids better at math. At best,
it'll drift towards investment in reward-hacking the exam (like it
always was).
I think it was idiotic to make it optional to begin with. The stats
they're talking about, though, can't be a primarily admissions-signal
problem. Whatever they're using these days in lieu of exams are
imperfect proxies for math skill, sure, but it's not like they're
admitting kids off their CoD K:D. Kids taking APs and stacking
extracurriculars are generally motivated. So, if even the motivated
ones show up unable to do middle school math, the cause is more
systemic than "we stopped testing."
My vote: TikTok brain rot. I build LLM products and I see how the
parasocial pull shows up even when the products have nothing to do
with companionship. I watched one user obsessively spin up 44
separate chats around a K-Pop vampire character over a week. The
product is NOT designed for that. The pull toward frictionless
digital reward is just that strong, and that's what kids' attention
is up against now. Math is the most effortful, least immediately
rewarding thing they do. Doesn't stand a chance against an infinite
feed, and I guess infinite vampires either.
Which is why the ask from the faculty is kind of arrogant. The
article, at least, doesn't even float a hypothesis for WHY math
skills collapsed, simply assuming standardized testing fixes it. I
wholly believe in standardized testing â but it measures the
problem, it doesn't fix it.
make3 wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
blackboards in uni where you can't do anything but just rewrite
everything the prof is writing is a nightmarish waste of time,
especially for anyone with any kind of attention difficulties
please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
kleiba2 wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
Uni and high-school are not the same.
SoftTalker wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
If you have attention difficulties perhaps uni isn't the place for
you.
mos_basik wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
As someone with attention difficulties who eventually decided to
leave uni and pursue another path:
I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose
first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because
I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into
something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you
should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard
class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly)
figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your
betters."
And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and
comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate,
politics, war, and future generations)
My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it
sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where
one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be
more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose
incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those
of mine (USA).
jazzpush2 wrote 3 hours 39 min ago:
I had the opposite experience, as it were, teaching in the UC system.
The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those
post-COVID, were the problem.
Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every
quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of
better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than
worthwhile.
And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for
a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for
discrimination.
I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that
making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of
the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it
resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for
students.
0:
URI [1]: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
zahlman wrote 1 hour 2 min ago:
> The politics were mostly fine, but the students, especially those
post-COVID, were the problem.
I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
> And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0]
for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're
eligible for discrimination.
Case in point. It's exactly because of the politics both that the
students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture
suppressing that questioning exists.
> I had a student claim...
Again, this is the student expressing the politics in question.
jobs_throwaway wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
Give teachers authority again. It shouldn't be their problem if a
student wants to fail the class.
borski wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
The problem is that just like students, teachers are not all
created equal.
My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for âdisciplineâ
problems. In reality, she simply didnât 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.
porridgeraisin wrote 38 min ago:
Yep, and there is (rightfully) general distrust in giving
teachers that much authority over students. Parents already
have that authority, which is why a family environment
conducive towards education is the most direct way to improve
overall student outcomes. Trying to fix it in the school is
bordering on pointless. In my country, boarding schools /
boarding at another ...quieter... family member's house and
attending a school near there was the most common solution
among poorer people. Example: more-or-less sane mother sends
off kid to uncles house during the school year to go to school
and escape drunkard father. The kid visits on some weekends and
most holidays.
Hard guidance is needed for kids. Hard guidance requires
authority. So either you give teachers that authority which is
very hard especially in diverse settings, or you make the
family environment give better implicit and explicit guidance.
Now, the government will always attempt to solve it using the
tools they have, which is the school, but it is destined to
have vanishingly little success if at all.
borski wrote 31 min ago:
Which country? (Curious)
porridgeraisin wrote 29 min ago:
Urban poor of India
thot_experiment wrote 1 hour 2 min ago:
Crazy that such a load bearing job isn't better funded and more
respected. Arguably the most important job in society and the
level of respect, pay and to some extent training (at least a
lot of places require a masters for what that's worth) is
absolutely not commensurate with it's importance.
I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a
teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different
styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a
particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just
not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through
the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that
effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire
system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but
it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable
people are with the education system here.
Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why
do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they
can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non
controversial.
ethbr1 wrote 53 min ago:
Multiple things can be true, because the goal is to optimize
in aggregate.
- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)
- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the
bad ones impairs and burns out the others
Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle.
Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the
worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with
outcome-less proscriptive policies.
* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching
included, regularly poll their end users (students or
employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get
bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't
adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?
bearjaws wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
I'm always torn on this, I learned a lot of algebra, stats and calc
from actually writing TI-Basic programs in my calculator. I was
deeply interested in programming since the age of 11, so it felt very
natural to translate the formulas and concepts to code.
Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it
out by hand.
DonutATX wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
I suggest you glance at the novel Ananthem by Neal Stephenson. The
core plot device is about "universities" stripping all worldly items
away from the students, so they are left with simple clothes and
chalkboards. Fascinating topic, well executed by Neal. One of my
favorite books.
jobs_throwaway wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
Anathem* for those like me who googled it
mos_basik wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
God, what a great book, imo. My favorite Stephenson novel.
__rito__ wrote 52 min ago:
Mine, too. Cryptonomicon was the gateway drug. But I loved
'Anathem'.
__rito__ wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
This is nothing new. It is ancient.
Ancient Hindus divided life into four parts, the earliest was
called "Brahmacharya" - core tenet of it was celibacy, but sons of
kings and rich merchants lived ascetic lives in the teacher's house
who was also an ascetic and a sage - no rich clothes, no luxury
foods or comfort.
This was supposed to last till the age of 16, going as high as 21
for some.
The Buddhist monastery-universities of India also kept students
under similar conditions - celibate, ascetic, and far from luxury.
