> "Families with resources turn to fee-required online algebra 1 courses in eighth grade, outside the public school system, or enroll their kids in private schools,"
Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many private schools. If I have the means, why would I not send my kids to such schools and therefore fuck up the funding of the public schools? Not that I want to, but it furiates me that the school administrators really hurt the kids who need public education the most in the name of equity. It also saddens me that the constituents are okay with such administrators.
> Families face a "nightmare of workarounds" to get their high-achieving children on track for advanced math, write Rex Ridgeway and David Margulies in a San Francisco Examiner commentary.
Families in Palo Alto recently won a lawsuit against PAUSD, [1] which was denying students credit for courses taken at other institutions (mainly community colleges, IIRC). In Menlo Park, we deal with similar issues; I recently wondered to myself how much I could have taught my kids in all the hours that I have spent talking to the school/district about allowing students to receive advanced learning. Other parents with less time and more money opt for private schools. Those with less time and no more money simply resign themselves to the situation. It is shocking how hostile schools are to what used to be common sense: letting (or, gasp, even encouraging) all students to learn.
1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/03/03/judge-rules-h...
Argh this grinds my gears.
It’s the education SYSTEM that is wrong. We are working with a 150 year old way of educating kids that does not apply to our culture today. Kids aren’t going to work on the farm or in a factory. They need the math!!!
For courses like algebra, etc. kids need support at home from parents. When that support isn’t available (for whatever reason), don’t water down the content for goodness sake. The kids need 1-on-1 tutoring help.
Cut off the head of the problem—the school administration that continues to support our archaic system-and spend the money you will save on tutoring the kids. Or switch to mastery education. Fix the PROBLEM.
It's interesting how path-dependency makes these things seem like controversial reforms, while nearby districts have always done it this way. In Berkeley, for example, there isn't any course called "Algebra I" or II. Through 8th grade there is just math, with no differentiation. Then for 9th grade you can test into an advanced track, and people take either Math 1/2/3 or Advanced Math 1/2/3. In senior year any of these people can take AP Statistics or Calculus AB, but only the advanced track can take AP Calculus BC.
So anyway the point is Berkeley has always done math the "reform" way and its math outcomes are much better in every respect. It gives one the impression that San Francisco's issues are other than with the reform.
The district’s curriculum is partially available to the public:
https://www.sfusd.edu/departments/mathematics-department-pag...
https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd-math-core-course-sequence-...
And the district position statement:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uije_05H3BtVyp55oQZ7NCa2k58...
It has a “guiding principle”:
> Students’ academic success in mathematics must not be predictable on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, language, religion, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, or special needs.
That’s amazing! While it may be laudable to hope that a math education program could be so strong that socioeconomic status and race make no difference, the rest of this is absurd. There are people with special needs who are at a disadvantage in math. The only way that their special needs would not predict the distribution of their academic success would be to have an implausibly amazing special needs education program, to redefine success, or to hold everyone else back.
math is just the beginning of these backwards policies. public schools in california have been removing advanced classes in the name of “equity” for years. the racial enrollment in those classes did not reflect the racial enrollment of the school.
the result? parents moving kids to private school. at the school nearest me they kindergarten enrollment is dropping. they are likely going to only have a a single class in a couple years
california is making it very clear the public school system is not going to help your children succeed beyond a base level. it seems to have the completely opposite goals of when i was in public school in california
The best school I ever attended was one which strongly divided classes between social and academic. Social classes (homeroom, gym, social studies, home ec., shop class) were attended at one's grade level, Academic classes (English, Reading, Math, science) were attended at one's academic level, though there was a 4 year cap on advancement until 8th grade, at which point students could test to determine what classes they were eligible for, and begin taking college classes (the school was affiliated with a local college and many teachers were accredited as faculty members there --- for classes where there wasn't a teacher, arrangements were made to either bring one in from the college, or to arrange for the student to attend classes.
Apparently the Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that it conferred an unfair advantage to the gifted and was therefore illegal and had it dismantled.
It sounds like they tried to set up a large one-size-fits-all program.
This might be a good time to bring up Lockhart's Lament, which imagines what artistic education would look like if we treated it like math.
https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament
Nobody with decision-making power in a school district likes the answer which this paper proposes: very small class sizes.
> The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam
That’s the worst part. It just shows either complete ignorance and incompetence or deception. “Look how failure rates have decreased. We all deserve a bonus!”
They knew exactly what they were doing if they went about bragging about it.
