The new California Mathematics Framework promises to minimize racial inequity at the expense of mathematical excellence—and the promise of the Golden State.
"Equity" is destroying our educational system. In school, I didn't learn about any mathematician of any color. We just learned math, which is already colorblind. Most kids go from K-12 without learning the name of a single mathematician, with the exception of Pythagoras, and only because it's called the Pythagorean Theorem.
And it ultimately doesn't matter, because math is the same math across races.
Exactly. What silliness, that math can only be relevant if there's "representation" involved in who came up with all these theories and hypotheses. We spent little time in actual Math doing "history" and "social science" about the mathematicians as opposed to, ya know, actually learning their math. Wasting time trying to reverse engineer history to be "inclusive" in some weird insistence that POC can only "understand" math if it involved previous "POC" is very reductionist. The only way to get more POC into math/STEM is to teach them.. wait for it.. MATH.
As a 21-year middle school math teacher, I will tell you that the focus on high-school curricula is welcome, but should not be the priority.
There needs to be a much heavier focus on elementary level math. In order to be able to do any abstract or general mathematics, students need a solid foundation in numeracy. They need to know their times tables tables as well as they know the alphabet. They need to be able to add and subtract two-digit numbers in their head and 3-4 digits quickly on paper. They need to know what fractions and decimals actually mean.
And, above all, we need to severely restrict the use of calculators. There has been a misguided notion that one can separate "concepts" of math from the actualy mechanical calculation work, and therefore having a machine do the 'grunt work' allows the human to do the thinking. This goes against everything we know of cognitive science - the two are intimately linked.
You can't think critically unless you have the relevant facts stored in your brain. Having a machine do the work weakens the mind in the same way that parking close to every store and always using the elevator weakens your body.
As I always tell my students: If a machine is doing the work, nobody needs you.
This is, without a doubt, the best assessment of what is wrong with math education I have read. I am a semi-retired math teacher, and I agree wholeheartedly with what you are saying about the need for the fundamentals in elementary school and the need to severely restrict calculator use, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels.
Great comment, agree so much about each paragraph. And yes, you need to be able to do math in your head (to some extent; some are not as good at math. C.S. Lewis had tremendous gifts but struggled at math).
I think you need math to understand a news story. 'X' happened. How often does it happen? Does that justify a change in policy or would change cost too much, or cause 'Y' to happen more? Are the numbers being given even credible or are they mistaken? Despite 'X" happening, and 'X' being bad, are we really doing about the best we can to prevent it?
People have reactions to news stories based on the anecdotal content but you need to do the math to understand the picture.
Again, there are going to be people who are more gifted in other areas.
Which is a huge problem. My kids were in a thing called "discovery math", no times tables, and they were lost. So i taught them it myself, and they immediately improved in math.
then their teacher got snotty, saying "well i guess we'll have to make everyone do it".
Partially true, in my experience (in California). They are taught, but learning them cold is more of a suggestion than a requirement. Self-motivated or parent-driven kids learn them; others master a portion over time. Which is a very dumb — and inequitable — way of teaching them.
In general, we’ve gone way overboard in denigrating memorization.
I'm shocked to hear this. I remember practicing my times table like a fiend as a kid, and all these decades later I still have access to those products in the same way that I can still read big words without blinking. Why in the world would children be discouraged from memorizing the times table? Memorizing anything improves our ability to memorize anything else. What's the point of not learning to multiply? Does every five year old carry around a calculator? It seems criminal to deprive children of this fundamental skill.
It reminds me of the shift in reading education from phonics to the whole-word method that occurred in the late 20th century. Columbia University professor John McWhorter, a brilliant linguist and author, has written about the superiority of the phonics method and indeed feels that it is THE antidote to illiteracy. It's the way I learned to read 65 years ago, and I'm still pretty good at it.
I, too, practiced my times tables regularly, reciting them to myself at odd moments just to prove I could do it, lodging those numbers firmly in my head so well that I couldn't get it wrong. Considering that FACTORS (which you only know if you know the times table backward, forward, and upside down) are the key to advanced math, the movement away from memorizing times tables seems like an intentional way of creating innumeracy.
