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> 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".

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.

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.

Give the money to the parents in the form of income-adjusted vouchers to spend on education as they see fit.

They defined equity as Fair outcomes, treatment, and opportunities for all students.[1]

[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/qs/ea/

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...

The most important factor isn't the schools, it is the kids themselves.

>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.

I think you have equity and equality exactly reversed

> 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.

Why do you even need higher education if you can brain drain educated people from India?

The solution is simple and every Asian country does this. You need to have nationwide testing at key intervals up to three times during your entire schooling. If you fail that you can keep retrying. Gaming it is a very hard because the people grading are thousands of miles away and have no idea who you are besides an ID number. This will also lead to a common curriculum that everyone has to prepare for. The bar for this common curriculum is very high in places like Japan, South Korea, China, and India. Doing this will also almost guarantee that a huge number of black and Latino kids are not gonna pass school. The truth is they’re culturally just not educationally focused at a family level. There might also be a genetic element to this though I’m not sure because kids of African immigrants perform pretty well. This is what all of these curricular dumbing down programs are trying to counteract.

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

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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

Professors who fail large swathes of their classes get in trouble.

> 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?

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.

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"

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.

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

Have you observed a reduction in the number of students who match those pre-requisites over time?

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?

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.

> 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.

I can't read the article - do they explain why they think this is a "paradox"?

I don't think it's paradoxical at all. This was the original strength of the SAT system.

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.

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 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.

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

It is depressing but not surprising.

The November report mentioned in the article goes into (disturbing) details: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...

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.

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.

True. COVID has set the entire cohort back, in terms of education but also every other aspect of personal development.

> 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.

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.

>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."

https://youtu.be/Gatn5ameRr8

Internet streamers will need to know basic math unless they are clowns.