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.
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.
I see quotes from faculty there about this being "unexpected", like "the bottom dropped out". Are they just pretending to be surprised or actually surprised...
A mixture.
1) They were delusional and thought SAT/ACT scores werent useful signals for selecting qualified candidates.
2) They didn't care and prioritized the ability to admit people based off race and other demographics.
And now they are resolving the dissonance between their mission and admission policy.
Johnathan Haidt detailed this dynamic a long time ago in a lecture at Duke entitled "Two incompatible sacred values in American universities." The incompatible values being "truth" and "social justice."
Even if your family has the money, put that extra 30k in an index and you have a home down payment by the time you finish school.
>Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.
Ehh, you can't balance the world so easily. I was never going to go straight to a 4 year college because I didn't have a stable home situation.
“Meritocracy” at best seems to mean, have a race and gender neutral set of rules, and then follow those rules rigorously. I think it is often tied to admission by test scores, which is I suppose in some sense race neutral. I think this is a horrible idea. Selecting for good test takers even in fields like Maths, Physics does not select for good potential Mathematicians, Physicists etc.
An even worse consequence is test scores is blind to physical fitness and fitness determines so much more about your quality of life than test scores. It is very hard to live a happy and fulfilling life obese, but it’s very easy to do so without a perfect SAT. I would rather, colleges focus on some amount of physical fitness at least to encourage fitness among the populace. But beyond that, in most careers your social skills and social intelligence is paramount, even that is completely ignored by test scores. What sort of “meritocracy” is then admission by test scores.
“Meritocracy” then seems to be the benefit of only a certain kind of person, a conscientious striver or a good test taker who tends to be bad at everything else. People who vouch for it tend to like the current status quo.
Let us say a billionaires son, born to immense wealth and connections, is probably going to have a larger impact to society just by fortune of his birth, by “meritocracy” he is denied admission into college. In this way, meritocracy is not dissimilar to equity, a leveling of the playing field, bring down everyone to the level of writing tests, the “equity” advocates want to create a system that eliminates racial differences, the “meritocracy” advocates want to create a system that eliminates fortune of birth, they just want a different system that often benefits them.
If colleges were optimizing for maximal impact to society and the world, its student body would look radically different than what it is now. There would still be one of math geniuses but there would be a lot fewer perfect SAT scorers, who never end up having much impact on society anyway. They would be far more children born to wealth, connections, but also more social butterflies who can fit into any group. Just some food for thought ;) not saying I agree with the picture I’m painting here. I just find the meritocracy argument self serving and annoying.
Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).
Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.
A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'
SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.
There is a fundamental problem with a good percentage of public schools right now, where the previous expectations of child behavior, learning ability, and classroom teaching outcome has been broken. And instead of coming up with ways to fix that, lots of people are trying to patch the holes at the output side.
Unfortunately, public schools have to serve everyone, including:
-- kids who have learning disabilities, which seems to be disturbingly an increasing fraction of the population, which costs lots and lots of extra money to pay for
-- kids who don't behave properly in school, which is a degradation of the expectations and frankly, reflection of the standards of families at home
-- "phone-it-in"ism of unfortunately a large enough portion of public school teachers, who are a combination of not the best trained, and honestly, not allowed to enforce discipline any more due to "equity" and liability rules that govern this now.
And instead of being able to fix these problems, concerned people try to look at the easier thing to "fix" which is to rig the outcome to "look right". Until it blatantly and obviously fails. And disserves a generation of kids in the meantime with their hypothesis about how it was going to work.
That's why you have dumbing down of entrance standards, as well as avoiding standardized tests (whether for the claimed reason of being "inequitable" or the worse lazy reason of "it's so stressful for the kids").
In the meantime, those with the means take their kids out of public school because no parent wants to conduct the experiment on their own kid.
And you then watch as our society generally falls behind other countries that are not yet so rich that they can afford to have kids failing and still somehow end up somewhat ok in life.