Although I learned to read, long before kindergarten, by the whole-word method (paying attention to the words as my mom read picture books to me), phonics was still a very valuable method for me to increase my reading vocabulary. It allowed me to decode words I had never encountered in written form before. And for students who don't innately "teach themselves" to read (as I did), phonics is the most logical approach to learning to read. Puritan children sitting over their hornbooks learned reading this way!
As with most things where people are getting screwed over, this is all about money. The people who create curriculum materials always need to be presenting the "latest, greatest thing" in order to sell new textbooks and give new seminars. If instruction methods stayed with the tried and true, these people would not be able to make money.
Absolutely! Students need to learn “the language of arithmetic” before they can decode the more advanced math. All math curriculum content from the 2d semester of 3rd grade on
assumes students have fluency of multiplication and division basic facts. MOST students do not! They are simply pushed through and teachers are forced to fake all assessments through the nonsensical standards based grading systems. I recently had a job as a math intervention teacher. I developed a 1:1 assessment which assessed fluency of all the basic facts from 1X1 to 12X12. 10% of the SEVENTH GRADE students had reached full fluency. I developed a 1:1 oral practice system which resulted in these 7th grade students increasing fluency significantly. Once they have developed some basic understanding of numeracy they can start to access the second semester 3rd grade curriculum to 5th grade.
Curriculum. Look at the non college credit courses required of 50% or more of college students that align with elementary and Algebra I math curricula!!! We are in a crisis. I would love to meet with any retired math teachers interested in helping to develop solutions to this problem. It needs to be regular elementary teachers NOT college professors getting rich off national grant monies! New Hampshire Governor Sununu has just made learning the basic multiplication facts a requirement.
I recall drilling to learn the multiplication tables in third grade. The teacher caught a student cheating on a math test by using a slide-rule which was on her pencil box lid. The teacher's cheeks were red as she explained to the whole class that a cute pencil box with a slide-rule on the lid was fine as long we intended to carry one with us everywhere the rest of our lives.
Sadly, now we do rely too much on tools on our phones which are omnipresent. Too often we are weakened by clever devices.
We need a new sign posted on the door of every aircraft right next to the "Wi-Fi on board" sign so that passengers can inspect it as they board. "The engineers who designed this plane did NOT study math in California".
We can do the same thing with medical devices, cars, cranes, vaccines and any other products that will kill you if they go wrong.
There is a term in product design called "planned obsolescence". California is in the process of obsoleting itself.
It's hard to believe that the people there have become so stupid in such a short time....g.
“Under the framework, the range of student backgrounds, learning differences, and perspectives, taken collectively, are seen as an instructional asset that can be used to launch and support all students in a deep and shared exploration of the same context and open task,”
Good heavens...What does that actually...say? It's bureaucratic nothing speak in spades!
What's a "same context and open task"? How can one explore it?
Is Kamala Harris ghostwriting the CMF?
What's not fair is kids; black, brown, Asian, white, or whatever, not being able to do mathematics at grade level. Mathematics for the average citizen hasn't changed that much in millennia.
We've had any number of "systems" for teaching mathematics...there seems to come a new one every couple of years, each one about as successful as the last. And while learning skills fall along a spectrum, it appears that people in the lower deciles economically tend to have more limited skills.
One can continue to argue that the methodology of teaching mathematics is flawed, but at some point one has to understand that the answer may not be where you are looking.
Charter schools have, time and again, proven that those being left behind at our public schools can learn given the right environment, and that environment includes accountability on many levels.
It would be my thinking that instead of condemning the private schools for whatever the reason du jour might be, public schools, their management, their teachers, and their unions could adopt the concepts of accountability and get back to the teaching of mathematics as a wonderous language in which to explore our world.
LOL. I read the same paragraph and had the same reaction - 43 words of nothingness, of ideological blather. I suspect the author included it for a reason.
Liberals. “We’re going to solve global warming by introducing a pall over the Earth which will block the sun’s rays.” In other news, “liberals mandate every house, car, bicycle, and yes, even your horse will be required to install solar panels.”
Liberals. “We’re going to end gun violence forever by seizing all firearms.” In other news, “prosecutors arrange for the president’s son to have his felony gun crimes waived.”
Liberals. “We are a sanctuary city, we will pay for all illegal aliens.” In other news “We can’t afford illegal aliens so send them to conservative states.”
Liberals. “Look how high our IQs are, we understand math.” In other news, “we’re getting rid of standards so everybody can get an A in math.”