__rito__ wrote 51 min ago:
The maths in the book where these students and scholars stayed in
Anathem, were directly inspired by matths in India. I visited one
last month.
bix6 wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
This reminded me of Kvothe from Name of the Wind.
xg15 wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
That sounds like the other extreme.
koolba wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
They got rid of paper because teachers are lazy and do not want to
spend time grading things by hand.
Iâve 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 itâd 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, âwe encourage students to redraw the entire
picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpfulâ.
Itâs strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.
sonofhans wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
> teachers are lazy
Teachers donât make those decisions, school boards do. School
boards are elected or appointed political entities.
Teachers are humans just like you, and like or dislike work for the
same reasons you do, including your unoriginal display of classic
American anti-intellectualism.
koolba wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
School boards to do not set curriculum or methods of instruction.
At best they hire and fire the administration team. But even
those positions usually have tenure.
So even a willing school board is unable to do more than rubber
stamp the status quo.
watwut wrote 2 hours 59 min ago:
> I specifically mentioned itâd be inferior as students would
not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers
when simplifying expressions.
All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw
and calculate on paper and submit the result.
koolba wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
Yes youâre allowed paper. But itâs strictly worse than pure
paper as the student is forced to copy the entire problem,
possibly with errors.
Itâs much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter
(replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from
scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a
geometry problem.
nathan_compton wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
I don't think anyone with a lazy disposition would get into
teaching. There are so many other jobs that pay better and involve
less work.
mlsu wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
Itâs definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast
majority of education. And, itâs a purely selfish thing by tech
companies to insert themselves into education.
A student should not see a computer until college or vocational
school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or
electronics class.
nradov wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
You've got to be kidding. Writing longhand was always a miserable
experience for me no matter what technique or pen I used. Typing on
a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.
buellerbueller wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
>Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.
...and studies show, inferior for recall:
URI [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-b...
swiftcoder wrote 3 hours 35 min ago:
> A student should not see a computer until college or vocational
school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or
electronics class.
Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the
extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand?
Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free
essay writing...
curt15 wrote 39 min ago:
In the age of chatbots for outsourcing thinking at one's
fingertips, absolutely!
The invasion of tech into the classroom has not produced more
capable graduates. There's a lot of empirical evidence to the
contrary.
The mind is a muscle, and developing that muscle is the education
system's main purpose.
mlsu wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
Yes, I really am. For the purpose of learning, internalizing and
organizing information, hand writing is superior to typing in
every case. It's physiological.
gizmo686 wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Back when I was in middle school, we had "digital typewriters"
that worked fine, and was brought out far more often than the
laptop cart or computer lab.
ekidd wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
As someone who hates handwriting in bluebooks, and who types
constantly, yes: I think we should bring back in-class writing by
hand, we should lock up cellphones for the school day, and we
should proctor exams. If you're not doing this, your students
will be stuck to a screen all day, pay no attention to class, and
use ChatGPT under the desk to cheat.
ethbr1 wrote 49 min ago:
This is literally what most grade level school systems are
doing, with good results.
The teenage brain is not prepared for addiction of digital
magnitude.
delta_p_delta_x wrote 3 hours 19 min ago:
> making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand
You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was
writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my
CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics
for computer graphics, etc).
In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand,
and the national exams are all still handwritten.
bix6 wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
I learned typing in 3rd grade iirc. That seems reasonable for a
fundamental skill.
mftrhu wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
You don't necessarily need a computer for that. They built more
than a billion typewriters, IIRC.
bix6 wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
Sure letâs buy a bunch of typewriters instead of multi
purpose computers
ethbr1 wrote 51 min ago:
When's the last time you played DOOM on a typewriter?
doubled112 wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
My kids are in grade 3 and 6 and nobody ever taught them to type.
They just handed them a Chromebook and assumed they know what
they're doing.
It is a skill, but everybody seems to think it will just happen
on its own.
toast0 wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
The problem is everyone knows you learn to type when you get on
IRC, but you can't put elementary school kids on IRC.
doubled112 wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
Why not? I was in elementary school on IRC. ASL ;-) ?
toast0 wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
I'm sure you turned out fine. But the school district can't
put a bunch of kids on IRC, it'll look bad.
breppp wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
I wouldn't put any kids through some of the stuff I've
seen on IRC
account42 wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
Now that's just needlessly extreme in the other direction. Students
will be seeing devices much earlier than that just because their
peers will use them so it makes sense to educate them on their
proper use and dangers much earlier than college. It just doesn't
make sense to cram them into every subject because not using one is
outdated.
skydhash wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Students also see power drills and cars, and schools donât use
them as part of the curriculum. I have a lot of computing device
and still believes in real books and pen or paper for learning
anything. The mechanical actions and the physical presence really
helps in retention of the materials. Even those TI calculators
can be overkill. Iâve only used one in college, and it was for
a few exams about polar coordinates and transmission lines, IIRC.
For everything else, the simpler scientific calculators were
enough. Multiplying matrices and graphing functions doesnât
take that much time at high school and undergraduate level.
VortexLain wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
> The mechanical actions and the physical presence really helps
in retention of the materials.
Although this is the case for many people, I personally
struggle to process information and write it on paper at the
same time. Thus, I strongly prefer digital note-taking and use
Obsidian or just vim instead of paper.
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
I'm not trying to be offensive, but I don't see how typing it
into a computer is significantly different than writing it on
paper.
Is there something stopping you, or anyone from writing it
down and taking notes in class and then reviewing it later as
needed? Not just process it in lecture time, but regurgitate
it to physical form for later review.
Also, I would definitely constrain this into educational
groups, where K-6 are much different from college (post
mandatory) education.
mos_basik wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
>I don't see how typing it into a computer is significantly
different...
