I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates.
University was free and there was no test for enrolling in STEM degrees, and you could retry exams every semester as much as you wanted to. But goddamit exams were HARD and if you weren’t prepared enough you would keep failing until you gave up. We weren’t entitled because we weren’t paying customers.
Also because Italy is Italy we had unlimited beer and wine on tap in the canteen. For real.
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.
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: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
Give teachers authority again. It shouldn't be their problem if a student wants to fail the class.
The problem is that just like students, teachers are not all created equal.
My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years.
I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me.
Activist teachers are also a thing.
I had a teacher the exact opposite. Completely ruthless about you doing the work, but patient and kind as long as it got done- And very pleasent.
education is highly funded. teachers are not paid well because there is a perception that "anyone can be a teacher" (which is true in the sense that there is no particular enumerable qualification or credential that makes you a good teacher) so the market is full of people who decide that they should be a teacher (many should not, but there is no a priori way of knowing). supply high. a lot of education funding goes to things that are not teacher pay.
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?
It is very well funded but the money has gone to the new administrative layers of busybodies instead of the people in the classrooms.
As someone with ADHD I actually somewhat agree.
Not that all cases are simply the natural state of kids, but that it's overdiagnosed for that very reason.
"Oh your kid can't sit still and learn about some artificial topic by staring at whiteboards and pieces of paper all day? Better load 'em up with drugs, they clearly have ADHD!"
> I'm not completely convinced that "ADHD" isn't just the natural state of kids who are bored most of the time.
Sounds like something my Gen X dad, who put zero effort into helping me succeed, would tell me as I failed my way through all school with zero direction or ambition and convinced I wasn't capable of anything useful.
I won't claim more people probably think they have ADHD than actually do, and being bored disproportionately more than most in most situations is absolutely one of the symptoms, but it's a wildly incomplete trivialization of a set of debilitating difficulties that can/do carry long into adulthood. and is heritable.
Boredom and ADHD are comorbid (maybe obviously), but ADHD is a real thing.
I'm not sure if you have seen a kid with genuine bad ADHD then. Absolutely nothing will hold their attention.
No offense but if you haven't done enough research to actually have a studied opinion, maaaaybe you should avoid posting an inane comment about it.
That’s why the same person shouldn’t teach and evaluate the students learning.
It's normal that such teachers exist. But management level should notice this kind of problems and react. I switched classes in age 8 exactly because of that – for some reason a teacher disliked me and/or my behavior and I was moved to another class. No big drama. It was in 1970, Soviet Union.
Which country? (Curious)
> 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.
Of course teaching pre/post-COVID is very different. Studies abound reveal this, as do plentiful anecdotes from both teachers and staff.
> I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
Which distinction can't be made?
> It's exactly because of the politics...
Which politics, concretely?
I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
For those who downvoted without comment: how did I say anything disagreeable, untrue, or otherwise meriting a downvote?
Challenging someone else's lived experience without providing any justification or alternative explanations, would be my guess.
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.
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.
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.
Anathem* for those like me who googled it
God, what a great book, imo. My favorite Stephenson novel.
Mine, too. Cryptonomicon was the gateway drug. But I loved 'Anathem'.
This reminded me of Kvothe from Name of the Wind.
That sounds like the other extreme.
It’s definitely actively bad to involve a device in the vast majority of education. And, it’s 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.
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.
Students also see power drills and cars, and schools don’t 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. I’ve 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 doesn’t take that much time at high school and undergraduate level.
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.
But you didn't include them in your English or Math classes. They were optional courses, and for older students, not K-6.
I learned typing in 3rd grade iirc. That seems reasonable for a fundamental skill.
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.
Why not? I was in elementary school on IRC. ASL ;-) ?
You don't necessarily need a computer for that. They built more than a billion typewriters, IIRC.
When's the last time you played DOOM on a typewriter?
I can already tell that you would've been the equivalent of the adults that made life hell for me as a teen with their awful heavy handed opinions and interjections.
> 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...
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.
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.
> 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.
I chose a hybrid method (I don't study anymore, this is just for personal stuff).
I bought a cheap graphics tablet, and still handwrite my math, but on a digital whiteboard on my PC so I can save and take backups of it, and waste less paper. But I still get the tactility, and its associated benefits (the act of handwriting something helps you remember it better)
> I tried live latexing my math courses
This was by far the biggest time sink in my maths courses, and frankly, a giant waste of time. Sure, the end result looked beautiful but I think I understood less of it than if I'd just written it all down on A4 ruled paper in gel pen.
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.
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.
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.
Genuinely, why not? Seems obvious to me that this would produce better outcomes.
This is how you get people who can't comperhend why they can't open Thesis.LNK from a thumbdrive.
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.
Same. Slowly writing things out by hand is excruciating for me. I would always refuse to do it, even as a kid. Rarely took notes.
>Typing on a keyboard is so much faster and more fluent.
...and studies show, inferior for recall:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
Interesting article, although it does raise a few questions for me. I can see handwriting being uniquely important when learning to read but beyond that it would seem to just be suggesting that directly translating the same note taking to using a direct-mapped keyboard is a bad idea. But what about more complex input methods like for Chinese or a chording stenograph? Is there a distinct point where brain activity pops to wider activity? Do other computer based activities like correcting typos or non-computer activities like wiggling your finger to draw the shape of the first letter of each word engage more activity similar to handwriting? If needing a summary is the main difference, that seems like an easy thing to incorporate into digital note taking.
Learning to read I can see that handwriting directly relates but beyond that it seems like there must be more effective ways to engage with the material than just making the writing method more complex. I'd say the same about lectures; interacting with someone who understands the material can be quite valuable but spending a lot of time listening to the same thing that could be read can't be the most effective way to learn even if the complexity of the transmission does help some with memory. I hope this type of research goes beyond basic handwriting vs typing and looks into the effectiveness of additional ways of engaging with information.
For example, I like "don't guess" as a major principle of learning (per B.F. Skinner) to cultivate awareness of how reliable your memory is and avoid remembering incorrect answers as much as possible. The process of determining and looking up things that you aren't fairly certain about seems like something that could also engage wider brain activity and do so in a way that is more directly relevant to what you are learning.
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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.
I think TI calculators are not a source of distractions the way a phone or a laptop is
It didn't hurt that you can't play Fruit Merge on a TI 84
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.
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?
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.
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.
No matter how you restrict it with MDM profiles, it’s distracting compared to pencil/paper.
Can’t it run restricted to a single application in kiosk mode? Unless the application itself provides distraction, what would be distracting?
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.
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 doesn’t need to use any distracting animations or highlights.
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.
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.
I’m 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.
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.
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.
You can just use a pencil and paper, and it's a lot cheaper?
Yes it is cheaper and who will steal or rob a student of pencil and paper compared to a iPad also pencil and paper doesn’t require age verification.
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.
That's being done, but it would not be sufficient to satisfy the powers that be.
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.
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 — but it measures the problem, it doesn't fix it.
They got rid of paper because teachers are lazy and do not want to spend time grading things by hand.
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 are lazy
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.
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.
> 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.
All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw and calculate on paper and submit the result.
Yes you’re allowed paper. But it’s strictly worse than pure paper as the student is forced to copy the entire problem, possibly with errors.
It’s much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter (replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a geometry problem.
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.
Sorry, but I’m 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
> 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
Visualisation helps of course, but if you want to be good at maths, you need to put the work and try to solve tons of problems. Most of what 3blue1brown shows in his fancy videos are things you can drawn on your own on a paper, and if you've never done it yourself, chances are you don't understand.
The problem with digital tools is that it's easy to get distracted. If you watch 5 minutes of 3blue1brown and then 20 random videos, it's not going to help.
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
Those lectures were the very best I had at uni. Because they were meant to be copied it allowed for two important effects: you process things very differently when writing with you hand, and just copying rather than transliteration from a slide say means you can focus on what is said and what's going on with the math.
