"In the name of “equity”, California DOE’s 2021 Mathematics Framework attacks the idea of gifted students and eliminates opportunities for accelerated math.
- no grouping students by ability - no Algebra for 8th graders - no Calculus for high schoolers
Edit: The “lol” wasn’t directed at you by the way. I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true.
From what I've gathered in the thread, the actual official recommendations appears to be simultaneously recommending and not recommending the elimination of HS Calculus.
Of course the most common 'solution' is then to get rid of "advanced" stuff like Algebra as a graduation requirement altogether, which is an even clearer disservice to students and their surrounding communities.
Nowhere does it say that 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calc will be removed.
The only mitigating factor is Khan Academy and its surrounding ecosystem. A motivated learner with internet access can excel in spite of the school system.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! So and so came from a violent environment with food scarcity, and THEY succeeded, so you can too!" - Nevermind that that person's environment produces generation after generation of poverty (hence, "cycle") and violence.
Khan Academy mitigates nothing - it's a structural failure.
I also in high school, I took Pascal as a learning to program/into class. I college I learned Ada, and it was a breeze due to my high school.
I feel thankful to my last year in public school in middle of no where, rural VA, as it gave me great education/foundation that I did really well in college.
I feel bad, as now Virginia is doing the same crap with math in the name of equity. Dumbing things down to the least common denominator is terrible, especially for smart/capable immigrants like I was. We don't have the luxury of private schools, and public schools are starting to pull the rug out as well.
It is awful
Ap calc is a joke from my perspective. I’m not sure how to solve the crisis, but it’s plain to see that American students that test into calc are woefully underprepared. I’ve tried to advise students to start with more fundamental courses, but they’ve been told they are “gifted” their whole lives. They ignore you and charge into calculus. Then they come back when the semester is about to end to reassess options. Just like that, what would have been another perfectly serviceable American engineer is lost.
Math is a useful skill for everyone, including calculus. Not everybody goes to university, so we should teach it in HS.
Most people's lives and jobs involve even less math than mine does.
More stats probably would have been helpful. Anything less-obviously-useful needs a hell of a lot more emphasis on what it's used for and how to apply it than I ever received, IMO, unless you're a pure-math major, and certainly in k-12 since almost none of the kids are going to be math majors.
... and then I got a new job when I was 43, in medical x-ray machines. Suddenly everything was 3D coordinate transforms, Fourier transforms, and integrals, plus radiation physics.
You don't need or use this stuff... until you do.
I used trig yesterday to figure out what angle I needed to cut a board (I'm building a barn).
I used calculus a few weeks ago to help solve an issue I was having with a water tank.
[EDIT] actually, I take that back, I do sometimes work with odd angles but never do it without a physical template built and fitted, because attempts to do it "cute" or figure it out purely on paper have a history of being hilariously wrong (when I do them) even when the math is 100% correct (according to the evidently-not-precise-enough measurements).
fwiw I sell LEGO drone kits
It's absolutely about other groups trying to pile on and say "we're important and deserve extra funding too".
But try telling that to millenials today and you'll get an earful.
You don't need super geniuses to run factories, just competent people whom you don't afraid to leave alone with a welding machine.
But much of the growth and competitiveness will come from very sophisticated industries requiring highly specialized STEM experience.
Think of a Tesla or Space X company. You need both a large number of competent technically skilled people. But they are powered by an adequate and smaller number of very highly specialized researchers and engineers designing the product.
Both of these segments are lacking investments in the USA
It doesn't work this way. You will get very smart people knowing what to do.
But they will not come to work in your city if there will be no factories to make their smart designs, and hire them.
Many tried, many, many to just have RnD shop, and ship everything else to China.
It did not work even for Apple for example. Most of their engineering has moved to China, and they are very shy getting public about this fact. People in Apple RnD office in Kerry Plaza for example were for years forbidden to even disclose the fact that they worked for Apple.