/s
To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus. They explicitly (in the abstract / introduction of their plan) reject the idea that some kids are more talented at some things than other kids, so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something. On a related note, instead of writing some Rust code, today, I think I'll go paint a Banksy or something after I finish my coffee.
That plan caused a lot of uproar and was blocked before being implemented.
Anecdotally, when I asked our local public school for a copy of the curriculum, the teacher said they just teach common core. If you go to the common core website, somewhere towards the top it makes it clear that it is not a curriculum, and just meant to be a lower bar that gets supplemented.
Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.
If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.
Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education. This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).
This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.
The system gets gamified and the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically, every student who can't pay for tutoring or full-time care, which is a very technical form of "excellence".
Most struggling students are not special ed. It's a serious mistake to conflate the two. In many 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.
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.
Top schools aren’t that way merely because of socioeconomics.
You don't get that dedication unless you're at private school. It democratizes private education for the masses. Also have lots of volunteer teachers and student teachers from local universities so the ratio is 1 instructor to 10 students. Special project teacher is a volunteer who is earning her masters at Harvard.
- The 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.
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
Is it easier to hold back talented students with a low bar or push untalented ones to a higher bar?
I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.
When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...
The "levelling" is real in Canada and good private schools often manage to skip multiple grade levels.
Funnily enough, I've seen the opposite in the USA. My highly driven American friends somehow manage to get entire associate's degrees before finishing high school, which is unthinkable in Canada.
Yet, somehow, for math:
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
the only states/territories doing worse at math are DC, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and Alabama.
I'm not sure what Alabama's excuse is, but the other three entries on that list have obvious economic problems (only low income urban, failed power grid, literally blowing away due to climate change).
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.
This seems problematic.
Students' success isn't entirely up to the school. Some areas genuinely need more resources than others.
This system punishes areas that need more resources with by removing resources, likely causing a downward spiral.
A generation of kids is left with poor education before the schools eventually close, and then who wants to start a school in an area that has historically struggled when funding depends on them succeeding?
Based on happenings in other states, when public schools close the schools that take their place are from well funded groups who care more about spreading ideologies than running successful or profitable schools.
California already spends tons of extra money on stuff like special ed, and struggling districts. I wouldn't touch that.
So, if there's a high school in a struggling area and it's graduating kids that can't do 7th grade math, then that opens up funding for charters in that area at 150% state average per student, or whatever the current formula us.
How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare between educational opportunities for their kids?
The status quo says that the schools do not measure outcomes (and when they do, they do not publish it, or publish it on a long delay), so any objective data parents could use is not available.
> An alternative to eighth-grade acceleration would be to adjust the high school curriculum instead, eliminating redundancies in the content of current courses, so that students do not need four courses before Calculus. As enacted, Algebra II tends to repeat a significant amount of the content of Algebra I, and Precalculus repeats content from Algebra II. While recognizing that some repetition of content has value, further analysis should be conducted to evaluate how high school course pathways may be redesigned to create more streamlined pathways that allow students to take three years of middle school foundations and still reach advanced mathematics courses such as calculus.
Nor can I find any evidence that they "reject the idea that some kids are more talented at somethings than other kids". Instead, their FAQ [1] includes:
> All students deserve powerful mathematics instruction. High-level mathematics achievement is not dependent on rare natural gifts, but rather can be cultivated.
> All students, regardless of background, language of origin, learning differences, or foundational knowledge are capable and deserving of depth of understanding and engagement in rich mathematics tasks.
This is not remotely the same as the silly framing of "if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination". It's about not giving up on students who are undeserved by mathematics education as it is currently constituted.
I myself have mixed feelings on "de-tracking" mathematics courses. I benefited from accelerated math classes and would have been bored to tears if forced to take classes at the standard pace. But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding. It's a thorny problem. But this comment adopts the framing of right-wing propaganda rather than the actual contents of the framework.
[0] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathframeworkch8.p... [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp
--
It's not really racial discrimination per se, but there's a strong parental-educational/economic/class element which is still tied to race in the US unfortunately.. It's not reason not to have high school calculus but it's still something to keep in account.