For me this meant I recalled it way better. I hardly looked at the notes afterwards, but writing them down were crucial. I also could follow the process and ask questions where I didn't understand a step. When I did review the notes, they were very well structured and thus very informative.
The absolute worst lectures I had were slide-based. I either had to focus on transliteration to notes, but that meant I had to focus on that rather than what the professor was saying. And if I did the opposite I didn't write notes and thus could hardly recall the details if at all.
If you have attention difficulties perhaps uni isn't the place for you.
Truer then you know, however it's essentially a requirement in this day and age.
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).
Uni and high-school are not the same.
>“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,” 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.
Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.
That's presumably why so many professors are banding together for this letter. 600 professors is a fairly significant chunk of the faculty.
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.
When we are put into a catch-22 situation, we should not expect sympathy from the ones who created the catch-22 situation.
Especially when “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." – Upton Sinclair
The full letter (https://ucstudentsuccess.org/) 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.
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.
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.
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.
> No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy.
Aren't the issues that there is no collateral/nothing to repossess? What kind of issuer would give a 5 or 6 figure loan with no collateral and nothing to repossess?
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.
At that point you don't have a loan, you have a subsidy. That's OK though, many countries do have that.
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.
Eh, I don’t know. We’re talking about high school math proficiency here. The upper 80% of students should be capable of passing that, in my estimation. Regardless of differences in capability among that 80% (which I acknowledge!)
>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?
Deliciously ironic that your “just use AI” reply cites a story that isn’t related.
>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)
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.
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.
Even my local community college does it this way, I believe for both math and English.
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.
It seems like the current situation means that processes need to change in a major way somewhere (maybe everywhere) but this report (and the letter) seem to be focused on doing as little as possible to get their part of the system back to the way it was. With this many students it seems like larger structural changes like a remedial year should be considered or else quickly redesign the system in other ways like reducing the focus on directly attending university after high school.
> 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.
The system is working as designed. If they don’t 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.
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.
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The types of students who are entering college needing dramatic remedial math are not the ones you want to fail in large numbers.
Sounds somewhat defeatist. Besides, the teacher nevers wants to fail anyone. Teachers would be happy if all students performed well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
A lot of hurt feelings. Which to be clear is productive. We treat university students with kid gloves far too much
I care about those things but not enough to keep people who can't do the curriculum taking up a university slot.
This sounds like the real underlying problem then
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.
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?
They should not admit students who have little chance of success
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.
At the university level it should be up to the student to ensure that they learn what they need.
If you were never taught math, that sucks, but you shouldn't be admitted to a university. That's just not what needs to be happening. Go catch up on math at your own and reapply when ready.
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.
There are several interrelated problems.
A particular historical virus comes to mind
I was hired in my current role to replace one such professor who was fired because he insisted on giving a majority of his class failing grades. And honestly, it was the right call; he was being kind of unprofessional about it. He was teaching a very difficult subject -- C++ -- as an expert, and then getting mad that people weren't also experts at C++ within 3 months. So I agree that professors should have more control and authority over their classes, but also at the same time those professors who fail large swathes of their classes can be really unpleasant.
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.
> 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?
I had a professor who made sure to give an early exam before the no-penalty drop date, which helps a lot of that test's outcome is predictive of success in the rest of the class. Then people just drop out early if they're going to fail.
Where I graduated, the hardest classes were expected to fail about half of the class
(at least in Budapest, many moons ago) highly technical programs had some really infamous classes. but people had a lot of chances to pass the exams. each semester about 3. and it was possible to take the class 3 times (the 3rd required a permission, but it was formality, it was granted almost to everyone)
so in the end if someone was unprepared, they had at least a year to get their shit together. (but the exams rarely required real maths mastery, mostly rote memorization of proofs and a few typical problem types with really mechanical solutions.)
it's so strange to read about a professor getting suspended for being too strict.
I graduated in Brazil almost 2 decades ago and the only places that suspended professors for being too strict were crappy for profit universities, everywhere else professors could fail the whole class if they didn’t meet standards.
>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.
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)
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.
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.
>So I would fully agree, but I'd also be a bit surprised if you don't have any dedicated "math for scientists"-like courses to cover the stuff usually needed.
we do! those are dedicated courses, where it is expected that the students are taking it to catch up (i.e. no prereq)
students can also drop a course within the first 4 weeks for no penalty, and retake it in a later semester if they figure out they they are behind and would not perform well.
I 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.
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
Makes a lot of sense. I can't imagine giving up significant chunk of my regular teaching for offering remedial math!
Have you observed a reduction in the number of students who match those pre-requisites over time?
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.
What isn’t fair is for schools to take students’ 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
>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
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.
You’re making this about yourself
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"
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?
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.
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.
This isn't high school. This is a college, specifically for STEM majors. At what point does this not apply? Can someone take a high level Spanish course without having spoken a word of Spanish and expect the teacher to cater to them? If not, why not?
> professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students.
Even after admissions, why aren't they using placement tests and prerequisites to handle this? Also why would you try to teach someone middle school math during a STEM class in college instead of just... urging them to drop the class and letting their grades reflect their competency if they choose to stay?
I think because if their graduation requires them to pass that course (and it's a freshman-level course), the university is basically facing a choice of, "teach them this thing", "change graduation requirements", or "either kick the kids out or willfully let them waste 4 years just to not be able to graduate".
Both the latter 2 are big choices for a university administration to make, so it's much easier to ask the professors to make up the difference. That's why it's the faculty and not the admin demanding this; they know what the admins are asking them to do is impossible.
tl;dr: remedial classes are good and some schools are good at them. Admissions question aside, it's not a bad idea to get good at them.
I attended community college in my hometown, as well as a university elsewhere, and eventually completed my undergraduate education.
While I attended the community college, which openly advertises that it has no admissions requirements at all, I also worked there as a tutor in math. Since it had no entry requirements, the school had decent placement tests and a pretty damn comprehensive suite of remedial math courses. Some of the students I tutored were studying arithmetic (negative numbers, exponentiation), and some were even practicing how to pronounce and write out numbers by name in English and map those to Arabic numerals. There was no amount of ignorance that could make you unteachable there, as far as I could tell; you just had to find the right course.
Their math classes also included stuff you'd normally take at a university: when I was there, I took first-order logic, differential and integral calculus, vector calculus, systems of differential equations, statistics, discrete math, and probably some others I didn't take or forgot about. Some of those courses I had to retake at university anyway because of transfer credit limits and things like that, and in some of those cases, the community college version was actually better anyway (the university ones were fine).
I think it's awesome that the school had really weak admissions and really strong placement, and that it can take an earnest and reasonably intelligent high school dropout from the basics they missed all the way to being ready to dive into upper-division, in-major courses in STEM at a university.
It seems like that's an unspoken possibility for universities, too. Round out the catalogue, beef up placement exam regimes, further partnerships with local community colleges, lean into early exams and pre-tests within courses, and when students prove to be really unprepared, direct them to an appropriate class. It's not a matter of "waste 4 years just to not be able to graduate", it's "okay, it's going to take you longer to graduate because you have to take this detour in this subject area, so here's what your path now looks like". And of course dropping out or trying and failing are still (painful! expensive!) options, as they always were.
I'm not saying this is easy or cheap or a responsibility I expect universities to want. But "teach students the thing" can be a much saner option than the article seems to describe, which is hijacking existing courses that are purportedly focused on something else in order to teach their prerequisites inline.
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).
> 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".
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.
"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.
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.
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
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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.
I've always thought we should get rid of grades altogether. There should be curricula that builds upward but if a kid masters 4th grade math, they should move on up right then, not wait for half a year to join 5th grade or have to retake 4th grade. Obviously there are operational challenges with this but it's got to be better than having bored advanced kids, the shame of being "left behind", etc. The kid with dyscalculia should be able to move at their own pace.