I haven't read up on it much myself, but any discussion
along the lines of this subthread re: "handwriting >
typing" is probably discussing research that's starting to
be talked about more and more in the past 5 years or so
(maybe the pandemic and online learning accelerated
interest?)
here's a 5m clip of a neuroscientist presenting to the US
Senate this year on correlation between dropping academic
performance and use of tech in classrooms in many countries
over many years, and asking for more research into
mechanisms and causation. [1] 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 [2] >Is there something stopping
you from...
No, but I feel like it's not hard to argue that default are
important.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
URI [2]: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/ar...
dmbche wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
If I may, people write (with pens) slower than than can
speak, and thus to take good notes you need to synthesize
the material you are being explained. You need to
understand what you're writing.
Many people can type as fast/faster than they talk, and
when typing it is possible to try and type verbatim what is
being said. In this case, there is no understanding. (If
you've ever taken a class not all that is said is pertinent
and not all that is pertinent is said)
I personally don't revisit my written notes their purpose
is uniquely for me to remember/understand what I've
written.
smcg wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
shop class and drivers ed used to be offered by schools...
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
But you didn't include them in your English or Math classes.
They were optional courses, and for older students, not K-6.
collabs wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
I am thinking why not use the iPad simply as a letter pad with
infinite
pages? the new iPad with the new iPad pencil can do that and I am
sure
with the right software you can write, erase, rewrite as much as you
want? What am I missing?
nathan_compton wrote 3 hours 26 min ago:
For awhile I tried all sorts of digital notetaking devices.
Eventually I realized that pen + paper notebook was vastly superior
to all of them for retention, ease of use, and cost. I am sure
that, for some people, the calculation is different (for example, I
have a pretty good memory and thus writing something down once is
sufficient for me to recall it later) but for me, the idea of a
digital letter pad eventually seemed utterly wasteful and absurd to
me.
ncr100 wrote 3 hours 45 min ago:
Human biology likely makes it harder to write on a glass screen
with a perceptible Gap in time, latency between where the pen is
and where the pixels appear as well as the physical colocation Of
the pencil tip and the written line differs more so on a tablet
screen than on direct application of matter to paper.
This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not
helpful!
Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system
nearly entirely for part of the
handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure
distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside
your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction
surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on.
Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or
OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend
to flicker. This is more of a strain.
Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll
long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if
you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write
to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved
around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.
stonogo wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
That isn't a matter of human biology. You learned to expect a
specific experience when you took pencil to paper at a young age.
Other people can learn to expect different experiences. Your
acquired habits are not a genetic imperative. All of this post
seems like ex post facto justifications for an implicit claim
that the tech you grew up with is natural and good and the tech
that came later is somehow inimical to life.
snazz wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
No matter how you restrict it with MDM profiles, itâs distracting
compared to pencil/paper.
layer8 wrote 3 hours 52 min ago:
Canât it run restricted to a single application in kiosk mode?
Unless the application itself provides distraction, what would be
distracting?
nathan_compton wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
I friend of mine once made an observation that really stuck
with me: a kindle is not a book: it is simultaneously all books
at once. If you lock it to a single book, its still all books
at once, but with a lock on all the others. Also, why not use
paper?
layer8 wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
Iâm not an advocate of using tablets in class, I was just
curious where the parent is seeing unavoidable distractions,
compared to traditional tools like for example textbooks and
calculators.
shimman wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
Why do we even want to pay $500 per device for something that
is easily replicated by a $1 paper notebook? The only people
that benefit from forcing classrooms to adopt these devices is
big tech relying on corporate welfare to juice their books.
nsxwolf wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
It's just not as good as a notebook. I've tried to make it as
good. It sleeps, there's too much fumbling around with it to
get to what you want. You lose the muscle memory of where
something is in the book, you can't quickly flip to anything.
You notice you used to do certain things, like flip to two
different pages at once. Everything is just immediate and
tactile.
sparqlittlestar wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
The very light it emits, the liquid glass lensing animations,
etc
layer8 wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
At least with OLED, the light output can be auto-adjusted to
match the reflecting light of the environment. This can be
quite convincing, looking like a purely reflective surface.
And a dedicated app doesnât need to use any distracting
animations or highlights.
econ wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
I recall some research in the TV age. They observed, if the
subject is looking into a light source, (be it a camp fire, a
screen or a bulb) they go into a kind of sleepwalking mode.
They also mentioned the phenomenon was already well
documented by hypnotists.
In the early internet days I couldn't help but notice people
who read zero books now spend the whole day reading.
I think it means the tool is used the wrong way? Interactive
should be e-paper or real paper. Dull cramming or basic
reading skills would be a good fit for glowing displays.
Perhaps we even need a device that can do both.
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
You also don't get the physicality as part of recall with
eInk over real books. When reading technical books, as an
example, I often would look back when going to review
something based on where it was physically in the book... I
completely lose that with ebooks.. I still mostly use
ebooks and online docs these days all the same because
moving hundreds of pounds of books when you move sucks.
shakna wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
Blue light changes the way you think. Makes it easier to focus
on the thing emitting the light, than the rest of the room.
Just having a screen, with perfectly locked down control, can
distract.
bigstrat2003 wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
The point is that it's foolish to require inserting an iPad into
the classroom purely for the sake of using an iPad. The goal (or
proposed benefit) should be identified first, and then decide what
the best tools to achieve that are.
irishcoffee wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
You can just use a pencil and paper, and it's a lot cheaper?
ptek wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
Yes it is cheaper and who will steal or rob a student of pencil
and paper compared to a iPad also pencil and paper doesnât
require age verification.
throwway120385 wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
It's also probably good to make sure students know how to
figure using a pencil and paper because pulling a calculator
out on a job site is pretty impractical.
tracker1 wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
Not sure I agree with that last point... you probably have
one in your pocket already (phone app). Though I'm strongly
against electronic devices as core education materials in K-6
especially.
kleiba2 wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
That's being done, but it would not be sufficient to satisfy the
powers that be.
eunos wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
It's very astonishing that sometime I heard folks with very high SAT
including math /science/programming accolades failed to get admission
in UCs but you have severe math deficit like this.
kyboren wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
But were those folks members of politically desirable racial groups?