I can’t believe they actually went so far as to dismantle the little haven for achievement that was Lowell high school in SF by getting rid of GPA and entrance exams for a few years. Eventually furious alumni got that idiocy overturned but it should have never happened.
We’re also seeing higher ed address grade inflation by capping As at some institutions of renown.
From my perspective, there has never been any dumber debate than whether 9th grade math is called "Math" or "Algebra". My kids went to high school in Berkeley where Math is just called Math in grades 9-11 and after that you can take AP Calculus or AP Statistics if you want. And this is not Woke 1.0 stuff because the courses have been named that way forever.
I understand the motivation to deny that San Francisco banned middle school algebra: it's embarrassing, and it was disastrous for student outcomes. But it was a very real thing.
(The Lowell debate was a separate thing: should an academic-focused magnet school be able to use a standardized test to determine proficiency? Or should it be a lottery?)
However, you can read the proposal if you want to see what sort of reasoning leads to "UC is admitting students to STEM majors, then finding out the students are not prepared for pre-algebra".
There are people who see massive business opportunities for enriching themselves in privatizing the education system. Some of there points are reasonable, and sometimes they are frauds. Either way, they lobby hard and have a lot of generally Republican politicians in their pockets.
Also, teacher pay is terrible in comparison to the job stress and - reasonably and expected - educational requirements.
The education system is trying to deal with a probably that is out of their control, the increasing wealth stratification in the US, while fending off adversaries that with both good and bad intentioned reasons are trying to undermine the institutions of public education.
At the same time, we have a totally new societal threat in social media. If you haven't read "Careless People", read it. You seem societies around the world locking social media away from kids on the advice of professional groups of educators, pediatricians, and psychologists. There are hordes of irresponsible and negligent parents whose kids are barely functional, and working their way through the educational pipeline.
There is no easy fix here that anyone is missing. In a democracy, this is an existential national crisis, as we are all seeing in real time.
edit: don't ask me who is working on this. It just tells me you are unserious and just complaining. Try google. Hundreds of thousands of people are working on this. Please elaborate on your disagreement with teachers groups (NEA, AFT), the prior administration (American Rescue Plan), or the current administration (ECCA). Or disagreements with AmeriCorps or NPSS as private volunteer service groups groups. Or disagreements with private education advocates (CAPE, NAIS). You may not like all the administrators and principals and teachers as individuals working on it in the system, or PTA organizations outside the system. I could go on all day. But these people are all seriously concerned about the problem, even though they may disagree in areas - you are not special in awareness of this issue.
Find a library that still has a copy of the educational plan California used back in the 1970's, and do that.
At the time, we had the best schools in the country. The state is much richer and has much higher income/sales tax rates now than it did back then. I think that should more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster, though it might mean moving some cash around in the state budget.
Which people are you referring to?
Meanwhile, an anecdote:
11th Grade: Precalculus, all A's
12th Grade: AP Calculus, C average, one D quarter (in the middle of my parents' divorce, onset of body dysmorphia/dysphoria, college entrance applications, senior research practicum)
College Sophomore Year: Applied Calculus, aced, highest final score in the class
Post-college self-study: Failure to advance
Circumstances affect performance.
>so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something
Within the wider historical scope, in America, specifically: yes. Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that. That's why it's systemic. A cold summer day doesn't negate the existence of climate change.
In what situations would you attribute effects to concrete, near-term causes instead or abstract, historical ones? In particular, why do you attribute academic success in some areas to historical racism instead of (presumably) modern poverty? In other words, given a cohort of poor kids and not poor kids, which outcomes of each group would you assign to historical racism and why? In particular, would you expect different groups to perform better or worse after controlling for things other than race and experiences of racism?
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.
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.
Paradoxically, removing test requirements harms underprivileged students the most. Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection. In contrast, building a competitive profile based entirely on expensive extracurriculars, sports, and elite summer camps is far more wealth-dependent. Standardized testing isn't perfect, but it's often the only objective equalizer we have."