> That didn't happen, concludes a study by a team of Stanford professors. "Large ethnoracial gaps in advanced math course-taking . . . did not change."
Is there anything that will get these people to realize that maybe they are working with a hypothesis that is fundamentally flawed?
It doesn't take a large amount of thinking to imagine what might have more predictive power in explaining what's going on here.
Turns out math isn’t actually white supremacy. To the surprise of absolutely no one.
Remove the ability to compete in math because you are poor and cannot enroll in private school. Don't allow the poor to do algebra? I left SF (and took my poor kids with me).
However, the SF policy that was truly evil to the poor was randomized school selection. Tell a poor kid in western addition they need to go to school in pacific heights. Tell the pacific heights kids they need to go to school in western addition. So what happens? The poor kids miss school (a lot) since their parents are working crappy jobs for rich people and can't do bus commutes each day. The pacific heights parents just enroll in private school. So tons of schools in SF just close. Awesome work SF. I am confident if you do the exact opposite in all SF policies you would have a great city.
In 1st grade it was an unspoken understanding that Latin kids are put in the slow class. It's understandable since most of us didn't speak English at home. But my teacher realized that I was advanced for my age so she put me in the back of the class with another classmate who didn't know any English. An hour or two a day we would sit in the back and I would read to her, translate words, and practice spelling. She seemed happy that someone was helping her and I felt great helping a classmate.
One day I mentioned this to my parents. They didn't understand/believe it at first. But the next time I mentioned it they understood and instead of feeling proud they were clearly upset. Then a few months later I wrote a poem that impressed the school teachers and at that point they moved me to the "fast" class and I never tutored again until college.
Why couldn't I have done both? Would I have learned more if I had been forever in the slow class but tutoring half of that time ? That seems better than where it we are headed -- where everyone is in the metaphorical slow class and the advanced kids likely become numb and disinterested.
If you were a hardcore racist and systematically wanted to keep Black and Brown kids uneducated, you would throw out all expectations and requirements and let them pass every year until they graduated high school with almost no education. The white kids and the rich kids will find a way to educate themselves, either through tutors or private school but the poor kids with no options would be stuck in this worthless system and graduate high school completely uneducated.
This is exactly what’s going on right now in SFUSD, and it’s so blatantly bad I honestly believe they are white supremacists in charge of the curriculum. What we are seeing is true systematic racism. How do they expect these kids to compete intellectually when they have lived an entire lifetime with lowered expectations?
In the interest of dogpiling, I'll also never give up my support for standardized testing.
My childhood school had 99% pass rates on standardized state tests and we literally never prepped for it. Time wasn't wasted studying directly for the state tests because there was no further score on which to grow. If a school of students is unable to meet the trivial ability required to pass the state tests then they have significantly worse problems than wasting time studying specifically for state tests.
I commented on this 18 months ago: https://www.newslettr.com/p/when-do-they-learn-algebra
As time passes, it looks more and more like policy in SFUSD is being set by various individuals whom, for their own reasons, think that "math education" is bad and that it must be avoided for "reasons", probably that they say involving "promoting equity".
I think these one size fits all policies almost never work as I think many here will agree.
But I also think the public school system has many one size fits all policies that no one questions.
Many people advocate for smaller class sizes so teachers can spend more time with each student, but this is very expensive so if tends to come with compromises.
I did very well in HS including advanced math but class size had nothing to do with it. I did well because I ignored the instructor and just did homework and studied in every class; often to the annoyance of the instructor.
In college this effect was even worse since class size is a key metric for US News college rankings work. Small class sizes mean college costs more. If college costs even $10 more per class-hour then you loose about an hour of time to study (per hour of class/instruction!) if you're working to afford college.
But weed-out classes are often taught via large lectures while easier electives tend to be smaller class sizes so it'd be difficult to observe this in metrics.
If you A/B tested large very small class sizes would you see an improvement? Probably, but you would never see the effects for an individual student. I keep wondering why offering different size classes isn't the solution? I think a lot of students would prefer the hands off approach of large classes while some really need smaller class sizes.
Why don't policies go through double blind trials or more A/B tests? And attach automatic rollbacks to policies based on metrics. I'm all for trying new solutions but they should be iterated on quickly.
Meanwhile, I experienced one of the most unique job interviews at an autonomous driving company just this last week.
It was 45 mins of math.
Questions ranging from simple algebra to probability theory to physics. And I was applying for an embedded systems position.
Boy was I glad that I was good at that kind of math.
It seems the government and schools keep trying to parent kids for some reason.
