> The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware.
I was wondering if some people are aware of studies supporting this strategy.
I could try to dig them up, but I remember few studies demonstrating that school success is more correlated to the socio-economical situation of the parent than to the child intrinsic capacities (I think one usual method is to compare success of twins adopted in different families to remove the naive argument "higher socio-economical situation means that these people are intrinsically smarter").
If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).
I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some. A bit like if your professor was saying "we have an exam on chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, I will tell you the chapters 1 and 3, the chapters 2 and 4 are in the books but I'm going to give this book only to some students and not other". If a professor does that, people will obviously say that it is stupid, that the professor should teach chapters 1 and 2 to everyone and then do a test on chapters 1 and 2, and nobody will pretend that this is "dumbying down" the students.
> If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).
> I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some.
The NORMAL pace is too slow for some kids who aren't even doing any math at home. The solution to kids learn at different paces and some kids can learn at a faster pace if they have resources at home, but not all kids have resources at home isn't force everyone onto the normal pace. It's to make sure all kids have access to resources.
If it's hard to get resources, then maybe you can free up some by adjusting class sizes. Instead of 60 kids, and 20 kids / class room all at the same pace; you can take the 30 kids capable of doing a faster pace and put them in the fast paced room, then have two classes of 15 kids at a slower pace and now they've got more time for individual instruction, and you didn't have to hire anyone.
Let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of our class and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they are? -Bart Simpson
People who fall behind don't need a slower pace. They need to move faster. That means not just more attention but longer hours. But there is only so much time. A school wanting to maximize its graduation rate needs to spend less energy on teaching people who are good at a subject in order to divert resources to those who need more. That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.
> That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.
Maybe it's the right thing to do, but you're not going to get a lot of support for letting the kids who are good at school go home after an hour. All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class. Might as well try to have something for them to do other than throw paper airplanes after ten minutes and distract the kids who need the whole hour.
Anyway, I suggested 2x the pupils for the fast math class, so that the normal math class got more resources. If you've got smaller schools, it's harder to allocate resources, and that's understandable, but a lot of schools have enough kids to push the ratios around to get more attention to the kids that need it.
It's unnecessary for all high school graduates to have taken AP Calc; but it's a waste of students' time for those who could have made it through that not to have had the opportunity. Just like it's a waste of students' time for them to be in classes that are beyond their current level so much that they can't catch up and then just passing them because there's no alternative, so they just zone out. Admittedly, the daycare function of school doesn't really care about wasting students' time, but that's only part of the function of school.
All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class
But why? This is a very dysfunctional way of allocating teaching time, especially if the classes are not split along learning ability. What ages are we talking about here?
At my school, we didn't even get subject-specific time slots until 13/14 years: before that, we all spent the same time in class but everyone worked on their own subject. The teacher's job was to make sure that every child spent time on each subject according to their needs, not according to alotted time.
And after that, when we did get separate classes and separate teachers for the different subjects, only 70% of our school time was scheduled for the whole class; the other 30% was for teacher "open hours": the students were expected to fill that time according to their own needs.
What is measured is what gets done. If schools are judged by graduation rates, then yes, fewer scientists but more people graduating highschool. Or we go the other way and judge schools by how many elite scientists they produce. Identify the best students early. Give them everything so that they can all become neuroscientists. Abandon all those who struggle in order to focus resources on the future doctors. Imho a public school should only start diverting resources to elite students once the school has achieved a reasonable graduation rate (90+% imho.)
I can see how that would help with the feelgoods, but how will this advance science and technology? The very things that allow you (and me) to be here pontificating about this instead of sustenance farming.
Apparently, the measure was not to "cancel advanced classes", but to replace advanced algebra by something more challenging, more engaging and developing more the scientific brain of student (in this case, advanced data science).
It looks like a lot of people who are screaming at the end of science haven't even realized the problem may just be in their head.