This is just another play from the Democrats' covert-racism playbook. The underlying assumption is that black people can't do math without careful coddling that largely prevents them from ever achieving math proficiency.
When asking students to get the correct answer to a math problem is "racist," students are never going to learn to get the correct answer. And getting the correct answer is the ONLY point of using math in the real world. Without the correct answers to math problems, we can't do science or engineering on any level.
But then, that seems to be part of the Left's plan--replacing science with "The Science." And they wouldn't want anyone to be able to do math well enough to understand their fraudulent use of statistics.
Agreed except the third paragraph, reminiscent of the oft-repeated canard that Republicans "oppose education" because they want people dumber so they will vote Republican.
Many black kids start out at a huge disadvantage due to bad or absent parents, no community mentors etc., so literally they can't do math as well as others, and I suspect they become discouraged at school quite early. The only way to fix this I can think of is huge interventions (tutoring, etc) pretty early on. Available for any other kids too, naturally.
The unfortunate thing is, early interventions don't seem to be enough. The gains that kids get from Head Start are more or less erased by the time the kids are in third grade. Something more is going on than just starting behind.
We did not see the current anti-education phenomenon among black leaders 60 years ago. Not only did black people want their children to become educated, they wanted them to be able to go to white schools, which spent more per pupil on facilities and teachers.
If we can figure out who started and promoted the spread of the idea that doing well in school is "white" (and that that's somehow a bad thing), I think we would know a lot more about how we've reached a point where Leftist leaders don't want black kids to become proficient in math.
Thanks for your reply. I find the whole toxic subset of black culture that features absent fathers, antisocial behavior, crime, etc.very frustrating and off putting, and I try to arrive at some positive ways to address it. But change mostly needs to come from inside tge culture and it is so broken I don't see that as likely. As you note, there seem to be no black leaders now, just charlatans hawking stupid victimology narratives, people who aren't even interesting, much less correct. I do know that there are sports figures and pastors who go into those communities and try to provide some of the mentoring that would ordinarily come from an intact healthy family, and that's great but not near enough.
There was much that was better in the past about the black community, when there was too much adversity to make stupidity an option. (Again, I hasten to add I am not talking about all black people but the toxic subset)
If any real change happens it won't be imposed from outside.
One further factor is the college education quandary. I am for admission (and degree granting) strictly on merit, but releasing more educated black people into the community is going to pull it up. Education is not the be all and end all regards the cultivation of good character, but it does seem to help.
I agree that more well-educated black people are a benefit to their community. But what the Left is doing right now is actually *preventing* black people from becoming well educated.
When you lower and lower and lower the standards, more black kids may be able to "graduate" and "get into college," but if they have failed to become literate and numerate along the way (the result of lowering standards), those "achievements" mean very little.
And if, as Leftists would like, colleges also lower their standards, even having a college degree will mean little. Which devalues having a college degree, while simultaneously giving black kids nothing more than a shiny paper that has become only a participation trophy.
Don't forget that Leftists have already largely been achieving the awarding of college degrees without any guarantee of literacy or numeracy *for decades* in the field of education. Way back in the mid-80s, California had to institute a competency exam for prospective teaching certificate candidates, precisely *because* education majors were graduating from college without adequate literacy and numeracy to be teaching children.
Leftists have already long-since mastered the illusion of education without having learned anything.
The soft racism of low expectations. It’s become a trite saying I guess, but it’s become a cancer that is eating the west from the inside out.
Cowards and low-functioning academics - all of them. They impose their incoherent ideology on children across the state, and don’t have the courage to defend their ideas to the public.
School choice would solve this problem, but that will never happen in California. Newsom couldn’t care less. His children attend private school.
Mathematics is the language of science. Numeracy is as important as literacy. California in its public schools is failing on both counts. The basic level of literacy in California is equivalent to Rwanda's. Many African and Caribbean countries have a higher rate of literacy and numeracy.
The tech industry can continue to import numerate engineers from around the global or indeed move to where there is a high preponderance of numerate people. For example in Britain, Cambridgeshire is now known as the Silicon Fen. The numeracy and literacy of England and Wales has been increasing because of a focus on phonics and teaching the basics in maths.
In Mississippi, literacy is on the increase, again because of phonics. (See the op-ed in the NYT from a month or so ago). The costs of doing business in Mississippi with a literate and numerate workforce will be far less than in Silicon Valley. If the education department can do this in Mississippi why can't they in California or is the will simply not there because of incompetent bureaucrats?