But maybe they don't need to attend completely different schools, either.
> What sad place do you come from?
The American public education system
> Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.
Regrettably. A place where money rules and brains die
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I'd be fine with that. It would provide an incentive to care about the bottom 75th percentile along with the spoiled rich kids
The current situation, where students succeed regardless if they completely failed to learn and do zero work is also pretty bad
> 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.
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.
I’m not going to defend the broader plan (I don’t believe in it, or at least, I haven’t 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 “fail” for the school, right?
Then, the incentive would shift to prevent the students they don’t want from entering the school in the first place. Which could be a real pain for the students. But, this does seems like it would incentivize the schools to do what the original poster wanted, check that the incoming students actually learned what they were supposed to.
This already happens — 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.
Public school districts cannot expel students in California.
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.
> the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically
Top schools aren’t that way merely because of socioeconomics.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It’s also fraught because schools will spend increasingly large fractions of the time preparing kids for tests instead of teaching them anything.
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.
Wasn't this the plot of the Wire season 3 or something?
It is one part of the plot that focuses on inner city schooling in season 4 :)
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.
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. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14629696/)
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.
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.
>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.
Ideally, schools shouldn't have to fix every social problem, but in practice, in modern day America, schools are stuck being the backstop. Schools shouldn't have to provide breakfast to kids, but they do because we keep cutting SNAP and other basic assistance programs. So schools need to pick up the slack, because you can't teach a kid if they're starving.
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.
> A child from a wealthy family will reach their potential, where one from a poorer family will not.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It's actually zip code.
Almost everything is correlated with zip code, most especially SES, so this comment doesn't really say anything.
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.
I attended and have worked in US public schools, so I have a very clear picture of why a lot of students are not performing well.
Intelligence is strongly hereditary, I haven't seen proof of anything beyond that.
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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.
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
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
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.
I don't know, was there? Do you have a link?
The other LA (Louisiana) had lots of evidence to the contrary. If you force charter schools to participate in a lottery, they almost always come up worse than the public schools (there was a single exception).
We saw this happen in Houston. Many of the worst public schools suddenly "improved". It's a miracle! Oh, they did this by encouraging the lowest performers to drop out. Whoops.
And this is before we start talking about all the high GPA students who now all magically need IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) because it gets them an extra 50% of time on their tests. So, now you have your best students loudly (because these parents are active) soaking up lots of resources genuinely meant for your worst students.
I believe the evidence claimed is that there aren’t 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 don’t necessarily benefit from being in a team with other 6 foot players, but I’m saying people should apply for my team because I’m doing so much better than the team that can’t make those weeding out decisions. I’m intentionally conflating the success of my capacity to select for success with my capacity to coach a team.
It’s 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 shouldn’t be in the same classroom as those who are struggling for all of their classes.
People don’t like to talk about gifted kids, except to imply that being “too smart” is somehow bad or unfair, and I think it does them a disservice.
Gifted kids get very, very bored, and lose interest quickly, when they aren’t challenged.
Taking you at face value, the first step is to address the framing here:
'redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results'
You are advocating for draining public education. That's the position this takes. And you believe it's better to give it to private education, all for-profit entities. So you have to recognize that the position here isn't "give more money to better schools" it's "give money to private for-profit companies and take it directly away from public education"
'allowing school choice for students'
But the bigger problem is that it directly harms public education. So then what happens is that public education gets _worse_ at the expense of the people who can afford private schooling.
So all this to say, defunding public schools is not a good position, and they are doing everything they can to try to dress it up and muddy the conversation.
Because it’s 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 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.
Surely it’s 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?
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.
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.
In your vision how do you force the charters to accept a representative sample of students? Or do you not force them, and allow them to recruit the easy to educate kids and filter out the expensive kids?
> 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.
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 “you don’t belong here” is a thing. The rich schools are in the rich places. The poor schools are in the poor places. The outcomes—often—not always, but often—reflect 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 “have it more together”?
Another is the idea that schools are motivated by money in the same way profit-seeking ventures are. A company’s shareholders might respond to financial threats and incentives, but the teachers on district-regulated wages? What’s the phrase, can’t squeeze blood from a turnip?
Then there’s of course the construct validity of standardized tests as a measure of “suckiness”—they’re easy to administer at scale and to compare across years and between schools—but do they really capture every flavor of good work that’s done at a school? They’re the best thing we have, but does that make them good enough?
The main issue, though, I think we can frame in terms of a slightly different legibility issue: since the school is the only variable we directly control, we model the school’s “suckiness” as a function of its… what, budget? Staff bonuses? Whoever exactly is it who we’re proposing to punish by removing funds? But just as I imagine we can think of kids who would be fine either way—one of the less provocative stereotypes that comes to mind is that of a Tiger Mom kind of community—we can probably think of kids who won’t be fine. The less provocative stereotype that comes to mind is a child with special needs: with an aide, maybe that child may develop enough to participate in society, and we’re a more humane and moral society for trying. For that matter there are other children who are living and growing up in situations where survival is always going to come before their test scores—and those are probably the students with guardians least equipped to exercise “school choice.” How does punishing their school improve those kids’ outcomes?
Often students who perform poorly need more resources, not fewer.
…are a few of the counterarguments, anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love to see the true colors of this vile place when topics like this come up.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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"
The case for closing down public schools and replacing them with a for-profit child education industry is that it's systematically easier for all parents to get a better education for their children by abandoning bad schools and only paying good schools in a free market, than it is for parents to participate in the mass political process of fixing public schools, which are government institutions intended to serve a broad mass of people.
Also because different parents have different ideas about what constitutes a good education for their kids, different private schools can differentiate themselves in the marketplace by specializing in different styles of education and attracting different student bases; rather than parents having to democratically coordinate to enact the changes they want in the same mass-scope public school system (and fight against rival groups of parents who want incompatible things).
Self inflicted injuries. Bunch of the public schools in large metro areas have removed their gifted and honors programs. Seattle and NY. That will force people into private schools or charter schools. Some districts talked about removing pre-calculus, thats will force kids as well. Dumbing everyone down to the lowest common dominator isn't the solution and public schools should fail if they keep that up. Its banning schools from having separate JV team and varsity team forcing all the athletes into the two teams without looking at ability. Unfair for everyone.
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> 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.
It could also be that fewer of the sorts of people who choose to live (or can afford to live) in places like Saratoga and Cupertino are having children at all.
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.
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.
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.
It is smartphones and social media.
The decline is across demographics, across geographies, and correlated with an increase young mental health issues.
The answer is staring us in the face, quite literally, as we type this. We put a cheating and dopamine producing machine in the hands of children without any regulations. Of course it is harming their academic performance.
Ask a football coach if there kids are going to play tackle football and you'll be surprised how often you they won't let them. Ask an educator or psychologist at what age they give smart devices to their kids, and I'd guess it is 3-4 years above the median.
The policy doesn't matter when we're actively damaging the brains of children, which are not fully developed.
Did that "old, failed policy" yield better results than the current one?
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> though there isn't really any serious dispute about it factually
citation sorely needed
Wow, what a position
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The actual alternative is to provide resources to schools that are in bad areas. And to provide resources for people in those areas themselves.
Resources != funding
Resources means teachers qualified, able, and willing to teach in those areas. That probably means paying them more than a similarly qualified teacher in an area that is currently doing better and hence more attractive. But it also means finding head teachers (principals in the US?) who can inspire the whole school, staff, pupils, and parents. Such people are not thick on the ground. And then you have to have stability.
Mere money will not do it, everyone has to work for it.
Because there is such good precedents that providing unlimited resources to troubled areas actually fix problems.
As others have told you, there is no evidence that increased school funding in and of itself results in better results.
Contrary to what is often said, there is no shortage whatsoever of funding for public schools in urban areas. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US. <https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...> Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
It sounds like you have some particular groups in mind.