Unfortunately, many social scientists are pushing the idea that students learn better by having far less hours in school. There is also a lot of sketchy science claiming that homework is detrimental.
I think you are correct, but you are pushing against the headwinds of academia.
I agree with you, and I think AI-based tutors and software assisted personalized education could help a lot in this regard [1]; however, I'm not that optimistic in terms of implementing this in the USA.
About two years ago I chatted with a professor at ASU who was developing AI tutors and other sorts of systems and was able to show in research papers that they enhanced the learning of the class overall. However, he claimed that adoption among teachers and schools was largely rejected because teachers hated having imbalanced knowledge among the students.
Speaking as a parent with a child in private school, even there they have a strong resistance to teaching kids who already knows materials from the current year, where I was explicitly told those topics wouldn't be covered for two more years rather than embracing my child's curiosity and interests. K-12 education seems extremely non-optimal except for enabling parents to work, but my complaints about education aren't new [2] and our K-12 education certainly doesn't cultivate geniuses [3].
No-one does real intelligence studies in humans because it's such a third-rail in academia. Think "The Bell Curve". Some scientists seem to believe that intelligence is intrinsic. The analogy with dog breeds, with their different temperaments and capabilities, with individual variation, applies to humans as well.
Some people believe being homosexual is also intrinsic, despite identical twin studies showing contrary evidence. People like simple answers. It’s probably partly genetic, partly environmental. In other words, something worth studying further.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" This generalizes. Good luck funding research into a question to which people really don't want an answer to. There's some valid reasons to not want an answer - eugenics was and is a real thing, and its terrifying. For a while we seemed to skate by on a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not look into it too much. Just like there was a kind of "gentleman's agreement" to not point out the facts of sexual dimorphism in humans, as a paean to feminism. When feminists start claiming superiority of females to males, or extremist egalitarians start claiming we're all the same, I think an argument could be made that they have invalidated the agreement. Unfortunately.
They've studied it extensively already. Twin adoption studies have conclusively proven that intelligence is mostly genetic with environment playing a small role.
But then engaged parents will take their kids to Kumon, and rich parents will take their kids to private school.
Their kids will then mop the floor against all other kids, including engaged kids without engaged parents, that would have benefited from more advanced classes. Is that equality?
That does not make any sense: without this measure, the kids that you are trying to save from moping the floor will ... mop the floor twice.
Without this measure, the kids that are not able to follow classes that needs things they cannot afford will just fail the lecture and drop from school, from THE WHOLE SCHOOL.
Without the measure, you have people who drop out of school and get a mathematical education close to 0 and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10.
With this measure, the same people will get a mathematical education closer to 5, and will compete with people of mathematical education of 10.
I think you might be misunderstanding the system. In California, you had standard track math, and advanced or accelerated track. This measure gets rids of advanced/accelerated, and forces everyone into standard. Without the measure you have 5s and 10s separated, with the measure, you have 5s and 10s together.
But as the parent post points out, 10s either dominate the class, leave the class, or ignore the class and take math outside school. None of that help's the 5s, and all of it hurts, or is wasteful for the 10s.
Thank you for bringing my attention to that. Looking closer, I'm even more confused: it was never question to drop "advanced math", but to replace "advanced algebra" by "advanced data science mathematics". The program was even claiming (maybe incorrectly, but it's not the point) that they wanted to replace the boring memorization of formula by real life problems more challenging for students.
So, I'm now not even sure where this "dumbing down" the students comes from. Maybe it's yet another moral panic.
It is not a moral panic, it is legitimate dumbing down of the math curriculum.
You have to look further back. They are blocking middle schoolers from taking Algebra. That means they won't haven't progressed enough to get to Calculus unless they skip ahead a grade level of math, either via summer school, or other outside study.
> They are blocking middle schoolers from taking Algebra.
By replacing it by another challenging mathematical content. How is that "dumbing down".
It's like saying "they are making students less musical because they are replacing piano lectures with guitar lectures".