The big question is why is the California electorate content to neglect California's most important long term resource -- namely its young? A mind is a terrible thing to waste -- to quote an old slogan.
Every time anyone hears the word equity, they should correct the person using it by saying "by equity, do you mean enforcing equal outcomes through racial quotas?"
Perhaps part of the issue involves the quality (or lack thereof) of public school math and science teachers. Let's face it - the best and brightest mathematicians aren't teaching in public schools, because there are much better paying jobs elsewhere.
This is influenced in-part by the rigid union-created pay structures in most public school districts. It doesn't matter what you teach; pay is a strictly function of a teacher's education level and seniority. So a middle or high school math or science teacher with, say, a masters degree and 10 years of service gets paid the same as a gym teacher or a kindergarten teacher. Not to say that the gym or kindergarten teachers aren't important, because they are. But there's a lot more involved - both inside and outside the classroom - in teaching math or science. This is especially true in cases in small and medium sized schools where the math and science teachers have to prepare for and teach multiple subjects.
Californian politicians will need the electorate to pretty rubbish at math (maths?) if they hope to convince the voters that paying gazillions in "reparations" is not going to bankrupt their state.
It would seem that two wildly disparate groups have reached the same conclusion:
"Indeed, the ideological gap is basically nonexistent between CMF supporters and reactionaries who once thought black and Latino kids were cognitively or culturally incapable of advanced mathematics."
“After seeing Natalia’s success, she signed up her younger son, Matthew, when he was 6. He complained about doing math classes at 9 a.m. on Saturdays when his friends were playing sports, but it paid off. Matthew, now 10, was able to skip the third grade.” - from the NYPost link.
One stupid extreme or another. Where are the adults in the room??
"Equity" is destroying our educational system. In school, I didn't learn about any mathematician of any color. We just learned math, which is already colorblind. Most kids go from K-12 without learning the name of a single mathematician, with the exception of Pythagoras, and only because it's called the Pythagorean Theorem.
And it ultimately doesn't matter, because math is the same math across races.
Exactly. What silliness, that math can only be relevant if there's "representation" involved in who came up with all these theories and hypotheses. We spent little time in actual Math doing "history" and "social science" about the mathematicians as opposed to, ya know, actually learning their math. Wasting time trying to reverse engineer history to be "inclusive" in some weird insistence that POC can only "understand" math if it involved previous "POC" is very reductionist. The only way to get more POC into math/STEM is to teach them.. wait for it.. MATH.
As a 21-year middle school math teacher, I will tell you that the focus on high-school curricula is welcome, but should not be the priority.
There needs to be a much heavier focus on elementary level math. In order to be able to do any abstract or general mathematics, students need a solid foundation in numeracy. They need to know their times tables tables as well as they know the alphabet. They need to be able to add and subtract two-digit numbers in their head and 3-4 digits quickly on paper. They need to know what fractions and decimals actually mean.
And, above all, we need to severely restrict the use of calculators. There has been a misguided notion that one can separate "concepts" of math from the actualy mechanical calculation work, and therefore having a machine do the 'grunt work' allows the human to do the thinking. This goes against everything we know of cognitive science - the two are intimately linked.
You can't think critically unless you have the relevant facts stored in your brain. Having a machine do the work weakens the mind in the same way that parking close to every store and always using the elevator weakens your body.
As I always tell my students: If a machine is doing the work, nobody needs you.
This is, without a doubt, the best assessment of what is wrong with math education I have read. I am a semi-retired math teacher, and I agree wholeheartedly with what you are saying about the need for the fundamentals in elementary school and the need to severely restrict calculator use, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels.
Great comment, agree so much about each paragraph. And yes, you need to be able to do math in your head (to some extent; some are not as good at math. C.S. Lewis had tremendous gifts but struggled at math).
I think you need math to understand a news story. 'X' happened. How often does it happen? Does that justify a change in policy or would change cost too much, or cause 'Y' to happen more? Are the numbers being given even credible or are they mistaken? Despite 'X" happening, and 'X' being bad, are we really doing about the best we can to prevent it?
People have reactions to news stories based on the anecdotal content but you need to do the math to understand the picture.