Or were they Asian?
confidantlake wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
It is depressing but not surprising.
japhyr wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
Anecdotal data point: My son is finishing 9th grade, and he's taking
10th grade math because he got ahead a year when he was younger. At his
school, you're exempted from having to take the final exam if you're
passing with a reasonable grade at the end of the semester. He said
there are about four students who don't have to take the final exam.
Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier
math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to
education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds,
it's only gotten more difficult.
t0mpr1c3 wrote 3 hours 52 min ago:
True. COVID has set the entire cohort back, in terms of education but
also every other aspect of personal development.
chaidhat wrote 4 hours 31 min ago:
As a product of the STEM post-SAT UC system (UCLA â26), I never
personally experienced âmiddle school mathâ being taught or a lack
of mathematical understanding.
Iâve 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
âstupid questions.â
So in my personal opinion, I think profs shouldnât 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.
JCTheDenthog wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
>Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good
predictor of college success.
I mean, it seems pretty clear from the last 6 years of experience by
professors and others that grades (or at least grades in isolation)
aren't a good predictor at all for this. The problem is removing the
use of standardized tests here was done for ideological reasons. You
can already tell by the use of the word "inequitable" here, because a
certain insane subset of policymakers and the public believe that we
should push for equal outcomes ("equity") over equal opportunity
(usually referred to as simply "equality").
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
> the public believe that we should push for equal outcomes
("equity") over equal opportunity (usually referred to as simply
"equality")
This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people
talking about equity. [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_equity
elteto wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
That all sounds great in theory but in practice it devolves not
into only giving extra help to those in need, but also to _take
away_ from those perceived to have some sort of advantage. See for
example NYC's idiotic plan to close gifted and talended
kindergarten programs in public schools.
The truth is that it is a hell of a lot easier to lower the bar for
everyone than to raise it. I.e. it's a lot easier to make dumb kids
than to make smart ones, so in the name of equity we shall have
dumber ones.
JCTheDenthog wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
>This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people
talking about equity.
From the wiki article you linked:
>Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society. Equity
proponents believe that some are at a larger disadvantage than
others and aims to compensate for this to ensure that everyone can
attain the same lifestyle.
9dev wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
If you hold a race, but some people start further behind others,
they have a longer track to run. I think we can agree that to
call it a fair race, we'd want to accommodate for the track
length.
elteto wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
Following your analogy, what equity efforts turn in practice is
to not only accommodate for track length for those that start
behind, but also to cut one leg off of those perceived to be
ahead.
9dev wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
My point wasn't that every existing equity effort is
justified and flawless, but that there is a clear reason why
some kind of levelling is required if you want to live in a
fair society - and I do believe most of us want that.
elteto wrote 2 hours 28 min ago:
It's funny you mention fair, because to me a fair society
is one where smart kids are not penalized for being so.
So yes, we all want fair, but what we think of as fair can
be wildly different.
JCTheDenthog wrote 4 hours 15 min ago:
Sure, but if some people are faster than others because they
have longer legs or because they've trained more etc. then
people without such advantages aren't given special
accomodation. It actually runs in my family that we have very
short legs in comparison to our torsos. For example I'm 6' tall
but look like I'm 6' 4" or thereabouts when sitting down next
to someone with more normal proportions. In spite of this
disadvantage, one of my brothers did cross country in high
school and still runs half-marathons every year or so. He
doesn't demand to be given a head start or to have time
subtracted to accommodate his inherent disadvantage, because
that's the difference between equality and equity.
9dev wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
And that's commendable, but what if your brother would not
have had time for doing cross country in high school because
he had to care for his siblings as your parents were poor and
working double shifts? Or so heavily indebted due to a cancer
therapy that he couldn't afford running shoes?
> people without such advantages aren't given special
accomodation
They are not - but I'm specifically talking about the reverse
case, where people start with extra disadvantages that cause
them to start even further behind their peers. Curiously,
everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in
Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social
contexts.
JCTheDenthog wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
>And that's commendable, but what if your brother would not
have had time for doing cross country in high school
because he had to care for his siblings as your parents
were poor and working double shifts? Or so heavily indebted
due to a cancer therapy that he couldn't afford running
shoes?
That's awful and unfortunate, but he still shouldn't have
an extra hour shaved from his half-marathon times over his
competitors, because the half-marathon isn't measuring "How
fast could you have run this in an alternate universe where
you had no disadvantages". It's measuring "How fast can you
run this, full stop."
Poor Black kids who had uninvolved parents that didn't help
them to learn math better aren't helped by affirmative
action because you're just setting them up for failure in
the actual college level math classes they end up in (and
are woefully unprepared for). The SAT measures how capable
you are at math because that's what matters for college,
not how capable you might have been in a different reality.
>Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of
handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept
in social contexts.
If I try to join the PGA tour, they aren't going to
consider my handicap.
ceejayoz wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
Those are certainly shitty ways to ensure equity. Why are
they what you jump to?
What if we did a better job helping parents with
childcare and healthcare?
JCTheDenthog wrote 3 hours 35 min ago:
>Those are certainly shitty ways to ensure equity. Why
are they what you jump to?
Because they're effectively what proponents of equity
have implemented in practice: [1] >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.
URI [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/whi...
ceejayoz wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
> Because they're effectively what proponents of
equity have implemented in practiceâ¦
So you agree with the goal of equity, but not the
approaches taken so far?