And, yes, I get that Algebra is not the same as Data Science, and that Algebra may cover some foundation needed for a math specialization. But a lot of students don't end up doing a specialization in math: for them, Data Science may make them SMARTER than Algebra which give tools rather than train the brain to think differently.
I had a strong math cursus at uni, and I've observed that it takes a while for the "math point of view" to "click" and suddenly make sense. It is also the case in some comments here. I have never seen someone saying they have "clicked" before uni (I'm sure there is some, the point is that they are too rare to be the reason we waste all the other students' time). The reality is that teaching 1 year of something that you need 2-3 years before "clicking" means that it is just wasted on people who just do one year.
And, of course, Algebra is not limited to that. But it is also just true that a lot of it is learning formula by heart, which makes it difficult to pretend teaching a more challenging, engaging and practical math domain will make people somehow less smart.
They address that in the article: tutoring. One on one tutoring works amazingly well. I used to volunteer as a tutor. The students I worked with accelerated drastically. It's simply a matter of money.
They do leave out some things: food + shelter. Many poor students have problems with nutrition and safe shelter, both of which make learning near impossible.
The metro area I'm in is a perfect example of this. We have two small cities side by side. Pretty much the same socioeconomic makeup in both. One invests massively into education, tutoring, summer programs, etc. In the other the schools are literally crumbling, but hey, the police budget is at an all time high! The city investing into education ranks 9/10-10/10 on state tests, the city that allows its buildings to literally crumble (the library was off limits for a while because the ceiling tiles were falling so often they were injuring the children), ranks 2/10.
We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.
They don't really address it: tutoring is OBVIOUS, everyone knows that tutoring works. The reason they are applying this measure is because tutoring is not doable.
> We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.
And we can also give poney to every kids.That's a nice thought but that is so deconnected from reality, which means that you are pushing for something that will never happen and at the same time the unfair situation will stay the same.
Why? It's always appeared available on an opt-in basis as far as I can remember. It should be possible to drastically expand this through various means, outside of standard classroom hours.
We can tax corporations and billionaires. Building a functional education system isn't an unrealistic pipe dream, its an imperative for a well adjusted society.
Billionaires aren't the unlimited money piñata that you might hope; their total assets are less than federal yearly tax revenues, and good luck getting even a tiny fraction of that per year. As for corporations, I assume you're proposing raising the corporate tax rate -- but we're already near the revenue-maximizing peak of the Laffer curve on that particular tax, and there's just not much room to get more money that way.
(Also, only about a third of the incidence of corporate taxes falls on shareholders, with the rest being split about equally between lower wages for workers and higher prices for customers. It can be surprisingly regressive!)
The Laffer curve is a laughably poor model to inform tax policy:
- There are many taxes, not a single tax rate
- It completely ignores the idea of progressive taxation: rich individuals and giant megacorps can afford to pay higher tax rates without the same issues that would occur by applying those tax rates on lower and middle classes and small business.
- It cannot be empirically validated without cherry picking data because it ignores many crucial factors.
It's basically just propaganda paid for and promoted by the rich to convince the proles to let them keep more money.
I would love that (more money for education), and I'm pretty sure the people who proposed this measure would drop it immediately in exchange for more money for education.
But you are obviously not the first one coming up with this idea. Plenty of people have tried and are still trying, and it still does not work (it does not mean we should not try). In the meanwhile, we still need to improve the situation for people who are being the victim of it.
This is why this measure has been created while your measure is still far from being reality.
You are on to something here. The thing I'd contribute is that then we need teacher training to improve math teaching in the US. Math teaching in the US is often of poor quality, as teachers may not be trained well and are often not confident in their own mathematical ability. Curricula are often haphazard.
The US generally takes the approach that changing the curriculum or changing standards will change outcomes, but rarely invests in teacher quality, which would have very high impact (compare to Korea, Finland, etc.).