Again, there are going to be people who are more gifted in other areas.
Elementary school students have not been expected to memorize the times table for decades.
Which is a huge problem. My kids were in a thing called "discovery math", no times tables, and they were lost. So i taught them it myself, and they immediately improved in math.
then their teacher got snotty, saying "well i guess we'll have to make everyone do it".
Yes, jesus.
Partially true, in my experience (in California). They are taught, but learning them cold is more of a suggestion than a requirement. Self-motivated or parent-driven kids learn them; others master a portion over time. Which is a very dumb — and inequitable — way of teaching them.
In general, we’ve gone way overboard in denigrating memorization.
I'm shocked to hear this. I remember practicing my times table like a fiend as a kid, and all these decades later I still have access to those products in the same way that I can still read big words without blinking. Why in the world would children be discouraged from memorizing the times table? Memorizing anything improves our ability to memorize anything else. What's the point of not learning to multiply? Does every five year old carry around a calculator? It seems criminal to deprive children of this fundamental skill.
It reminds me of the shift in reading education from phonics to the whole-word method that occurred in the late 20th century. Columbia University professor John McWhorter, a brilliant linguist and author, has written about the superiority of the phonics method and indeed feels that it is THE antidote to illiteracy. It's the way I learned to read 65 years ago, and I'm still pretty good at it.
Why would we deprive children of what works?
I, too, practiced my times tables regularly, reciting them to myself at odd moments just to prove I could do it, lodging those numbers firmly in my head so well that I couldn't get it wrong. Considering that FACTORS (which you only know if you know the times table backward, forward, and upside down) are the key to advanced math, the movement away from memorizing times tables seems like an intentional way of creating innumeracy.
Although I learned to read, long before kindergarten, by the whole-word method (paying attention to the words as my mom read picture books to me), phonics was still a very valuable method for me to increase my reading vocabulary. It allowed me to decode words I had never encountered in written form before. And for students who don't innately "teach themselves" to read (as I did), phonics is the most logical approach to learning to read. Puritan children sitting over their hornbooks learned reading this way!
As with most things where people are getting screwed over, this is all about money. The people who create curriculum materials always need to be presenting the "latest, greatest thing" in order to sell new textbooks and give new seminars. If instruction methods stayed with the tried and true, these people would not be able to make money.
Yes, because of that I forced my son to learn them. I also had to insist on correct spelling. Poor boy having a mother like me 😂
Absolutely! Students need to learn “the language of arithmetic” before they can decode the more advanced math. All math curriculum content from the 2d semester of 3rd grade on
assumes students have fluency of multiplication and division basic facts. MOST students do not! They are simply pushed through and teachers are forced to fake all assessments through the nonsensical standards based grading systems. I recently had a job as a math intervention teacher. I developed a 1:1 assessment which assessed fluency of all the basic facts from 1X1 to 12X12. 10% of the SEVENTH GRADE students had reached full fluency. I developed a 1:1 oral practice system which resulted in these 7th grade students increasing fluency significantly. Once they have developed some basic understanding of numeracy they can start to access the second semester 3rd grade curriculum to 5th grade.
Curriculum. Look at the non college credit courses required of 50% or more of college students that align with elementary and Algebra I math curricula!!! We are in a crisis. I would love to meet with any retired math teachers interested in helping to develop solutions to this problem. It needs to be regular elementary teachers NOT college professors getting rich off national grant monies! New Hampshire Governor Sununu has just made learning the basic multiplication facts a requirement.
100. Thank you.
I recall drilling to learn the multiplication tables in third grade. The teacher caught a student cheating on a math test by using a slide-rule which was on her pencil box lid. The teacher's cheeks were red as she explained to the whole class that a cute pencil box with a slide-rule on the lid was fine as long we intended to carry one with us everywhere the rest of our lives.
Sadly, now we do rely too much on tools on our phones which are omnipresent. Too often we are weakened by clever devices.
We need a new sign posted on the door of every aircraft right next to the "Wi-Fi on board" sign so that passengers can inspect it as they board. "The engineers who designed this plane did NOT study math in California".
We can do the same thing with medical devices, cars, cranes, vaccines and any other products that will kill you if they go wrong.
There is a term in product design called "planned obsolescence". California is in the process of obsoleting itself.
It's hard to believe that the people there have become so stupid in such a short time....g.