JCTheDenthog wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
No, I actually believe that the terrible
implementation is inherently tied to the ideology,
in large part because the ideology is rooted in a
blank slate view of differences in humans. I
believe in equality of opportunity, I don't give a
damn about equality of outcomes.
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
Note: everyone can, not everyone will.
That's opportunity, not a guarantee. Yes?
valleyer wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
From your link:
> Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society.
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Also from my link:
> factors specific to one's personal conditions should not
interfere with the potential of academic success
JCTheDenthog wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
Sure, but the reality is that such conditions do interfere with
the potential of academic success, as much as proponents of
equity like to argue otherwise. If I had a severe brain injury
as a child, or my mom drank and did a ton of drugs while
pregnant with me, or any number of other reasons, I will
probably be far less academically successful than in the
counterfactual reality where I didn't get a brick dropped on my
head as a child.
Equality proponents argue that brick-on-head and
no-brick-on-head should be judged by the same standards. Equity
proponents argue that brick-on-head should be given advantages
over no-brick-on-head to make them obtain substantially similar
educational outcomes.
Once again, from your own link:
>Equity recognizes this uneven playing field and aims to take
extra measures by giving those in need more than those who are
not. Equity aims to achieve equal outcomes for groups, also
called substantive equality. Equity aims to ensure that
everyone's lifestyle is equal, even if that requires unequal
distribution of access and goods.
cyberax wrote 41 min ago:
> Equity proponents argue that brick-on-head should be given
advantages over no-brick-on-head to make them obtain
substantially similar educational outcomes.
The problem is that the solution that they're proposing is to
force _everyone_ to have that brick-on-head. With maybe two
or three bricks for especially "advantaged" categories.
TimorousBestie wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
> Sure, but the reality is that such conditions do interfere
with the potential of academic success, as much as proponents
of equity like to argue otherwise.
This is a bizarre claim in the second clause. Proponents of
equity do recognize that various conditions impact academic
potential; otherwise, they wouldnât attempt to ameliorate
them.
You even quoted, âEquity recognizes this uneven playing
field. . .â so where did â. . . as much as proponents of
equity like to argue otherwise,â even come from?
JCTheDenthog wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
The person I was replying to quoted the article saying
"conditions should not interfere", my point was that they
do interfere, and will continue to interfere, in spite of
all the efforts and hands on the scale and discrimination
that equity proponents try to implement. Equity
fundamentally arises from a more or less "blank-slatist"
view of humans, which is why it leads to such insane
outcomes when it comes into contact with reality.
TimorousBestie wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
> The person I was replying to quoted the article saying
"conditions should not interfere", my point was that they
do interfere, and will continue to interfere, in spite of
all the efforts and hands on the scale and discrimination
that equity proponents try to implement.
So? Name a social intervention that did achieve all its
goals.
> Equity fundamentally arises from a more or less
"blank-slatist" view of humans
Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not
particularly persuasive.
JCTheDenthog wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
>So? Name a social intervention that did achieve all
its goals.
That's not my argument though? In any case, I believe
that many of the ideas that have been proposed (and
actually implemented) by proponents of equity aren't
just failing to meet their goals, I believe they are
actively harmful to them (and to the health of society
as a whole).
>Digging up a straw man from the 17th century is not
particularly persuasive.
Blank slatism in one form or another goes all the way
back to the Greeks. In any case, belief in blank
slatism is effectively a prerequisite for believing in
one of the primary standards used by equity proponents
to judge if a system is equitable or not: disparate
impact. You can't a priori assume that disparate impact
is proof of discrimination unless you also discount
inherent differences in human capability and
performance.
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
In your scenarios, equity proponents would tend to advocate
for things like extra testing time, access to tutoring, etc.
(And systemic efforts to prevent dropping bricks on
childrens' heads in the first place.)
JCTheDenthog wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
>In your scenarios, equity proponents would tend to
advocate for things like extra testing time, access to
tutoring, etc.
So you claim, but in reality proponents of equity
instituted a system that gave Black students a roughly 450
point advantage over Asian students on the SAT: [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-s...
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
> somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair
advantage for White students
Make up your mind? If their having to score higher than
Black students is unfair, how is "Asian-Americans had to
score 140 points higher on their SATs than whites" not
also unfair?
What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect lifelong
achievement? As I noted elsewhere in the thread, wealth
(translated to parenting time, tutoring access, better
schools, etc.) can help do better on the SAT. How does
one account for that?
JCTheDenthog wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
I didn't say it was fair, I was pointing out the NYT
being racially biased (as per usual). Imagine at a
school that Jenny gets 10 cookies from the teacher,
Timmy gets 3, and Johnny gets two. Billy sees all this,
but he has a crush on Jenny, so when he tells everyone
on the playground about it he doesn't say "Jenny got
way more cookies than Johnny, that's so unfair!"
Instead he says "Timmy got more cookies than Johnny,
that's so unfair!". That's the ridiculousness that I'm
pointing out here.
>What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect
lifelong achievement?
It was never intended to?
>How does one account for that?
It's impossible to account for everything. As much as
the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors
have attempted to quantify and measure everything, it's
simply not possible in reality. If someone could devise
a better means of measurement than current standardized
tests like the SAT and ACT, I would happily welcome
them.
But one thing is pretty clear and certain: the SAT is a
far better measure of mathematical aptitude that high
school grades, and until better measures can be found
and implemented I fully support continuing to use it
for college admissions and college math placement.
ceejayoz wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
> I was pointing out the NYT being racially biased
But we apparently agree that "somehow found a way to
describe this as an unfair advantage for White
students" is actually accurate on their part?
(The article also openly explains why, if you go past
the headline a bit.)
> It was never intended to?
Then we shouldn't use it as such.