> The problem is not allowing people to take more advanced classes, if they so choose.
The article itself says that students who want to go ahead will get private lessons.
The idea is not stopping people to get more advanced classes, the idea is to cancel more advanced classes as long as "normal pace" classes are not present.
The way it works is that if you put an advanced class and no normal pace class, people who need the normal pace class will fail school over and over again and finally drop out of it, and people will just say "the advanced class is just a normal pace class" without realising it's not the case.
> The article itself says that students who want to go ahead will get private lessons.
This is a ridiculously privileged view that hurts the people it claims to help.
As a child, I was heavily invested in math, but I was raised by a mother who had no resources or inclination to pay for private lessons. Luckily my public school district had a few advanced classes available for all, and along with my own initiative, I was able to scrounge up a passable math education.
> The way it works is that if you put an advanced class and no normal pace class,
Caveat: I didn't grow up in California. I don't know how public schools are run there. That being said, this sounds like nonsense to me. There were always normal pace classes for students who excelled less. These were, in my experience, the most populated classes.
> This is a ridiculously privileged view that hurts the people it claims to help.
I'm not saying it is what it will happen, I'm saying that some says "this measure is stupid, smart students will get private lessons anyway" and other are saying "this measure is stupid, smart students are forced to not learn".
All I was saying was: if you think that the "private lessons" argument is elitist or unrealistic, then you should disagree with the author of the article.
> Canceling advanced classes quite literally prevents people from taking those classes.
1) You've cut my sentence, which says "cancel more advanced classes IF ...", which means that not all advanced classes are cancelled.
2) You are therefore asking to cancel "beginner's classes". I'm saying "cancel advanced classes as long as there are not enough beginner classes", so you are in practice canceling beginner classes. As any "advanced class" student was first a "beginner class" student, you are canceling the path towards advanced class.
> This is about allowing people to take the advanced classes if they choose, and allowing others to take normal classes.
Quickly looking closer to this, it was NEVER QUESTION TO CANCEL ADVANCED CLASSES. Simply, instead of algebra, do advanced data science (basically statistics), which is probably 1) more challenging, 2) more engaging, 3) more practical.
> Just allow people to take those advanced classes if they choose, and allow others to take take the normal classes. Problem solved.
Which problem exactly? It looks like the "no advanced classes" is just people on the internet getting all exited for something that was never considered.
> You are therefore asking to cancel "beginner's classes"
No, people are not asking to do this, lol. The complaint is about the education report that opposed students being allowed to study algebra in advanced classes.
Thats what this is about.
> Simply, instead of algebra, do advanced data science
Ok, so algebra classes are being cancelled. Yeah, thats the problem!
> Which problem exactly?
The problem of not being able to take algebra classes.
> No, people are not asking to do this, lol. The complaint is about the education report that opposed students being allowed to study algebra in advanced classes.
Obviously, nobody is just coming and saying "lol, I hate children, I want people to be dumb, I will stop them being educated".
The reason this report proposes to replace algebra by data science is because this report argues that data science is making people as smart as algebra, but also, unlike algebra, it does not stop some people to get smart.
(in more details: algebra is a lot of "learn by heart" and is mainly a preparation for higher studies with a learning curve that blocks more people, which means people who have not the luxury to take it will not take it)
> Ok, so algebra classes are being cancelled. Yeah, thats the problem!
They are replaced by something better, and removing them stop some students to end up less smart. Is that really a problem?
I'm sure algebra have some good sides (it's good to get good foundations when someone wants to study math, for example, without being indispensable), but is it worth the cost on other students?
> The problem of not being able to take algebra classes.
And yet before this proposal, no one was able to take data science classes, and no one (and not you) were complaining. Isn't that a bit unfair: you don't mind a world without data science classes (despite the fact that they are better than algebra), but a world without algebra is suddenly a problem (well, not "without algebra", you can still do algebra, just not in the same order)
> The reason this report proposes to replace algebra
Ok, so it is replacing stuff! Not sure why you had to go through so many posts to just admit that.