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.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...
In British Columbia there is no special ed and there is no gifted program. It is a total train wreck. After the non-verbal autistic causes everyone to leave the classroom for the 5th time that day it gets really old (I’m not making this up).
I was a terrible student until high school — where I could start entering into college classes and/or skip classes — because the pace was too slow and I got bored and caused issues. Having the opportunity to do advanced classes was a huge gift for me and my peers I no longer disrupted.
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.
They reversed the lottery thing after just two years as a failure and reinstated the previous policies.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m...
> “They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.
> I 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.
> ... 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.
They defined equity as Fair outcomes, treatment, and opportunities for all students.[1]
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?
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).
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.)
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Innocuous at first glance, but you can see how it could be manipulated into justification for banning advanced math classes and other bad ideas.
People have more wildly different definitions for "fair" than "equity".
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.
> 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
The most important factor isn't the schools, it is the kids themselves.
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:
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).
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. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
California had below average (for US states) school funding per student until recently: https://edsource.org/2026/california-education-funding-rise/...
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.
I am agreeing with you - the funding gap is one of the causes for under-performance.
I think you also named Alabama's problems. It's one of the poorest states and seems bound and determined to stay that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No. It's largely the environment that the parents create. Which is why the equity vs equality arguments are bullshit. If I can afford to hire the best tutors for my children and sign them up for summer classes as well, is it really "equal" when they dominate the tests and edge out other kids from opportunities? No. It's because of my financial situation and the opportunities we're able to afford and willing to sign them up for which the majority of Americans cannot. But because everyone takes the same test we can pretend it's "equal".
> "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
> Stephen Jay Gould
No one in my friend group got any SAT tutoring yet the worst person was still 95 percentile. The tutoring argument is overblown. Testing is one of the great equalizers. Us nobody suburban kids had just as much of a chance as the rich prep school kids. Despite the fancy tutors we still outscored them.
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.
> 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 I’m the person who said underperforming kids should be put in work programs or mental institutions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060371).
I should’ve chose better words, so let me clarify here: there should be tiered schools, all funded in relation to how many students they have. One school for gifted students, one for second, … down to “schools” that teach vocations, then “schools” where students play around and see therapists, both for students who aren’t learning even with an IEP.
This is roughly what some European countries like Germany do. Although unlike Germany, I think they should start earlier and allow movement up for students that show improvement.
Ultimately, no student should be educated below their level. LLMs allow a decent teacher to teach at the PhD level (and IME most teachers are decent, because most become teachers out of passion).
> 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.
"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.
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.
Equality is more expensive. It’s 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s an interesting contrast to what I perceive as an issue where I am.
Where are my kids go to school there’s plenty of classes for gifted kids (as in kids who excel in a traditional school environment). And there’s plenty of help for kids with challenges.
But it feels like there’s really nothing to try to move the needle for anyone else, anyone not super motivated or with specific challenges.
If you doing “ok” nobody cares.
> 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.
Can you provide a link?
Give the money to the parents in the form of income-adjusted vouchers to spend on education as they see fit.
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.
> 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).
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.
I think you have equity and equality exactly reversed
No he hasn't.
> 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.
> 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.
The results were predictable and predicted but politicians, state and local went whole hog on equity. That along with NCLB results on this catastrophe. We’re finally seeing some needed pushback. You can’t just hand out As to everyone and pass everyone as it’s a kindergarten assignment and then expect excellence. You’re teaching people who will become adults and you’re shortchanging them on skills if you don’t require proficiency. It’s also unfair to apt students who put in the time to learn and do well.
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.
The equity vs equality argument only ever seems to be brought up by people clueless about both. They seem to think "equality" is fair. As in, anyone who can pass this arbitrary test is qualified and that is fair and just. Despite the fact that these tests have been deliberately designed for generations to be both subjective and exclusionary. But there is one test that everyone needs to pass so it's "fair" to these people.
I own the house I live in because of the school district it put us in. It allowed my children to literally walk a couple blocks to their elementary school. I can afford to and do send my children to all the extra-curricular learning opportunities I can. And they have latched onto it and started asking for more things in the areas they are interested in. I can send my children to all the fucking dance or music lessons they can handle. I buy them literally every book that they ask for. My children are in the top 5% of every fucking metric, but it has nothing to do with "equality". It has to do with the opportunities we've been able to afford them. Opportunities that the vast majority of Americans cannot or will not follow up on. But people like you are willing to judge those kids as less deserving because they don't pass some arbitrary fucking test that I have been preparing my kids for their entire lives. But that's "equal" and "fair". Unlike "equity" where we take other things into consideration.
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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.
How is underperforming/disadvantaged minorities not diversity?
Also, I don’t think there’s a problem with using athletics as a criteria for admission.
Other than that, I completely agree with you.
>underperforming/disadvantaged minorities
Underperforming with a standardized test floor, i.e. for tier1 PRC universities this is lowering bar for minority to 99th percentile instead of 99.9 percentile. They filter before tertiary with programs that find all the high performing minorities in poor/disadvantaged regions and throwing them into subsidized boarding schools in wealthy provinces with better academic pipelines, i.e. ensuring they still enter university fully prepared instead of lowering floor to 80th percentile SAT math scores that on paper is good enough but in reality is borderline remedial stupid for university math. Hence PRC STEM has negligible drop rate vs west.
As for athletics, I think it's sensible for US who tightly coupled university economics with (some) sports that it makes sense for some athletes, but that's an... unusual arrangement.
Standardized testing is usually foiled by Goodhart's law. If the outcomes of the tests matter, schools start focusing on test prep, at the expense of actual education. It's probably necessary to have one set of standardized tests for college admission, but otherwise they should be abolished, because they are a terrible idea.
Separation of responsibilities is the actual key to good public schools. At least to the extent politicians and administrators can solve the issue. There should be a central entity that sets most of the curriculum and monitors and audits the entities that run the schools. And it must have the power and the resources to intervene if it determines that a school is not performing as expected.
Test prep and actual education don’t have to be all that different. If the test is hard and comprehensive (ie random enough) preparing for the test will teach you a lot. You see this with the SATs where people preparing for it digest 3000+ vocabulary words, write tons of sample essays and really dig into grammar. Same with the MCATs, foreign doctors spend 1-2 preparing for the MCATs and because the tests are so comprehensive you end up learning everything you need to.
Also, I think another very important thing is Asian students rely very little on the quality of the teacher. A lot of the work is self work and extra curricular tuitions. The average Asian is done with school and then goes to two or three hours of additional tuition. This isn’t like the bottom 5%. This is 95% of the student body.
I think you’re drawing too much of a distinction here. Education can be just learning for the test. What you’re being tested on can be the entirety of what you need to know. It’s working extremely well for all of Asia. There’s no reason we can’t take away something from that.
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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.
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?)
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".
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.
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.
> 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]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...
[1]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/lcffoverview.asp
[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...
[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/
> The people working on this aren't idiots.
Which people are you referring to?
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.
> 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.
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] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathframeworkch8.p... [1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp
> 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.
Why do you even need higher education if you can brain drain educated people from India?
Why so complicated? I thought the idea was to rent intelligence from OpenAI.
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>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.
> 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:
https://www.cafoodbanks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SB138...
I haven't checked food insecurity rates since then, but you may have noticed that food collection barrels have become rare around the holidays. At least for a few years, the food banks in Silicon Valley were truck-constrained, not food-constrained, so those barrels weren't worth the effort.
You’re 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 can’t get a bunch of random people to write production ready code in a month ( maybe JS, but not Rust).
Public schools can’t pick and choose students. Charters sorta can.
If I ran the school system I’d set up *paid* apprenticeship to job programs in high schools. Actually get these kids real careers. You SHOULD be able to afford an apartment with a high school degree.
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.
> 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?