“Under the framework, the range of student backgrounds, learning differences, and perspectives, taken collectively, are seen as an instructional asset that can be used to launch and support all students in a deep and shared exploration of the same context and open task,”
Good heavens...What does that actually...say? It's bureaucratic nothing speak in spades!
What's a "same context and open task"? How can one explore it?
Is Kamala Harris ghostwriting the CMF?
What's not fair is kids; black, brown, Asian, white, or whatever, not being able to do mathematics at grade level. Mathematics for the average citizen hasn't changed that much in millennia.
We've had any number of "systems" for teaching mathematics...there seems to come a new one every couple of years, each one about as successful as the last. And while learning skills fall along a spectrum, it appears that people in the lower deciles economically tend to have more limited skills.
One can continue to argue that the methodology of teaching mathematics is flawed, but at some point one has to understand that the answer may not be where you are looking.
Charter schools have, time and again, proven that those being left behind at our public schools can learn given the right environment, and that environment includes accountability on many levels.
It would be my thinking that instead of condemning the private schools for whatever the reason du jour might be, public schools, their management, their teachers, and their unions could adopt the concepts of accountability and get back to the teaching of mathematics as a wonderous language in which to explore our world.
LOL. I read the same paragraph and had the same reaction - 43 words of nothingness, of ideological blather. I suspect the author included it for a reason.
Liberals. “We’re going to solve global warming by introducing a pall over the Earth which will block the sun’s rays.” In other news, “liberals mandate every house, car, bicycle, and yes, even your horse will be required to install solar panels.”
Liberals. “We’re going to end gun violence forever by seizing all firearms.” In other news, “prosecutors arrange for the president’s son to have his felony gun crimes waived.”
Liberals. “We are a sanctuary city, we will pay for all illegal aliens.” In other news “We can’t afford illegal aliens so send them to conservative states.”
Liberals. “Look how high our IQs are, we understand math.” In other news, “we’re getting rid of standards so everybody can get an A in math.”
That’s a good essay from in an intern !
I’m not typically a comment section guy, but I came here to post something similar. Very impressive (and depressing!), Julia.
This is just another play from the Democrats' covert-racism playbook. The underlying assumption is that black people can't do math without careful coddling that largely prevents them from ever achieving math proficiency.
When asking students to get the correct answer to a math problem is "racist," students are never going to learn to get the correct answer. And getting the correct answer is the ONLY point of using math in the real world. Without the correct answers to math problems, we can't do science or engineering on any level.
But then, that seems to be part of the Left's plan--replacing science with "The Science." And they wouldn't want anyone to be able to do math well enough to understand their fraudulent use of statistics.
Agreed except the third paragraph, reminiscent of the oft-repeated canard that Republicans "oppose education" because they want people dumber so they will vote Republican.
Many black kids start out at a huge disadvantage due to bad or absent parents, no community mentors etc., so literally they can't do math as well as others, and I suspect they become discouraged at school quite early. The only way to fix this I can think of is huge interventions (tutoring, etc) pretty early on. Available for any other kids too, naturally.
The unfortunate thing is, early interventions don't seem to be enough. The gains that kids get from Head Start are more or less erased by the time the kids are in third grade. Something more is going on than just starting behind.
We did not see the current anti-education phenomenon among black leaders 60 years ago. Not only did black people want their children to become educated, they wanted them to be able to go to white schools, which spent more per pupil on facilities and teachers.
If we can figure out who started and promoted the spread of the idea that doing well in school is "white" (and that that's somehow a bad thing), I think we would know a lot more about how we've reached a point where Leftist leaders don't want black kids to become proficient in math.
Thanks for your reply. I find the whole toxic subset of black culture that features absent fathers, antisocial behavior, crime, etc.very frustrating and off putting, and I try to arrive at some positive ways to address it. But change mostly needs to come from inside tge culture and it is so broken I don't see that as likely. As you note, there seem to be no black leaders now, just charlatans hawking stupid victimology narratives, people who aren't even interesting, much less correct. I do know that there are sports figures and pastors who go into those communities and try to provide some of the mentoring that would ordinarily come from an intact healthy family, and that's great but not near enough.
There was much that was better in the past about the black community, when there was too much adversity to make stupidity an option. (Again, I hasten to add I am not talking about all black people but the toxic subset)
If any real change happens it won't be imposed from outside.