And people have a problem with what is being replaced.
If you wanted to say that support the replacement of algebra, you should have just said that from the beginning instead of doing this whole rigmarole.
But other people very much do not want this option taken away from them and step one to talking about this is at least admitting that, yes, algebra is being replaced.
> But other people very much do not want this option taken away from them and step one to talking about this is at least admitting that, yes, algebra is being replaced.
Of course algebra is being replaced, where do I say anything different.
I guess my mistake is assuming my interlocutors are not idiots and want to debate the reason of the replacement rather than just staying on "I like Algebra so I'm crying like a baby".
> And people have a problem with what is being replaced.
This is what I don't understand. They don't have any arguments to support the fact that the replacement is not bringing more supported "pro" than "con".
All they say is "I can see one good thing to Algebra, so it implies that this measure can only be a bad one", which is obviously incorrect. In real life, measures usually replace things that are not all bad by things that are better. The point is that you need to weight the pros and the cons. Here, it feels like people are just saying "I don't want to hear the pros, I know one con, and it means it's a bad idea".
I personally like Algebra, and I would have loved it to stay. The same way I like the convenience of some fastfood. But when a study shows that for the same price, they can replace a fastfood menu to a better menu in a school, the normal thing to do is to weight the pros and cons, not just cry because I prefer fastfood.
It is interesting to see that some people who present themselves as on the side of reason will act so irrationally to oppose some proposal without caring of the pros and cons, just because it feels negative in their feelings.
replace "normal" with "slow" and "advanced" with "normal", and you will discover:
1. Why this initiative is a problem
2. That simply rewording "slow" to "normal" and "normal" to "advanced" seems to constitute the majority of your argument, without which there isn't a good one
And replace "slow" by "terribly fast" and "normal" by "advanced" and, magic, now everyone gets advanced classes.
Estimating if the pace is "fast" or "normal" is very very complicated. Only an idiot will pretend they know for sure that "this is too slow" (unless obvious extreme cases which don't correspond to what we have here)
Also, apparently, the measure was to replace advanced algebra by advanced data science which was in fact more challenging than the initial recite-by-heart-the-formula algebra lessons.
it's actually not that complicated, just look at what other schools in the country do, or what these did before the change
then, with that data, you will know to replace "terribly fast" with the original "slow", and can try to make your proposal not depend purely on the semantics of inaccurately renaming "slow" to "terribly fast"
remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum the normal one, when the normal one is the one they had before these changes, the one which reflected the norm (hence the name) in the US
if you think that one is actually "advanced", that's upon you to convincingly make the case for, otherwise we default back to the above, but a purely semantic argument is pretty weak on its own anyways
also, the last paragraph of your post presents a false dichotomy: creating a new class doesn't require cancelling advanced algebra (advanced advanced algebra?)
> it's actually not that complicated, just look at what other schools in the country do, or what these did before the change
Except that you have not done that. Where are your data? Did you make sure that the group you compared are representative to each other? How do you correct for all the differences in state (unemployment level, diversity in education, political orientation, level of rurality, ...) that all have an effect? ...
So, no, it is objectively pretty complicated. You should have taken advanced data science, you would understand better that just comparing 2 states is very very naive to draw conclusions.
> remember, you are the one who started these word games by renaming the slow curriculum the normal one, when the normal one is the one they had before these changes, the one which reflected the norm (hence the name) in the US
In fact, I was not the one who started: the measure that is in question in the article has been proposed because people have done a study (a real one, comparing the numbers, you know, the thing that you say one should do before saying if it is slow or not but that you did not do) and concluded that there was a problem.