When specific exams are abolished or watered down under the banner of 'diversity and equal opportunity,' the wealthy actually gain a massive advantage. Of course, the exam system itself inherently favors the rich as well.
The reason is simple: weakening exams naturally forces the strengthening of alternative metrics. During the transition period when a new system is introduced to society, wealthy parents are far better equipped to adapt than poorer ones.
Korea’s 'Spoon Class Theory' (where rich parents are gold spoons and poor parents are dirt spoons) and Japan’s 'Parent Gacha' (parent lottery) stem from this exact dynamic.
Sure, standardized testing benefits the wealthy because they can hire top-tier tutors. However, when the rules of the system change entirely, the underprivileged simply do not have the buffer or resources to keep up with the shift.
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.
I’ve had my fair share of classes which throw you into the deep end and not many which coddle you. Never seen any professor teaching middle school mathematics. A lot of professors started off with a vague idea of prerequisites, covered the basic ideas and usually go straight into the deep end with new material. It is up to the student to make sure they are acquainted with the prerequisites, go to discussions or office hours to ask TAs or the professor, or just drop the class and do it next quarter (without penalty). At least in my four years at UCLA, we have ample opportunity to do it and the TAs are 90% empathetic towards “stupid questions.”
So in my personal opinion, I think profs shouldn’t be wasting time teaching basic math and there are more than enough opportunities for the student to learn it at their time in the UC.
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).
Briefly, a Stanford-affiliated "researcher" named Jo Boaler produced two deeply underpowered studies claiming to show that putting all students in the same grade-level math course led to better outcomes for everyone — even the kids that would've normally been tracked into advanced math. But she only tested results on grade-level math — of course the would-be advanced kids did better on "grade level" math if they've taken it recently. The loss is the advanced math they didn't take.
Here's an article: https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death...
I fought with my son's middle school administration about this precise issue. It is the stated policy of CA's state level education department to de-emphasize advanced math and tracking, in favor of these deeply suspect ideas. I'm pretty progressive in general, but this is braindead stupid, alarming, and self-defeating. (If you care about equity, you NEED to have options in the public school for the underprivileged gifted kids! the rich kids have lots of options and will be fine.)
It's deeply depressing, but education has long been a weak spot for California; since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think). But to compound that with this wrongheaded, moronic, politically suspect and quantitatively incorrect policy is... infuriating.
Dropping standardized test requirements is disconcerting. Of all of the institutions that should be making decisions neutrally based on the evidence, it’s universities. The fact that even institutions like MIT changed their admissions policies according to ideas that aren’t backed by evidence.
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.
That program is expensive and apparently made people “feel bad”. The colleges were no longer allowed to require placement tests. Then they were no longer allowed to offer remedial courses (courses that did not count toward a degree) and students went directly into college english and math.
The failure rates are astounding. About 1 in 3 at a large CC.
This issue is trickling up from k-12 being required to “pass” everyone to the colleges with that same pressure.
We need our policy to focus on education achievement rather than number-of-degrees. The incentive is short sighted and the ramifications could result in our local economies declining with ineffective employees, fewer successful businesses, etc.
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.
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.
Direct link to its FAQ page:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxdfw0gIE2UW9k5cqtf6FVMaclI...
And here's the slick 50-page, double-column manifesto from the UC establishment, unsigned of course, on the subject -- giving us a sense of the scale of the bureaucratic blob that the petitioners are up against:
https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
I was in 4th grade, but attended 8th grade math, science, English, and history (there was a 4 grade cap until after 8th grade classes) while my homeroom, Phys. ed., and social studies were with my 4th grade age peers.
Some teachers at the school were also accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and for students who were able to take courses which weren't able to be taught, either a professor from the college would come to the school to be taught, or arrangements would be made to bus students to the college.
It wasn't uncommon for students to be awarded a college diploma along with their high school diploma at graduation and there were multiple instances of multiple majors being completed.
Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds, it's only gotten more difficult.