Wrong premise. Near-term and historical causes are intertwined, inexorably-linked. Both cohorts are the result of historical racism. Hence,
>Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that.
I would expect the continued, sustained, and unburdened efforts to address and undo the effects of the policies and behaviors that make up what we know to be and have been systemic racism are necessary in order to remove historical racism as a cause of contemporary circumstances.
If understand you correctly, your answer to my question would be "never", that is, you would always attribute some blame to historical causes. Okay.
I am left with more questions, however. To paraphrase your final paragraph, you expect that efforts to undo the effects of past racism—those effects which we collectively call systemic racism(?)—is necessary to snip that past racism from the causal chain to present ills. But I'm left wondering if this language of systemic racism is even particularly useful in describing the situation.
That is, it seems the manifestation of this framing is to address these downstream effects (poverty, etc.), none of which are inherently racial, but affect educational outcomes. But it seems to me that framing the problem nonracially and focusing solely on the proximal causes of educational issues has the same (or better!) manifestations as the racial framing.
In short, I feel the systemic racism framing is unproductive, because in a prudent implementation it merely adds discussion of distant causes, while identifying the same social issues to address. In an imprudent implementation, it would not only cloud the field with historical discussion, but distract from important proximal issues which don't fit the historical frame, while at the same time alienating people who feel excluded or infantilized or condescended upon based on their immutable characteristics, which is scarcely outweighed by a possible ethnic rallying effect which could boost participation.
I think I need to provide a concrete hypothetical to tidy up. Consider a cohort of struggling students in Virginia, say, old coal town. The sociologist correctly identifies historical racism as a factor in some of the students' issues. So they... what? Acknowledge it? What for? They begin their real work addressing (somehow, idk) the homework environments kids have, their encouragement to succeed, the parents' support, school supplies, whatever. And race comes into the calculations exactly... never. I imagine it would be very disturbing if it did. "We're gonna help the black kids first because Jim Crow happened and that means they need it more." Well... maybe! Why make the approximation? Just focus on the proximal causes and get a precise prescription, no need for rounding.
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).
>You're arguing that teaching calculus in public school is a form of eugenics.
If that's your assessment, then you are, ironically, yourself proof of the failure of the American education system. (If you were educated in it. If not, you're proof of the failure of whatever system you were educated in.)
There is no reasonable read of the previous message that could lead the to conclusion that that was its argument. None. Zero.
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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.
> 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.
Afaik China has widely carried out this same experiment to basically the same effect, across multiple disciplines. It's the push for so-called "happy education", which involves the relaxation of exam standards inside public schools, and has led to more after-school tutoring to make up the gaps, for families who can afford it. Lowering the common standards simply doesn't really work when there just aren't as many seats in universities as there are people who want to attend them.
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.
FWIW: A few nearby towns that are supposed to have good schools: Castro Valley, Albany, Alameda.
Private schools are not all created equal. And the admissions gauntlet can be a special kind of hell.
Can you speak more to the gauntlet? Had a bunch of friends go private in SF this year and other than “play date interviews” it seemed like a breeze?
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.
We've heard:
- It can make kids "overconfident when they see material they think they already know, so they end up not engaging."
- Some programs, particularly RSM, are criticized for valuing speed over depth. Current culture for K-8 math teachers is the opposite, they value depth over speed.
Left unsaid:
- It can make the teacher's job harder when the class has a wide span of abilities.
- Current teaching culture is skeptical of accelerating and/or skipping grades in math.
Notably, we've never heard English teachers be upset about a kid reading a book outside of school that's above grade level, or using advanced vocabulary in an essay. They tend to praise it.
Maybe part of it is that math is objective and writing is subjective? A math teacher could be called out by a 13 yo for “being wrong” but for an English teacher, what is “wrong”?
Got it, thanks for the response - I think my honest reaction is shocked by reading this. I was always good at math and it was such a source of pride and sense of accomplishment. In english I struggled, vowel sounds, grammar, it just didn't come naturally to me. I'm a little disheartened by this slide (for lack of a better word) of public school education, especially STEM.
> valuing speed over depth
have you shown them the lengths of the homeworks RSM gives? vastly more depth than any hw a public school would give imo.
I believe there are some public schools that have stopped giving homework for k-5 completely which is just shocking to me.
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.
https://www.mathschool.com/blog/parent-resources/what-is-rus...
> 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)
So just to be clear, I guess the issue isn't so much SAT or placement tests as it is that there's no functional baseline level of knowledge without some kind of entry exam, and without that there's no functional boundary on the starting place or length of time it will take to get a degree. So some level of entry exam is needed to avoid rebuilding a new remedial version of K12 education inside of every four year college?
I think the focus on the SAT as a mechanism for this detracts from this as the SAT isn't really an designed to sus out topical placement, right?
It's at least a standard, and that's the important part. Narrow down what exactly the best way to tell is later, the SAT fits the bill of good enough to re-impliment quickly.
I’d say written tests is a common thing in many countries, and at college age you really should be doing more than multiple choices
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.
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.
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?
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.
The ideal of education is holistic growth, but functionally, it's a positional good. An Ivy League, MIT, or UC Berkeley degree is valuable precisely because others do not have it, not simply because you do.
Add to this the fact that global productivity is maxed out, yet access to the tools of production remains highly restricted. This is the core issue. If the number of good jobs is fixed, hiring is a zero-sum game.
When education becomes universally accessible, we don't get equality; we just get higher hurdles. Just look at the dev industry. It used to be that knowing a local CMS was enough to get a job. Now, you are forced to grind leetcode and memorize the deep architecture of tech stacks you'll never actually use just to pass the filtering process.
I don't think there's any real solution to this inequality. It's a reality, and any attempt to 'solve' it is bound to fail
So your post got flagged, and I wonder what was controversial about it.
Wouldn't you agree that this zero-sum quality ultimately stems from increasing wealth inequality?
While scarcity is a reality indeed, more egalitarian societies, where life can be satisfactory whether you've studied with billionaire kids or in your town's vocational college, the issue is much lesser.
I'd argue measures that reduce wealth inequality would be the solution.
I'm from Korea, and people often flag my comments as 'GEN AI' I really don't care about the reports. It just happens because non-native speakers tend to rely on the same formal dictionary words that LLMs use. Regardless of that, here is my take: the extreme widening of wealth inequality is a serious systemic issue
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.
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Insightful.
I wonder if there will come a time where being conservative is seen as being on the side of the working class, the poor, and the disadvantaged, because inequality is so far gone that any change to the system is too likely to be exploited by the ruling class/the rich and make things worse.
Arguably, some must already feel this way.
This is criminal that these students aren't graduating with a solid math education, regardless of what major they are going into. Math isn't only for STEM majors! Fix k-12 for everyone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>Awwww, poor throwawaypath, you're so downtrodden and oppressed :(
Stop projecting. Not everyone is as miserable as you.
>If you're going to be racist online, at least have the backbone to say it outright.
Demographics are destiny. Import the third world, you get third world results. Nothing about that statement involves race.
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.
Thanks for chiming in Young Sheldon
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
What do you mean people used to do a lot better? As far as I know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect 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.
Before devices and AI came. we're seeing a reversal of the Flynn effect trend
As a product of the STEM post-SAT UC system (UCLA ‘26), I never personally experienced “middle school math” being taught or a lack of mathematical understanding.
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.
Thanks for sharing your post-SAT experience and it's similar to mine (UCD engineering '14). The article mentions "middle school math" for people in first semester calculus but doesn't specify which calculus series. There were at least three when I was in undergrad: engineering/physics/math, biology/life-science, and business/econ series.
"In 11th grade, the most relevant grade relating to college readiness, 30.5% of students met or exceeded math learning standards. Of these, nearly half exceeded the learning standard — marking them as likely to be the best prepared for a college STEM major."