The document is 1000 pages long, of course it covers the elements that support their proposal (and you should agree with that as you say it's not complicated). These elements were themselves critized (maybe correctly), so it is funny to see that sometimes the argument is "their base study is badly done" and sometimes it is "I claim that I know what is 'slow' or not, without study, which is fine because if someone says it's not, they have just renamed without study"
If a team came up and say "we had a look and concluded that we should replace algebra by data science" and you just say "naaah, I have ZERO study on the subject, but I want to believe that algebra is fine", when someone says "but the point is that algebra is not fine", you cannot say "you haven't done a study": YOU are the one who pretend that the measure is not supported by the data, while you are the one having not looked at the data.
(and don't get me wrong, it does not mean that the study done by the people who proposed these measures is perfect or even correct. On the opposite: such study is difficult. If you now claim their study is invalid, it just show that 1) it is true it's complicated, 2) you don't care about the reality as you didn't even consider that they may have been backed by a study, you just assumed there was none because it was more convenient for you)
> also, the last paragraph of your post presents a false dichotomy: creating a new class doesn't require cancelling advanced algebra (advanced advanced algebra?)
What are you talking about: I'm not saying they had to remove advanced algebra in order to introduce advance data science, I'm saying they decided to replace something that they think is not challenging, engaging and useful enough by something more challenging, more engaging and more useful.
And if you think "aaaah, it's awful because before there was algebra and now there is no algebra, so it tortures the poor students who like algebra", why were you not crying about the poor students who like data science that was "canceled" before this proposal.
>Except that you have not done that. Where are your data?
It's your responsibility, not mine, to prove that what was normal before is now "advanced" by the standards of the country, and that slow is now "normal"
> I'm not saying they had to remove advanced algebra in order to introduce advance data science, I'm saying they decided to replace something that they think is not challenging...
this contradicts the assertion that the class was too advanced, now it's not advanced enough? Doubt.
Plus, you yourself are using the word "replace", here meaning removing 1 class and adding another: two acts. There's nothing requiring them to remove the first class, and there doesn't seem to be a convincing case for doing so. If you want to have a new class, go ahead, but don't nuke good, unrelated classes in the process.
>...by something more challenging, more engaging and more useful
is it, though? That's what they say, on 1 side of the issue, but it doesn't seem like that's the case, and again, both are useful, so that's not a valid excuse for nuking 1
> It's your responsibility, not mine, to prove that what was normal before is now "advanced" by the standards of the country, and that slow is now "normal"
I've answered that already: the demonstration is in the 1000 pages of the report supporting the measure debated here.
> this contradicts the assertion that the class was too advanced, now it's not advanced enough?
This is not complicated.
I'm saying we need a correct entry-level, followed by a correct advanced level.
I was just saying: "This measure does not dumb down people if they allow them to enter something they were not able to enter before. Moreover, I've also noticed that some people here seems to think that this measure implies that everything will ever be entry-level, which is not true, they are also doing advanced-level for students who have a faster pace"
> Plus, you yourself are using the word "replace", here meaning removing 1 class and adding another: two acts.
That's correct, well done. Let's see another example: yesterday, I've downloaded a movie, this morning, I've replaced this activity by listening to music. 2 acts. Yet, no false dichotomy.
> There's nothing requiring them to remove the first class, and there doesn't seem to be a convincing case for doing so. If you want to have a new class, go ahead, but don't nuke good, unrelated classes in the process.
Say the person who has absolutely no idea of the intricacy of designing an education program. They have to compose the program. Having parallel subjects means multiplying the work for the design, for the teacher, for the controlling bodies, ... Not something impossible, but certainly not something you want to do unless you really have to.
But then, you say "good class", and this is the problem: the reason this initiative exists is because IT IS, according to them, NOT A GOOD CLASS. It creates problem: inadapted learning curve, inequalities, early tracking of students, ... while not being intellectually very interesting.