I mean, it seems pretty clear from the last 6 years of experience by professors and others that grades (or at least grades in isolation) aren't a good predictor at all for this. The problem is removing the use of standardized tests here was done for ideological reasons. You can already tell by the use of the word "inequitable" here, because a certain insane subset of policymakers and the public believe that we should push for equal outcomes ("equity") over equal opportunity (usually referred to as simply "equality").
This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people talking about equity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_equity
Providing a hearing aid to someone hard of hearing so they can learn is equity. Their outcomes aren't guaranteed; an obstacle to achieving them is removed.
From the wiki article you linked:
>Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society. Equity proponents believe that some are at a larger disadvantage than others and aims to compensate for this to ensure that everyone can attain the same lifestyle.
> Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society.
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.
Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.
And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students.
0: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
Ancient Hindus divided life into four parts, the earliest was called "Brahmacharya" - core tenet of it was celibacy, but sons of kings and rich merchants lived ascetic lives in the teacher's house who was also an ascetic and a sage - no rich clothes, no luxury foods or comfort.
This was supposed to last till the age of 16, going as high as 21 for some.
The Buddhist monastery-universities of India also kept students under similar conditions - celibate, ascetic, and far from luxury.
A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
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...
Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.
This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not helpful!
Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system nearly entirely for part of the handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on.
Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend to flicker. This is more of a strain.
Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.
My take is that the test won't make kids better at math. At best, it'll drift towards investment in reward-hacking the exam (like it always was).
I think it was idiotic to make it optional to begin with. The stats they're talking about, though, can't be a primarily admissions-signal problem. Whatever they're using these days in lieu of exams are imperfect proxies for math skill, sure, but it's not like they're admitting kids off their CoD K:D. Kids taking APs and stacking extracurriculars are generally motivated. So, if even the motivated ones show up unable to do middle school math, the cause is more systemic than "we stopped testing."
My vote: TikTok brain rot. I build LLM products and I see how the parasocial pull shows up even when the products have nothing to do with companionship. I watched one user obsessively spin up 44 separate chats around a K-Pop vampire character over a week. The product is NOT designed for that. The pull toward frictionless digital reward is just that strong, and that's what kids' attention is up against now. Math is the most effortful, least immediately rewarding thing they do. Doesn't stand a chance against an infinite feed, and I guess infinite vampires either.
Which is why the ask from the faculty is kind of arrogant. The article, at least, doesn't even float a hypothesis for WHY math skills collapsed, simply assuming standardized testing fixes it. I wholly believe in standardized testing — but it measures the problem, it doesn't fix it.
I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.
The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”.
It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.
Teachers don’t make those decisions, school boards do. School boards are elected or appointed political entities.
Teachers are humans just like you, and like or dislike work for the same reasons you do, including your unoriginal display of classic American anti-intellectualism.
All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw and calculate on paper and submit the result.
please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
whenever i have had a larger-than-normal percent of my students failing, i am provided an opportunity to explain it.
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.
"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?
i have
>you did one of the following with that class: [...] Which was it?
these are not the only two options.
We could set up a standardized test for the UC schools ensure that the students being accepted have minimum baseline normalized across all applicants. We could call it scholastic aptitude test or the American College Test.
There was also a real math lecture that went into topics above high school math, but also contained some repetition. All other courses mostly relied on what was contained there.
So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you don't have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to cover the stuff usually needed.
we do! those are dedicated courses, where it is expected that the students are taking it to catch up (i.e. no prereq)
students can also drop a course within the first 4 weeks for no penalty, and retake it in a later semester if they figure out they they are behind and would not perform well.
Do you really think these professors are up in arms about a few students who don't have the prereqs? It obviously must be a large enough proportion to worry about.
It's no longer "if a student somehow makes it into my class", it's "many students are currently making it into my class"
my comment in no way implies that we have don't have an intention of educating our students properly
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.
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?
This is... Wild.
Sports frequently just requires a ball or a place to run.