I believe what underscores the current problem is STEM being something special, while current "elite" STEM high school is what used to be a normal school curriculum 60-70 years ago.
Everybody miss the fact that curriculums were much more small, compact, pushing, and focused in the West before everything from basket weaving to "business education" managed to sneak into high schools.
A conservative, and supposedly "elite" high school in Russia in nineties-noughties were all having more hours, and very few subjects.
Mine were 8 classes 5 days a weeks of:
- math
- physics
- geometry
- engineering
- chemistry
- language
- pe
- biology, literature, history, geography, informatics, 2nd foreign language, military education, professional education as electives
And even math, and physics there wasn't anything too fancy. We used textbooks with more hardcore, and grinding emphasis on arithmentics, and analysis/linear/diffeq/stats were put in the last 2 years almost as an afterthought. In physics, they actually removed almost all of curriculum quantum stuff, and put even bigger emphasis on Newtonian mechanics, and Landau-Lifschitz classics for everything else.
The school tried to introduce art as was required per new Russian curriculum, but it was quickly thrown out after a year due to militant opposition from parents.
So in reality what this massive "STEM" push amounts to is an excuse to trick children into wasting their time going thousands of dollars into debt getting useless degrees in mechanical engineering or mathematics before they can attend a Javascript bootcamp to become actually-employable.
It's STEM, plus Art
"What I insist that we do is to refocus our STEM education debates on the right question. And that question is not “Who deserves what"?”. It’s “Who will run the fabs?”."
First, where does he get off "insisting" anything? If he's so gung ho on improving education, why is he wasting his time writing a blog post instead of going out and doing the hard work of actually educating some people?
But even leaving that aside, why do "we" have to debate this question? "We" don't determine who runs the fabs; the companies that own the fabs do. Nor do "we" need to centrally control what education kids get; the fact that we have a huge, bureaucratic, centrally controlled public education system in the US is a bug, not a feature. But not to this author; in fact, he is basically arguing for expanding the central control model of education:
"[T]he notion that the purpose of education should be to discover and elevate natural talent is fundamentally flawed, as the entire previous section of this post argued. Finding a few kids capable of defeating China in a math competition is useless compared to the task of training millions of kids to work in high-tech export industries."
So now the education system is supposed to do job training for specific skills? Didn't that used to be called "apprenticeship"? And didn't it used to be done as a private thing, without having to drag a huge, bloated bureaucracy into the mix?
And what, exactly, is wrong with the idea that education should discover and elevate natural talent? Isn't that exactly what you want if you want to have the best chip fabs? Not to mention all the other good things the article mentions. (The author does argue that the belief in "natural talent" has bad side effects and that what should be focused on instead is "long-term motivation". But then he saws off his own branch by admitting that "what people want to do is ultimately more important than what they’re told to do." And when kids are subjected to education to "improve their long-term motivation", they see it, correctly, as being told to do things they don't want to do. The only handle that any education system can really grasp with a kid is "natural talent"--what do they naturally want to do? What are they naturally interested in? And our regimented, structured, centrally controlled bureaucratic education system is perfectly designed to entirely ignore that input--and not just ignore it when deciding what kids will do, but kill it when it is detected, on the grounds that it's disruptive.)
To this author, the "millions of kids" are just cogs in a machine, to be moved around to wherever the central authority thinks they will do the most good. (But of course he isn't any such thing.)
I'm all for encouraging more kids to go into STEM and to improving the incentives involved so more kids who are interested in STEM will see it as a viable career. But we don't need to make ourselves into China to do that.
If one were to create a strawman of the most capitalist, greedy and shortsighted kind then there would be nothing more beautiful to that strawman than consumption without income, because it allows wealth inequality to grow without hitting macroeconomic limits that would otherwise prevent the relative wealth of the strawman to grow beyond a certain point.
You're right that there is no need for more central control but how else do you get out of this trap?