Politicians in California want the ethnic mix of students at public universities to reflect the ethnic mix of the state population. They cannot achieve this goal if colleges use academic preparedness as the main factor in admissions:
https://tools.encona.com/caaspp-explorer#slots=state%7E76%2C...
Academics presumably have multiple reasons to want students showing up having mastered the prerequisites of whichever class they're taking.
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 “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.
MIT dropped the SAT requirement only to bring it back a few years ago: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our....
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.
Isn’t this contradictory to your point? They dropped it, collected data, and then reverted when the evidence suggested they made the wrong choice.
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 couldn’t tolerate the burdens of not screening students properly.
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.
That was a coincidence. MIT announced it was dropping the SAT on March 20, 2020, just a day after the first statewide lockdown order. The announcement says that they had already planned to make the change before COVID: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/a-special-announcement... (“And last, but certainly not least: I know we are making this announcement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We had already been planning to make this change…”)
The UC system dropped the SAT in May 2021, in a settlement of a lawsuit that argued standardized tests were discriminatory.
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 I’m not sure how well of a predictor high school is.
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.
But were those folks members of politically desirable racial groups? Or were they Asian?
It is depressing but not surprising.
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).
> I remember decades ago when I started high school. We were all given laptops
Decades, plural? Perhaps that could happen two decades ago, but I doubt much more than that. Three decades ago you were lucky if your school had a computer lab.
Two decades ago “given laptops” — astonishing. I graduated a shade over two decades ago and most of my classrooms didn’t have a single desktop computer, let alone were students “given laptops.”
> "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,” 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.
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.
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.
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.
> It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA
I think it's because socioeconomic status is much more correlated with tests (40% of variance explained) than grades (<10% of variance explained): https://cshe.berkeley.edu/news/family-background-accounts-40...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qeeeGJ4100oM-mK0g-1Z34VqEaF...
I'm surprised the correlation between SES and grades is so low.
Its because the people pushing for these changes are privileged and stupid, so they want the most gameable version to still be there ie GPA and extracurriculars and not the SAT.
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.
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.
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 — 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.
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]: https://reason.org/k12-ed-spending/2025-spotlight/
[1]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...
[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...
[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/
This is interesting news to me, thank you. I'm curious if the per-pupil spending includes locally raised funds; the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor, and districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate. So public schools function as local charities and inevitably have fundraising arms to make up the shortfall. This has been true since at least the 1980s when I was in school, and is definitely still true today.
> the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor
No, it really isn't. Again, just mandated Prop 98 state spending on K-12 is $127.1B for next year, with this year's enrollment at just about 5.8 million students. That works out to $21k per pupil not including all discretionary state spending, federal spending, and other local funding (like the fundraising you're talking about).
> districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate
Since 2013, under the LCFF, districts with a very high amount of property tax revenue only get "basic aid" from the state, but this is only a small fraction of school districts. Anyway the funding disparity is the entire point of the LCFF: The idea is to give rich districts less and poor districts more.
It's frustratingly difficult to get my fellow Californians to understand that our schools are, if anything, over-funded, and that throwing ever more money into the black hole is unlikely to improve our abysmal outcomes.
Your situation is a good argument against the equity-focused LCFF. It's such a HCOL area that despite having high property tax revenue vs. the rest of the state, your district really should be funded at a higher level. Unfortunately I have little hope of Californians abandoning their zeal for punitive equity any time soon.
It is indeed indisputable that education is not well-run here. But it's not going to be easy to fix. For starters, nearly 100% of the people I talk to about this issue believe, like you, that the problem is Prop 13 and underfunded schools. I don't know where this idea came from but it's remarkably pervasive and consistent across demographics.
But the biggest problem IMO is that the education administration mafia has a stranglehold on our one-party state and things are broken just the way they like it.
Your comment prompted to look into this further, thank you. The funding situation in California is complicated and weird, but yes, CA does spend a lot of money on public education.
There are weird relics of the underfunded past, but you can’t blame the educational failures on lack of budget.
Something many people here miss: UCSD is a selective institution. UC San Diego’s most recent published first-year acceptance rate is about 28.4% for fall 2025, based on 136,740 applicants and 38,846 admits. UCSD’s own admissions page also summarizes this as a 28% admit rate. The lousy students aren't even going to apply since they know they will be rejected. So we are not talking about an open enrollment institution where you would expect a significant number of students to need remedial math help; we are talking about the cream of the crop of California high school graduates many of which don't know high school math.
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 it’s set at a local level. There’s AP, but that’s not universally available.
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.
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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.
We didn’t have a community college, or any college, anywhere close to where I lived. Instead, I, probably like many others here, dove into computers and programming on my 33.6 kbps modem.
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.
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.
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.
The open letter from UC faculty is here.
Web site built for the petition campaign:
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...
> 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.
The November report mentioned in the article goes into (disturbing) details: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
> 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
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.
Memorizing binary would certainly revamp the A in STEAM.
STEAM takes STEM education a step further by integrating “Arts” into the
acronym, encompassing language arts, drama, graphic design, visual arts,
music, and new media.
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!
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.
True. COVID has set the entire cohort back, in terms of education but also every other aspect of personal development.
>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").
> 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.
>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.
Note: everyone can, not everyone will.
That's opportunity, not a guarantee. Yes?
Saying "everyone can" is not incompatible with intending to force the issue.
The claim "Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society." demonstrates a clear intent to force the issue. "Equality of outcome" could not possibly be more clear or explicit of a phrase.
But what's the rationale in removing advanced math or objective measures of talent such as SAT tests?
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.
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.
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.
>Providing a hearing aid to someone hard of hearing so they can learn is equity. Their outcomes aren't guaranteed
from your cited wikipedia page: "Equity is equality of outcome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_equity#Equity
giving somebody a hearing aid is basic decency, but will it erase all deficits, guaranteed? no.
IQ is a different page of the book, it basically says that a kid with a high IQ who needs a hearing aid is likely to do better on the SAT than a kid with a lower IQ and perfect hearing. Sadly there is no "IQ aid". But just as families with a Down Syndrome child love that child every bit as much, IQ is not a measure of worth as a human, but simply "this kid can run the cognitive 40m dash faster"
From your link:
> Equity is equality of outcome for all subgroups in society.
Also from my link:
> factors specific to one's personal conditions should not interfere with the potential of academic success
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.)
> 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.
> 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 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?
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.
> This is the direct inverse of what's actually asserted by people talking about equity.
It very obviously is not. The equity proponents are extremely vocal about expecting equal outcomes; their metrics are stated entirely in terms of equality of outcome; they can constantly be observed decrying people as bigoted specifically for arguing for equality of opportunity instead. You were shown clear evidence of this downthread, and you pivoted and failed to engage squarely with a very simple argument.
I want to make sure this is perfectly clear.
When you say "getting a score of x on the SAT qualifies you for university", you are doing equality of opportunity. When you say "getting a score of f(x) on the SAT qualifies you for university, where f is chosen such that the racial makeup of university entrants matches the racial makeup of {applicants, the local general population, ...}", you are doing equality of outcome.
...And probably also violating the law, although of course it's up to the courts whether this constitutes a "racial quota", Princeton (per the opinion piece, and also Yale and Duke) substantively did the latter, which is how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... happened. As it happens, Students for Fair Admissions won their case.
(The policies in question were also likely detrimental, overall, to white students, but it was politically impossible for a white student group to bring such a case. You can see that even in the linked opinion piece, the discrimination against Asians is described as pro-white even though white students still had to do much better than black students to be given the same level of consideration.)
> Providing a hearing aid to someone hard of hearing so they can learn is equity.
This is disproven by both rhetoric and observable policy. It's all based on equality-of-outcome metrics; every disparity of outcome is directly cited to justify the claim that the work is not done. Either equality of opportunity is conflated with equality of outcome; or it is not actually the goal and any claims of such are dishonest.
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.