In both scenarios, you can still purchase better equipment/training. There are very expensive, effective SAT prep options out there for the wealthy.
If you are in a school that doesn’t have a well funded PTA, you are at a disadvantage.
What is the marginal gain of expensive SAT prep? Versus just doing hundreds of mock tests out of some prep book, like SWEs grinding LeetCode?
It was the silly idea that with tests you could produce a fair ordering of students based on potential to succeed.
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.
For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold.
School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health.
We also have very strong incentives as a society, as an economy and as a democracy to have as many educated people as possible, to work on setting the best conditions possible for people to learn
The human body is quite complex as well.
Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated.
The measure (college degree) became a target, and thus it stopped functioning as intended.
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.
That's opportunity, not a guarantee. Yes?
> people without such advantages aren't given special accomodation
They are not - but I'm specifically talking about the reverse case, where people start with extra disadvantages that cause them to start even further behind their peers. Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social contexts.
> factors specific to one's personal conditions should not interfere with the potential of academic success
Equality proponents argue that brick-on-head and no-brick-on-head should be judged by the same standards. Equity proponents argue that brick-on-head should be given advantages over no-brick-on-head to make them obtain substantially similar educational outcomes.
Once again, from your own link:
>Equity recognizes this uneven playing field and aims to take extra measures by giving those in need more than those who are not. Equity aims to achieve equal outcomes for groups, also called substantive equality. Equity aims to ensure that everyone's lifestyle is equal, even if that requires unequal distribution of access and goods.
(And systemic efforts to prevent dropping bricks on childrens' heads in the first place.)
This is a bizarre claim in the second clause. Proponents of equity do recognize that various conditions impact academic potential; otherwise, they wouldn’t attempt to ameliorate them.
You even quoted, “Equity recognizes this uneven playing field. . .” so where did “. . . as much as proponents of equity like to argue otherwise,” even come from?
...and studies show, inferior for recall:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
And yes, every student takes it, even the ones with high school AP math and high SAT math scores. The only exception might be if they have already completed and passed actual accredited university math courses for credit.
Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from 2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years behind in everything when they got to college.
Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12?
Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in California.
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.
Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.
The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.
Universities are business as any other!
At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.
This 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.
this seems absurdly low, from my experience. but i have only taught in one school, so maybe we're the outlier? i would say one to two failing students per course is the baseline, not the cap.
can you share where you are getting this number from? is that the guideline where you teach?
See also: Adele Jones, Steven Aird, Diane Tirado
It's a complete national mess. You don't know what will happen in your school until you do it. Half of the country hates hard teachers, the other half loves them.
your article appears to be about high school?
1 to 2 failing students per course is expected (from lived experience, not ai)
It was all part of the admissions process.
The visible result has been the weakening of these institutions. Do also observe that this is recursive — as these institutions have lowered their standards over decades, the people who go through them and end up leading them are weaker, too.
Eh, somewhat. They want some of those outliers hobnobbing with the legacies.
Is that actually the case?
On the other hand, we have: Allen Iverson, Larry Bird, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Vick, Bo Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Fernando Valenzuela, Albert Pujols, Jim Thorpe, ...
Oh, and LeBron James himself.
Flip answer: the bucket width should be 2.5 times the score improved of a prep course.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m...
> “They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.
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.
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.
From a future employer point of view, they are looking for credentials. But the future employer isn't paying for it.
Do we just admit that the purpose of school is to provide credentials, and that's what the students are actually paying for?
The latter may need an opportunity to succeed.
Plus, for some kids writing a practice exam at home isn’t the same thing as a simulated seating with kids all around and a proctor in the room.
That's awful and unfortunate, but he still shouldn't have an extra hour shaved from his half-marathon times over his competitors, because the half-marathon isn't measuring "How fast could you have run this in an alternate universe where you had no disadvantages". It's measuring "How fast can you run this, full stop."
Poor Black kids who had uninvolved parents that didn't help them to learn math better aren't helped by affirmative action because you're just setting them up for failure in the actual college level math classes they end up in (and are woefully unprepared for). The SAT measures how capable you are at math because that's what matters for college, not how capable you might have been in a different reality.