One further factor is the college education quandary. I am for admission (and degree granting) strictly on merit, but releasing more educated black people into the community is going to pull it up. Education is not the be all and end all regards the cultivation of good character, but it does seem to help.
I agree that more well-educated black people are a benefit to their community. But what the Left is doing right now is actually *preventing* black people from becoming well educated.
When you lower and lower and lower the standards, more black kids may be able to "graduate" and "get into college," but if they have failed to become literate and numerate along the way (the result of lowering standards), those "achievements" mean very little.
And if, as Leftists would like, colleges also lower their standards, even having a college degree will mean little. Which devalues having a college degree, while simultaneously giving black kids nothing more than a shiny paper that has become only a participation trophy.
Don't forget that Leftists have already largely been achieving the awarding of college degrees without any guarantee of literacy or numeracy *for decades* in the field of education. Way back in the mid-80s, California had to institute a competency exam for prospective teaching certificate candidates, precisely *because* education majors were graduating from college without adequate literacy and numeracy to be teaching children.
Leftists have already long-since mastered the illusion of education without having learned anything.
Equity is the same as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
This article perfectly encapsulates why communist ideals have failed, and why it must be rooted out and destroyed.
"...the board was left with two options: pull the bottom performers up, or push the top performers down. They did the easier thing." That sys it all.
The soft racism of low expectations. It’s become a trite saying I guess, but it’s become a cancer that is eating the west from the inside out.
Cowards and low-functioning academics - all of them. They impose their incoherent ideology on children across the state, and don’t have the courage to defend their ideas to the public.
School choice would solve this problem, but that will never happen in California. Newsom couldn’t care less. His children attend private school.
Very sad and very frustrating.
Mathematics is the language of science. Numeracy is as important as literacy. California in its public schools is failing on both counts. The basic level of literacy in California is equivalent to Rwanda's. Many African and Caribbean countries have a higher rate of literacy and numeracy.
The tech industry can continue to import numerate engineers from around the global or indeed move to where there is a high preponderance of numerate people. For example in Britain, Cambridgeshire is now known as the Silicon Fen. The numeracy and literacy of England and Wales has been increasing because of a focus on phonics and teaching the basics in maths.
In Mississippi, literacy is on the increase, again because of phonics. (See the op-ed in the NYT from a month or so ago). The costs of doing business in Mississippi with a literate and numerate workforce will be far less than in Silicon Valley. If the education department can do this in Mississippi why can't they in California or is the will simply not there because of incompetent bureaucrats?
The big question is why is the California electorate content to neglect California's most important long term resource -- namely its young? A mind is a terrible thing to waste -- to quote an old slogan.
Every time anyone hears the word equity, they should correct the person using it by saying "by equity, do you mean enforcing equal outcomes through racial quotas?"
Perhaps part of the issue involves the quality (or lack thereof) of public school math and science teachers. Let's face it - the best and brightest mathematicians aren't teaching in public schools, because there are much better paying jobs elsewhere.
This is influenced in-part by the rigid union-created pay structures in most public school districts. It doesn't matter what you teach; pay is a strictly function of a teacher's education level and seniority. So a middle or high school math or science teacher with, say, a masters degree and 10 years of service gets paid the same as a gym teacher or a kindergarten teacher. Not to say that the gym or kindergarten teachers aren't important, because they are. But there's a lot more involved - both inside and outside the classroom - in teaching math or science. This is especially true in cases in small and medium sized schools where the math and science teachers have to prepare for and teach multiple subjects.
Californian politicians will need the electorate to pretty rubbish at math (maths?) if they hope to convince the voters that paying gazillions in "reparations" is not going to bankrupt their state.
It would seem that two wildly disparate groups have reached the same conclusion:
"Indeed, the ideological gap is basically nonexistent between CMF supporters and reactionaries who once thought black and Latino kids were cognitively or culturally incapable of advanced mathematics."
Have you seen the YouTube video where the Leftist and the White Supremacist agree on almost everything?
Horseshoe Theory.
“After seeing Natalia’s success, she signed up her younger son, Matthew, when he was 6. He complained about doing math classes at 9 a.m. on Saturdays when his friends were playing sports, but it paid off. Matthew, now 10, was able to skip the third grade.” - from the NYPost link.
One stupid extreme or another. Where are the adults in the room??