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 — 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.
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...
>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."
All I have to say is LOL to holistic admissions.
Use standardized testing. We cannot power the future with feels, we need STEM grads.
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"
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.
> ...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.... If there's one good thing that can be said about ACT and SAT, they're relatively difficult for schools to game.
You understand that you're contradicting yourself here, yes? The entire point is to have a difficult-to-game test. Teaching people to do well on the SAT looks an awful lot like actually getting them to understand the things that the SAT is intended to ensure they understand (plus a little bit of generic test-taking skill that would apply equally well to any test in the same format). And if you don't have that, you only have things that are worse.
I've never understood the "teaching to the test" argument against these tests. Take a look at some of the math SAT sample questions: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/digital-sat-samp...
How would you "teach to the test" for these in a way that looks different from just teaching arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, etc?
With standardized testing, you lose a lot of detail about how the student got to their answer. Nuance is lost. But yeah I agree, with math it seems like that isn't such a big problem compared to, say, reading or science.
It does create some perverse incentives, to be sure. "Test mills" are an ongoing issue, especially in urban areas, in both public and charter schools. Basically admin guts all liberal arts programs, theater, music, history, etc, institutes some draconian discipline system, and kids just do practice tests over and over until they graduate from high school. Great standardized test scores, and virtually zero practical value to be had from the education the kids received. I know someone who got a 30 on the ACT and didn't learn that Africa was a continent and not a country until 9th grade.
I agree that Goodhart's law doesn't really apply to well designed tests.
For almost all math at the HS level, teaching to the test is exactly what you want.
To nobody's surprise, the SATs actually measure math competence which is crucial for success in STEM.
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.
In my public high school, the teachers just didn't teach and everyone passed.
Yeah Idiocracy
The only possible counterpoint I’d say is SAT math is quite trivial and also can be prepared for? Not that I think there are better alternatives out there.
the SAT is a (probably biased but relatively good) measure of willpower. it can be prepared for but its not fun
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.
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.
> 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.
This is what "math is racist" brought us to.
>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.
If you're admitting students to Berkeley who can't figure out how to independently close gaps in their own knowledge quickly (formal or otherwise), you have bigger problems.
I self-taught a bunch of remedial math when I went back to University after many years out. Khan Academy exists. Math tutors exist. They don't just exist, they're amazing.
If I can self-teach basic sequences and series or polynomial factorization or whatever at the age of 30 while juggling a full time job and a full computer science syllabus, an unemployed Berkeley freshman shouldn't struggle with it unless they have a legitimate disability or something.
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.
"The surge in math deficiencies after dropping the SAT highlights a systemic issue: grade inflation. Without a standardized baseline like the SAT/ACT, a 4.0 GPA from a high school with relaxed standards looks identical to a 4.0 from a highly rigorous one.
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."
I wasn't underprivileged but I did go to a terrible evangelical high school that had no honors or AP classes (AP bio at a place teaching creationism would've been something else...) and I think I only got in to a decent college on the strength of my SAT and ACT scores. My grades were OK (except in bio, where I refused to acknowledge young Earth creationism) but not amazing.
> My grades were OK (except in bio, where I refused to acknowledge young Earth creationism) but not amazing.
This is... Wild.
The funny thing is the Adventists seem to produce good hospitals but are still creationists. I guess it’s not a big deal how we got here if you just want to do medicine.
It's very common in US private schools.
I think this depends a lot on how you select the set of private schools you're looking at.
Uh, it's been a while since I've been inside one, but I would guess it's very common in a certain strain of US private schools, not as a rule.
Please provide a reference to this.
No it is not lol. Incredibly rare
Who gets to set the curriculum is a much bigger deal than given credit for. So many teachers complaining about the shit they have to teach. I remember one who didn't necessarily disagree but wondered why Al Gore should be the one to decide what goes into the [mandatory] documentary (in the Netherlands)
An inconvenient truth was mandatory viewing in NL?
That's what she said.
I can't read the article - do they explain why they think this is a "paradox"?
Expectation: removing standardized tests will give more opportunity to students who historically tend to do worse on those tests, like poor kids.
Reality: removing standardized tests means that universities have to put more weight on the rest of the college application, such as extracurricular activities which are often expensive and thus disadvantage poor kids.
Calling it a "paradox" is maybe a little hyperbolic, but basically it did the opposite of what they expected.
But this is relative, right? We're talking about SATs vs just relying on grades. Do poor kids do worse on SATs relative to how they do in their class grades, as compared to other kids? I kind of just figured poor kids do worse overall.
Its easier to get good grades in poor schools since regardless how you grade your teachers grade you against your peers, and poor schools have worse peers. So given same knowledge poor students have better grades, so their grades will be relatively better than their SATs.
At least in public schools were you don't have an incentive to give everyone an A, maybe private schools are different.
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but MIT added test scores back recently and wrote a blog post explaining why: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
I think the "paradox" is that you'd expect disadvantaged students to perform worse on standardized testing.
Personally, I don't think they actually believe it's paradoxical, I think the authors are just trying to be polite to those who criticize standardized testing with identity politics. Politeness can aid in persuasion, so I don't blame them.
I don't think it's paradoxical at all. This was the original strength of the SAT system.
And SAT as high school math exam itself I think is way too easy. They should design another test which can clearly distinguish top 1% or even 0.1%.from others
When I was in high school in California more than 20 years ago, SAT math alone was insufficient for admissions to STEM programs at mid-ranked and top-ranked universities. I was required to take the SAT Math IIC subject test, which went up to pre-calculus. We were also strongly encouraged to take calculus in high school. There are two AP Calculus exams: AB (which covers the first semester of university calculus) and BC (which covers the first two semesters).
There are already such tests. They're called International ___ Olympiad.
Yes, the scores at the top are way too bunched. A perfect score should indicate generational genius, not the 100th smartest kid your year in California.
That's not a real problem for UC admissions. They accept thousands of students every year. Anyone who scores near perfect (within the margin of error) should be admitted to at least one UC campus. If that's not happening then the problem is with the admissions criteria, not with the SAT.
There's about 500k kids in California each year. The 100th smartest is undoubtedly smarter than you or me.
> They should design another test
Why? What would the point of this be beyond bragging rights?
Yup. SAT is just a _bad_ test. It's way too easy to get top scores there, and the whole calculator section should be removed.
SAT also makes it easy to just mechanically grind it because the problems are so simple that you can just memorize their "shapes".
We need a test with a smaller number of tasks escalating in complexity. So that the top scores are extremely rare.
> Preparing for the SAT requires a book and an internet connection.
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.
My kids were able to take some SAT test prep course through their school (partially funded by the PTA) and it helped a lot. They wrote a bunch of practice exams and each time their scores went up. Also, test taking itself is a skill and the more you practice it the better you get at it. If you’ve written the SAT 15 times over the past 2 years, then the 16th time won’t be as stressful and you will know strategies that work and the questions will be familiar.
If you are in a school that doesn’t have a well funded PTA, you are at a disadvantage.
You can, as of about a year ago, take official SAT practice exams for free in Google Gemini.
The person to whom I responded seemed to imply that it consists chiefly or entirely of taking practice exams. I merely wish to point out that if you want your kid to take SAT practice exams every month you can do it for free at home.
Whatever gates you put up, the wealthy can fire cannons of cash at them. You just have to pick the ones least vulnerable to cash barrages.
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?
Your analogy works against you, given that tons of professional athletes come from poverty.
Professional athletes are like people who get 1600s on the SAT; a bit of an outlier.
We're talking about the California state education system here. They do not have the option to restrict the provision of their services to a tiny elite. The concerns of "top schools" absorbs altogether too much oxygen.
> Top schools are looking for outlier intellectual talent…
Eh, somewhat. They want some of those outliers hobnobbing with the legacies.
> tons of professional athletes come from poverty
Is that actually the case?