>Curiously, everyone seems to understand the purpose of handicaps in Golf, but it's an outrageously leftist concept in social contexts.
If I try to join the PGA tour, they aren't going to consider my handicap.
What if we did a better job helping parents with childcare and healthcare?
Because they're effectively what proponents of equity have implemented in practice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...
>What if we did a better job helping parents with childcare and healthcare?
I mean we've already spent trillions on such efforts over the last half century, and the effects have been pretty minimal (and in some cases I'd argue outright counterproductive). See Abbott Districts in New Jersey, the Head Start preschool program, subsidized daycare in every state, etc.
So you agree with the goal of equity, but not the approaches taken so far?
So you claim, but in reality proponents of equity instituted a system that gave Black students a roughly 450 point advantage over Asian students on the SAT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...
Note that the NYT, in their pure, non-partisan spirit of fairness and equity, somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students.
Make up your mind? If their having to score higher than Black students is unfair, how is "Asian-Americans had to score 140 points higher on their SATs than whites" not also unfair?
What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect lifelong achievement? As I noted elsewhere in the thread, wealth (translated to parenting time, tutoring access, better schools, etc.) can help do better on the SAT. How does one account for that?
>What if raw SAT score doesn't perfectly reflect lifelong achievement?
It was never intended to?
>How does one account for that?
It's impossible to account for everything. As much as the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors have attempted to quantify and measure everything, it's simply not possible in reality. If someone could devise a better means of measurement than current standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, I would happily welcome them.
But one thing is pretty clear and certain: the SAT is a far better measure of mathematical aptitude that high school grades, and until better measures can be found and implemented I fully support continuing to use it for college admissions and college math placement.
What's wrong with making universities easier to get into, but harder to stay in?
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.
But we apparently agree that "somehow found a way to describe this as an unfair advantage for White students" is actually accurate on their part?
(The article also openly explains why, if you go past the headline a bit.)
> It was never intended to?
Then we shouldn't use it as such.
I agree that Whites also got an unfair advantage over Asians in college admissions, yes (I haven't kept up with the state of things since some recentish supreme court decisions so I don't know if this is actually still the case).
>Then we shouldn't use it as such.
It isn't used as such. It's used to measure a student's current aptitude in math and English, hence the discontinuation of its use in California leading to the poor math outcomes for students described in the article this entire thread is about.
If university-level classes have pre-requisites that should be taught in high school, then universities should screen for that and disqualify students who do not have the required competency. They should not be taking the students' money, admit them in the institution, and then let them enroll in classes that they are not prepared to succeed in. That's outright extortion. Many of those students have to take on debt to pay for their education, and besides the financial cost, it's a waste of time, and their failures would be mentally crushing and have lifelong repercussions.
I sympathize with educators in that they cannot slow the whole class down, but that's the point: universities shouldn't be putting educators in a position to compromise the teaching. Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences. For the student, that requires a focused (and in many cases, guided) study of those subject areas and before university, without the stress of catching up to university-level courses that are already being taken at the same time.
then why did you accuse me of not intending to educate my students?
>Meanwhile, educators also shouldn't accept that "pointing [students] in the right direction to get caught up" is enough, because objectively speaking, it's not---that is not how a student develops an understanding of maths and sciences.
you havent bothered to ask what "pointing in the right direction" entails, and are making (wrong) assumptions.
It is a skill, but everybody seems to think it will just happen on its own.
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.
Honestly education really feels overthought and micromanaged already the whole setup is unhealthy
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.
The American public education system
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.
may not. I’m not just being pedantic; it’s very important to recognize that being impoverished is not the same as being incapable.
But it does mean you’re living life on hard mode.
But my point was that wealth = a child more likely to reach their potential. That's a real gap, and a real social problem that needs addressed, by the powers (government) capable of addressing it.