Alright, you want kids to have racially equal-ish academic progress? Make it the parents' problem.
I don't mean that parents should tutor their kids but rather pressure them and expect them to be #1. Unless your kid is mentally challenged then it is the parents' expectation and lack of discipline and parenting skills that is the problem.
Even facing racist teachers and kids a child can come out on top and prove them wrong. It is not a school teachers's job to discipline a child, morivate them or teach them perseverance. It is also not their job to reward and celebrate a child's achievements.
How then can you make parents do a good job at parenting when it comes to academics? Most people care about money so reward parents of academically performing kids with tax credits. This way you won't raise taxes or add fees but especially for poor parents having an extra grand or two on their tax refund is huge motivator. And if it really is the kids fault then they get the same amount of tax burden as usual.
And what if they get abusive? Well they'll get abusive anyways if they are so terrible anyways.and you can say that abour teachers and standardized tests as well.
There are quite a lot of Indians with dedicated teaching setup teaching from their homes -- to American kids -- mostly Math and Science. The good ones are in hot demand and are difficult to get and/or are very costly (against the average Indian tuition fees).
My wife set up a tutor from our hometown (a north-eastern corner of India) and I did a Zoom setup complete with a separate camera mount that streams my kid's table (where she writes) (we are in Bangalore). The teacher on the other end is earning much better than the local counterpart for an hour a day, five days a week. And we have a good teacher to work with. In fact, a few other teachers have approached us by now.
The recent Pandemic has taught everyone that it is indeed possible to learn from anywhere in the world and stay anywhere (almost). A few families had had their kids enrolled in schools (USA, UK, Australia) which were (I think) meant and started for home-schooled kids, and those that do not want to be in physical classes, etc. but accelerated for everyone during the Pandemic. So, an Indian kid might just be sitting at her home learning from teachers across the globe speaking native languages - English, French, and what not.
One problem in San Francisco is that the private schools are truly expensive. One good high school, Urban, has a tuition of 55K year. That means it is hard to leave the public system even when it has these awful flaws.
San Francisco has never really gone whole hog in trying innovative programs with underachieving programs for minority youth. This trick of trying to drag down high performers to disguise the other failures is typical of the district.
The article mentions a study which is showing that the 'Algebra for none' approach has failed - despite that official want to adopt this policy to all of California.
Does that mean that they ignore the feedback of the study, because of ... ideology?
I'll be the first to admit that I'm chronically stupid, but can someone help parse the linked SFUSD's decision for me: https://www.sfusdmath.org/richard-carranzas-remarks-to-board...
(it's linked in the article as the decision to push math back a year). But I'm having trouble understanding why not exposing students to a subject earlier would be better for their development with that subject.
Are they supposed to absorb the knowledge for that between 8th-9th grade somehow without knowing what it is?
Because "Racial achievement gap" sounds a lot better and gets more $$ for panels, committees, researchers, administrators, unions and co. Then "Yes we still suck at teaching math please give us more $$"
Has any child ever gotten better at something they don't have to do? It seems the practical effect will be to simply place these children farther behind and never catching up.
SFUSD does not appear to be run by intelligent people, however. I don't say that as some Internet slur. I mean that as a descriptive term. Should you disagree, it is worth watching this 2 min video of a meeting from one of their committees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdekUXyAAzI
I see here echoes of problems in the Finnish system (at least as far as I understand it).
The system is designed to be inclusive and promote equality of opportunity. In practice this means classes with uninterested and preternaturally disruptive kids who spoil it for kids who actually want to learn.
A related question: can anyone provide a link to what the K-12 syllabus of the former Eastern bloc actually was? Certainly USSR and Hungary must have had impressive curricula. I had a Croatian friend who said that his basic skills in algorithms (which were very advanced from my viewpoint) was based on his math schooling in the former Yugoslavia, which he said treated very advanced concepts early on.
Is there any link to an English version of these syllabi?
The solution, of course, is to ban private tutoring. Just like they did here: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008838
Dumbing education down in the name of democracy is the best way possible to promote authoritarianism. Guarantee a uniformly uneducated populace with a small exception for the children of the rich and elite.
And "the experts" wonder why they have a trust problem.
https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/equity-in-th...
> Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes.
I don’t get this idea that everyone should finish at the same time ?
why not let kids test into algebra in 8th grade and take pre-algebra when they are ready ?
Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.
That'll just create students who think they're great... until they experience the real world.