JCTheDenthog wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
>But we apparently agree that "somehow found a way
to describe this as an unfair advantage for White
students" is actually accurate on their part?
I agree that Whites also got an unfair advantage
over Asians in college admissions, yes (I haven't
kept up with the state of things since some
recentish supreme court decisions so I don't know
if this is actually still the case).
>Then we shouldn't use it as such.
It isn't used as such. It's used to measure a
student's current aptitude in math and English,
hence the discontinuation of its use in California
leading to the poor math outcomes for students
described in the article this entire thread is
about.
john_strinlai wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
>âWe now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must
reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the
material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other
quantitatively demanding fields,â they warned.
i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to reteach
middle-school math.
i teach. my courses have prerequisites. if a student somehow makes it
into my class without a passing-grade grasp of the prerequisites, i
will point them in the right direction to get caught up, but i am not
spending any class time on it. its not fair to the other students.
spiralcoaster wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
Now imagine a significant portion of your students are missing the
prerequisites.
Do you really think these professors are up in arms about a few
students who don't have the prereqs? It obviously must be a large
enough proportion to worry about.
It's no longer "if a student somehow makes it into my class", it's
"many students are currently making it into my class"
adrr wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
They could just accept the kids who are at or above grade level.
There are way more kids at or above grade level who graduate from
California high school like my nephew who took AP calc and missed
only question on the math of his SAT. He couldn't get into any UC
schools and instead had to leave the state for college.
We could set up a standardized test for the UC schools ensure that
the students being accepted have minimum baseline normalized across
all applicants. We could call it scholastic aptitude test or the
American College Test.
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
What isnât fair is for schools to take studentsâ matriculation
and set them up for years of debt, apparently without any intention
of educating them properly as per your comment. Better for schools to
just screen based on standardized test scores
john_strinlai wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
>without any intention of educating them properly as per your
comment.
my comment in no way implies that we have don't have an intention
of educating our students properly
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
I know, but your comment also in no way implies that you are
taking into account the bigger picture here, where the criticism
is directed at the admissions process, and wherein universities
are honestly at fault.
If university-level classes have pre-requisites that should be
taught in high school, then universities should screen for that
and disqualify students who do not have the required competency.
They should not be taking the students' money, admit them in the
institution, and then let them enroll in classes that they are
not prepared to succeed in. That's outright extortion. Many of
those students have to take on debt to pay for their education,
and besides the financial cost, it's a waste of time, and their
failures would be mentally crushing and have lifelong
repercussions.
I sympathize with educators in that they cannot slow the whole
class down, but that's the point: universities shouldn't be
putting educators in a position to compromise the teaching.
Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing
[students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough,
because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a
student develops an understanding of maths and sciences. For the
student, that requires a focused (and in many cases, guided)
study of those subject areas and before university, without the
stress of catching up to university-level courses that are
already being taken at the same time.
john_strinlai wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
>I know
then why did you accuse me of not intending to educate my
students?
>Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing
[students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough,
because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a
student develops an understanding of maths and sciences.
you havent bothered to ask what "pointing in the right
direction" entails, and are making (wrong) assumptions.
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
Youâre making this about yourself
john_strinlai wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
yes, obviously, because you called me out specifically. and
you are using what i said, without necessary context, and
extrapolating it generally to "educators". i'm not cool
with either.
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
First comment is explicitly directed at schools, and I
expressed approval of the petitioning educators
Feel free to take further offense, but Iâm not
expecting any substantial replies
jancsika wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
> i dont understand why the teachers would go out of their way to
reteach middle-school math.
"gaps" implies a critical mass of students who require middle-school
math reteaching.
> i teach.
If you've taught for a non-trivial amount of time, you did one of the
following with that class:
* graded on a curve so you don't fail half the class
* failed half the class, and got suspended (pours one out for my
compsci professor in college who did that!)
Which was it?
john_strinlai wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
>If you've taught for a non-trivial amount of time,
i have
>you did one of the following with that class: [...] Which was it?
these are not the only two options.
mos_basik wrote 49 min ago:
I'm genuinely interested in how you approached that kind of
situation, then. (And I'm not the commenter who presented what
you're saying was a false dilemma)
delusional wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
Because the like teaching and believe in giving their
students/customers the best possible education?
I get not wanting to waste the time of the better students, but if
too many student are behind, whose time are you really wasting?
thinkingtoilet wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
But it goes both ways. If a student doesn't have the prerequisite
knowledge for a class it is absolutely unfair and decidedly not the
best possible education to slow the class down for students who are
prepared. If a class requires X, and you don't have X, that's a you
problem, not a university/teacher problem.
delusional wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
I don't think it's helpful to be that rigid about it. Both the
teacher and the student has an interest in the student learning
something. Sometimes we have to give each other a bit of leeway
to get to the destination.
There's a whole "philosophy of education" discussion I'd like to
avoid, but the goal of education isn't really to educate one
person to their maximum potential, but rather to educate as many
people as well as possible. The individual should sacrifice for
the collective.
Trying to make it a straight forward linear dependency chain
displays a sort of autistic adherence to rigid hierarchy that's
really common in software people, but really uncommon everywhere
else.
fabian2k wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
It's a different country and a different time, but when I studied (a
natural science) there were dedicated courses at the start for
refreshing high school math. Those were optional, and covered
relatively simple topics.
There was also a real math lecture that went into topics above high
school math, but also contained some repetition. All other courses
mostly relied on what was contained there.