However, schools do have a duty to provide a safe and conducive environment for education. Many don't offer that. Many have meals that are inadequate, many have a bullying problem that schools refuse to address, many care more about their sports stars than they do providing equal opportunity for education, etc.
By law, they monopolize up to half of a child's waking life for more than half of the year. This time commitment requires that parents put at least one meal, a substantial portion of the child's physical development, and almost all of their intellectual development (and, by extension, a substantial portion of their behavioral development) in the hands of the school.
If educational institutions are not taking seriously their potential influence on the social outcomes of their students, they're completely misunderstanding the practical mantle they've taken on. And so have you.
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).
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.
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.
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.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Anyway, most of this has to do with the math framework, not the standards.
In wealthier areas of the Bay like Saratoga, Cupertino, Campbell, Fremont, Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamorindia, etc the school districts are only paying lip service to common core and still teaching as they were during my time.
Most students take multiple AP classes (and the HSes usually offer 15-20 APs) as well as attend the local CC, UC Berkeley, or Stanford to take additional classes.
The schools that are militantly common core and trying to remove classes are also (frankly) in crap school districts like SFUSD or OUSD where school board elections are dominated by local activists who oftentimes don't even have kids but are using the board as a stepping stone into local politics, and due to their reputations and low pay are unable to hire teachers for more advanced classes anyhow.
There's a reason the kind of house that would go for $1.5M in Sunset would go for $2.5M in the Peninsula or Tri-Valley.
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.
How convenient.
It's really easy to have good outcomes when you have the ability to curate your student population. And though charter schools are regulated to make it harder for them to curate their student population, the statistical evidence is pretty unequivocal: they serve different populations than public schools, and their "better outcomes" immediately vanish when you control for that.
So, what is the issue with redirecting funding from sucky* schools towards ones that deliver results**?
* Schools that teach the general population
** Schools that teach a subset of the general population that always does better
Wasn't there a failing neighborhood school in LA that got turned into four charter schools that basically rescued the district, without removing any students?
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.
Plenty 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.
The real differentiating factor isn't wealth but simply giving a shit about your children. Parents have to take some minimal effort to enroll their children in a charter school and many simply don't bother.
There are the parents doing heroics that I can hardly imagine, and they should be celebrated. But we need to design a system that provides a sufficient level of support for those families that only have an average level of capacity.
Are you providing after school child care options or transportation to their school of choice? If not, then it’s not a real choice and kids from lower income households will remain disadvantaged.
That is to say, the results will be mostly identical except now public money will be going to private entities. Because that was always the real goal of charter schools.
The “odds” don’t tell you whether or not it’s a “real choice.” Families that value education will take advantage of those opportunities. Families that don’t value education will get what they get.
Lots of families don’t value education and there’s nothing you can do for them. My wife is from Oregon, which has terrible test scores. And as far as I can tell, people there simply don’t care about school. Everyone’s dad is a logger or fisherman or something like that, and putting effort into academics isn’t valued.[1] In that environment, the best thing you can do is have charter schools for the minority of families that care. The alternative is to have shitty public schools that don’t serve anyone well.
[1] My wife did so well on the LSAT she got a scholarship to a top 10 law school. But people back home aren’t impressed. That doesn’t matter to her, because she is extremely internally motivated, but most people just go with their social flow: they won’t work hard for achievements people around them don’t value.
You’re avoiding the point by saying “anyone who cares can,” and avoiding the economics entirely.
Economics can force choices against your own best interests. If you have an hour between shifts and the school is 45 minutes away, you may have no choice.
This is separate from groups of people who don’t value education. This is about where others make that choice for them.
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.)
(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)
I don't disagree.
But at the same time, it's also important to ask: was that child offered to learn and apply themselves in the same, stable environment as a child from a more wealthy upbringing? If the answer is no, that child was done a disservice. If the answer is yes, and they still fail, obviously don't graduate them...
The goal shouldn't ever be "Just pass everyone" it should be making sure that every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
1. give a shit
2. enroll
3. ???
4. PROFIT!