> Test data from 2015 to 2019 shows that racial "achievement gaps have widened,"
I'm finding the statistics in the second article linked to in this sentence difficult to read (because I'm not smart). Can someone tell me if this is because the top achievers are doing better, or that the bottom achievers are doing worse?
If it's the former, then this could be considered a good thing. You could certainly look at it and say "well we haven't made things _worse_ for the people who weren't doing well, but we have made things better for those who were already doing well". I get that wasn't the goal, but it's another way to look at things that could be interesting, because then you could take that apart and see if there's anything to learn there.
I have no insight into SF school politics beyond things like this and Lowell High School. Who's voting for the school board members that are driving this?
Algebra in 9th grade??? I'm pretty sure we were doing basics of algebra in 6th, at most 7th grade in bumfuck nowhere western PA (graduated 2012).
What's the problem? I remember at the beginning of each school year they gave us math textbooks for the year. I took me a week to read it all and do all the exercises. Today there is internet, Wikipedia, youtube, everything is so much easier.
PAging Harrison bergeron, paging Harrison bergeron
Wow, that site allows really racist comments. That can't help their messaging.
Anyone with resources will avoid the public school system.
Progressive nuts embracing equality over everything else have taken over.
In my view, the only way forward is providing more educational opportunities that are accessible to underserved groups, not reducing the total number of educational opportunities.
This is a logical and natural conclusion of what happens when we give up on the idea of meritocracy.
When it comes to politics, San Francisco is the world capital of learned helplessness.
London Breed et al. are the problem solving equivalent of giving up.
Growing up in San Diego the accelerated cohort did algebra in grade 7. Some of us who were passionate took math over the summer and got even further ahead. It’s a little surprising to see in this day and age when things should move faster that algebra is delayed to grade 9.
The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.
It's easy to succeed when you can't fail.
Are we still teaching math well?
I grew up with rote memorization of math concepts and applying that through memorized math tables. That doesn't work for my spectrumy dyscalculic brain. If I had more advanced math education that started with elements of computer programming & interaction (actually, even at the "basic" level too), I'd wager I'd actually be relatively good at math today, with a much better lower level understanding of concepts. Instead, I'm effectively helpless when it comes to math.
From second-hand knowledge, the Stanford GSE is really bad at understanding equity and minorities, and routinely, minorities in STEP (the teacher training program) get less support and empathy
Yeah, we can just delay classes because the students weren't properly prepared in prior classes... no reason to fix the preasons the prior classes didn't prepare them.
Fascinating article. Unclear if this stops the Boaler initiative, though. Considering the tussle between her and Jelani Nelson of Berkeley [1], I wonder what actions she'll take against her own colleagues.
[1]https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/12/uc-berkeley-stanford-pro...
If it hurt achievers while not helping low achievers, the plan succeeded. The ends justify the means to these people. You voted them in.
Why must "college level" be uniform in all subjects for all students? Vast majority of math (algebra, calculus etc) are of little use in most careers (even quantitative ones). So why must the society strive for equal outcome in a subject that is of questionable use? Why not prepare kids instead for something thats actually useful for a job?
Kids take algebra in 8th grade? When the heck did this start? I didn't take it until first year highschool (using US terms).
Not surprised that not teaching doesn't help.
In contrast, a relative got into the special ed group for smart kids.
During orientation, the moderator said that it is just as silly to put kids in the top 2% in a classroom with everyone else as it is to keep the kids who can't tie their shoes on their own in that same classroom.
If anyone wants to hear some excellent talks on mastering mathematics, listen to Sal Khan on youtube. It is a stark contrast to Boaler's utopian way of thinking.
I can't believe such an insanely stupid proposal was ever taken seriously. This really needs to be a career-killer for anyone who supported it.
Is Byjus not a thing in America ? IIRC Disney / Facebook invested many billions in that company. Didn't they deploy for US students?
Obligatory Harrison Bergeron short story.
By the time you can measure the difference, it's too late.
What's with the comments on that site? Bunch of right wing paranoid reactionists. It's like a disease. Soros this Mao that Communism blah, wtf? Is this what ~50% of America is like in real life as well?
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> San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes.
Ugh, I couldn't imagine being a high achieving student and having to be lumped in with people who don't give a shit about their education.
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I live in Seattle, not San Francisco, but we have some similar issues with our schools. I'd really prefer to send my son to our local public schools, but if they aren't challenging him appropriately then my wife and I obviously aren't going to just give up on his education. We'll either pay for extracurricular enrichment like the person in this article, move to a wealthy suburb, or send him to a private school instead.
That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.