So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you don't
have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to cover the
stuff usually needed.
john_strinlai wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
>So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you
don't have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to
cover the stuff usually needed.
we do! those are dedicated courses, where it is expected that the
students are taking it to catch up (i.e. no prereq)
students can also drop a course within the first 4 weeks for no
penalty, and retake it in a later semester if they figure out they
they are behind and would not perform well.
malshe wrote 4 hours 22 min ago:
I agree with you and think this claim needs a lot more evidence. In
my university we have been providing remedial math classes for
freshman students for a long time. They must pass these before taking
regular classes that have math prerequisites.
colechristensen wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
I had to take a math placement test which was exactly "do you need
to take remedial math?" in test form, passing the test was a prereq
for a large swath of math/science/engineering classes
malshe wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
Makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine giving up significant chunk
of my regular teaching for offering remedial math!
simonw wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
Have you observed a reduction in the number of students who match
those pre-requisites over time?
john_strinlai wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
i have not tracked it, so this isn't based in data. but, no, i have
not noticed any major trends.
i dont have any 1st-year courses though, which is where a lot of
students are filtered out (for various reasons), so im not in the
best position to answer that question.
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.
ginko wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
When I studied in Austria everyone with a high school diploma would
be eligible to matriculate at Vienna University of Technology[1],
but then the first semester courses would have a bunch of
"knock-out" exams that would have a large chunk of first semester
students fail and eventually drop out.
IMO this is "fairer" but of course it means you might lose a
semester. Helps that there's barely any tuition fees.
[1] Even then (~2005) that wasn't the case for all universities
though. Medical university already had entrance exams, mainly due
to the high number of German students trying to enroll.
swiftcoder wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
This is why universities have offered what amount to remedial math
classes for donkey's years. Even in the early 2000's, if you showed
up to Calculus I without sufficient preparation, you'd find
yourself bounced to Pre-Calculus by the end of the week.
thewebguyd wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
In 2005 I had to take placement tests before I could even enroll
in my classes, so someone who wasn't actually ready for Calculus
wouldn't get to enroll in it if they didn't pass the placement
tests.
It was all part of the admissions process.
kzz102 wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
Tenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and
it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is
still very important in universities. This is not generally true
for non-tenured and adjunct professors, but for a different reason
-- their job review rely on a large part on student feedback forms,
and failing students are not happy students.
The idea that if only all professors stood their ground then
somehow students will be motivated to study doesn't pan out in
practice, though. There is already a significant number of students
who are perpetually struggling. They are missing basic
prerequisites, and instead of catching up on them, they repeated
try and fail at learning the same materials, passing only when they
got a lenient instructor. The problem compounds because failing
brings helplessness and exacerbates their mental issues, which
brings more failing. The university cannot sit on their high ground
and watch these students struggle, especially if their number
reaches a critical mass.
vkou wrote 3 hours 35 min ago:
The universities can just fail them out and admit people who
barely missed the admission bar in their place. Many of them will
make it.
What's wrong with making universities easier to get into, but
harder to stay in?
jobs_throwaway wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
A lot of hurt feelings. Which to be clear is productive. We
treat university students with kid gloves far too much
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
Costs the failing students money and mental health issues,
which are bad, if you care about those things
Ekaros wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
Also these are most likely the first classes. You can not block
most of your entering cohort. Or even any way significant part. At
least in the system these professors exist in. In some other
systems like say German where getting in easy and getting rid of
some is normal would be different.
zdragnar wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been
more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for
entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took
remedial classes first.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
The processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at
the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of
what's happening at their campus ( [1] ): their remedial math
placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in
2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering
grade 1-8 math which had not previously been needed.
URI [1]: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-ad...
firesteelrain wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
The system is working as designed. If they donât want to
provide remedial then they need some pre-admission test to
weed them out. The students can try again later after
maturing more or taking community college classes.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
Right? That's what the source article is about, the UC
faculty would like to resume using the SAT and ACT as
pre-admissions tests.
firesteelrain wrote 59 min ago:
I am more saying that isnât enough. You can get a
sufficient SAT/ACT score and still need remedial training
SoftTalker wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
> 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025
Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from
2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years
behind in everything when they got to college.
vkou wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
Is there a shortage of students who have a grasp of
elementary school math, who apply to UC?
Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who
can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his
boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not
have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied
themselves and passed Math 12?
Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in
California.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
You're misunderstanding the problem. It's not that the UCs
are admitting a bunch of special exceptions who failed out
of high school math; these are people who got decent grades
and are supposed to know the material.
SoftTalker wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
This shouldn't be a hard problem to solve. At the state
university I'm most familiar with, every incoming Freshman takes
a math assessment test. If they don't pass it, they have to take
remedial coursework (which does not count towards their degree
requirements).
And yes, every student takes it, even the ones with high school
AP math and high SAT math scores. The only exception might be if
they have already completed and passed actual accredited
university math courses for credit.
amanaplanacanal wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
Even my local community college does it this way, I believe for
both math and English.
declan_roberts wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
The types of students who are entering college needing dramatic
remedial math are not the ones you want to fail in large numbers.
radiator wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
Sounds somewhat defeatist. Besides, the teacher nevers wants to
fail anyone. Teachers would be happy if all students performed
well.
SoftTalker wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
If I may assume, I think GP is alluding to the likelihood that
such students are going to be minorities from poor
socioeconomic backgrounds. If they are failing in large
numbers, that will open the door to claims of systemic
discrimination.
AlanYx wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
That's presumably why so many professors are banding together for
this letter. 600 professors is a fairly significant chunk of the
faculty.
1970-01-01 wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
That is the entire problem in a nutshell. You cannot reject more
than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you.
everdrive wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
In part this is a consequence of blank slate ideology, which
presupposes that all students are equally capable of identical
outcomes and that individual student failures are always /
usually systemic failures in disguise.