Depends on the sport. I don’t think the Olympic equestrian competitors would be dirt poor.
Sure, those are some good counterexamples: both sons of professional athletes. And there are plenty of others.
On the other hand, we have: Allen Iverson, Larry Bird, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Vick, Bo Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Fernando Valenzuela, Albert Pujols, Jim Thorpe, ...
Oh, and LeBron James himself!
So my view is that people of both rich and poor upbringings have a good chance in the sports world these days, at least for those sports where the necessary gear is relatively cheap.
According to IA this is mostly a myth though.
Sports is the most expensive way to get into college. Tennis is close to $1 million to get your kid into an Ivy league through tennis. Malcom Gladwell wrote about sports and colleges in his book "revenge of the tipping point". Sports is used by the wealthy to get their less academically inclined children in to top schools and some school are expanding it.
That's not the reality for most youth sports anymore. It's gotten much more competitive. Participating in school sports isn't enough. They generally can't develop the level of skill necessary to gain advantage in college admissions without paying a lot to participate in travel club teams and for private coaching. And I'm not talking just about NCAA recruited athletic scholarships but even for the sort of regular extracurricular sports activities that might give someone an advantage in college admissions.
A friend of mine brought his girl up in club soccer, he was starting to travel to different states for tournaments when she was about 8 years old. It was insanely expensive. The only thing i can think of crazier than club soccer is maybe club cheerleading. Youth sports is completely bonkers if you've never been exposed to it.
It feels like the problem are the SAT prep courses' existence then
I've been wondering with all the data that's available now couldn't admissions look at a 4.0 from HS A vs a 4.0 at HS B and then compare those to actual grades on the campus once students were in class? Assuming HS A has lower standards, they should be able to tell that a 4.0 isnt as meaningful as a 4.0 from HS B. Seems like a straightforward exercise.
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The problem is as never the tests. It was pretending that the difference between a 600 and 625 (or whatever) really predicted anything.
It was the silly idea that with tests you could produce a fair ordering of students based on potential to succeed.
You can absolutely make a bet on who's more likely to succeed based on a 100 point difference, though. It's not absolute, but it's highly predictive. And the reason the SAT was dropped wasn't because admissions were being forced to blindly accept 620 over 610 (they never were), but so that people who scored hundreds of points below the mean could be admitted (in the pursuit of other institutional goals).
We have decades of data (test score vs grades and degree completion). They should gather it up and calculate the answers.
Flip answer: the bucket width should be 2.5 times the score improved of a prep course.
Any working system has to rely on some arbitrary rules. Drawing a line between students who scored 600 and 625 is still infinitely better than drawing it based on the decision-makers' moods.
Or, treat 600-625 as a tie, and use a lottery.
As imperfect standardized tests are, they are still more fair and less biased than using arbitrary judgement on extra curriculars
Bucket to the observed predictive power of the score, resolve ties with a lottery .
And you don’t want a 100% cutoff. You need to admit some people just under the threshold since the scores are relative. You need fresh data to keep the model tuned.
Some kind of weighted lottery
who uses SAT scores as "potential succeed"??
The original argument for standardized tests was to pick based on how well you would do in university (vs who your parents know).
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.
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It’s 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
Internet streamers will need to know basic math unless they are clowns.
But they are clowns.
First make SAT/ACT free. Then we will talk about it.
Severe asian deficit because reasons.
the SAT is an IQ test, btw. who would have thought that could lead to better results in cognitive fields? shocked. shocked!
Now that there is some grudgin recognition of this idea, it might do to remind people that high SAT scores on Verbal are correlated, and salient in non STEM subjects.
and that there is no known way to increase scores significantly, neither from early intervention nor sustained practice. And, depressingly from an egalitarian perspective, there is a strong genetic correlation.
You could read more about the measured statistics, the "mainstream science on intelligence" and "bell curve"s, but sadly the scientists studying it have been cancelled by people who did not like the results.
> And, depressingly from an egalitarian perspective, there is a strong genetic correlation.
No, there isn't. Hope that helps your mood!
saying things doesn't make them true, but studying them informs what you should think and say.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/
Intelligence — the ability to learn, reason and solve problems — is at the forefront of behavioural genetic research. Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait. Recent genome-wide association studies have successfully identified inherited genome sequence differences that account for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence. These findings open new avenues for research into the causes and consequences of intelligence using genome-wide polygenic scores that aggregate the effects of thousands of genetic variants. In this Review, we highlight the latest innovations and insights from the genetics of intelligence and their applications and implications for science and society.
read what it says carefully: they've correlated genes to a small percentage of the heritability of intelligence. That means there is much more heritability than they have yet found a source for.
Life is an intelligence test. During the school years, differences in intelligence are largely the reason why some children master the curriculum more readily than other children. Differences in school performance predominantly inform prospects for further education, which in turn lead to social and economic opportunities such as occupation and income. In the world of work, intelligence matters beyond educational attainment because it involves the ability to adapt to novel challenges and tasks that describe the different levels of complexity of occupations. Intelligence also spills over into many aspects of everyday life such as the selection of romantic partners and choices about health care1. This is why intelligence — often called general cognitive ability2 — predicts educational outcomes3, occupational outcomes4,5 and health outcomes6 better than any other trait. It is also the most stable psychological trait, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.54 from age 11 years to age 90 years7. Box 1 describes what intelligence is and how it is assessed.
see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intellig...
I don't even have to argue with your cite (and I'm not a Plomin fan), since the numbers he's giving drastically slash heritability estimates from just a few years prior. If we were having this discussion 5 years ago, the claim would be that intelligence is 80% heritable. Now the foremost academic proponent of hereditarianism arguably concedes it could be as low as 20%. Molecular genetics numbers put it lower, in the mid-teens, with rare-variant hypotheses capping it there; that is: it could get lower, but it can't get higher (unless you come up with a novel mechanism).
I want to add: I put as much effort into my original comment disagreeing with your claim as you put into your casual assertion that some people are genetically inferior to others. I feel comfortable with how this discussion has played out.
Your claim is "a strong genetic correlation". You can look up what that means mathematically.
Yes there is. Stop drinking the woke-aid.
Look at where advanced civilisations started, and it's clear as night and day.
Egypt in Africa? Mesopotamia aka modern Iraq? India? China?
Looking at that you'd have to wonder how ever it ended with Whitey on the Moon.
Maybe there are other factors at play.
It is indeed awfully difficult to explain the genetically determined part of European civilizational dominance given that we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbassids less than an eyeblink ago in genetic timescales.
Is molecular genetics woke now?
(Or are you just trolling me? If that's what it is, I have it coming, but I can't tell.)
Its bad for natives and African Americans. The whole system is designed to keep them poor and powerless
progressive with a throwaway account: "We can't expect BIPOC people to pass SATs, because of reasons". The reason is racism.
The evidence shows the opposite, SAT testing allows hardworking/gifted minorities to get ahead.
Having just shipped the kiddo into the real world, she's leaning liberal arts (her and her mom suck at math), but she has a benefit neither her mom or I had - EU deal citizenship. She's going to do a year here to figure things out - she's also been thinking about Europe. University in Europe, for undergrad, is different than the US.
I think the large class model and a barrier of exams to advance makes sense in Europe. I've not been in the University of California system for years, but the school I went to - some classes didn't always hold up a level of academic rigor.
Does EU dual citizenship help with university if you are not currently a resident of the EU?
I always thought the low EU-local fees for European universities were based on EU residency, not citizenship.
No one has to suck at math. Any human can learn the majority of skills.
No one has to suck at anything. But we do, because time is finite and there's other stuff to be good at in life other than math.
Have you ever taught?
Yes and I standby genxy’s comment. It was always a question of motivation, not ability.
What is EU deal?
EU dual citizenship
Edit: if anyone’s confused, there was a typo in the original post. I corrected it.
It's the new deal.