Again: ACCORDING TO THEM. It does not matter if you don't agree with them: it is impossible for them to do a proposal where every one agrees. You are not special, and you can repeat "it's a good class", THEY HAVE A 1000 PAGES REPORT, they did not just wake up a morning and decided "it's not a good class", it's a result of a reflection that may be wrong but is certainly way more solid than yours. (just in case: it is not an "argument from authority", I'm not saying they are right, simply, painting them as if they are equivalent to a random HN commenter is just either intellectually dishonest or the proof that the person who does that is themselves really stupid)
> is it, though? That's what they say, on 1 side of the issue, but it doesn't seem like that's the case, and again, both are useful, so that's not a valid excuse for nuking 1
You realise too that if you propose to keep the 2, you will have people complaining about that, right? Some people like the color orange, some people like the color green. You may like green. Sometimes, people choose green, and you are happy. And sometimes they choose orange, but don't pretend that "green" is somehow "the good one", especially if you have nothing else than feeling and vague idea of how it works. But also, importantly, when we have the green-vs-orange, there is always an idiot who say "it's easy, let's just mix green and orange together" thinking that magically, both green and orange will be happy.
No, having both Algebra and Data Science is not "the best of two worlds". There are plenty of reason why it is very very stupid: more work, more confusion, we dont fix the early tracking of student (we increase it in fact because the uni will even less adapt to people who haven't done Algebra if they can just say "you had to choose Algebra"), we don't help diversity (Algebra will be even more non-diverse now that the "bad ones" who loves math will be pushed to do Data Science), ...
I don't follow this debate closely. In the late 1970s, I had the option to take algebra in 8th grade. I was stunned that I was selected, because I was terrible at arithmetic, and honestly I still am. I got Cs, maybe a B every now and then, in math up through 7th grade. My parents didn't apply any pressure (that I know of) to get me in. I remember taking the assessment test for algebra and I didn't even finish it. It was very stressful. But somehow I got in. And starting with algebra, something clicked. I could actually see how math could be used to solve practical problems. I got mostly As in math after that.
More recently, my kids had the option to take algebra in the 8th grade. I don't see any good reason to not keep it available. Sometimes kids need a challenge (or at least need to see a point to it) to engage in a subject.
My guess is that the districts that want to eliminate it are looking at poor math achievement and thinking that applying more resources to getting all the kids up to some minimal level of math literacy is better than diverting some of those resources to a smaller number of kids who are ready for more advanced topics. And yeah, sad to say but there are some teachers who are not themselves capable of teaching algebra or anything more advanced. So teaching it in junior high leaves a smaller pool of qualified teachers for high school math.
So the problems they are trying to solve are really a scarce resource problem. They need more resources to try get the low performers up to some satisfactory level. The real answer of course is always the same whenever you have a supply problem: you need to pay more. Wealthy families will do this. They will hire tutors, either personal or virtual. For the rest of the kids who only have public education available, we've shown a consistent unwillingness to properly fund it. And I don't necessarily mean in terms of total dollars. We spend a lot of money on public education, but we spend it poorly.
> I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some [...]
You don't need to have a unified "goal". Just let the faster students learn more. Note California public schools started *removing* optional classes for faster students.
> The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware.
I was wondering if some people are aware of studies supporting this strategy.
I could try to dig them up, but I remember few studies demonstrating that school success is more correlated to the socio-economical situation of the parent than to the child intrinsic capacities (I think one usual method is to compare success of twins adopted in different families to remove the naive argument "higher socio-economical situation means that these people are intrinsically smarter").
If it is the case, while avoiding the privileged ones to run ahead is not ideal, the alternative of doing nothing is even worse (which is in practice what a lot of people criticizing this measure prone: they did not have any plan to change anything before the subject was introduced).
I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some. A bit like if your professor was saying "we have an exam on chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, I will tell you the chapters 1 and 3, the chapters 2 and 4 are in the books but I'm going to give this book only to some students and not other". If a professor does that, people will obviously say that it is stupid, that the professor should teach chapters 1 and 2 to everyone and then do a test on chapters 1 and 2, and nobody will pretend that this is "dumbying down" the students.