This is a silly perspective, but the blank slate folks really got
their tendrils in just about anywhere. In reality, some people
are simply bad at math. More education will help, but they will
always be disadvantaged compared to people who are more naturally
predisposed. (note, I'm quite bad at math myself)
It may seem altruistic to err on the side of caution here and try
to catch the kids that fall through the gaps, (again, assuming
that they are falling through the gaps due to systemic failures)
but as the article points out, there is a limit to this approach;
eventually it brings the talented students down and degrades the
program.
john_strinlai wrote 4 hours 15 min ago:
>You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year
this seems absurdly low, from my experience. but i have only
taught in one school, so maybe we're the outlier? i would say one
to two failing students per course is the baseline, not the cap.
can you share where you are getting this number from? is that the
guideline where you teach?
1970-01-01 wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
Just use AI: [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://abcnews.com/WN/houston-teachers-fired-students...
hack1312 wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
Deliciously ironic that your âjust use AIâ reply cites a
story that isnât related.
john_strinlai wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
>Just use AI:
your article appears to be about high school?
1 to 2 failing students per course is expected (from lived
experience, not ai)
1970-01-01 wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
HS and undergrad students have overlapping math levels:
Algebra, Pre-calc, and Calc.
john_strinlai wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
we're talking about this claim you made: "You cannot
reject more than one or two students in a year"
which you appear to be basing on a high school article
your ai supplied you, which is irrelevant to how many
students a post-secondary institution can fail per
semester.
overlapping math levels is unrelated.
1970-01-01 wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
Do you disagree with this?
URI [1]: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessio...
john_strinlai wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
it does not claim that professors are only allowed to
fail 1 to 2 students in a year.
1970-01-01 wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
Are you disputing that limit of 1-2 students is
failing factcheck, or that there is no formal
established quota limit? No pressure for teachers
to pass more?
Here's more, spoon-fed style: [1] [2] [3]
URI [1]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/0...
URI [2]: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2008/05/2...
URI [3]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/0...
URI [4]: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confe...
john_strinlai wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
>Here's more, spoon-fed style:
friend, you can just say "oops, my article was
about high school, my bad". no need to start
being a dick.
>Are you disputing [...]
i am disputing your claim: "You cannot reject
more than one or two students in a year or the
school will reject you" (as i have reiterated 3
times now).
you have now morphed it into a completely
different claim, which appears to be something
along the lines of "you should not fail more than
30% of your class". which, for most of my
classes, would be approaching 24 students i could
fail. 12x your initial claim!
scarmig wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and
even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of
thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is
entirely predictable that the student will fail at.
The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how
successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not
to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal
student in the class will pass.
SoftTalker wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
But universities need the tuition to support ever more bloated
administrative hierarchies and salaries. Most are in a state of
abject panic because international graduate enrollments (a cash
cow) are way down in the past couple of years. Staff layoffs
are starting to happen, which were previously almost unheard
of.
throw9494krrj wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular
bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if
university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects!
Universities are business as any other!
account42 wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
At that point you don't have a loan, you have a subsidy.
That's OK though, many countries do have that.
scarmig wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
That would be a reform I'd get behind.
At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders
likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on
likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program.
So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed
to the lender and students likely to succeed.
john_strinlai wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
professors who don't/can't cover their curriculum also get in
trouble. if i had to dedicate half of my classes to reteaching
things the students are required to know before taking my class, i
would not cover what i am supposed to, which then has a knock-on
effect to the classes that my class is a prereq for.
whenever i have had a larger-than-normal percent of my students
failing, i am provided an opportunity to explain it.
btilly wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
When we are put into a catch-22 situation, we should not expect
sympathy from the ones who created the catch-22 situation.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
The full letter ( [1] ) gestures towards "growing pressure to
dilute quantitative rigor". The strong implication seems to be
that some administrators have told some faculty that the failure
rates you'd get from holding the line are unacceptable.
Presumably they don't want to frame this issue as a faculty vs.
administration thing, which makes sense to me.
URI [1]: https://ucstudentsuccess.org/
dmoy wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
This sounds like the real underlying problem then
lokar wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
They should not admit students who have little chance of success
smcg wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
It's difficult to assess which students have a chance of
success without standardized testing.
"In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade
average of 4.0".
Math 2 is the remedial elementary and middle school math course
at UC SD. Lack of standardized testing plus grade inflation
contributes to this outcome.
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
Sure, but these students are likely two groups; those who are
never going to be good at math, and those who were never really
taught math.
The latter may need an opportunity to succeed.
account42 wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
At the university level it should be up to the student to
ensure that they learn what they need.
bmn__ wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
Under the circumstance that the primary and secondary
education levels have failed to adequately prepare a
student for tertiary level, I think your idea would be
unfair.
lokar wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
I agree, but they should be admitted into some special
program. Like, turn up in July for 3 months of catch-up
instruction 4 hrs a day.
Shank wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
It's kind of like how if you owe the bank $1000, you have a
problem, but if you owe a bank $100M, they have a problem. You
just can't reasonably ignore a huge portion of the class as a
professor without a serious amount of documentation, and proof
that you've tried to escalate and solve the issue. Ultimately,
people are paying for these courses, and it's probably better to
teach something rather than nothing.
9dev wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Sounds like people are paying for these courses is part of the
actual problem, then? Students should not have any kind of
entitlement whatsoever to pass classes other than merit.
amanaplanacanal wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
Well... Maybe. From a customer point of view, they are paying
for education. If they aren't getting education that's a
problem.
From a future employer point of view, they are looking for
credentials. But the future employer isn't paying for it.
Do we just admit that the purpose of school is to provide
credentials, and that's what the students are actually paying
for?
9dev wrote 3 hours 39 min ago:
Framing it as a transaction is part of the problem IMHO. We
have a collective interest that the majority of the
population gets the best education possible. Turning
universities into credential stores leads to all the
negative side effects we're dealing with - pay to play
schemes, dubious credential mills, rich families bribing
universities, and so on.
ceejayoz wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
There are several interrelated problems.
conartist6 wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
A particular historical virus comes to mind
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